He flops at rest stops
hid by other sleeping truckers.
He likes the loneliness
as the cab windows gradually mist over
with smokey stars.
Rolling on,
cities of light flare upwards
and beneath them
are the unseen, the dead eyed
that hide under a metro-glare.
Amarillo, Detroit, Tacoma, Richmond,
places packed and stacked
with broken dreams and loose ends.
Just driving; hauling and honking.
No one looking.
Launderettes and liquor stores,
five finger fandangos in the back,
chicken wings and Jack D.
Atlantic City, Apalachicola,
soaking in the slipstream
while America looks somewhere else.
What are you watching America?
Sometimes he thinks
only the coyotes are paying attention.
Roads thread through his fingers.
The Great Lakes shimmer,
Rockies rear-up and ripple,
all those dust painted
played-out rural towns,
the roads are his tunnel
through both beauty and depredation.
Old men on roadside benches
stare unphased by his air horn blare'
as if he himself were an 18-wheeled
rolling exhibit of America itself,
yet no one looks long enough
to care.
Fret sawing winds
chafe a river and its banks,
the fluidity of time
has shaped them both.
Glints of starlight are in
water and clay,
The script of gravity
is pressed into rock striations,
by the dead-eyed grind,
of a monotonous momentum.
Pebble by pebble
the river moves the land,
mountains follow then give way,
while ripples and waves
score blue veins deep
into indurate granite.
Many a rock drips a green alga
that records
every twist and turn
of an always oncoming past.
Night stampedes wind-horses.
I edgily negotiate the sharp corners
of swerving shadows.
The hind hoof of a doe
slaps the reflection of my startled face,
the Chevy twitches, plows on -
headlights rake the earth.
From a rear-view mirror
I see myself prone on the asphalt,
terrified limbs still stamping
over a shell-shocked mind.
The deer chased its bones,
disappearing into the sight unseen.
Night dropped its iron curtain.
Later,
I sleep dead-eyed
behind a spinning wheel.
Midwinter - means
transparent ice walls
pressed against shrinking skin.
Dead-eyed horses are revived
only by the steam of their nostrils.
No one predicts a beginning or an end,
'mid' is a frozen idea
in an ice-locked fountain pen,
it will not write even in warm hands.
Killer clowns' shelter behind
their fixed, blood flaked grimaces,
the whites of their eyes
reflect pinpoints
of a dawning apprehension.
Roads decelerate,
creaking through knuckled hands.
Chilled mounds toboggan off rooftops,
dump malformed snowmen
through unmeasured backyard graves.
At the hazy horizon of each grinding day.
midwinter blurs perspective.
This is the middling 'Mid'
a middle where the mind stops flowing
up or down.
No one turns in their grave,
so, Irene I will turn for you.
I will turn this final page,
turn all those love-lights out
that I have kept bright
for these many decades.
Turn off the flow of love letters
that,
though never written,
I did indeed, scribe upon the dark,
dead-eyed nights.
Graves thrive on the marrow of lovers.
I have imagined you and I
both decaying in our own ways.
Now the days shorten Irene,
now toothless shadows bite at my soul.
Will you get to see me as I was Irene,
or will every mirror shatter
that we ever looked through?
Damn Irene, even the sky misses you.
Will this threadbare longing ever end,
or will my mind at last
run dry of this
all but invisible ink!
“What is Past is Prologue.”
The Tempest.
It's the young ghosts that
haunt us most.
A vison of my 6-year-old self,
looking up from a basement window
at the gray pavement above my head.
It scared me then and still does.
One dead-eyed day in a wintery city
I saw a man without a coat
crouched and shivering,
the coat that he did not wear that day
I wore at that time.
The more I looked, the more I understood.
Such younger ghosts are spectral preludes,
phantoms of our psyche,
sealed into a setting, just large enough
for them to relive forever
a one-act play
of our soul-etched moments.
Works of fire and thunder
flower the surface of a dark river.
When the rockets
are dead-eyed and spent,
muffled calls remain -
a flap and gabble,
of the peevish and ruffled.
Night stumbles over the edge
of gunpowder clouds.
Ducks deliver themselves
to the dark-dinged sky.
Distant cannons sigh.
The best part of a hopeless war
is when it begins.
Under new helmets
the hapless and the brave
are trained to die
far away from patriotic eyes.
Mothers are sacrificed
to blood oaths,
the news is all good
initial reports, thrilling.
The worst part of war
is its ending.
Those that come home
march dead-eyed
behind ghosts.
They live now,
as if on a rifle range,
firing at undying memories.
