HAIKU

 I waken early

To half darkness and daylight --

A mourning dove sings.

Pandemonium

Hortus, a suburban devil of Pandemonium,
Is lonely tonight for want of a loyal friend:
Anyone, sick or foul, human or fiend,
Even a specter enriched with plutonium.
The lights glare like angry souls at the palace,
And the burning rivers between here and there
Drown out the sweet, anguished tintamarre
Of endless victims of his own so-called malice.
Cold comfort for Hortus, who once boasted
The brightest shield and the longest spear,
Who stalked the palace halls without fear,
Now to stand out here, alone and untoasted.
"Curse you all!" he cries, "I don't deserve this!"
But knows there's no leaving Satan's service.

The Power of Babble

Their hero made sentences not drawings

With crayons and one day broke in half

Eighty-eight in the box (for no reason),

Leaving little pieces for the cawings

He scribbled so his friends might read and laugh.

No judge would banish him for this treason.

He built a tower to gild his language,

Then praised their god when his hate made them spit

At words others spoke and rip up the page

They'd written, substituting bullshit.

The tower still stands, rotting and silent,

But for the greatest of men who scribbles

On a clapper-less bell senseless dribble. 

Asleep, he mumbles alone in his tent.

Joker Jokes

“Now, my dears, keep watching the ace.

My favorite card — it has no face

And just one itty bitty heart.

Hee, hee! It can’t squeak out a fart

The way the queen of spades

Will to call forth some dainty maids

To please her king of diamonds,

Who’ll grab one with a showbiz mons.

Now, see? Your lazy eyes don’t peel

On the ace! It has disappeared!

Where’d it go? It’s as I feared,

Some joker has stolen the deal.

Why, that’s me! I rule the whole deck.

Every card’s at my call and beck!”

On T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Sonnet #617

One hundred and four years ago

He diagnosed our vertigo.

His scalpel cut beneath the skin

And removed original sin.

He held it in his palsied hands —

The nothing he left on Margate Sands.

It’s only gotten worse since then —

The commandments are ten times ten. 

Dust is fear and the unreal real.

Now it’s not what you think, but feel.

A cacophony of voices

Warns us to forget all choices.

As night falls a whimpered prayer

Confuses the canting slayer.

Death and the Miser

There’s one bastard that Death doesn't yet want --
A man He's content to smilingly haunt,
To assure that he hasn't forgotten
What comes. "Maybe when your mind's most rotten,"
He whispers from behind the sickroom door.
The man, a murdering conquistador,
And raper of the widows of the poor,
Cut a priest's throat to settle an old score,
And sold babies to feed a king's prize boar.
Delectable crimes for Death -- no reason
Not to take this human in his season.
His disgust is with the miser's grasping
Love of Death’s own hot and eternal sting.

Another War

I drew a high number the last year of the draft,
But a childhood disease would have kept me 4-F.
I have a misshapen hip and couldn't force-march
Or negotiate a pitching deck, fore to aft.
I lost no friend or brothers to war; no one left
My high school to volunteer; no triumphal arch,
No memorial was erected in our town,
No first-hand accounts of battle were written down.
The nightly news showed all there was to see of death
And defeat: we lose each war the minute one man
Fails to open his eyes or to take a next breath,
And new wars start soon enough, because they can.
We launch and drop bombs and bombs and more bombs,
Generously, Samaritans offering alms.