Long Dead eyed Poems
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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!
The blacktop is uncovered,
yet the road has a moving face.
Wind-drifts sketch fleet features
then sweeps them away.
Lawns and fields are snow encased
every blade an icy spear;
much is buried, some pierce through.
Spears rattle in the dark robed dawn.
Under parked cars
a grey haired crawl heaps
a dead-eyed silence.
The sky puts on a dull armor
as a submerged sun glints.
A short walk in November
my heart is a chill beat
in a raw breast.
I will get used to this;
become used to the gnaw of winter,
but it will take awhile.
Hot black coffee helps
while I order leather gloves
from a thawing window.
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.
“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.
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.
Up in the above
roof gardens pluck air out of thoughts.
Changelings run between
brick walls
one is dead-eyed and evermore shall not see
yet it grows itself upon a dendritic tree
to hear what the empty places speak of.
Long moved furniture’s leave there after-images
they remain as stains upon inlayed grains.
inside the crumbling interior of bare floor
wood owls slowly turn spiral eyes
to see for those no longer here.
Above this homeless and dreaming mind
a straight-backed chair plays a dark cello
most melancholy are its tunes
that resound on ceiling and echoing ground.
The space within the structure will one day rupture
but for now a ghostly grey-matter
knits together
the under, the over,
and that room
where music sighs between two lovers.
People are duck-walking,
The ice has stuck,
only the sky just above my top lip
is melting.
I move forward
by counting the parked cars
on this side of the morning.
A bundled-up woman I knew
from last winter stares at me,
she is way across the street,
sheets of black ice divide is.
Hands wave inside suede mittens
makes me think of cold kittens
like the one I did not save
one winter, abandoned, it looked past me
into its own abandonment.
today it’s me out here in the dead-eyed light.
The woman across the sheet ice
is a figure under a skating sky.
I imagine that she only believes
in a warmer memory of me,
figments are fragments
on this cracking ice.
She was in service in Vietnam
she nursed,
this part of her I remember,
but the weathered face
underneath her mouth-covering scarf
does not smile at me.
She is done with healing.
I understand,
why should we even try a pleasantry
abandoned as we are
on this street
that keeps sliding forward
forgetting for us
our last but one footsteps.
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.
Hiking into the soul of clouds.
Catching sun seeds in the palm.
Petals grasp a ruby-throated song.
Brookies pretending to be stream gems.
Set sail, no more worries on a willow.
Meadow fairies hoisting the breeze...
Weave an ancient fire nest.
God gently coaxing clouds into wrens.
Hushed conversations within the heart of heaven.
Sleepy in whirling puffs of sweetened pine.
Tranquility tapping souls with a gentle lullaby.
Now it's high time to descend.
To collide with obligation and
putty-faced iron men.
Plastic smiles replacing scented pine.
Dead-eyed techno-bots pretending they're alive.