Madwoman Madman
She dreamed like mad, she said
to set gallant horses prancing across the sun
and plant rainfields in the sky.
On blackened beaches she'd glide and spy
marshmallow-bellied men leaning on withered elbows.
“I’d pluck their arms, whisper droll fish stories.”
Hurdy-gurdy anthems floated by.
Out of nuisance, rumor, history and inkblots
the hospital team, each with a key,
cooked up a syndrome: tight, concise.
Will fit in a file.
Off the record we fretted, “She’s in another space.”
Consensus was she must be brought to our dimension,
grounded, kept usefully occupied with therapy,
given all the right drugs and lots of TLC.
Trained, with a heavy set of keys, a steady eye,
I volunteered to rectify.
“The problem is, you're crazy.”
“Yes of course. But here's a tiny path
with cottony borders bright blue and green,
and it twists like a rambling length of string
laid out by nervous children to find the way home,
twists far off toward fluffy homes
scattered like windsown orchids
pulsing bluer and greener than beached rainbows.
Oh come with me.”
“How?” I asked, instant lunatic,
suddenly cured when she looked me over
the way she'd examine a week-old loaf of bread.
Looked me over and shook her head.
I waited patiently.
“Wake up” is all she said.
Improvise
They took her baby, and she cried.
It was enough to make the social worker look
out the window and attend to seagulls
kewing wharf to sky.
It was not in the book,
but the MSW kept her head: she wasn’t fit to sigh.
The degree insured distance; the papers, authority;
and the script,
the script called for ornithology.
Metamorphosis
Being a Report of a True Conversation between The Polyester
Princess and The Poltroon
“No more polyester.”
“What?”
“I’m looking for a significant change in my life.”
“Oh. No more polyester.”
In Flagrante (Delicto)
Caught with her pants down.
Again. Look, on innersprings
she sprawls like clock work,
pretty well put together.
Later she does her patented barbiedoll blush,
rubicund, all over.
Some Cats
Some cats have scratchy eyes
that grate on you
like steely harrows breaking clods of flesh
or hayrakes scratching the itch of alfalfa
windrowing into the sun
until your pinprickle skin
can't take it anymore.
Damn those sonsofbitches,
those cats with scratchy eyes.
Call
Cry if you want
for languid days we could have pyramided up
like chunks of chiseled jade,
a ramshackle pile of green dream days steaming in the sun.
See if you understand
we might have read each other and been informed
about the climate, news, sports, and cartoons,
as we became as newsworthy and brittle as last year’s paper.
Laugh if you can
at punchline lives that never came off.
We puttered around, frowned and wrinkled noses,
made urgent noise in space
and used the finest hard-to-find tools
to patch up a brokendown joke.
Believe if you will
that toads grow jewels and campfires hypnotize,
and you'll let my hand deceive your eye.
Damn all magic that takes two to thrive.
Hope if you must
for bubblegum times when every spring is gently green,
when the singing fiddler's bow slides straight and true,
and there's a soft new detergent for the washing machine.
And pray for glad storybooks and snappy tunes,
for peanut butter that won't stick in the mouth
as you stand in a cold telephone booth
with a pocketful of coins.
A Grotequerie:: Coming Attractions
Crusty old men, I hate you all:
infirm sum of high moment, ill-defined hope.
Leaves, scuttled by autumn wind gusts: fall.
I have previewed your derelict scope,
comprehend your doting rage;
I grow senile, malnourished, and I mope
and mutter sclerotic folderol.
(Yes I hate: you remind me
(lost, relying on strangers, utter strangers to find me
If only one got gibbering stupid with age,
not a desperate butterfly in a tattered cage.
Year's End Resolution
Like tornadoes fashioning holey cotton underwear,
this winter wind tears through flesh
and slick snowflakes hit the dirt, skid and crunch
in dugout bowls fit for marching bands and fans.
We standby to catch fastbreaking news.
Weeks ago the pumpkinman tracked back to his carven shell.
He broadcast poisoned apples to throw them off the trail.
