Old Poetry #1 12.2005

For someone I used to know.

“Driver”

Warm grain sand, fixate hands
looking back at you,
bumblebees leaping grass to weed,
plowing through trees,
intoxicated moon rising,
stumbling to take a leak;
that same second: atoms splitting,
in the arc of a god’s arrows-
angry teenage thumbs stuffing combat shells
embracing like a mother’s love
the bat dung, glistening gunpowder
in collective armory, filling
righteous ears and ten hearts
all scattered to the reaches
of the desert, as biblical text undeciphered
secret scripture coming up through crevices
where hides battle tactics and hippie schemes,
where no one tells him he’s wrong
or so right that his dream
should reach further than the world
in which he disbelieves.

Breezy wheatfield youth,
softest in secret,
clinging to you at night,
afraid to invite the silence
the science of Alone-
noises heard, not yet learned
the courage to possess,
made into an addictive nose bleed
sunrise, prizefight mind,
body moves hard, a suit of armor,
kidnapping you to every seaside
carnival you could ever crave--
to overdose on saddling the sky
a tragic carride accident,
comic ferris wheel junkies falling fist-first
like thoughts into waves, laughing them under,
begging for a smoke, a chance to save.

The broadest calm, a father sits to judge
his unborn children, from behind
selective, fluid and slipsliding eyes;
the truth pounds
wishing well-bound
refurbished garden shed door,
already reaching his dreams since the hour
before he was born-
conqueror of every shore,
to the root of the outer albatross,
the giant kept dragging blind to the side,
breeding new ideas that die,
then scream, laugh-like:
a horde of school children,
monkey fish with 10,000 voices,
soaring opera of strength and weakness,
feeding from this world,
then found alone and calling,
nestled in the leafy greens, high
above treetops, waiting and gone,
beaming mad with boredom
from the off ramp, dead end street of excess,
u-turning in a circle of fire water ritual.

Cult leader without a tribe
Come to take a drive
bleeding into the sun as it sets
on the shores-- one day promised to recalculation,
eavesdrop to its unspoken ground
the soul born free, beneath
grand confusion, collapsing star,
live to walk on top of carriage rides,
soar through verbal skies, believing
that the stars twinkle above, shining
even in the paleness of daytime, from within
broken bones, scattered- abandoned playground
shrouded in the deepest equation of blue.

Chieftain of foreign tours, sands of war, civilization
in every pore, peace in the valley in the soles of light shoes;
rainbows hailing colors like cabs in each second
of his eternity, the moment before it runs from itself –
always around the bend, just never close at hand,
trapping movement in the meadow pond, still conceiving
even sleeping, telling lies small and overblown,
unclaimed truth that’s lived and known;
Soul glides down the waterfall; cascading heart beats
filling with sounds, stories emptying from veins
like children and rules, surrounding his multitude
shooting at midnight starry skies---
The day is old, fades to a close, bold
that it will construct him forward,
forever on a roam, in search of haven,
boundless Home.