Afterthought

After a good time
and a lot of talk –
people on the porch,
food on the table,
friends leaning against
the spatter painted walls
of an artist’s room –

it’s easy to go home
and drift on
into the solo passage
of a song heard in my own living room
and fall into
half-sleep with my eyes open,
recalling other nights like this

that are far in the past,
far enough away to be out of reach
permanently,

and startle myself into realizing
that even the memory of tonight
seems part of that past,

and I realize that I was never part of it
while I was there,
just twenty minutes ago,

that it happened around me
and there wasn’t much to it
that involved me…

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Gig Info for Duende shows this week…

If you’re in the Providence RI / Southeastern MA area, you might want to come see Duende performing at one of the two places we’ll be this week:

Blue State Coffee on Thayer Street, Providence, RI on Tuesday;

as part of an evening of poetry, music, and dance on Wednesday night in Middleborough, MA.

Please go check the show listings in the tab above for more info.  Hope to see you there!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Awareness

The hawk
invites the
attention

of three boys
smoking weed
near the old foundation

in the abandoned
pasture
behind the funeral home

but they don’t
look up
as he rounds over them

unnoticed.
Perhaps he considers
the coal-spark of the bowl

from up there,
perhaps not;
more likely

the hawk
is as uninterested
in the boys

and the ruin
they’re using
for camouflage

as they are in
the hawk’s easy grace
as he passes hungrily

over what is
beneath him.
Importance

is relative,
after all: dependent
on where one is,

what one seeks,
what surrounds you
as you search.

What passes
among the boys
is irrelevant

to the hawk,
what may be
scurrying nearby

is irrelevant
to the boys,
and no one can ever say

what the ruin, the hayfield,
and the dead
think of all this.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Mantra For The Hard Times

It’s easy to lament.
Praise, instead.

Find a purpose to the day.
Praise, instead.

Lift your eyes. Raise the dead upon your shoulders.
Praise, instead.

If a cut is made, paint the gray trees with your blood.
Praise, instead.

The crow slips into your veins, cackles, and you die a little.
Praise, instead.

Flight into the desert, no water, no sign of shade.
Praise, instead.

You open a moth-haven billfold in the presence of a feast.
Praise, instead.

Love splits and draws away from your hard skin.
Praise, instead

the levers that move you,
the gears of your throbbing head,
the dinky children born from your fears,
the light of fires burning the spars of pirates,
the hats of soldiers riddled with flowers in the long battlefield grasses,
the red charlatan’s grin as he slops his hogs with your fortune,
the skulls of ancestors empty of expectations,
the diversion of hunger,
the urging and prodding of want;

all brought to you by the machine of living,
all slim and taut and combat tested,
all for you to contest and create from.

Praise, instead,
the pain of painful life.
Lamentation is not a wizardry
against the wave that comes for you;

praise, always praise instead
your remaining behind
as it recedes.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

From Afar

Oh, you are

beautiful,

though in no
conventional sense, and
yes the word is overused
but occasionally correct, as in
“full of beauty,” with it spilling
over your edges and into the street,

I can see dictatorships dissolving
in your wake as you pass through
gray and dingy capitals of pain,
the people rising up pastel
behind you, their leaders bowing
to pressure, opening gates
and secret files, domestic spies
throwing up their hands and flinging
headphones to the floor, questioning
the rationale for listening in on
drab conversations when you
are possible,

and you still walking,
oblivious to what’s happening,
serene, humble, not even noting
the turmoil you cause,
drama, even financial panic –

you don’t see the bankers
with their hands full of fraud
running after you to buy a glance,

you don’t see the drug dealers
kneeling and begging their marks
to try an addiction they can satisfy,

the warriors gnashing armor
and wailing missiles at each other
regardless of uniform just to gain ground
where you might pass,

and all the time you think you’re nothing,
you’re ordinary as shattered silk, wasted
as a second chance,  all the time
you’re spilling over and the world
slips on what you leave,

and most of all, in all that
roar and tumult, all that steady
chaos, in all the following general disbelief
that you are walking among us,

you don’t ever think of me.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

No Names

Definition
of a name:
what holds us
in place
while we’re polished
faceted
made shiny

acceptable facsimiles
pulled out of our
rough and ready true shapes
presented
as honest selves

Names
ought to be given up

I’ll be you
You be me
We’ll fuck them up
by not being
what’s expected of us

as we sit in settings
made by others
to show us off
as gems
of the art of
artificial beauty

That makes us lies

Lying world
makes us up as we go along
and we do the shining
from our cut up selves

End this
anonymously
Give up identity
Don’t let them make you
your own alias

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Finding Religion

we cobble
faith
together

from the odd street-Christian tract
comic books
snatches of poems
random lines from TV

slip it into our thin wallets
as if
it could feed us

and starve while we imagine ourselves
well-fed

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Love Songs Of The Ordinary

The love songs of the ordinary
can be heard in the cattails
that intrude in the ditches
of the roads between the town
and the city.  That thin whistle
and shattering rattle
are all you need to know
about how we find each other,
setting up housekeeping
where everyone can see
and no one will notice. 

