Poetry+

---

i find my stones again by gps
i borrow some for years
then return them to the exact same spot
by gps
some have names
Hardknock
Gneiss, Piece of Schist
Aggie

1990 Santa Cruz 

I must relate to you my former marmot life

when I did know the lovely mole-like ground hog wench

who shared my den and its surrounding woods.

I met her in a tavern tree where sap ferments

and drips from paw to snout.

Her uncle had just lost his fur to a truffle hunter’s

digging stick.

We each observed the other’s glance and shied away.

Our tails did feign ambivalence and food we then discussed.

We nuzzled close and grew quite tipsy

’ere the badger barkeep tossed us out.

Her dalliance with a rotund squirrel I was apt to fret

and blue jays’ gossip tried to foul our warming bond.

And yet her scent would always calm

my too rambunctious brain.

Well organized she was and when the seasons tugged our species

She’d be vexed by how it cramped her style

but ’round she’d go to civic groups

and gracefully bow out of duties planned.

“See you in the spring” she’d chime.

“Sorry. Bio clocks, I’m sure you know.”

One year we lay a bit too close and while we slept

our curved buck teeth grew long and interlocked.

When it was time to seek the surface she suggested

that we grab the Sunday papers piled up there.

So we both climbed up as one and what a frightful vision

was that shadow of our double-bodied form!

We quick retreated down the hole

and careful gnawing on remaining nuts did wear away

the twining ivories binding us.

Those days are gone and I have since evolved.

Yet every spring the steamy earth evokes

sweet traces of my green swathed furry past

though human forms now tantalize

my procreative dreams.

The lemming drives its stainless stake to market where his ankles break from burdens of another life when, as an artist, captains’ wives would cream his ocher while the lentils burned. An animal less waranteed might crack and warp rebirthing in such stressing times tho’ [hauling] substance salves its quirky rhymes.

April 1985, Mojave 

What if ice cream told you all it knew.

What if turnips turned the tail on straw and hay

and sage brush bayed and horses neighed.

What if antelopes went out to play

and celery was glad to see you every day.

Suppose you heard a carrot say “I’m blue.”

Do you feel good and think you shouldn’t cry

when apples turn to pie?

Does rhubarb seem to rattle when it rains?

Are chick peas ever captured in the snow?

Who knows why toes of bears and rhinoceros retreat

from sitting by a stream where onions meet?

Where do cactuses ascend a flight of stairs

and ants might snare a crumb of bread?

A mismatched set of tubers sends me reeling

when I think there might be life beyond the garden wall.

That’s all.

This is the latest in a series of outhouse poems, a pad & pen for which is always waiting at the facility at Bill & Hildie’s Gold Mine. This poem defends & respects a hitherto maligned part of life too often made a laughing stock. Well, no more!

May 1985, Mtn. King Mine, Merced River 

They’re not the ducts of sweat and tears

that idly bide the passing flow

but sterner stuff that work all day

to see congealed quagmires hot and cold,

the swamps and seas of dinners foreign,

mixtures unbenign and old.

My bowels condone, nay! Sanctify

what roughage makes its presence known.

They jump and shout their windy legume tunes.

When celery arrives prechewn,

my bowels perk up with gleeful looks.

My god, they’ve seen some wondrous things –

digested bonbons, fish with hooks!

Tho’ daylight fails and systems slow

and aching bones their maintenance demand,

my bowels may yet have hours of toil

within their sinusoidal land.

And late at night they rumble

friendly sounds of industry

to cheer the lonely wanderer

through dreamland’s dunes of sleepy sand.

The road extracts some skin cells. They dry.

But the DNA don’t die. It flies. It mates with a jumpin’ cholla.

Its baby hooks a ride on a jackass rabbit.

Up to your daughter’s backdoor.

Dig in skin deep to read the lines

That make her kind bring out your scars.

Then make the peace and back your back up to the nearest wall.

You think you’ll get a porridge brain

And all the schemes might dissipate.

