a dozen donuts (haiku)

it's funny how
we ask the donut guy
to choose for us

all points Now

pen and paper in the morning
pen and paper in the dull afternoon
turning tides
scritching out notes
in the after birth of early evening
blown by winds unseen
inside

gusts, any which
way
but where I'd like
or deem possible

won’t let me be
yet can’t persuade me
and by the same token
could never un-make me

and I have discovered
an idea leaking
from the roof of my mouth

I have traced it back
to my brain
cranial drip
eclipsing faulty reasoning

pen and paper in the brown shadow dusk
ironing out the lake of past
drowning the tidal wave of future
allowing the present to be lopsided

discreet ripples
lulling me to strip and dive into
the pool of Now

Siamese Twins

if you want Yin
feel free, take her
there she is --
your next Olympic bed-jumping partner
all you ever wanted

now, if you DON'T want Yang,
I'll tell you the secret
-- you're out of luck

here he comes
the next morning
with a shot-gun

he is attached to the mistress
they are like Siamese twins
attached at the hip
spinning in harmony
until a bozo like you comes along
and thinks you can enjoy one
without the other

and when Yang comes
you will swear off womanizing
for life

and this will last
until Yin seduces you again

I'm not saying you have to swear off romance
or pleasure, no
you'd just be inviting the same cycle
but in reverse

you don't have to forego Yin
just respect Her
while keeping your wits about you

then when Yang comes in the morning
He will come with a soft mat
for meditation or exercise;
He will come with coffee or chai

he will come as your servant
and your confidant

this is the Way
this is happiness
and true contentment

no destination

there is no destination
just infinite encasements
nested obscurations
there is no refutation

we have no proof of being
can't see for the seeing
are slow to know solutions
or see through the corruption

attempt your confiscation
lift the haze invading
choose your side cascading
out of definition

we're playing with a time bomb
pulling at its wires
call me out as terrorist
or slave to my ambition

I'll tell you one more thing
you do not want to hear
the man that stands before you
is not the one you fear

and you yourself aren't solid
an apparition vanished
in and out of being
where all the money goes

lines so sure

floating landscapes
mud-orange, radish-red
a hint of a splash of yellow hovering above
hills falling at each other’s feet
like swallows, flying in clusters
losing themselves in one another

lines so sure, so true
there is trust involved here
the artist may have been close to her mother,
a locus of self-assuredness

the jumble at the foreground
is a blood-purple march of spears – battle foliage and the sky, the ceiling – misty
regretful, like the heart of a girl on her way
to her first day at pre-school

Happy Dog

it's the throw-away
it's the sink-hole
it's the first night out
in a while,
the soul of the moon presiding

it's melancholy
how it feels and sounds
against my ear

lips of velour sadness
kiss and whisper
terrible things
that flatter me

"Peaceful Easy Feeling"
the lady sings,
sitting in with the band

and this tasty Gennessee Cream Ale,
crisp and conniving against my throat
so honorable for its cheapness

and tonight
I can be
gone for awhile here
wondering how
I've survived so long
being so fucking
correct

kin ECT Id

Badass Id and I
went to see a film
while in college
about a young man
who kept killing himself
in order to get a rise
out of his mother

soon after
(our first and last trip together)
I got religion and
severed my connection
to my family

so that I could get high
on God
without psychedelics

so that I could dig a grave for myself
and, discarding my body
be free

but what actually happened was
I hit gold

for much like the boy in the movie
who, in the end, renounced death
for banjo-picking in a white suit
with suspenders

I joined the Lithium club
and came to give up my aversion
to happiness

my horizon
now 360 degrees
one step at a time

paranoia in a cafe

I am made of plastic
I disgorge
a pear
a crater
a mouth
an ignoble emptiness
that I cannot find a drawer for

flies circle her head
but ignore mine

my nose cannot find its way back
out of the classifieds

this is my 11th plague
and me
not even Egyptian
but a Jew

serves me right
for my past lives
.as a womanizer.
.in the mob.
.in the Third Reich.

emergent church cafe yin yang

one for the Phoenix Project -- an "emergent church" whence I have received social and spiritual sustenance