Then a throttled gobble stuck in the throat like a bone,
the last hack of a frozen bird.
Reliable sources said grace.
The old chiseler snorted and jiggled his fatso belly
slung like a bag full of Girl Scout cookies.
Always the life of the party,
he scanned the room for a lampshade. Size 7-3/8.
We've been so-so for goodness’ sake,
toast a cheer for mom and dad
who purchased bowling balls, food, school and social security,
invested in America’s future on the bond-a-month plan,
prepaid their cemetery plots, exercised and ate more bran.
Tired and petulant, they want to live forever.
They? you ask, as if we spoke only of citizens
and had to look them up in hefty phone books
we'd ripped apart for proof and approbation.
Gadgetbound, we finger Nikons, toy with electric noise.
Time-lapse shots freeze us dancing doom’s ballet,
tapes trap the clump of the highstepping boogieman
who rides the windblast of afterdinner jazz
like a logroller with ambidextrous feet.
Let’s bystand on wooden knees for the book of records,
and garner green brass medallions to wear in holiday parades.
Soliciting votes for the losers hall of fame,
we’ll find the usual comic-book villains to blame.
A text we’ve thumbed and grimed with use
falls open like a trusty whore:
Memorize once and for an the principal exports of Brazil.
Hangovers :: A Hypoglycemic Serenade
Hangovers give you an idea
of what hell must be like:
a malignant freighttrain
manned by a satanic engineer
racking the body’s rails from head to toe;
and heaven’s an eternally distant
watering tank and station
where arrivals are always soberly punctual
and you had telegraphed ahead
a cantankerous message:
O lay off hotlipping that horn, Gabriel.
4 for Herr Doktor
I
Walking along Angst St. in Vienna,
Freud slipped and skidded
on rimed Viennese cobblestones,
danced for once in his life
to maintain balance, and never
wondered at all what it meant.
II .
I would have paid full admission,
bought a season ticket,
to see the doctor play
baseball with the other kids:
fielding gracefully on the first hop,
running like a proud stag to second,
hitting huge Hank Aaron home runs
and striking out
now and then like the rest of us,
all unaware of what games mean
and rampant bats, and balls.
III
Freud in the States
didn't get to see the winos
on Burnside in Portland or Trent in Spokane.
If he had, would the master analysand
have spent 50 minutes with one
in free association?
Wet brain, wine sores and vitamin deficiency;
liver's scarred up, a fine teaching specimen.
Not at all suited for psychotherapy,
a journal paper, yes: “The Case of Dipso Dan,”
a footnote to the grand theory.
Freud changes his mind,
thinks of countesses, lusts for cigars,
and reviews the reproductive systems of eels,
he leaves the wino alone amongst winokind.
They say cocaine
activates sluggish neurotransmitters in the brain.
If Freud were in Portland or Spokane,
he'd crank out
bona fide theories up the yazoo,
and make keen clinical remarks on the analysis of a lout.
He'd keep in practice just off Burnside (say),
subsidized by a three year grant from the NIAAA.
His caseload? Bored wives of real doctors,
a subclinical pellagrin or two,
court-ordered problem drinkers,
and sexfiends fixated on the yazoo.
Freud dreams (and forgets)
of safe cigars, countesses, yazoos
and reproductive systems of eels.
IV
No one should be surprised to find
that with at least nineteen patients,
all pretty crazy cases,
Freud had without doubt every bit
of as much spectacular luck
as Lourdes.
A Dream of Horses
is a little-boy dream
when white horse herds flow, collapse
and splash like spilt milk
on fresh furrows of black plowed silt,
is a mad multitude of horses climbing mountains.
is a girl in dreams who shakes her head
to start and stop the wind
and makes the cliff-bound waves strike and froth and roar,
lacey patterned steeds cast in bits upon the shore.
is a horse-dream of horses
is kneedeep clover and oats galore.
Along the dusty road people pace
back and forth, jostle, shove,
sit astride the long white fence
and watch horses dream with unimpeded love.
Wars
Wars
make our sisters
whores
for a slab of lard
between two hard pieces of bread
Wars make our brothers dead.