A tailor’s toppled gown sogs

endless in the heaving gull-bent sea

whose brick beamed shell shocked mouth

delights the roving stratum of too proud

sand flee groveling terns

A cake-packed battered map case, child,

unwrestled bulrush combed

to breezy loon song ways galoomph

past blue memory doors

The licked up bread bowl growls,

beaked kinship wounds rise yeasty

dragging clanky moons 

of going, bitter storms

Mundane thoughtless worms send by sinew

bits of world end tea leaf gloom

tapping comfort out of buried chocolate tins

Seizing from within the sweet eye’s elbow,

its stage bones’ futile hurling

unseats a flour flocked book’s floured spine

This sugar-bitter seance cannot staunch

the cloying juices of my dirge mocking pulse

behind its grate of reminiscence

The L.A. Visit bled me.

Two vain Gestaltists eviscerated my illusions.

Now diminutive clerics dredge the fouling skyline

for my surviving visions.

In a month the in-laws arrive with a reminiscence subpoena.

Marie will demand I expunge all I hold of our time together.

But my painting keeps me bright till then.

And after, bolts of color will electrocute,

transporting me safely behind the canvas.

as a cat i likkda fir

mouse blud floed hot roun my dager teeth and raspi tung

life as a man started suden

i bit a tode and spit it out

by sum change it rid it self of me

next i no im nakd under a bush in nite in rane

a homlis cloth me and teach words

ain no other memres up to this account

Bewildered Utopians trod the cold yellow earth bowl.

Remnants of squandered enchantment entrapped the stragglers.

Some returned to the savanna of caprice.

Aeolian harmonies burst the ground

turning the others toward the stagnant farmlands.

Above the rim, dull moons pocked an ice black dome.

Emotionally asphyxiated, unevolved, they subsided in a bog.

Their lives, written in their bodies’ patterns

embroidered the descending layers of sleep.

This is our recipe if Judee & I ever promote 

the occurrence of such a commodity.

Babies? Makem

Boil & bakem

Sautéed, fricasseed

Eatem up, yum!

Basted, they’re tasty

Floured, not too pasty.

Nibble ears & fingers

Toes & just a thumb.

October 1983

Flow de melon onion lope

Caca wheelie cotton ginny

Get out my way you friggy dope

I’m driving here on grapes you ninny

Now Fresno harpy stink of horse pile

Sniff a tuber ooze for sailing past

Through pump stings

Mounds of yellow stemmy patchwork

Smithy trucker java tailings

December 29, 1982

Got under tarp bag on foam. Winds start up. Detach tarp from truck, wrap it around bag. Rain starts OK—gets heavy—get up, into cab wet & cold. Can’t stretch legs out. 10 hrs total till down.

1980

A look.

Think thus.

State your human place.

Walk from A time to second B.

Hear strings of tear-heart music the cells recall.

Invest the have-done, up to now, too late to start—too hard to—momentum.

In relation to, and body next to, rock, plug in.

Disappear, reappear then.

See in a radius,

Think in a skull.

The evening’s orange and blue hot horizon

seeps in layers through the louvers,

the colors vortex and blend where the fan churns.

Can the inlay of sky breach the brass containment?

The horses turn and trot back to the house.

The clouds dip and bow.

A cut cactus gives water. 

A fan of green bulbs blows by, then alights.

In the distance, staves, roof, and a floor of slats resist

another season of frozen cloud precipitate.

A gill shook in mire-time. The swamp gas gurgles wine stuff sacked

daphnia hordes. Baby snakes swim under the wharf-soaked

ladder. Whose blue baby, you? A stem in time blobs the lime.

Cough it up in dumped goo.

1979

Scratching a snatch of the wounded moon match,

fallopian brinkmanship flattened in June.

Undertaken enormously flippant the patch

of restricted or otherwise fractured pontoons.

Out of season the priggish mulattoes rehash

all the gloamings increasing without undue strain.

Syphilitic and Coptic not cryptic the gash

from the wrist to the buttocks and out through the brain.

September 1978

An ear aping tree is wind deformed

to a chick embryo.

Its solidity pours down the trunk,

the roots lushing and knotting.

It bows, the window winces.

For seconds it’s still.