I have been shanghaied
into a hurricane whose eye is Jesus' swarthy baby-face
temple terrorist
water-whisperer
can't make up his mind whether he's dead or alive
drops plumb-line heart-cord straight down
to core of fiery planet
pulling up Earth energy to ground my feet
to glue my ass to Terra Firma, aquaderma
perma frost, Pentecost
found and lost, dead sea-tossed
toss your cross and “why” your “I”s
tolerate, equivokize, love has sprung, hate’s demise
trembling trickster, Mistress Mister
rocket-launch, mighty paunch
politician’s selfless lies, campaign speech anesthetize
“We gave them food stamps, now they’re pissed –
Fascist Muslim Socialists”
civil union, pork communion, pulpits, gulp it, sure as shit
rich man, poor man, bastard, priest

and this is how it was preached in Jesus’ time, in every
Bhagavad Gita sonnet rhyme, Buddhist Sutra, Taoist mountain
Jewish volume, atheist commune –

settle with your brother, give of yourself to your neighbor
if she is in need, indeed, undoubtedly
she is your savior

Moon's -- coffeeshop therapy

One summer evening, shortly after we graduated high school, I found myself in my friend Moon’s bathroom, on my knees in front of the toilet, doing what teenagers with low tolerances to alcohol and marijuana do best.
I had found my late-teen nirvana, had indeed begun to hang out with the guys getting intoxicated and high. This was the first in a long string of nights that we would spend at Moon’s house when his Mom was away, smoking, drinking, listening to music.
As the nausea retreated, something overtook me gently, unnoticeably at first. Then I was suddenly aware of it, filling every corner of my consciousness. "It" was a joyful, highly intelligent Presence – It was a unity of my thoughts, feelings and other sensations, and everything within reach of my perception. But it was something deeper than thta. This was a conscious energy that ran from the core of my being. It was the thing that gave me awareness, intelligence, life.
Laughingly, It emanated from and flowed into everything in and around me – my breath, the music blaring from my Moon’s room (Pink Floyd’s Welcome to the Machine), the walls, the fixtures in the bathroom.
And this Flow, as I came to call it, was laughing, because its very nature was comical, intelligent and light-hearted. It was delighted with its own Self.
I reasoned the next day that, either I had had a schizophrenic experience – or that I had experienced something spiritual, akin to what Buddhists find in meditation, welcoming me to the Universe.

everyone else's trip

caught up
in everyone's trip
but my own

let his be called
codependency
or laziness
or kowtowing to the guv'nor
or bowing butt-backward to the donkey
or quite simply not caring about myself because
I don't know my Self well enough

I long to share communion with others
with some a cup of coffee
a tear, a sigh
a laugh, a sunset
without entanglement and mutual self-mutilation
without the lose-lose prenuptial for the "hello-please-thankyou-goodbye ceremony"

maybe some I need to walk away from
some --
parasail

maybe there's someone I can
lay down with
in a field of dandelion tea bags
free of fee and spam and scam
we would let the breeze blow down the arid nose-bleed mesas
the monstrous skyscrapers of schemes and greed
the fantasies we get caught up
in our zippers
when we are fascinated
with other peoples' trips

well, until I find that friend
I will lie down in a field of dandelion chai
blowback the day in a symphony of
carelessness
cloud spot until I have fallen asleep
dreaming of her,
strawberry sunsquash, likewise-alienated soulmate

vintage bass, circa 1975

no particular logic
to its platypus get-up

electric bass
eel pie, vintage, worth more
with a pick-up missing
than a new blue Rickenbacker having known
Spaghetti-Lee's
magic hands

varnished, shellac-finished
stands
like a rake
leaning on my couch
as if in an alley,
poised to light a cigarette
to eye a skirt
to lay down the law
in thumping, stumping, junkety funk
stuck in the 70's
astral projecting toward a new home
in the third world of some future U.S.,
a mankind now mojoless
mocked by its rock and roll past
waiting to be saved
by the rhythm that permeates
its shocked soil

savors smoke

through
dark-grey mesh blinds
out into
the dull sky over
Parma

I stare at great clouds
of pearl
and slate

and time peels and smells and
savors another mandarin orange
while I watch,
reclined back-beyond-horizontal
in the dentist's chair
the clouds swooning slightly

her hand
crosses my face
her other hovers
over my mouth

I reach for my mantra,
an addict
a smoker reaching for a pack
I draw the words into my chest
with my breath

time savors smoke now,
smells drill on bone

my gaze is riveted
I repeat my mantra harder
a bird, blurred by speed,
crosses the upper left corner of the window
and is received
by the sky