On Education
How can my girl
be learning anything,
she’s so happy,
said the tired mother
asking the only question
her scrunched-up mind could muster.
Science Lesson
(I) Observe.
(2) Develop critical technique.
Armed with this twofold canon and unique
instrumentation, we may plod, but seldom swerve
once a problem’s formulated.
We simply can't work with what's imprecisely stated.
Within certain inscrutable degrees of error
we know more or less where we've been,
and in a sense, how, if we want, to get there again.
But facts do not exactly save the soul.
Facts do not neatly redeem when
we confront the first startling terror
of mortality, a manikin role
we're unaccustomed to express.
We could, in nights of full moon, brazenly yell
and gesture defiance of hottest hell.
Needing redemption less
than accuracy, we hazard not to guess
where we can’t find out. Thus painfully we observe
and balance out a fleeting loss of critical nerve.
NUMBER ONE, SON
“200 corporations stole America,
count ’em,
another under-the-nose job,
a dandy ripoff,
no prints left behind, no clues.
Could it be the work of the goddam jews?”
Everyone looks for comicbook villains
a superman could nab:
“Break out yer crimefighter’s notebooks,
when yer finished with coffee and rolls,
we’ll bust the balls of these asshole crooks
as soon as we find their MOs.”
Silk collar culprits merge and splurge,
flinging dividends from Seattle lo Switzerland,
Lockheed, Korea, Vietnam.
Meanwhile, the investigation's getting out of hand:
“It's a tough case chief,
better call in Charlie Chan.”
Ditty
So what if there are plastic cows
and eco-freak crybabies;
all our rabbits, dogs and cats
are given shots for rabies.
So what if Pentagoners wear
leaden jocks; their ladies
defend cosmetically, you see,
against Strontium-90 babies.
And what if sugar coats the land
and cloys and clogs your liver,
we'll sooth our souls and bath our cells
in the Great Rock Candy River.
We’ll cola this and sweeten that
and french fry all we eat,
and spawn a breed of quick food brats,
hyperactive, dumb, and beat.
So what if warriors lead us
with our Congressmen’s consent?
They know we've more concern to hear
where the yellow went.
O how do your armpits smell today?
Is that a trace of sweat?
Is her blue hair really grimey gray?
She’ll never tell I’ll bet.
Let’s clearcut trees and leach the soil
use coal and nukes for power
and wash the dust from off our boils
with a phosphorescent shower.
Let’s sell more beer and liquor,
build high speed muscle cars,
promote good dope (don't frown and mope).
Watch the GNP climb far.
Let us have a gala Disneyland
at every county fair,
and pray and pray for comic gods
to unpollute the air.
Public Enemy
Mother got arrested for stealing sheets
to sell for cotton rags.
She was easy to spot in the lineup:
her rummage sale clothes were a dead giveaway.
Mother upstaged the judge.
“Don't be a churl,” she said.
He instructed the jury to put her away.
“I am away.”
She knew how to get good press,
the old phantom of the clothesline circuit.
A juror later complained that it’s hard to convict
a woman who could be anyone’s mother.
Crazed Dopefiend Poem
Everybody’s on something all the time,
nobody’s on nothing any time,
and someone way, way out there,
some ding dong’s on absolutely everything.
Husky With the Musky
The wino was pretty damn impressive
when he stood right up, thrust out chin and chest
and said he was afraid of nothing
and knocked it back with a shot of muscatel.
Knocks Once, Maybe
In perfect time
the sandman zealously soft-shoes up
to anyone’s front door.
He knocks once, if he knocks at all,
a hollow thunk, then a granular footstep in the hall.
He spreads himself thin, far and wide,
as if he were a converted gypo logger
reseeding echo-laden wildernesses
with huge handfuls of knotholes.
Men baptized in fire would run amok
to have their eyes fill up with sand.
The wickerbasket corps weave, wake, and listen.
When the only sandman ever shuffles his feet,
he sounds like a demented centipede
cavorting on rainbow-thin ice.