A bush cushes across a corner

and steps back across the wall.

Again it blows, glass breaks, a young branch

abrades and shreds its skin, bleeding sticky.

Air in the room damp-thickens 

pressing the Naugahyde.

Bass booms from a distant speaker

punch a faint dull war dance through the aether.

Light takes a chance, slinks imperceptibly past

the sharp glass edges and streams out diffuse toward the west.

Colors and objects expire to gray silhouettes.

The tree is now Teddy Roosevelt.

The line prime hailed a blue crease all up the distant ways. 

The hasher held tight till morning. Only an occasional hare-word wheeled. 

Evening had now balanced the north polar dawn sticks.

Look out, you beamer, I’ve been more hornigal in a flow pattern than two canters in Fairfax.

6-23-77

History anecdotes rare tails

Stanley & Livingstone

Martin Luther

Animals customs rules etiquette

Satisfaction of

The best snots I ever picked

Detailed cases

Snot pickers competitions

Working up in the nose

Dry cakey

Wet slimy

Stringy

Dust snot

Week old

Day old

Chewable

Flickable

Roll into a ball – hard to fling away from finger. Sticks to flicking finger until dry. Or oily? 

Spit onto ceiling & watch it swing. Will it drop (green gooey globs).

Synonyms: loogie, snot, mucous, spit, spat, phlegm

Fingernail pinch. Long circular blade shapes snots from crack between nose walls.

Dry finger adhesion. Thumb dry.

Ability to move snot glob from nose to esophagus, then mouth & reverse back to nose again.

Single nostril aimed snot blowout finger over other nostril

April 1974

I, Ogleman to drew my height on sloping shores

hitherto unhailed, retrench on sarsaparilla’s quenchant plight.

Twixt handled reamer toward unstilled

my requiant pills sift till the pants of lamentations

sear the blister-hackneyed blear-faced nags.

However low, I’m still here, banter ’bout, deep-fry my moat.

Admitted spasms and bursitis in pain.

Seventh heaven in rain.

Joined in squander of flail.

Pressed thick twisted knotty vial stamps,

green howdy muse taken beer.

Now that they’re here in mere maybe, it’ll fare.

A floating cut in ripple satin plow

up to the cold gold house.

“Mountain Office Insurance Ploy 

Takes Avalanche Boy.”

He supped and crossed the polar six hour molar,

pulled a tooth, encroached the gums

and deemed past politic plasma stores.

Under fender lights blue also Jersey poles at night

ever taffy tug of mosquito bite.

(Or lift your arm for mung scrape sight)

I spin about through space and warp the loop.

Retrace upside up in never starts.

But at the opening the bales are just beyond the links.

I dance, I brew the tube, I threw the cube,

recook mistrialed lace albumin sticky chew,

lever of the fiscal pie.

A hush crashed around the yearningly huddled critique

survivors in whose company the acrylic pigment-bespattered

brunette had already achingly seduced not a few robust

picassoesque tube squeezers themselves already fomenting

an inner catharsis over the day’s freshly extruded paradigm.

A trickle of the bleakest poetic twaddle dribbled down

the smoking gown of Glenda’s father as Caesar’s bust’s

glazed stare goaded choked-down yawning fits within

the small horde’s breasts till a dinner bell paroled them from 

encapsulation.

Pregnant with a heady brusqueness and tossing her Ayn

Rand–like savoir faireness aloft, Daphne alighted at the 

canapés, bit down on an olive pit, fracturing an

impeccable incisor, unleashing a Moliere-like ribbon of

invective, shattering the chandelier-like ambience.

The red-toed, sloth-eyed, marmot-like Beak Heads

transcended toward Captain Ormy Whalon whose firm

yet atrophied defensive training tugged at the sinews of

a not totally devoted sense of heroic patriotism while he

calculated the diplomatic repercussions of unwinding the 

fleshy genetic plasma coils of these representatives from

the smarmy eleventh moon of the planet Plebny.