China -- coffeeshop therapy

Nearly a year later, we stepped through the threshold into the Forbidden City. One minute, it was a vast square with hundreds of bicycles, rickshaws, cars and walkers, the looming banner portrait of Chairman Mao presiding over one of the most iconic scenes in the world – and the next minute, Joy and I were talking in a quiet garden of concrete walks and statues.
We were in China with the Singing Angels. Their 1983 summer tour included Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai in China and Tokyo in Japan. We were breaking the ice in the centuries old home of Japanese emperors, now deserted and left as a tourist site.
The trip was no-doubt exciting, one of the high-points of my life. But the promise of a new romance upped the ante even more.
The most memorable events of the journey were not the performances in front of appreciative Chinese crowds, the tours of schools with fantastic child performers showing off for the state or the site-seeing in Taoist and Buddhist temples and the Tokyo Disneyland, but bonding with Joy and the other Angels and a couple of new Chinese and Japanese friends. Visiting a middle-of-the-night trip to a Tokyo disco after sneaking out of our hotel with Joy and three of her friends; slow-dancing with Joy to bad American-pop; taking a drunken midnight swim in the hotel pool when we got back – definitely one of my all-time best memories.
We survived our misbehaving and the boredom of rehearsals and adults and their rules. And when we got back to the United States, to Cleveland, Joy and Tom (who had missed out on the trip), Joy’s brother and some other friends drove to Edgewater Park for a day of swimming in the then-polluted Lake Erie.
And some time during that day, Joy and I snuck off into the high grasses on the hill leading down to the beach. We picked grass and talked, and then shared our first kiss.

coffeeshop therapy -- sophomore summer, high school

I was looking through his pictures distractedly. It wasn’t my idea to try out for the Singing Angels. I flipped picture after picture of their trip to Mexico last summer, a lot of dorky kids in uniforms smiling in exotic locales.
I did like the idea of my learning to play bass guitar. That was Tom’s plan – for me to learn the instrument and join him in the Singing Angels’ back-up band. They had had a great time that last summer, and he went on and on about his friends from the group. There was a story behind every picture.
I got to one photo, of three girls laughing hysterically. The middle one – my God, she was beautiful. “Who’s that?” I asked Tom.
“That’s Joy. She’s really cool.”
I was still stewing about Kim. A little hurt and a little angry, I wasn’t letting go of her too well.
But I began to practice on Tom’s Dad’s bass. As I took off on the thing; as my birthday and the beginning of school approached and my parents bought me a cheap starter bass and the Singing Angels try-out came upon me and I “made it”, my heart re-attached to other diversions.
I also tried out for our high school Jazz Ensemble (Tom’s idea as well). Mr. Roytz was touched by how much work I put into learning the parts, so I’d be trading off the duty of bass-player with another kid.
I was enjoying the present and my expectations of the coming school year, more so than any other time in my life. I was excelling at something that was my own goal (well, maybe a bit of my friend Tom’s goal, too), that had nothing to do with my parents’ desires for me. And I was looking forward to meeting that strawberry-blonde girl from Tom’s photo.
In study hall one day, I printed out a note to Kim, apologizing to her for having pushed her away with my clinging. It was the first time I’d ever made a serious amends. A rock fell off my heart, and I was free to enjoy my Junior year in high school.

where I want to be

a mosque
a mosquito
a mountain
a molecule
an Earth
an electron
a quasar
a quark
a galaxy
gravity
an infinite greatness
an infinite smallness

where lies
the perfect size
the silver mean
the in-between?

