SELECTED POETRY

 

THE SEASON OF LILACS

Your skin is painted
with islands;
every whorl, dash, and freckle
of you is a satellite
in a universe of moons.

These imperfect
perfect worlds
still ring
with the sound
of their creation—

when rain discovered
you,
it marked you
with its
dark, glass bells

In some space long past,
you were the only moon,
and I climbed to you
on a ladder of linen
and reed
to be born again.

Skin remembers this,
in the smallest of brown moles,
as clandestine
as the eyes
of melon seed—

To listen to skin is
to listen
to moon splattered
memory—

when I touch you,
I hear
lost and buried oceans,
the season of lilacs,
a silver silence.

 

 

SOMETHING LIKE SUNLIGHT

(In Memory of You)

These last years for you were
the triumph of living—
the bigness of your body
was giving way to the bigger.

This was the largess of the universe:
in some still moment before you came
bounding into this world,
you were selected,
you and your fragile insides,
for trial.

Your ticking genome was tripped,
your singing cells set wild into a fire—
a metastatic ecstasy of heat
that set seed after seed
of self into your body’s earth.

You grew blood blossoms.
They stirred and rose from your insides.
They lifted their heavy floral heads.
They turned and twisted in your interior,
into you, seeking light
that was something
like sunlight.

 

Persephone of a thousand springs,
you were mother to an infinity of
new flowers weeping—
they became your children,
curled and potbellied.

You grew full with them,
round with their bodies,
packed with the clamoring of
their needs—
they grew
until you, filled to bursting,
burst.

You, like life, are life.
And you, the first mother,
made of your body the only universe
that ever existed.

You could not turn ear or eye
away, could not pass
so lightly from the singing,
could not not feed—

because,
before you came,
there was always, always
this sound—

the weeping of little salamanders
seeking light
that was something
like sunlight.

 

Eating Sorrel

4.5 billion years before the lace of fiber optics
braided through the common sorrel,
two earths became earth
the way we meet love, navel to navel—
a Hadean earth imagined.

We split out a naked moon,
lit from within,
when time was becoming
among the singing unformed galaxies
spangling the skin of a new god’s cheek.

Now we measure time in life—
by the bitterness of sweet herbs,
the teeth of new infants,
the years that have pressed the folds
of your counting eyes
counting the forgettable miracles of seasons.

Like the forgotten miracle of
your reaching scent when we first passed,
back to back
among the whiskey damp dancers
dancing summer into the steady crust of bar wood.

Or like the sometimes remembered miracle
of mandolin hung inside the
fist of the bar wood bard
who sang about forgetting
in a jangle we could not entirely forget.

When we are apart we hold time in our fists
and stretch the pixelations of our eyes across
the terrain of miles.
But long before our exhalations are digitized,
were the first condensing exhalations
of our twinned planet twisting
into an amniotic ocean,
inorganic.

Our life begins as electric turbulence,
solar winds, bombardment,
turmoil, magnetic attraction,
and repulsion—

But before the lacing of molecular fingers
was our single great collision—
a fusion that exploded into
one then two,
that threw out a satellite
that if our eyes were tongues
would taste it as
the painted lemon yellow,
break of sorrel.

 

 

Some Other Imagination

How did this all begin as ocean?
As magma? As space?
Is Theia, Earth or is Earth, Theia—
this is the science of our
dreamed cosmology.

And then recall
spontaneous generation,
life rising from unlife,
as flies from carrion,
as the detonation of bees
from flowers.
Or preformation,
that orchid seed homunculus,
a curled juggernaut—
These theories rejected
because inert matter
would bear no life
without God’s hand.

But then consider the hearts of
those inhospitable hydrothermal vents,
where we have seen
chemical joints come together,
precursor and testimony
that life might arise
spontaneously—
for really,
there’s no such thing
as inert matter.

Then we are the pieces
scattered in the cauldron of
a cosmic wind,
excited by lighting,
and a molecular hunger—
screaming, red faced, and
drawn out from the womb
that fashioned us.

Or were we seeded
when the first glimmers of life
appeared
during the big bang?

The miracle of the universe
is that we know
the beginning of time,
our memories nascent,
ancient as core mantle.

But do not forget
really, we imagined this
the numbers, paths,
magnetism, humors,
the scientific method.