With an impressive fanfare (considering the nature of the

support committee’s finances [the treasurer’s son-in-law having

developed a prostate enlargement]) the meeting of the Society

(including a chapter from as far away as Haverstraw, New Jersey

[originally absent since the 1930s because of legal entanglements

too lengthy to be of interest here, although some might debate that

point ad nauseum if not perpetually]) of Terse (in the sense of “not

more descriptive adjectivally than absolutely required [given each

circumstance’s fair consideration]”) Communication convened.

Elusive yet nameless feelings of ardor bestowed thru

Ellen’s inner heart while enameling her shell of being

with a whole ‘nuther engulfment of love light, the likes

of which neither she nor Bill had as yet had the balls to

live thru.

“Melba’s Baby” broke wind that morning, a steel-layin’

testament to an iron-kettled fortitude, where fresh

out of rivets and spittin’ rail spikes as a “how de do”

was Morocco Minnie rubbin’ leg hides in the smelter’s

chowder line.

Befuddled, foundering, remote, and horizontal with a

nearby goose à l’anglaise glowering behind the

consommé au vin, I noticed the grilled shad glassily

eyeing the raw loin of lamb resting tenderly on my

soundly trounced and puffy right eye.

Brain-drained yet eagle-eyed, Billy Joe high-tailed it

knock-kneed and flat-footed down the tree-bare roll road

where his pussy-footin’ Jackass stood hog-tied to the

hitching post while his baby-faced honey-pie Lucinda

Mae sweet-talked the saw-bones into house-sittin’ the

rug rats.

Once there was it and then they did not eat part of the apple. However, herewith each whosoever might therefore according to love anything.

From us spontaneously articulated generating spontaneity, we will thereby enforce nothing spontaneously generated.

Idiosyncrasies carefully, cautiously destroy inhibitions when suddenly without deep process of migratory birds under full awareness of such mentality as heretofore exhibited by decomposed scats.

Malignancies produced by cynicism applied generously and the hawks dove into destructive antisocial societies smilingly pleasant apprehensiveness. 

Snow is falling daintily on spreading birch philosophy barking viciously, redundantly toward creative endeavor present although without any reservations it holds terror for future generations.

Wallachucks are nonexistent but chuckwallas seem hesitating although they smile at green polka-dotted tuataras waddling sexily toward male chickens.

Wallabies wash weekly when leap years dry wadis outside mangers.

Chumash Charley chuckled charmingly at Silly Sally.

Reinforced chipping techniques continually studied the evangelic chips.

Osteodontokeratic found fossils long haired bearded lemur flirting flirtatiously forever amber until evening descends into prehistoric luminescence divining reflections upon grass. 

Breach until the universe perpetuates panting existentialism desiring only porous sensuality but don’t ever heed ambitious advice condescendingly before duly authorized authority authenticated to restrict ideas.

Booze nips urgent tones of flattened riffs

skimmed recent tool bins not a dialer’s gift.

Augment my knee-stones, broil some mason’s crew

allow the remelt to crystalize beneath such catered brew.

But pork chintz dreams of altered beams till nascents 

track down miles of entered cemeteries.

I won’t crack hither stance nor will a berylite fracture

photon mules in dust puffs passed by sides permitting.

Rational

Inside digitus

flambe. Disgustus

omnio nausea. Lemetido

o luch pachuco. Gauniche,

sum cum lo ude gone wit da

pro food dam blast ya enny

way. Cortland grace sin only

cude wan ham. Profligate tin

noony times flippant side

blousey talk. Doodja say

ya wanna digitate? Poor uny

pablam tapioca wake. Tambura

noise-in lap flaky nung.

Daniel is now walking down his driveway. He’s a heavy-set man of medium height. Two kids. He’s walking on asphalt laid a month ago by a roller derby groupy from Long Beach who, back in kindergarten, used to pick the nose of a girl now employed in a New Zealand feldspar mine.

The girl recently ate some Peppermint Lifesavers that were wrapped and packed in Newark by a machine that was maintained and repaired by a cousin of the grocer who sells regularly to Daniel and his neighbors.