If I could stand to dream the sandman
right in the eye again
face to face, a confrontation,
I’d advise the solitary old insomniac
to take a few nights off, put on
electric blue suede shoes
and hustle the iceman's eldest daughter.
Buffalo Bull, A Lament
Taking long, sure potshots
TV moviemen plunk fearless domesticated buffalo
(Will the big white bull finally survive?)
The dumbfounded targets grunt
like sledgehammered hogs. Die, die, die.
(Junk store rugs, see how they lie?)
I’m not fooled by pantomime poaching
in our home on the range.
(Why doesn't the Cavalry arrive?)
It’s farfetched as the ancient Indians
and legendary as a molecule.
Off camera the ghostdancers stamp,
turn and chant. The ghostdancers try
to keep the audience alive.
Off camera the ghostdancers die, die, die.
Variations On A Theme: “Deacon Blues”
(with apologies to Steely Dan; esp., Don Fagen and
Walter Becker)
Woodsheddin on my castinets,
hacking out some blues.
I’ve chewed my share of chiclets,
paid my union dues.
Now I snort borax with the best of them,
smoke hi-grade powder fuse,
and short-circuit out the baseboard heat
to shake my cortex loose.
They name the winners in this world,
and they'll name me as I lose.
Call Moby Dick the great white whale
and me, Old Tennis Shoes . . . .
You Ole Hi-Octane Dinosaur, You
If a plan had not been passed without dissent
to dig a hole as large as meteor crater
or a mammoth cave filled to the brim
with low-income families, instant future oil reserves
to help restore depleted fossil fuels,
all those poor people might have been bombed
and turned into a parking lot in Indiana,
according to a report leaked from a select committee
on Rational Responses to Energy Crises—
1. Resource Management, Reallocation & Recycling.
Next time you buy gas, fillerup
and consider how it’d feel to be
a tankful of unleaded hi-octane dinosaur.
Teacher, Teacher
song
Teacher, teacher, what have you got to say?
Hey there, teacher, you better keep out of my way.
I’m looking for a teacher, but all I can find
Is a respectable man who's got nothing but an old ugly mind.
He teaches me truth from a book full of lies
And we conjugate verbs while the country dies . . .
I look for a teacher and find bland men leading the blind.
Teacher, teacher, where did you go to school?
It seems like to me all that booklearning’s made you a fool.
What good’s it gonna do on that dark last day?
What kind of smart things are you gonna bray?
Teacher, teacher, what did you learn in school?
Like a greenbroke jackass thumping down a long dusty road,
I go plodding dumbly carrying some damn idiot’s load.
Carrot in front of me, big stick behind,
Nothing but stark fear clouding my mind.
Jackass, jackass, all alone on that white winding road.
Hey there, teacher, what did you learn today?
That stealing for hunger’s a sin, and crime does not pay?
That you can kill for love and still be just,
And there aint nobody you really can trust.
Hey there, teacher, you better keep out of my way.
Here comes Teacher all dressed up in a suit.
Outside it looks all right but there’s mouldy rot at the root.
At three in the morning, when it’s getting late
Ask: how many minds did you multilate?
Teacher, teacher, what’s the red spot staining your suit?
Did you teach about the niggers and where they ought to stay?
Did you tell how to put all the crazies far far away?
You can kill kids in war with a napalm bomb,
You can kill them in school with your blue suit on.
What kind of grade, teacher, do you deserve today?
What kind of grade, teacher, do you deserve today?
Teacher, teacher, what have you got to say?
Hey there, teacher . . . what have you got to say?
Teacher . . . Teacher . . . you better keep out of my way.
Teacher ... I'm looking for a teacher ....
A History of Philosophy
During a helterskelter winter walk
ranging wide among pine and fir
and low-spread branches
bent with the sure weight of snow
like dutybound wives loaded up
with Monday’s wet sheets,
we could not get lost: we knew
from indisputable frontier lore
that moss always grows on the north side
of the trees, I said.
“That's not so. I know places
where moss grows all around the tree.”