Or maybe we are digits
of the thing that strings time,
meaning we extend back and back
into the past
before life
began
among life.

 

The Burren Way

When it was light before
light became dark,
I walked along an opened path
that sank into soil and mud
and made my feet
the things that breathed.

And all along a silence slipped
from ruddy concrete beats
and unridden asphalt unturned
by the trample of speech
and the clatterings of
daily, wakeful bartering.

And in this space, I found
the illuminated sound of
cattle lowing through their cud,
and the heavy grinding pleasure
of their masticating teeth.

The stonecrop clustered along
the stacks of brittle lime
could only clamor at this time,
and they were like cream and merlot mixed.

If gray were made of sound
it would be lit with notes of twilight
and the fiddle strain of wind.
And the tune would be revived
the way all immortal songs are passed,
and one by one
the solos would align.

 

 

The Collective

Across the mow of Burren sheered loam
I heard their bovine lowing call and hold the tone
from throat to throat, a moan airborne
and thrown from bull to cow to calve
and beasts born and unborn

moving with the old voice of aurochs
that roamed the age of snow, that we
thought gone in a final throw among the
moss logs of the woodlands and north bogs.

They know the Neolithic dawn that cowed them,
ringed their noses in bronze, turned
their horned crowns to the ground,
and stole their newborn milk by
some uncommon feat—

for fauna that have braced themselves through
the epoch of the Pleistocene and
all its glacial aggressions would not forget
the violence of this transgression and
transformation we call domestic.

Taurine do not forget, and will forever
hold stubborn to the old buffalo, guar, yak,
banteng, and Bos acutifrons that hulked the
open grasslands like Roman glory before Rome.

I was too clouded then to know
the lowing of the Limousin was blown
from cornus to their commune that rose muscled
on their hooves and bones before dawn,
even in this modern world.

Still, my heart shook at their call—
we a body, one and whole,
are crossed, choked, and
raging.

 

 

Yellow Jacket

Beyond midnight, before dawn,
when night had laced itself
like troubadours, long against the
invention of air,
I slid beyond my cottage door
into a bowl of cool and mist,
and found myself inhaled
by the dark of country Clare.

Here summer wove
from traceries, her shuttle unseen
until a drift of weft would pass
between the tangled seam traced
in a smudged ring, the corona
of my portico, electrified,
where I lingered

and found that sound
and what is seen
at night traverse
at equal magnitudes.

Silence might have been
my overwhelming delusion.

The civic hum and clatter
of concrete streets and vinyl rows,
tabled like pachinko,
were absent, and so when rain
gamboled to the ground, loud as glimmer,
I thought it was the secret noise
of nothing,
and nothing delivers.

A sudden apparition— a sliver of hornet.

It might have been a bullet hip shot,
a rocket gunning for the sun,
an incision in the halcyon,
one whiz bang streak and collision—
It assailed the artificial fission
of the fixture lit above,
and the atmosphere shivered
with the buzz of desperation
and percussion of its flight
into the bulb,

until it was snared.
A drift of web reached and caught
a foot and wing and tangled up the thing—
How delicate the twine that nets
struggle and makes a delicacy of desire.

I watched.
I was netted between compassion
and my wants—
I wanted this wild thing to be trammeled
by its fight, to see its toil
coil itself in knots,
to greet the carnivore,
see paired chelicerae grasp and lock,
to count the eyes
that did not need to watch.
I wanted to be a witness
to the drama of life
fraught with failure
and how failed effort feeds—

until I saw it freed.

It flung itself into a window,
smashed a crevasse in the rock,
struck at shadows,
looped,
and dropped,
and dove,
and disappeared
into night.

I shivered.
I still heard a steady rain
but saw now that it had stopped—
beyond the light were the sight unseen
convents of trees, weeping
pattering drops,
their habits so full of rain
they were spilling and streaming,
in the cadence of the sky.

It might have been
the drumming of ants,
of earwigs at war,
the patter of micromoths,
the webbed skin of bats flickering
between spaces.

Suddenly the sky opened up again,
and poured and blurred.
I look but cannot see,
straining to perceive all
that I had been taught—
but I am blinded
by an incandescent sun.

What is holy and what is not?

