Very Brave
all the rage
to tempt loneliness
upon Front page
gold head lines
w/ Ali Khan & all the rest
Onassis, Blues
BB Albert Collins
gin & tonic
give him a high martin i
get him down
the prancing clown
will bring the empire
swooping swirling
Tunnelling Thundering Tumbling
hell, O, down
(That's as down as I can get right now, on a Mainstream, & I am pretty high, far gone)
Thank god I have the
Sweet warm promise of
a woman there to keep
me warm
So this is where my fine warm
poetry (pottery) has got
me,
led me
back to Madness
& the men who made
me
Jim Morrison
incest is the wolf.
denial is the forest
your mother send you through.
the red cape is the passion,
the cloak of the warrior.
the brave woodcutter (and this is the catch)
the brave woodsman,
who slays the wolf,
and saves you,
will have to be yourself.
the life you lead will be the one
you carve out.
will the red cloak fit,
will you like the food in the basket?
maybe you will take the wolf's tongue
into your mouth and go willingly to a
house made of gingerbread.
why did your mother send you
in the first place to do the job
that was hers?
will you chop off you own
toes with the ax?
will you get jung up on the
weird berries growing like
little red nipples
on the underside of shiny green leaves?
the ax
the path
the cape
the shoes
the mother
the forest
the wolf
the woodcutter
the grandmother--
you were given these.
how will you rearrange, tell back the story
through time?
what choices do you really have
when the story's so old?
is the moss soft under your feet?
is there mystery in that much green?
do you take the woodcutter in?
and who, who, hoots the owl
holds a girl child whose eyes have been
plucked out and sent into the forest alone?
Sapphire
but I don't want to write about
how the air stinks with the smell
of loneliness.
how it beats me like some Tonton Maconte hand
from Haiti
how it shoots me in the back like some
Israeli settler bent on the final
solution
how it has no flag or homeland.
how it walks outside the night
dragging a penis of ice,
eyes like empty cans.
it got my brother
it got my mother
it got my father
it has my sister's foot in its mouth
I see the top of a hill, the blue sky over it
either way -- his hill, my hill, I keep going.
Sapphire
Time works like acid
Strained eyes
You see time fly
The face changes as the heart beats
& breathes
We are not constant
We are an arrow in flight
The sum of the angles of change
Her face changed in the car
eyes & skin & hair remain
the same. But a hundred similar
girls succeed each other
Jim Morrison
There is a pretty girl
on the
Face
of the magazine
And
all I can see
are my dirty
hands
turning the page
Jewel
PAGE TWO