Ass-Backwards

Rickety flickety,
Roger McMilligan,
Rode a fat donkey to
Boston, MA.

Destabilizingly,
Facing ass-backwards he
Flummoxed the exit and
Wound up in Maine.


( A double Dactyl written for English 324)

The Illusion of Difference

Go liken your weakness
to a green verdant glen,
rollicking in its shade
and mere temporality.

Deconstruct the spaces
that delineate dear
time, tangible distance,
autonomy and difference.

Fill yourself up, humming
Hi Hay Om, Glory and
Hallelujah to a
Universe that sings with you.

Crave the feeling of each
falling leaf and still rock
exuding oneness and
swelling with God on this Earth.

A Perspective

A rusted shovel head
molded into the gravel ground,
resting just under a stand of elegant old oaks
catches my eye as I pad the trail
through eighty-odd years old
iron ore territory, vast open trenches,
dynamite gashes cut into the crust,
and buried beside it a brown iron spike,
a railroad tie half rotted lying by.
I imagine the same trees in adolescence,
and a bustle of dusty thick-accented men,
passing through unhewn scaffolding
like ants to their tunnels, a steady clank
and buzz of Depression-Era mechanics,
violent blasts and burn-piles of refuse
blazing smoke into the bleeding sky.
I look back, justified,
feeling the incongruity of their business,
the ecological rent and rending,
and despise their callousness.
Under the thin shade
of the oaks and the artifacts
I saw, and was again caught,
by a cigarette butt in the gravel,
just then I felt my own barbs
dig in--seeing it there
resting so recently--
my own indignation
at the roughness of my grandparent's generation
turned back on mine
from the generations that lay ahead,
the naivete of my own time.

Read this in Bed.

Filmic Canterburries
Dance through my head,
Never moralizing like old Chaucer,
But rather pointed
Like Mountain Goats songs about
Meth-heads and lust,
Writerly like docu-voiceovers
and twisted with Tarantino Epigrams.

Someone asked me to carbonize them
or at least lighten them to air, voice,
but their substance
compounds too heavily
in my skull to scrape thoroughly,
stuck the ecstasy and terror
as they flick in my mind's eye.

A canvas could edge them elegantly
(If I were one to paint,
colors confuse me)
but only a crawling one,
flesh incarnate and walking,
running, breathing, singing,
stretched tight across the wood frame
that will rot or burn away,
In time leaving stiff silver images,
screened life-thoughts,
as a memorial to
my own meandering mind.