 

 

Winding

I met you when
your hair had turned white
and thin, the infant pink
of your scalp vulnerable
of between hairs
as you bent to

rolled out your years
traveled,
to the places where you were
drawn, as though
by fishing line.

Your goal as a young man—
the Canary Islands

Before you made it
you stopped in Ireland
and when you wandered
into the Burren
you were caught by a tweed earth,
roped in by knots of lay lines
guarding etched pavements,
queens of gentian,
lace of clover,
devas of grass.

And momentarily stilled,
an onshore wind caught your chin
and aimed your eyes
to an inconstant and bombastic sky.
You saw the lines unwinding
in the kite caught glide
of gulls,
in the flight vertiginous
of peregrines,
and in shards of
sibylline magpies.

What was it that was waiting for you
at your journey’s end?
The blue of coves,
white sand crushed in heat,
a lady’s Spanish breast bound
in the brown curtain of her skin,
where moles caressed
the tenuous hair of her spine?

Ephemera.
Ephemera.

These were your dreams,
as florid as whiskey,
and the wind’s waggish tug
on your shirts hem.

You were delivered
to the Canary Islands
but came back again
to the Burren trailing
the same lay lines still
wrapped around your boots.

And I found you knit
into earth with thick cables,
an unknown hole of yours
mending.

 

 

Three Hens

Along the back stone wall of lime,
guarded by aluminum,
were the ground’s three hens,
plushed white and illuminated
strutting like automatons
on amarillo hocks,

Against the lolling green of grass,
and lobed and fat clover,
by splits of lady’s smock,
these birds were stark as buttercups
and were revealed as martyred saints,
bleeding by their crimped, red crowns.

The sun made of them glossy slides
that slid like shade through ever green,
and I watched them preen and strut
around their coop, turning in a hangman’s loop,
and when they cornered and turned the edge,
they disappeared, and disappeared
and disappeared as though they
were imagination.

And we too often question
the whorls of grass, nests of moss,
flies, wasps, and birds
negotiating limestone,
these little teeth of joy.
Beyond the coop
a mountain hails the sky
like a screw,

and when the chickens
turn and corner, returning
they are still scrape for seeds
and I knew that they will keep on—
I was seeing but did not see
how they scratch
all earthly desires from the dirt.

 

 

The Singing

The bar was soaked,
stunk up with the odor of hours
and every unfulfilled promise passed,
with every deed caught up
in the wrinkled bar wood.

And the sound of the blues man
and his guitar
over it all—
heated, hearty,
heavy and brass,
with the tin metal steel
of string booming away
on the PA system,
a tin whistle fiddled orchestra
rioting like the ocean
into a sea of stars.

And though we did not break
out in song,
we were one voice,
strung up on high wires
across the moon,
drinkers saddled with memory,
washing and then wringing out
worries.

Here time melted meteors
of nothing
that were our conversations
dropped like shattered buoys
out on the sea.

That was
the problem—
this being together
that made us sick with ourselves.
we knew nothing, and yet
knew everything—
but never as much
as the blues man with
his guitar.

 

 

The Women Who Fell From the Sky

I have turned myself out
into the world’s calloused hands
that have stirred the earth into rubble,
and gnarled the oaks,
and curled thunder into gray sleet.

And I have found in it
the lakes of your eyes,
made so that I may dive
with my shoulders, curtained
by your ripples, into
the earth dark spring cupped by your iris.

In you, I find among the marl
a nested egg saddled by wreaths of algae
that I must comb through—
it is so much like your damp hair
at midnight
that memory and seeking merge,

and I want to place these filaments
between my teeth
to trace until they greet
the stucco bow of eggshell
like the curved lip of your scalp.

They are portals
that guard a pinhole of sky,
or are maybe one in the same,
so that when I press against them
I fall through into
an ink streaked afternoon blue,
and defy a cardinal gravity.

You have made of me
the escapee from one world
into the next,
and in this life, I am a new creation—
the clot red bird you followed
in the swimming November rain. 

 

Butterfly Bush

I would pluck from night
the violet of the hours,
to rise like all ten o’clock flowers,
the fingers of lilac
made to dance,
hung among
the hazel bards.

 

But Not You

Grown man,
you wanted
so hard to know
spirit as a lover,
you prayed
so badly
for that thing to come
descending down
upon you,
to extend itself
in dreams
to become coquettish
with her voice
promising—
“I exist only for you.”