She laughed and casually made havoc
of all my Boy Scout Handbook universe
and the natural scheme of things.
So we argued like antique metaphysicians
and slid and tumbled down a snowbank
to a fir where by chance we observed
and became in a moment ourselves, crude empirics.
I pointed to the tiny moss fingers
sprouting from the bark northbound.
And on the other side, Lichens.
“Well, it looks like moss,” she said,
as the world instantly reconstituted.
Sayeth The Preacher
If I had as much priceless hair
on my head
as collects in lingering heaps
among the linoleum worms on the floor
of the Cle Elum laundromat
or in my clogged-up shower drain,
why, quicker than you could swing
the armaching jawbone of an ass,
I’d renounce vanity forever,
count myself hirsute king
of infinite space,
and just for practice
pull apart a sunbleached wishbone
like Victor Mature spreading Delilah’s thighs.
HOMERIC
Thus oft in a bedazzeled head
vagrant thoughts trespass:
How canny was the chap who said,
“O green grows the grass!”
Who split the first infinitive
and made banana beer?
Laugh the laugh definitive
when cowards eschew fear.
As lechers dance and apes cavort
under a moon on dew,
behold the slug, old worrywart
attempting to recoup.
“Sing of fox and porpentine
how one the other slew.
And toast grave deeds in aged wine—
drink! to we hardy few.”
This song of cheer he brings today
of warriors bold and tall;
sings he their deeds and strength till they
prop him against the wall.
“My own valour, alas, was such
as had never been seen before.
And I could not have loved her half so much
loved I not bock beer more.”
Leave him there a pious man
inclined towards the floor.
Tomorrow he'll be no wiser than
he never was before.
May our dreams to sawdust crumble
and our eyeballs scum encrust,
we'll find some way to mumble
till we’re inarticulate dust.
I’m Keeping It A Secret
Tomorrow’s lecture could be about
how to be nonchalant
when you walk whole-hog into a room full of strangers,
how to survive
the typical stress of being alive
without undue sweat and ostentation.
The syllabus says
it’s almost like barehanded groping in a tidepool
where you get bitten, nibbled and gnawed
by an algae-soaked anemone
and live to lie about it.
I say, Come, and take notes,
and imagine you're prepared.
The Passionate Butcher To The Shepherd’s Love
(The New Cavalier)
Endless delight and rustic joy—
So vows the cunning shepherd boy.
And in his erstwhile lover’s pose,
he woos with myrtle and mystic rose.
As fancy decks out grove and field
earth and bough lie word-concealed:
enchantments of his lusty rime
count no weeds amongst the thyme.
The once shallow river’s waterfall
is a dust-dry cliff where lizards crawl.
In woods where songsters trilled and flew
camp the carrion crow and his raven crew.
Eagerly would I be deemed a liar
if rosebuds bloomed in the warrened briar;
if green grass grew beneath the crystal sky
unblemished both to the skeptic eye.
But the shepherd pipes a seductive song,
alas, no lass can resist for long.
And if innocence lacks the grain of salt,
whose is it but the innocent’s fault?
Submit but once to a deft caress,
forthwith his passions end;
for he who mouths of lastingness
flings words into the wind.
Such subtle vows and fickle ways
are vices lightly used
by a slighting lover in his craze
to be abuser, not abused.
His fantasticks by fact belied,
love, in short, does not abide.
Remember, too, there is small delight
from odor of sheep in the warm summer’s night.
So: Come with me and be my love
for something like a minute;
and we will such pleasures prove
as the time has in it.
Blind Mouse in Lavender
When we walked into the room
where the black light was on
I began to see things.
Under The Bookcase
We were all pretty shook up
by the rabbit turd incident.
Food For Thought
To a gourmet
Have a heart.
That is, with knife and tine
dig right in.
(Some blood?—though it does not compare with wine.)
Take all, or any part.
The greed and glutton’s so-called sin
are mine.
You pause.
Too dry? Or hard.
or quite savorless and cold?
Granted, it’s old:
an antic shard,
impulse encased by boney laws.
