The Trumpeter Drake's Tale

THE DRAKE'S TALE

Donald Trump, a man duck born in Queens
Didn't care what the p.c. thought that means
But went ahead and said whatever he thought
Spent his excess wealth: an electorate bought;
Outbid the pundits and cartooned the Greens.

The Grievance Bearers

THE GRIEVANCE BEARERS

They come like i-devices, pre-loaded
with grievance, heavy-loaded with many grievances
as if these were the default
applications of the many human souls bereft
of their main connection.

They come, a whole population loaded with
so very many grievances like
people well balanced to black humour by so many chips as if
epaulets on the shoulders with which
they shove all others of prior functionality aside.

When the grievance bearers dominate we will then have
our right democracy of full grievance!
as if this becomes us; as it does, a malfunctioning cellular growth
budded out of who we thought we
were - once we lost the way back to acknowledging

the primal grief.

The Enigma is Care-Born Hatred

THE ENIGMA OF CARE-BORN HATRED

Too much cure; pampering, a too
Lenient we, too great an application

Of care; it's like saving antibiotics
Overdone by granting too frequency

Creates biotic Resistance. So
This climate of the therapeutic,

This capital comfort is what foments
These home-grown self-hatreds

Breeding a murderous terrorism:
Out of some deep viral helix that

Screws in like biopoesis; the Black
Holes of that unplanetary gravity

Hid beneath the ordinary conceit
Of our fatal human inadmission

Wabi Sabi Recipe

WABI-SABI RECIPE


A burn-used
beaten
wok
of mild steel
left
a long time
unwashed after
rinsing
so it is now rimmed
in rust
making red
silhouettes of the last stir fry
over
the stove's green gas flame
like a meal print
long set
and gone cool by now
and then thrown with the scatter
but unfilled
with half a dozen blue mouldering
slices
of dry curled bread
seeded
with multigrains
that would grow if they had not
been baked
like no restaurant plate
and yet a surprising
catch of
the here and now of the vegetative eye
with its last residues
of lost
domesticity.

* * *

Oscar Winning Performance

OSCAR WINNING PERFORMANCE


The old split log fence pickets are bone set awry now
like teeth spavined from a long clenched elder jaw

still performing a millennium-championed function
as they yet keep the passing cattle and asses at bay

though more by habit than by putting them to test,
but the line they kept so long is now braced by trees

whose backs yet thicken to these inclement weathers
as much as the bark blocks anything like ears in want

not to hear passing speeches at the Oscars, to remain
deaf as post and pickets do and quite blind to celebrity.

Lost Man

LOST MAN

He went inside, maybe to clerking,
Or accounting, and lost himself in slippers
And nibs, in seconds, the clocked meal
Times, and his moment was lost, his time.

He went to the office, that soft opted
Occupation, as if to keep his hands clean
Of the dirty world, and not only lost himself
A man, he lost direction, his spirit potency.

A search was led by Major Hemingway
Big and game up wild gulllies and razorback
Ridge in the uniform beige of jungle gear
Portraying its every proof expedition manly

As he retreated to the bottle, one he'd lost
Or the snuff and laudanum of pretend divinities
With artifice of prophetic mantles to be a seer
Burnt with the self needling of his bought office.

Anti-lost men appeared like the Lawrences
D.H and T.E. both of whom went to the wild
For primitive vitality, its Acchilian limelight fame
And disappeared in the deserts of their unmaking

Women decided men, lost men were to blame
And so joined them lost, losing gift of parturition
In officing herself as man, as if the bifurcated soul
Of the carrot was not yellow in fork-tongued retreat.

* * *
Only the man of earth, poor man, salt or peasant
Went to the sky and sea, to earthen furrows as always
To keep the wolf knocking, the lion roaring at very doors
Toward which lost man kept throwing away his keys.

His Finest Operator

HIS FINEST OPERATOR


His daughter Kellie left school pregnant
and came home
with the little girl like a surprise daughter
he and his wife
loved like their own and when he had to
tow the excavator
in the yard on the home farm one day
Kellie came out
to drive it and enjoyed the hydraulics
in steering so she
asked him to show her the whole gammut
of lever twist and turn
and within a week she was out on the job
doing the demolitions
by driving the backhoe excavator. It was
a fine thing to watch
the feminine way she had in bringing
a chimney down and
soon walls and rooves were cleaned up
under Kellie's hand
as if swept clean by a proud housewife.