It took a red-light woman,
coyly tipping her hips,
to call out
“You think too much!”
when you retreated
from her ermine potentials.
for you to remember
your boyhood,
the little you
who had closed his eyes
in the sun,
lying like a shadow
on her thigh.

 

 

The Stolen Oranges

We raced through the farms of California
when we failed to cross the ocean,
and discovered the doppler streaks
of baubled citrus groves,
and so I made you pull and brake
so I could fling the door
and run to grasp a loaded branch,
and run returning, laughing with my plunder
back to you where I command:
Step on it!

We made our getaway with these casualties,
torture really, as beside you I skinned
the sun warm oranges to bleeding
vermillion, pumpernickel, and bone pith.
We knew nothing about where we were
and it would take too long to know.
We would never watch a seed become an orchard,
I would not even see it bear fruit,
and yet in all my world I have never swallowed
such ripe sweetness as that stolen sphere.

 

 

The Ring Fort

I went with you into that ring of stone,
where grasses passed through and through,
and faced a kind of lace curtained knowing,
of the who that formed this place
with solid hands intent on holding ground.
I saw these ghosts come rising up and
close around you, saw them watch me
as our footfalls collapsed in secret hollows
of rock nested with lichen and bitter root.
Interlopers in their home, in all of their homes,
I am reminded of what is neighborly
and what is not neighborly.

Time has burned itself into the face
of the world, and is the face of everything,
and in the face of time, there is no time at all
All the life we have comes and goes
as though we too were the shades
that have abandoned themselves to a world
of interlopers.
There are a million thoughtless reasons
for who we are, for why we are strangers,
and strangers to places that
we will never hold.

 

 

Listen—We Are Both New

What do we
do but meet
and say hello, and
that we are something
less than what we know,
and do not know,
and are?

This is
an easy diversion,
but we hesitate,
our eyes askance,
a scratch to the nose,
a hidden tremolo in the throat,
to swallow
the misgiving
in the giving
of ourselves.

Aren’t we all
strangers here
collected and colliding?
And if so,
aren’t we all
the same?

This is
the gods’ old logic,
the joke they’ve played
out over and over
again—they
swaddle our
eyes
to see
if we’d notice.

But even
if we find
that we are blind,
they’d laugh
anyway,

so listen for it.

 

 

Senbazuru

Gods,
I do not
need to fold
a thousand
birds to live—
Consider lime
the paper book
of pressed sea flowers,
its lily crinoids creased
and folded into cranes
flown to roost among
the dappled fertility
of chlorophyll,
strung through
with hyphae lace
stitched with
the art
of
arteries.

 

 

Distance

There has never been you without me because
before the fission of the thickly singing stars
I’d left my heart curled in your palm.

When I rolled over the sea,
it was riddled with the scent of you
and when it rains I know it as
the nightmare of ocean indulging me.

When our gravity disperses with distance
do we swell into the dying carnelian
of red giants, or do we collapse

into the gray light of a hazed morning
where herons pick along
the linked, brutal course of asters?

I rested my head against the shore
of your hair once, when you were sleeping,
so that I was contained in the
universe of your electric scent.

 

 

Paper Wasp

Dying paper eaters
you move as one
until the moment
of your demise
when you become
utterly the victim
utterly individual
utterly you
before you
are crushed

 

 

The Youth

The wood and brass of the old pub
rings with clinks of pints and slams
that chink the glass and jogs the overflow
of foam and black, round about the rims,
of drafts that pass from hand to hand.

I hung myself around the snug and swung
a glass of rocks and Spot to swirl the
shot of whiskey, allow the notes to blossom,
a caramel accord, before I fill my mouth
and swoon over the aroma of the night.

A hollow smoke dawdled in the finish
on my tongue, and rolled against the shoulders
of the coats of smokers making off toward
the bolt of the door each hour to blow
their rings into the summer cold.

And so, I joined to laugh and light
tobacco spooled in paper with a
whiskey branded zippo that smells of
kerosene and flames clean and tall
enough to catch the end and turn

the cured tobacco into the clouds that
curl each time a joke was cracked.
Among the girls and boys around the barrel
touched in ash, I felt a sense of wonder
as their shoulders dropped, too cool

to organize their bones into prudent
presentation, not old enough to throttle
all their joy and elation, not worked enough
to worry over unimportant problems—

They are occupied instead with all the
things that we’ve forgotten, lost or
left below a pile of apprehension,
or the pretension that we’ve done
it all and know each sorry resolution.

