poem: chalk it up

chalk it up to lorem ipsum
chalk it up to gypsy tweets
chalk it up to dismal science
chalk it up to inner petes
chalk it up to lunar babies
chalk it up to sideways sneaks
chalk it up to deep fried me & you
chalk it up to the darkened boundary
chalk it up to light in the attic
chalk it up to calcified dramatic
chalk it up to simon's garfunkel
chalk it up to nana's carbuncle
chalk it up to the amateur schism
chalk it up to emile's paroxysm
chalk it up to sweet sweetback
chalk it up to everybody's big mac
chalk it up to the wall-eyed symposium
chalk it up to manuel's pandemonium
chalk it up to here there & everywhere
chalk it up to carla's unnerwear
chalk it up to the reverend's dispensation
chalk it up to the cardinal's decaffeination
chalk it up to the intimate rosary
chalk it up to the notarized rotary
in your ear the mind will be displayed
in your heart the day will be inveighed
seek out the venture on bended knee
all that's right is what you'll see . . .

poem: shame to her

Image: "A Sky-Blue Life" (Peter Milton)

[Occupational hazard of the morning trek: poems that bloom without pen or paper. I carried the lines for the morning's five miles, plenty of repetitions to hold onto fairly tight, all blooming from my current momentary obsession - Kimbra's cover of Nina Simone's performance of George Stone's "Plain Gold Ring" on NS's debut album. Kimbra's cover, a skintight homage to Nina's haunted pavane, is on her album Vows. Throw in my Peter Milton obsession of late, too, that's a mighty full blue plate. Mercy.]

[Shame to Her]
Nina lived it in her cloistered misery
KJ rang it pure and mighty to a New World
We the chorus of bloody valentines
dispossessed ourselves on either side
the serrated lines of wounded exile
cattle calls of salted estuaries
catalogs of blue devastation
riddled holocausts of the blasted Heart
Shaman baby in her lil red thing
holds the barbed thorns of Nina's pain
holds the keys to your prison, too
jailbait Delilah
to your ancient woe
blue skies don't get in
dark stars don't get out
this dirge of regret
spirals down the ladders of
goldenmyths in the bleakest wells
only a kiss away kiss away kiss away
your priested gloom
gathers in the eyes
of her spectral charism
Caliban'd shame to
her Miranda'd tomorrows
high priestess of the wastelands
doomed to cry for merciless mercy
the call of a wild beyond
your blasted suns
your vacant moons
the sequin'd desecration of
the storms of noon.

poem: waveland

I walk the lines of compassion
Thin lines
Tit for tat
Ambrosial vagaries
I’ve been asked plenty of times
Times of plenty
Times of pasty gruel
Do the eventualities even matter?
Nappy-headed clockwork fantasies
Playing out the endgames
Of gogol ogling the gargoyles’
Fancies. Tribulation
Has its double-downs, its
Half-baked higgery piggeries,
Its seeming cascades of the dismal science,
The dismal heehaw of five and dime
Mentality. I need to know, she
Said, casual mistress beating
The streets, waveland down &
Outs, predestined Barbies,
Outflanked droogs,
Beatified novices of the tectonic scrapes.

Jean Savory savoried her way
down the dipstick nines,
slave to fashion,
romance novelist of the royal
climes, formulaic
congress after the egress -
a thrifty mess indeed -
chatter-worthy
back door mamas
in they classic poils,
inching their ways into
the deep ends,
bicameral ration toadies,
casual spelunkers,
situational ethics take a back seat
to page 79,
a mighty hurrah
for petty metals - since
you were asking -
dribble that sauce over
your past tense
vegematics:
the last clime was
roses and tartan plaid,
a carousing tarantella -
page 152 might have
grown an inch or two -
she was ever not when
she was naughty, it figured
gaily into the margins
for error -
grace on 193,
afterwhich aftertimes twas
anyone's guess,
your burden,
his sancho panza
their missing person,
her inarticulate, ghostwriterly, astro-criminal
crimes.

poem: merge not

[Facebook trolling again. Thanks to Rod - and his auto-correct - for NASCAR mascara and "take turns in the merge." Thanks, too, to the State of Minnesota.]

NASCAR mascara
the Ovaltine babies rain down
bliss in the ovals
corruption on the inner turf
vagrancy abounds round
the tapping wounds
sealing the rivers
of mongrel overtime
she rode one hard
& karioke'd the rest
take turns in the merge
not one of her favorite
flavors, she had other mantras
for sale, diddly on the square side
a sodding mess
virtual reality in Bristol
on the up side
call of the wild
she left her numbers
in the stall
left her facebook, too
urls dime a dozen
samsonizing the plastic babies
the bon temps
the Cali-mamas
the friendlies
the passion teas
over & under
time out of mind
a vigorous antiseptic
to the septic mind
I ask you
this your Murkin dream?
this your donut hole?
this the last time you
investigate the sullied
casualties of your cowgirl bowl?

poem: avalanche

I got lost in your Name
tumbling down the hillside
rolling past your holy rosy cross
inundations of blessed spirit
greening the soul
apriling the quivering hesitations
anviling the burgeoning seal
as if agency were a blessing
in all our nooks
all our harvests
all our emancipations
dissipations
triangulations
into the blessed might
into the blessed night
into the blessed sanctifications of our
rollercoastering rampant flight.

poem: nowhere you

(Facebook kept advertising a Norah Jones poem contest in my margins; every time I clicked, I was sent into cyber-oblivion. No Norah dinner for two for me, I guess; but, I wrote the poem anyway.)

Slapdash paddle ma'am
sitar-kissing punjab
of the western slopes
metroplex baby in her
swishy nines
you couldn't ask for more
digitalis has a way with
the wives of men
the dayglo apothecaries
rhyme their ways to heaven
absenting themselves
from the cooing
sisterwaves, algebra
too can boogie
in the shines, if
your danger has
a vegematic fluff,
dreamy dreams
accentuating anything in
the way of plenty,
she were a cooing cooer
weren't she, said
all the middle schoolers, she
were the biggest of your
minstrel dreams, when the down
was out, left field streamers
streaming the Madisons,
the Carries, the simplest
of rainbow girls on runabout:
blessed we are
she's a brokenhearted
little geisha girl,
all six-guns ablazin' -
she's your roomer, boy -
she'll do your dreams
in paisley, nestle up on
that bus to nowhere,
you can leave your
middleschool middleearth drearies
all behind, from here on
out it's all torchlight
daddy, touchdown
assassins of the unfurled
heart, ninth potion
of the seminal
stream. 

poem: lidhje gjaku

shell casings in
the bubble,
demographic pylons -
is it any wonder -
nashville cheesy grits all
on they gold-toothed display -
the lone Stetson -
belly girls dance
they belly ways down
the belly aisles,
come hither /
hithercome
organic the inorganic
knot in the
basal climes,
your nougaty despair
gives way to totem
animals, sampling the crackling
curls waiting at the 5
& Dime, solicitous affairs
of the stony hearts,
stony fields strewn
with delicious rubble
consanguinity abides in
moocows of the delectably
elegant: prop your
ways, prop your
days: let the perils linger, flash-bellied
thistle peril worth
waiting for, in your
teensy-weensy limestone
cottage of the
savoir-faire.