-the great disturbance of 2021-

there seems to be an outside disturbance of some kind.

I’m five floors up with a balcony which serves to be more

of an observational platform than a concrete slab to sit upon and have a beer.

besides, it’s raining and early April cold.

but to the north, the expansive river view is always rewarding.

the disturbance is heard to be at ground level, and

close to the building’s main entrance, a periodic rumbling

as in the dragging of multiple heavy objects across a pavement.

tornadoes enter with sounds like this; a deep rumbling

just before everything's jostled to the wrong place.

but my investigation is interrupted by a recorded call

from the pharmacy informing me that my prescription

is filled and ready for pick-up.

from the balcony, the commotion is subsiding,

and the wind has increased slightly from the northeast.

but the rain has stopped without leaving behind a scent of itself

which my precision-honed sensibilities find inexcusable.

I anticipate the scent left behind from the rain, and I expect

to be so informed.

I suspect the phenomenon of post rainfall scent is best served

during the mid summer months, and at street level, where the scent

of metal seems to be pronounced above lesser scents, with the exception

of the baseball park whose scent of anticipation is more clearly

defined when experienced immediately after the rain.

on the inside, the sink's clean and utensils are properly stored within

the conveniently compartmentalized drawer, so the time is ripe to move along;

to incorporate the more mundane characteristics of a life well lived. 

so I’m off to the pharmacy to pick-up my prescription.

                   -on page 19-

on page 19 we find “The Pope’s Penis”––

Sharon Olds' testament of how it hangs;

she said: "deep in his robes".

––too quick for an interlude,

but men find themselves washing it sudsy in the morning.

you'd think we'd approach the location with care and hesitance,

but we attack the structure (which she describes as

"a delicate clapper at the center of a bell") with vigorous lathering.

––end the interlude.

 you have to be bold to appreciate Sharon's descriptions

when it comes to the Pope’s penis; (when cloaked) she said:

“it moves like a ghostly fish

in a halo of silver seaweed.."  (I love that line)

and tomorrow during the rinse cycle I’ll either

prove or reject her findings.

now we're told by Saint Sharon that when the Pope sleeps,

his penis "..stands up in praise of God".

Yikes! or as Browning would say: "Zooks"!

from "The Gold Cell" / Knopf

                   threnody for "Pinky" Imbriglio drowned at the quarry’s ledge

why is it now that I see you

ripple in still water –– flesh

a muted grey resolution, the value

of raw granite?

with what invitation did still

water call to saturate your early lungs?

your dark eyes set deep in youth

are darker now, more deeply set. the fading

wavelet marks you drowned

in the calm below the water.

  

               

                  -the dream ends and there isn't a room to wakeup in-

to be clear, I don't die in the dream.

I'm not running, nor am I falling.

you won't find me flying over the chicken coop in this one.

but the dream cascades through time

bypassing the capriciousness of Movements and piercing

the fabric of unrelenting Periods before settling into the neutral 

territory lurking between them.

but the dream has no mechanism beyond itself.

that is, the dream is substantive without

the physical properties to support its substance;

that is, it has no piston to drive it.

well, what I mean to say is: the dream

has its piston which drives it, sure,

and there's plenty to think about, and a lot to unpack when

the dream gives way to approaching consciousness.

but when the time comes, when the dream unrepentant, but yielding,

enters through the doorway of consciousness, rattling the bones

of its mechanism and fracturing sunrise, it'll be all right; for that’s the moment

I'll join the inhabitants of the physical world where nightmares exist.

                   Antoine's pride / Insurrection, 1/6/21

watching the goings on,

a student of the day's

comings and goings,

it swells from Antoine's

gassy belly, panting for a guy

he doesn’t know

who dwells in Antoine's

hometown and runs

a small Five & Dime, north end,

one room narrow at the beam,

item-bloated, sharp florescence,

high, pressed steel ceiling,––

(Antoine's been there)

it's the guy who

hopped a Greyhound heading

south to D.C. and then

by cell-of-wifey, spotted

tossing a smokey into the throat

of the Nation's Capitol

breached by like-minded

bellyachers

with boners for Nancy but

not in the good way.

day one

                  -a serious problem resolved, somewhat-

I think most of my poems

are better served when

recited in the monotone.

I think the sound they make belongs

on the plane of the Earth.

no highs nor lows just flat as the planet.

poets I listen to online

reciting their work to an audience, tend to

accentuate syllables more often.