Below the moon, by the bar outside,
along the cobble streets and roads
and gardens graced by roses,
the youth are found and finding
that each first begins an unknown flow—

They are the April streams unfurling
that slake the desiccated the soul.

 

 

A thousand questions

 

Before this there was song

Rise and rage and flame.
Remember each part of you
that is alive, lives–
each cell a spirit,
each fold, a valley,
each ripe swell a song.
Remember before you,
and the earth,
before the rocks,
before the seas tumbled
from the sky,
before time,
there was song.

And you are song.
Saccharine, furious song,
bright and blinding song,
song that hums
with the chorus of
the million infinite
pieces,
song that is your body
becoming the body of everything,
song that rises into the stars
and calls and trembles
and cries–
Here, here,
I am!

You are this melody,
this music,
down to the ground,
down to the very dust
from which
you came,
to which
you will return,
singing even then.

 

I play music behind your back

 

When the day ends

Light sets,
and how she tucks away,
reaching first the
languor of her body,
the stretch of her impossible hide,
out with her fingers,
out in the most impossible of arcs,
out with the thrill of fiber
stretched taut as reaching
into the first span,
arms thrown wide after
laying in love,
after a day’s patient stillness,
graced by slow breathing.
How she tucks away,
pulling first the tickle of her limbs
into all elastic retreat,
a roll, a fall, drawing in and in,
each fine spine, a silk knot,
a sailor’s whorl.
She is your lover retreating into sheets,
skin by skin,
until at last, pulling
her filmy tail, alive,
into and into herself
she settles nose to feet
into her breast–
a beast,
a curled pearl.

 

Thank you for being poetry

Friend, you have always been there,
despite the miles, the twine of time,
despite the milling and meandering, all rogue
rough with wonder,
these peregrinations of ours.

Remember the dark bed where you lay?
The sink of seat and body,
the being of your being,
ployed as clay might be
into certain definitions,
into certainty?

Friend, it is the poetry of you
that was your smile drawing.
And the poetry of you that has sustained
all tenuous and tentative
the passing of time.

But what of that?
There beats no time, in truth.
Because before time, there was only song.
And in song there is only
the ring of poetry.

 

Hold fast

Hang tight to your ship of dreams,
and lash your hopes against the mast,
and make of the deck the very bed
upon which nightly you lay your head.

Safe harbors may lull loose your bounds
against the pearls of sun
that sink and low your brow to sleep.
How may you long to slide and throw
yourself deep to every siren’s singing,
a beckoning sweet,
a pearl’s nest,
an embracing bed.
How close this chimera
is to living.

Yet, persist in play upon your sail,
it is yours in every weather-
warm and wise, or sullen still,
or brutal white with beating.
For this you have cast yourself
to the world’s end,
and wound your rope,
about your hand and eye,
until why has turned its face
to yours,
becoming why.

Hold fast, endure, for there is only
light impossible, reaching impossible
for you and all the infinite sea.
The heart is a journeyman and knows,
winking slyly now,
that shore and ship and none,
and you will list and nod in time,
and on and on the ocean goes,
a thousand currents whispering,
what the heart already knows.

 

These last four years, in memory

These last four years for you were
the triumph of living,
in that the bigness of your body
was giving way to the bigger.
Largess of the universe, who in some
still moment before you came bounding into this world
selected you and your fragile insides
for trial,
and tripped the tap of your ticking genome
and set your singing cells into a wild fire,
an orgy of flame, setting seed after seed
of self into your body’s earth.
And in fields, your blood blossoms
stirred and rose, and lifted the floral
tendrils of their heads into you,
seeking something like sunlight.

Again and again, the vernal drama.
Again, the singing miracle of the smallest
part of you that can be called you
splitting into seeds.
Again and again the fling of their tiny
arms out, reaching to drink of you,
finding in you the hidden springs,
and sources, and the subterranean rivers
flowing from the parts of you
hidden from you.
You were the mother of a thousand
new children,
how could you turn from their cries of hunger,
how could they not be fed?
How could you not grow full
and round until bursting,
you burst?
You, like life, are life.
And you, the first mother,
making of your body the only universe
that ever existed,
could not turn ear or eye
away, could not pass
so lightly from the singing,
could not not feed,
because always, always was the sound,
the weeping of your little salamanders
seeking something like sunlight.