When the exemplary
drive past us, we just stand,
moved a little perhaps in their wake,
but holding fast to the ground
in places they would never think
to build upon. We sing there
the way they think they sing,
but we know better
as we fray and burst and
spread our seed,

and we’ll be here when they’ve gone by us
rushing to the homes built on solid ground
that they’ll abandon in search of a better place,
a place they’ll find and lose again
while we and our ordinary
sit by the road and sing
and watch them pass.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Et Cetera

Let us lie
and say we are unhappy
with our lives: the lack of money,
the unrelenting longing for
love/sex/contact, our voices unheard,
thoughts unacknowledged,
et cetera.

Let us lie and say we want
a colorless
world.  That we imagine our groups
catapulted over the walls
into erasure, imagine heritage
a myth. Imagine the lies
we could tell ourselves
about no boundaries, total freedom,
and other things: et cetera.

And so, forth
into the breach we make
by rejecting the fact
that most of us struggle
to stay alive,
wishing to preserve
the lives we have or make them
better, not to transform them
int other lives, or lose our current selves
to perfection:

let us lie and say
no part of us is happy
to be what we are now.  Let us lie
and say we desire to be
not ourselves, when the truth is

that all we want is to be
is exactly as warty and prejudiced
and venal, etc., as we are now,
that all we want

is an easier way
to be those things.  We’re happy enough
to know what we want because we have it already,
just not enough of it,
not all the time,
et cetera.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Check out the Reverbnation site…

Just posted all eight of the rough mixes of the re-recorded “Jim’s Fall” suite on the Reverbnation site…still some post production to do, but thought I’d get them up there for a bit. In order as we usually perform it when we do the whole thing live. Enjoy.

Click on the “Tracks” link above to get to the site!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Taking a break for a bit.

I’ll be focusing on some other aspects of my life for a bit. Still doing all my scheduled shows and readings, but probably not a lot of posting of poems.

Good chance to go back and read back pages, for those of you who might be interested.

See you soon.

Unfinished Poems

Two in particular,
two not yet in fact
even begun,
should be finished
before
I claim to be
finished,

but it won’t happen.

I imagine this is a form
of grief I’m feeling,
distantly akin to seeing
your children die,
or to imagining clouds
meant to bring rain
that will never even form.

When
I think of all of you
who will not know
how these two would have been
Great Round Pegs
in the Great Round Holes
of your understanding of me,
of my understanding of myself,
of things I’ve seen,
the explanation
of how I worked and what you meant
to how I worked, perhaps even
engendering
some kind of forgiveness:

yes, it is a form of grief I am feeling.

I”ll let them go.

Someone will do it.
Not for me,
but because it will need doing.
Because they’ll know the need to do them.
Because my name is unimportant to the doing.

Because I am not the sole purpose
of being, because they will be
regardless –

this is a form of relief
I am feeling.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tool

Chisel
calm, aware
of his own edge
but having nothing
to strike him and
make him cut,

he sat there
looking around
at conversations
he thought stupid

until the time came to go home
and return to his sharpening
in the dark.  His edge
was brittle in no time.

God, he cried,
you’re a lazy craftsman.
Take me up, Lord,
and let me make a groove
in your dumb wooden world.
I need a smiting to act
as I have been forged to act.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Blues For A Relic

Born in New Jersey
around 1925 or so,
certainly no later than 1930
by the style of her yellow label.
Scarred and battered,
solid spruce and solid birch –
no plywood here –
repaired cracks,
stained face,
pitted and cranky tuning pegs,
a matchbook shred filling in
the nut on the first string
to keep it from buzzing;
one bridge pin
new white ivoroid,
the rest original black pearwood
with mother of pearl caps.

None of that is important.

What’s important is how easy she is to read
when you understand
the scrubbed bleaching
under the high frets that says
blues,
the rubbed out tale
written on the back
of the steep V profile
of the still-straight
railroad track of the neck
that wails
blues,
I sang the blues
my whole life.

I keep her close,
always within reach,
never in a case. 
She still sings
old and clear,
balanced and knowing,
though I can’t make her cry
the way she must have cried
in someone’s hands
for the better part
of her life –

for there must have been a better part
than this one, finding herself
with me and my amateur hands,
me with my own dents and marks,
my own damages, some repaired
and some still raw and shaking.
We work together and sometimes
it almost feels good when I set her aside
and figure we can try again tomorrow,
starting from where we left off.

She’s got forty years on me at least
and still as strong as ever.
I keep her close, with her promise
that maybe you can’t be satisfied,
but you can still keep trying.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

At The Reunion, Joe The Hammer Buys Me A Beer

When you’re
a hammer, he said to me,
everything looks like a nail,
and that’s how you approach
every problem:
sometimes you drive it in,
sometimes you pull it out.

I wish, a lot of the time, he said,
that I’d been born
a precision screwdriver.
I wish I’d been made for details,
been a writer like you.  But I wasn’t.
I was a hammer. I did
framing twenty years,
had my own business the last ten.
I slammed
and yanked and banged my thumb
a lot.  I never did the painting
and wallpapering, though I did drywall
when I had to,
never liked having to finish things
the way others wanted them, I figured
that was their job.

You, he said, you got
to do all the cool stuff,  you got
to write and travel,
make stuff up, fine tune
and change things
a little bit here and there.
 
No complaints,
he said, I just wonder sometimes
what it would have been like,
so what’s it like?

And the Hammer
slapped me on the back

as I peeled the label
off the bottle
and studied
my nervous,
unmarked hands.

Blogged with the Flock Browser