I recall an earlier city than this,
that smaller metropolis had to be
plugged into black handsets for distant listening.
Often, I think that his city is a concrete megaphone,
one we have made from fabricated conversations.
Denizens daily must recycle themselves,
with ever louder words.
A few artisan poets,
with their mortar and spades,
grout the cracked and leaking windpipes,
hoping to calm the roar of a casual chitchat.
They labor on, to shore-up crumbling words,
before they all unplug themselves
from silence forever.
Categories:
windpipes, poetry,
Form: Free verse
I am drugged by music
the horsehair bow,
key and peddle
the blow and boom'
of windpipes and drums.
Unfinished symphonies
leave me mewing like a wounded gull
forever beached on that last note.
My love is dressed in crinoline
in the 18th variation of a rhapsody,
It is my joy and pain
to be a member of a ghost orchestra,
to sit on a hard chair as a soft shadow
listening to the fading smoke
of hollowed-out wood
and I am drugged.
unplugged from myself.
for as long as it takes
for that musical blend of joy and pain
in its endless moment,
as it walks through singing bones.
Categories:
windpipes, poetry,
Form: Free verse
Silver tongue money sign blow
bellow ballast
moral bankruptcy notes
Reprobate shekel vocal chords
toot the $eductive $ound of the crafty coin jingle —
Filthy lucre windpipes
utter-ly craving more and more
Tainted dross lips blare grifter bluesy groans,
lover of the honk heist Tap scale shrill moans
Pied piper pickpocket player (such a theft bar clone)
blow an Iscariot number
with a snatched purse pirate dirge Ag cornet tone
Argentum coffer con-duit
continuously ear play the bandito music,
that Gehazi leer song
Let the pilfering notes fill the covetous air
with a subtil silverware sound ...
Polluted decibel waves b crooked cavalier,
a-plundering thoughts abound —
Fork tongue reed bark paper lust promises;
empty air promissory echoes,
so wallet stolen wrong
Categories:
windpipes, allusion, corruption, imagery, truth,
Form: Dramatic Verse
For years it had flown through dim canyons,
hollows where the mute sheltered in echoing caves.
Poems shifted loose and gearless.
Words darted for cover as if caught
in an empty bell tower.
On tongue-chilled days it would croon inarticulately
as it sang beneath jawbone rafters.
Then one drunken night I felt it clearing its windpipes,
coaching a squeaky organ into yawps of utterance.
I can see it now, a raw unlovely thing,
a creature hammered through gurgling fissures,
grown stark with a transpiring clarity.
I would mislay it like a lost penny,
go crazy to find its untrod trail again,
then it would return like a tramp begging at my door.
I hear it knocking now – a homeless angel
eager to shed the next paltry revelation
in a foundling language.
No longer is it a chance sighting,
no longer a luminous flutter on dark walls;
it is red of lip,
a painted vowel in my unbolted mouth.
A mouth that now divulges,
and sometimes in a dull turning year
may say something worth transcribing
for the ears of other madmen.
Categories:
windpipes, poetry,
Form: Free verse
Another wave of voter vexation
is swamping the shutdown nation
To the left,
the windpipes are hissing
To the right,
the windbags are dissing
And all of the kitchen cabinet aprons
got their middle fingers
pointing up deaf adder listening
Their thumbs down
is the ballot death blow sign:
Telling the weathervane citizens,
the rainy day
slush fund money is missing
The proletariat are up in arms,
so voter vexed ... they’re getting no paychecks
When the last mint cookie crumble,
the murmurers
are gonna misty-eye mumble
The viper sound bytes
are cobra kissing —
Blowing inherit-the-wind
lipstick jinn wishes
Getaway stage right poll exit
says last count call:
the vault money is missing
The proletariat are up in arms,
so voter vexed ... they’re getting no paychecks
To the right,
the windpipes are bursting
To the left,
the windbags are cursing
And all of the kitchen cabinet aprons
got their middle fingers
pointing up to the empty cookie jar
As the latest patriotic wave of voter vexation
is giving wet back hex to a grumbling nation
And the whether vain citizens don’t know which way to turn
Categories:
windpipes, cry, howl, people, political,
Form: Ballad
They love to puff the beryl nicotine
Incendiary lungs
sucking down the cancerous green
Hard drag queens,
dressed to mass extinct kill,
inhale poisonous mushroom dreams
Napalm verbal smoke:
fungi promises coming out of plastic windpipes
Pinocchio nose choke
pollute the global atmosphere with mint gripes
Cigar truth snubbed in a submarine ashtray
New Cuban missile crisis
put cerulean code Leviathan in play
Naval equatorial smoke circles ...
Ring of Fire raze reprisals ends a Green Day
Negotiated denials has got a jade glow
As the wizened warlords
sell refugee passes —
Microchip markers ... gamma emerald
Dragging chain smoking kings,
boast ballast policies of reptilian oppression
Puff fork tongues pack a blowtorch sting
Black-hearted lungs
exhaling cold malignant scorch gangrene
Dirge windpipes hate the cure love brings
Categories:
windpipes, imagery, metaphor, truth, visionary,
Form: Free verse