The type that printed the headline of a certain edition of the Milwalkie Courier was slightly off center because of a metal burr lodged in the type carrier. This burr was caused by a reaming job done on the press’ bearing holders and was not cleaned out. The reamer used was bought from a firm in Pittsburg and the same day the order was filled, this firm was sending a shipment of tools to the feldspar mine in New Zealand. The bills of lading for both orders were sighed by the dispatcher in Pittsburg and, in so doing, the impression of his signature for the Milwalkieorder was produced on the New Zealand papers These can be found in the business files of the mine’s records office.

J. L. Hooker cuts blues records, and one of his album covers was designed by a man who was a teaching assistant in the art department of a school in Los Angeles. While speaking to the class once, his hand rested on a desk that had been marred by much use. The fingernail of the small finger of his left hand momentarily rested in an old scratch once caused by an etching needle. That scratch was made by a girl at the exact second someone next to her uttered the word anyway. A year later, the teaching assistant’s fingernail was in contact with that scratch just as he said way. The girl who had said anyway once went out with a physics student who had seen J. L. Hooker in Georgia about fifteen years before.

About twelve years ago, the girl who now works in the feldspar mine bought her parents an anniversary present with money earned by working at a taxidermist. Included in the payment was a quarter she had picked up in front of the cafeteria where she ate lunch. It had fallen from the coin tube of a newspaper vending machine when the distributor was filling the machine. It rolled into the street and ended up near the crosswalk, which was where the girl found it. The paper distributor who dropped the quarter had previously quarreled with his wife about anchovies. The argument was caused by the addition of the anchovies to the meal without the consent of the husband. The wife added the anchovies on the advice of a 1934 cookbook written by a man who worked in the first recording studio to cut any of J. L. Hooker’s records, and whose brother had a son that ended up on the roller derby team in Long Beach that was worshipped by the groupy that laid Daniel’s asphalt.

1969?

The crap in the air settles all over the chairs and the floor. If I leave the windows open for ventilation, in a week, there’s a layer of crap. The trucks. Fuck the goddam trucks. And the whole city they drive in on. The noise has already numbed me so that I don’t care anymore. The bumps in the street make the empty trucks sound like Gargantua is smacking them from side to side against the buildings. All night. And at six a.m. But I got caught in an obligation to keep the place for Jon till he gets back from Europe. The obligation tapeworm—with claws and sandpaper sides that rasp my innards.

Today is Sunday and wet. I see lots of Manhattan slimies out. Bricklass of the Bowery waves his arms at me and warns of hallucinations. The Wagnerian-horned Viking chalks up another 500 tourist leers and double takes on 53rd and 7th. The piss-puddlers in various angles of passed-outness display violet, crimson, magenta flesh tones in their faces and bottle-cuddling bare arms. Spring is near.

The bricks were unloaded & the truck blocked the alley so the lady couldn’t squeeze past. What was she late for? I glanced at her and pinched my fingers under a pile of bricks, but I didn’t worry about her or my fingers. Later I was at home drinking beer and the walls were pressing me like the trucks. I thought in the morning I would change occupations again. I had been paid by the day so I just called & said I wouldn’t be around anymore. No reaction. Just an OK, almost cheerful. Then the click on the phone.

I live behind a sporting goods store with my entrance opening on the delivery alley with no inset from the sides of passing trucks. The door opens out. Often I can’t get out when trucks are parked there. Sometimes they catch the door when it opens. It splinters or dehinges or slams back on me suddenly. I crushed an elbow once that way. Fixed it up myself. Now it’s too stiff for doing push-ups.

Things in the alley get smashed, kicked, and broken. I throw bottles or fluorescent tubes when I find them. But I don’t breathe the fumes. I threw a bottle at a cat once and it thudded safely off the cat’s side.

There was a truck of wooden slats on the back & I grabbed ahold when it took off. And the next block after the alley I dropped off & twisted my ankle & stopped for a cup of coffee where I always go. A man at the counter said, “You want those boxes?” Egg dripped to his shirt. He fingered most of it back.

“Sure.” I told him they’d be good for my project. I got Asian packing crates of teak and mahogany that make up [Acramic] masks that I sell to galleries. One in 3 months keeps me in shelter.