Billy Collins for example, recites from his podcast

employing a tone-scale intonation sympathetic

to the piece at hand, near pleading in some sense

at various moments of consequence

and when the reading is done, he slowly

looks up at us for a moment of silent resolution.

his face rises from the spine like a Sun

we can look at with our naked eyes.

maybe I feel this way because I listen to these poets

reading into my ear in their own voices.

but when it’s just me in the room, my poems

tumble through my head like hallucinations.

funny, though.

because I don't read my stuff out loud,

I hear them through the mind's throat springing

from the plane.–– but

occasionally a few stand at the mic

with the breathless sound of Marilyn's voice

when she sang: "Happy Birthday Mr. President" to J.F.K.

and man,..talk about poetry.

dead Jack, the guy in the back / requiem for Jack Kickabuck

for those who go down to the snow

at the helm of fierce machinery,

there echo's a distant romance in falling

to endlessness from behind the hand-

powered scoop, I know.

but old Jack Kickabuck layered his clothes

from skin to the outermost cloth, trudging out there

without fear, forging a pathway to an open road

guiding the rattling gas-burner with its auger's blades,

his crawling machinery altering the timeline of his life.

good old Jack would not be spared the frozen hand of god.

the undertaker has changed his socks, but his attitude

remains the same as it ever was; to collect the fallen

like old Jack Kickabuck laid bare upon his fatal snow,

and move the dear departed to deposit him to another

frozen space, and so it goes from time to time.

Jack Kickabuck, the guy in the back fell dead of heart failure upon a soft

bed of snow during a fierce winter day in 2017.

 

                  -At the grave of Albert Pinkham Ryder / Lot 4 / Section V-

So I went along to visit the grave of Albert Pinkham Ryder

which was marked by a heavy looking, but standard-issue stone,

a stone you might pass unnoticed when visiting a cemetery near you;

a non-monumental monument.

––I might have expected a stone of darker granite,

its face blackened, smeared by overcoats of home-cooked varnish,

riven, marked by erratic webs of otherworldly fissures,

all to mirror the surfaces of his pictures.

––The experience took place years ago at the "Rural Cemetery"

in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Daylight had faded and October supplied an early moonlight,

graced with sweeping Ryder skies in honor of our company.

 ––An art school upperclassman had asked one of us to attend,

and two others tagged along for the viewing.

I was one of two.

At the gravesite I was one of four;

one of five if Ryder is included in the column of attendees.

                 “life is too short to learn the names of weeds”

you’ll likely see a thousand poem titles

like the title above popping-up in the next few weeks.

consider this my entry into the fray.

but the line is attributed to a fan of Billy Collins

who sent it to his nightly podcast because recently

Billy had mentioned that he has a friend who

identified the nomenclature of every weed

they came across as they walked along a pleasant

country road somewhere on the outskirts of.. Paris, I think.

the fan, call her Naomi, seemed to be marginally pissed-off,

implying that Collins was taking-up valuable podcast time

simply because his buddy had the doggedness to identify weeds,

intruding on an otherwise pleasant stroll.

as for me, I didn't find the interlude disruptive, and

it was only a small part of a broader discussion, but

Mister Collins liked the metrics of Naomi's line and said so,

further giving his blessing to the world's home-shackled poets

to use the line freely if they were so inclined, opening a pathway

to Naomi's potential litigation against the Collins estate.

 but that’s all I have on the subject of weeds, except to say

I’ve spoken of them before, limited to their intrusion of

the vegetable garden, their indispensable cover behind the billboards,

and their routinely invasive attitudes,–– all without gracing them with

a proper noun to cozy up to.

                  -the hovering flying saucer from Mars-

and why not Mars?

why finger another planet for the invading

flying saucer from another world, but Mars?

Mars it's always been, so, Mars it is now.

this time the invader is seen from my kitchen window, and

setting the scene, I’ll say it’s early evening, but moonless,

and a soupy fog has settled in.

I can barely make-out the incandescence.

the windows of neighboring houses, once sharply delineated

are now fuzzy little rectangles in amber, glowing with a rarer kind of light.

the streetlight high above them emits a blue, hazy oval shape,

heavily atomized, and I see it as a flying saucer filled with slimy,

big-eyed, green-skinned Martians. how frightening.

I should simply wish it away 

like the kid in the Twilight Zone sending naughty

neighbors into the cornfield,–– forget this nonsense

and return to dishwashing like the other poets on the block.

but I expand the sighting.

the fog is thickens.

the invader's ship is calculated to be hovering very,

very, very far away and the farther away I imagine it,

the bigger the saucer from Mars gets, especially when seen up close.

It's unimaginable.

no stars. no moon. no fuzzy-coated streetlight anymore.

just doom hovering there above the sink between dirty dishes and eternity.

  

                  -end it now and everything’s alright-

my dear

perpetually brick-

headed republican

bloviators,

perpetually lost in the fog

democratic commentators and

perpetually inept

political pollsters;

gather, have lunch,

digest in your own

stale company,

sleep together

in separate beds in

separate states on

separate planets;

synchronize 

the sound machines to

power-on mode,

kick out the jams

and groove to some smooth

Michel Petrucciani licks.