In a newly edited past
bugles rally.
flags fly.
The violence moves on.
Beneath a movies-screen golf course,
the war still chews upon
a few salvaged bones,
though now unseen,
beneath well-kept greens.
Slow flames under the blacktop,
simmer-ghost rise
from the sloughing road.
Rubber scorches its skin
shedding blackened snakes.
It's a hot day,
creeping turtles fill pot-holes
with their hot-plate shells.
The highway drums along
to the churr of cricket songs,
along the way, either out or in,
dead-eyed samurai
rage-on at the speed of silence.
A fly in a warm margarita
brain-waves a thought of heaven,
then drowns in a wet question mark.
Sneakers, crocs or Jesus sandals?
Whichever way we walk
the town will be further away then we thought,
and the heat-hacked pigeons
will light the way like Tiki torches.
I guy reads about Maui
and its hills of ash.
A place where ice runs hot.
Dry tears run up
into his eyes.
The electric daffodils have dimmed now
Orange tulips back their guest arrival,
mechanical stem's,how they glisten
The arcane Robina tree is stet
no leaves this spring
Autumn is a long way off
Borage fills in the gaps
from corner to corner
they cover the ground
The dead eyed roses
grasp for sunlight
like mad mayhem
they last, in disordered array
The moon was big and lit-up,
so of course, some local dog
was barking like crazy.
I got up, it was half past the tic of time
and way deeper than any sunken face.
I was a little wasted;
I get mad at such times
when the night cracks open in my head.
Outside, the backyard was fractured by silence
and an unpredictable yammer of sound.
A full-on moonlight had crapped shadows
all over the place.
I yelled pointlessly at the splintered sky
both sky and dog seemed to listen,
then the mutt yanked-up the volume
and really began to howl
I guess it was upset.
Back inside I turned on the laptop
and quietly typed out a lot of
bold, loud expletives -
perhaps considering
it better
not to disturb any more dead-eyed gods.
Heroes are masked, monosyllabic but super.
The rat gangs obviously
are bad news and apparently
loose and reprehensible,
most are irredeemably dead-eyed.
It's on!
Action demands reaction,
busters need something to bust.
Make-believe peddles a glossy fantasy
until reality accommodates,
comes true
arrives not in good and bad costumes
but anonymously in SUV's, stolen bikes,
and highjacked Lincolns.
It goes on…
Momma bears are aroused,
sports fans are inflamed
creeps challenge, rob and mob.
A citizenry cowers then
strikes back with headlines.
It's most definitely on.
News flash -- it's over,
the good guys are back watching TV,
the delinquents and sociopath's
are out on no-bail,
the jail is a refuge for non-combatants.
On and off mostly.
Not long ago we were all masked
and suspected everyone,
but now
no one is guilty until freed -
all of us bleed.
Back on... it's Back On!
Back to back we stand staring into the future.
The moon loves us for it is dead-eyed and alone.
Long or brief all days dwindle, while nights row us back
over that vast seas we arrived from.
Faces blur, after-mages blanch,
we both recall the same lovers -
for are we not all ‘I’?
‘You’ and ‘your’ a mere pretense of duality.
Lovers filled our own footprints,
yours came to you weeping, mine left sobbing,
our tears are formed in the same deep wells
of hope and regret.
You are seeking an horizon perhaps;
for a while you see a shadow-man
slipping underneath a sunset.
Don't follow, don't go that way,
tomorrow, if it dawns for you,
will be the gift only you can give
to I.
Faults draw their battle lines,
fingers point to all and nowhere,
the powerful seize their dishonest moments.
America still has its lights on
but those lights are dead-eyed,
they stare like the painted orbs
of broken dolls.
I cannot write about this sickly ‘shinning,’
it both glares and shades my mind.
The new 'normal' is old,
both angels and devils, the meek and the bold
run to each other for answers,
but no one knows
the anger quotient of: Why?
From sea to shining sea
no one now is free.
Snow sprays off crow wings.
Flurries drift like torn lace curtains
over the blacktop.
The porch rocking chair
is draped like a madhouse ghost.
Nobody is going anywhere,
the side-roads are getting narrower
as cold pinches wind-swirled surfaces.
Every bare tree is festooned
with a year-old loneliness.
There are Christmas lights coming,
and the canned music
of tone-deaf elves – perhaps.
We may gather together
at the holy font of former years
but only if time moves on
away from this day,
only if the highways are not clogged
by lost days and their
dead-eyed nights…maybe,
maybe there will be carols and good cheer,
but only if the lone wolf
and his gun,
for a while have had enough fun.
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