 

Tales from the South Pacific

Your welcome was ready hot
and seeped the scent, already familiar,
of dusty plumeria, and truck exhaust,
and mangoes fermenting on the sidewalk.

Sandaled, thrilled, and tender
as an unknown thing,
unknowing this island as
a breathing god, universe of a thousand gods
already weighing my presence
in their great, brown hands.

I had a heart like a coconut meat,
cracked in two,
and a few trembling edges
were left behind in someone’s mouth,
tasting it no doubt,
some place cold,
some place where spring is pressed
to force itself from
hard plates of ice
to peek like green impossibilities.

But how could I remember this,
when in every hollow
was being poured
the thick, sweet air, sticky,
drawing ants and flies
seeking the same
nectar,
and my ears were drowning
already in an ocean
of brown voices, metal goings,
and ocean too.

I remember this–
the first explosion of fruit
like sweetness had never existed
on this plane.
It came on plastic, already melting,
weary with its place,
but to me, it was the only miracle that ever was.
Already gritty, already my clothes trapped
to me trailing vapors in the humid air,
my body falling to pieces
and coming together again
over and over.

 

The living story

It was about my heart–
every velvety thing,
every flight,
every humid curl fanned
by the wing of a bird called love,
by the breath poured from a sleeping face.
It was about this heart,
and the solemnity of
meals alone,
or the tumult–
the quivering,
wine spilling joy of meals
among you.
It was about how we laughed,
beating the table with the trick of a slap,
dusting our shirts
with the tumble of crumbs,
cheeks abloom about, about…
And about ablutions after–
of imagination, this sole kestrel
drafting into a dawn,
stained spilt cabernet pink,
spilt like the moon’s ink,
fringed with the blue of remembering
the story of your skin,
the story our wrists,
the story of my heart,
and really every story
that ever was,
and ever will be.

 

Maybe you’ve forgotten

curious part of you,
who in all its strange whirs
and loudmouthed jag,
and plaintive wailing,
wet with autumn moons,
has sung itself to slumber–
A sleep like a beast curled,
trouble toiled, rumble
ruffled by the rise rise
of animal dreams.

You forget like an ocean,
so long and far,
bottom black and surface
silky as an oiled eye.
So easy to lose yesterday,
so easy to misplace a minute,
to misjudge tomorrows,
to weigh a second like a stone
thrown into a rain dark gutter.
So easy to miss the moment
of your passing because
how easy, how easy it is
to rock along the surface,
and watch an illusory moon slice,
and never once look below.

This is forgetting.
There is no blindness, but
the sweetest of denials,
that you are wet from head to heel,
that you are but ocean,
that your hand is but a tiger’s tail.

 

You are light, in memory

 

…………………

SHORTS

 

In a breath

In a breath,
in the beat of the breaking puff,
the smallest whisper
of you exhales,
and in its wake trails
the tearing light of new stars.

 

First light

In the morning,
gray and alarming,
rises the ripe ardor of sparrows,
speaking in the language
that has commanded light
since the beginning of time.

 

Then

If I had listened harder
or yielded to impulse,
I would have
been brought to the
same place.
But I am here now
and that
is all
that has ever
mattered.

 

………………..

HUMOR

 

‘Twas the Eve Before Tuesday

‘Twas the eve before Tuesday, and all through the pub
stirred the boys and girls with their Guinness and grub.
All the rafters were spangled with tchotchke and flare
awaiting the session that soon would be there.

Now whiskeys were poured, and the ladies made snug,
‘round the fire lads crowed with their beer in their mugs.
And you with your cider, and I with my pint
had just settled down for the craic of the night.

When out by the gate came in such a clamor
that murdered sound sense and polluted good grammar.
Then the bar door blew open and all turned to look
when in marched a man with his terrible book.

