the city hums like a drunk insect,
half asleep, half insane—
and somewhere in a courthouse
a man in a clean shirt
is dreaming up another reason
to lock someone away.
they call it justice,
I call it inventory control.
bodies in orange are the new wheat fields—
they grow them, harvest them,
feed the system its daily bread.
you can’t sell peace,
you can’t profit off mercy,
so they build fear instead—
polish it, legislate it,
print it on letterhead
and call it safety.
meanwhile the cops prowl
like bored dogs looking for bones,
and the judges stack souls
like cordwood behind their eyes.
he has to invent new laws—
petty ones, quiet ones,
ones that sound like rules
for living clean—
but they’re just nets
to catch the poor,
the drunk,
the tired,
the ones who ran out of hope
before morning came.
and me?
I drink to that man,
the great inventor of misery,
because without him
the bars would rust,
the cells would echo with silence,
and the truth—
the raw, unprofitable truth—
might just walk free.
There is no ownership
in the night
where dreams come and go
alone
we burn the dead like cordwood
and wait for dawn
to summon the authorities
(from my second book, LITTLE PINE, 2016)
There is a crooked man
Who has a crooked mind
Which renders his decisions
Malignant and maligned:
The Paris Peace Accord
The Pandemic Office crowd
Both among the things
This man has disallowed.
Bodies in the morgues
Were cordwood stacking high
The count of them increased
And still, he did deny:
Vaccines and materials
Could cause the plague’s defeat
But his plan was to delay
Which made his plan replete
Those who once supported him
And gave an accolade
Are finding now within their grief
They all have been betrayed
The Bell of our Democracy
Which at one time rang so true
Begins to show a crack in it
As we allow this man to do …
All the things against our Creed
Against our very core
It’s time for us to stand and say:
Support this man … NO MORE!
Cocuswood, the perfection and beauty
made perfect sound a pitch
deemed as bass
a tone
with depths and richness
cocuswood
the studio with the barned afea
cordwood walls
five cords of cedar
cemented into
a fantastic and beautiful
place
sound and perfection
slendid for the eyes to see
a perfect place to
admire the beauty
of a bassy cocuswood bassoon
The creek is running swollen from the snowmelt.
The nights are getting shorter day by day.
The crocus pose like dancers in recital;
A portrait of the garden’s first bouquet.
Forsythia bloom golden by the pathway.
Azaleas wait their turn along the fence.
And all of it together tells the story
Of nature living in the present tense.
The squirrels are acting frisky in the treetops
And rustle through the canopy above,
Emerging from a season’s hibernation
As patient and enduring as your love.
Today I’ll take my axe and split some cordwood,
Replace the stacks I’ve burned the winter through,
And when I have my second cup of coffee,
I’ll dedicate my resting thoughts to you.
Bleak
Gray day,
Biting breeze
Offers portent
And tumbles autumn’s harvest of sere leaves
To winter’s foreboding, icebound doorstep:
Stacked, stands cordwood,
Shovels wait,
First snow
Looms.
All hail to thee love, your swave "eh" intrigues me.
Your embattlements stack like wet cordwood
upon the pile of used newspapers in my outhouse,
making the use of a corn cob most appealing.
I feel the need of purification, rejuvenation by fire.
Like holding a match under your out stretched eyelid
or maybe, just maybe sweeter, a cold sore
on the inside of your lip; so neat on a dinner date.
At least these things are real.
The lip has to heal, which it can do even if left alone.
Not like made-up words which have no direction,
no qualitative analysis, and no meaning
in the perceived circumstance or illustration.
Just made-up words which fit a line,
and you call it poetry?
You schmooze a line of B. S. at the reader,
in trite cliché and rusted phrasal tone,
riding the pretense of the sublime
and you call that poetry?
But then geezzz...? what can you expect
from someone whose only goal
is to piss someone off?
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