Observers find
ice is surprised by nothing if not thaws.
And tickless clocks in tinkers’ hands rewind.
Still not? Have then a mind.
You know what I mean.
And if you remain so unkind
to spurn this paltry rind,
have a bit of spleen.
One More Time Around, General, For the Ladies
You can imagine his surprise
When George Washington heard he'd crossed the Delaware.
“Damn it, I thought it was the Potomac.”
His breath steamed out like Yankee Doodle’s feather.
“No,” said the skinny sergeant-at-arms, quick-froze
in a West Point brace, sure sign of sentryhood.
“That was the silver dollar episode.”
“By George (III), you’re right,” said Washington, and retired.
He dreamed troublesome cotton candy things all night long,
and wrote Vienna in the morning.
After three years of intensive long distance analysis,
Freud advised against standing boatrides on cold winter nights.
He told George to lay off the hemp.
Like a good soldier, Washington followed orders
and became a huge success.
He allowed Congress to buy him a coach.
Martha couldn't have been more pleased.
As she later confided to Betsy,
“For a while I was afraid he was losing his grip.”
Groundfloor Catburglar At High Noon
Whenever any luncheon functionary says
it’s in the public interest
to kill two birds with one stone,
it’s time, ladies and gentlemen, to count
the birds, the stones, and the silverware.
Rebuttal
Argument leaves our conversation gulted
rusty, and sprung to space
like a ’49 Ford in a junkyard,
even when you’re right.
EXPERIMENT IN HOLES
“Why’d you dig that hole?”
“Because it wasn’t there.”
Want to study holes?
The scholar’s text has diagrams scaled to dimension
with coordinates to illustrate the paradigm hole,
comes with large print and a workbook.
It’s as good as a living lecture
or a sunrise tape on TV.
Investigate places where spindlylegged holeclimbers
scutter away like doomed spiders in a bathtub.
Kick at holes to delve them out.
Cuss a homemade oath at holes in high places
that blind gods might hear and mock and echo
as if such a curse meant nothing at all.
Caress the rugged gaping earth
to get the feel of holes
and sing to them in gentle madness.
Holes have to be dug and fell into,
scratched with clutching cracked hands.
Telling about them is like handing out
an old worn out handmedown hole,
as misshapen and hopeless as a Gl uniform.
Try it on. It doesn’t fit.
Having learned by rote, knowledge is power,
now you want to outfox holes.
The shovel’s there. Dig in.
De Mortuis
(Nil nisi bonum)
Even at 83
in late middle age (as he put it)
Dad was so ornery
they could have used campfire boiled coffee
to transfuse him
instead of someone’s thin blood
and washed out homogenized plasma.
They couldn't find any more veins,
that was the trouble.
The medical people hooked him up to the air
and went to fill out forms for Medicare.
Flexible rubber tubes sprouted
from his nose, rooting him in the septic room
where nothing could live for long,
nothing but mutant strains of staph
and pneumonia, the old man's friend.
The tubes made him itch deep down inside
and his brain wouldn’t let him scratch.
The way I figure it,
death caught him off guard,
dozing, catching a nap before the next assault.
It tippytoed up beside him
and took my father’s pulse.
A FAIR RESEMBLANCE
My God, you are a hard man
to live with: picky this, picky that,
nit-picking like some sort of potbellied Pygmalion.
My hair’s too short to spread out
pornographically over the pillow,
and so long it gets in your mouth.
I can't even talk right. OK.
Either take me as I am,
or forget it,
said What’s-her-name.
You know, the one with the phony accent
and the shredded-wheat hair.
BEDTIME STORY
When I showed these poems to Howard
he said, “It’s like showing pictures
of your family to people.”
That night at home in my empty house,
after boiled rice and beans, I had a beer*
as we listened to the stereo,
and I wrestled with them until I gave up.
At bedtime they asked for a story
about what families are,
and I told them families are like poems
that you show to people
who never really know where they come from.
* Written before I became a teetotaler. I would omit
this line if I could discover a clever rhyme for “stereo.”
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