Now the moon then was full, through the window it shined
and it lustered a neck beard so dark and so fine.
Then what to our wondering ears should we hear
but a celestial harp from a heavenly sphere

With a little old gal, playing syrupy licks—
we knew in a moment this sop was a dick!
But his voice prattled on with a puff and a pout
and his poetry rose to a vainglorious shout:

“Now see here good folks, tip your caps and fedoras
For I am the Bard of the Great Kilfenora!
To the top of the world! To the top of the charts!
So, hear me now! Hear me now! I’ll break all your hearts!”

Then he opened his book with a tear in his eye
and whispered so softly, “I’m a sensitive guy.
I’m roses and sugar and rainbows and jelly,
and you should know ‘bout my cat, and my pup, and my Emmy.”

And oh, how he shone as he uttered his tale
in his sports coat and v-neck from Tesco’s last sale.
Well I dropped my head to my hands and did groan,
“I’d have stayed in for Netflix and chill if I’d known.”

Now he surveyed our faces and said, “Don’t be shy.
I’ll read forty poems, I’m a generous guy!”
Then he sucked in some air and let out a gusher,
“Here’s one ‘bout the love o’ life—my dear mother!

“Her eyes-how they twinkled! Her dimples how merry!
Her cheeks were roses, her nose like a cherry!
Her darling sweet mouth is drawn up like a bow,
and the beard on her chin is as white as the snow.

“A stump of a pipe she holds tight in her teeth,
blowing smoke ‘round her head like a fine Christmas wreath.
Now know her, and love her, for all must adore her
for birthing the Bard of the Great Kilfenora!”

He shook and he cried, so proud of himself
And I burst out laughing in spite of myself!
But he caught my eye with a twist of his head,
and gave me to know I had all now to dread.

He recited for hours, read all of his work,
and I said to myself “How fucking long do I have to sit here listening to this jerk?”
Well he finished at last when dawn touched the highlands
and I thought in despair, “He’s the Spirit of Ireland?!”

He bowed with his harpist and at last went away,
this poet that came and spoiled our day.
But I heard him exclaim as he strode out of sight,
“Buy me book! Twenty euros! And to all a good-night!”

 

Lost in the Wood before the Evening

Who’s woods these are I do not know,
For off the trail I did just go.
Among the limestone karst of fear,
no one will find me lost and so

my little heart must think it queer
to hike without a marker near.
Between the woods, I sweat and quake—
Jaysus! I need a pint of beer!

I raise my fist and give a shake,
Oh shit! I’ve made a huge mistake!
For everywhere I turn to look
are thorns and grikes without a break.

How could I just have overlooked
that red mark slashed into the crook
of stone. The sun is setting fast
and telling me my goose is cooked.

I do not know how long I’ll last
I should have caught the bus or asked
a stranger for a ride, and how
I do regret my sailing past

the traveled trail, and now I’ll die
among the cows, and goats, and sheep
I’ll tell you this without a sigh—
I took the one less traveled by!

These woods are frightening, dark and deep,
and I have my deadlines to keep,
but miles to go before I sleep,
and miles to go before I sleep!

Breakdance

Shake your feet and here she comes,
the drumming hum of her humming drums,
the bang, karang where her cymbals meet
the shaking floor beneath her feet.
You watch her step and blow her horn,
as loud as thumple trumblets scorn.
She blasts the earth with tuba tunes,
and mischief merry song balloons.
Watch her quake and watch her beat
the prancey dancey Marguerite,
and every boy that is a bore,
who makes this magic maestro snore.
She is a beast, she is a bomb,
her thumpalump could charm your mom.
So do not run, but jump and scream
and dance the way you dance in dreams.

 

Thistle me this

Thistle me this,
thistle me that.
You whiny bore,
you crumbly brat.
Don’t point tongue
you smelly beast,
I’ll throw your toys
into the streets.
I’ll make you sit
on pointy thorns,
and then we’ll see
whose guts are scorned.
Thistle me this,
thistle me that,
I’ll whistle when
you’re old and fat.

 

Evelyn Evelyn, the witch

Evelyn Evelyn the witch
builds her castle in a ditch,
calls to girlzees in the dark,
“Come and play, dear, in my park!”
sings to boyzees on a breeze,
“Eat all the gummies that you please!”
plays a tune on her guitar,
lures the fair and not-by-far,
stirs a pot of something sticky
winks her eyes and Daniel Dicky,
is the beast of beasty lane,
returns at once to where she came.