a baby orangutan
in her mother's arms
a fireman pulling
a child from harm

a ninety-year old man
driving a thirty year old van
a future President
humming the soundtrack
to "Stop Making Sense"

the middle, the median
a modicuum of perfection
the thing that we search
the things that we learn

in the realm of sentient beings
a greater Home
suspended in wavy grace
a myth, a poem

dream of wrestling with God

I grabbed
His penis
I grabbed
God's
penis

I won't
deny
some degree
of homoeroticity
in my psychosexual
history
(yes, it is a strange
way to put it)
but it wasn't like that --

it was like
wrestling
with my best friend
when we were 12
right out of the shower
at his house
after swimming,
our laughter like
a fountain of water laughs,
its revelations
a constant surprise
to itself

and me
not believing
in a God
that innocent,
that kind

as kind as my best friend
who never laughed at
how I couldn't throw a baseball

but who
when he said he loved me,
I called a fag
and didn't mean it
in any way
other than with disdain

the bustle

we are separate, we are different and indifferent,
some of us blessed, some broke,
but loving, belligerent or unfeeling –
we are all the same

our bodies are all equal, all fertilizer
unshowered or covered in jewelry, make-up, cologne
carrying purses and fake personas
or funky trickster mojo with dirty clothes
we all bat our eyelashes as if
stunned at the bottom of a bank-building free-fall

the bustle,
the great, ballsy bong of downtown –
where homeless odors collide
with casino goers hubris

we are drunk on park benches in torn tennis-shoes
or tripping over our loafers on eight dollar night caps
nervous laughter and sleeping rage
work our mouths, vibrate the frames of our bodies

we don’t really know where we’re headed

and the glistening of the Terminal Tower
in red and blue
and the lights of stadiums
where little boys and little men nurse deep wounds
over chronic little losses

cannot outshine the shaky man with Bozo hair
drawing peace signs in chalk on the sidewalk on Public Square

he might tell us where we are headed,
his heart, a Universal router we cannot connect to
with our smart phones or our dumb Jonesing for
more and more human warmth
through less and less human interaction

yeah, he might tell us where we are headed

but we wouldn’t listen

giants

thought it would be a cool idea
to draw her
asleep
in her bed
after the stroke

this soon turned into --
an unflattering portrait of my mother

but I finished it
before throwing it out,
the wispy, white and charcoal gray hair
the narrow Jewish nose
with the long nostrils
drawn in red ink,
the only kind of pen
the nurse had

and what I found here
were memories --
of the things we had done
the way she had cared for me
how we had played our game
together

all that time,
never realizing
we are actually giants,
asleep,
dreaming ourselves
to be mother and son

Tom, Cheryl, Kim -- Coffeeshop Therapy 8

Pat and I despised him, which, I guess, is a hint that everyone I was to become friends with was first to be a nemesis. Lanky, Italian-curly-haired, with his arm always in the air so that he could be first to answer Mrs. Trocano’s questions in English class,Tom was sociable and appalling.
I didn’t talk to him for the longest time, until he mentioned that he played guitar. I assumed he didn’t play very well, but I asked him about it. He said he was just learning to play some jazz; his Dad was a jazz drummer. This latter bit won him some points with me. And by the time school broke for the summer, I was intrigued with Tom.
High school began in the fall for us. Brush, with its graduating classes of 500+, was imposing but thrilling.
Of course, I began to hang out with Tom. We would get together and play jazz standards out of his father’s “fake books”. Tom was quite good with jazz chords; I knew a lot, but not as much as Tom. Neither of us could solo worth shit, but he was way ahead of me in this respect.
We recorded ourselves on my 8-track cassette player, played at my house on the patio and played a little for our parents. We were a regular little jazz duo. The thing I liked most about Tom was his emotional depth. He, like Stan, was a brother to me.
***
It’s odd that the girl with whom I went on my first date, with whom I had my first kiss, I did not ask out again. Cheryl was in my Spanish class, and I was infatuated with her, her full mouth and the moist, dark circles under her eyes which led me to empathize with her (she was one of the few kids in 10th grade who had a job, and she must not have gotten enough sleep). I guess I feared she wasn’t interested in me, although she showed no sign that she was not. After that date, she was as friendly to me as before. But my first assumption and fear was abandonment, so I did the job for her and let her be.
Kim was a different story. Although I wasn’t as attracted to her as to Cheryl, once we went out, I continued dating this tall, quiet girl.
Kim was friends with Tom. Our relationship was fraught with intimations of the two being interested in each other, with her displeasure with my being much shorter than her, but most of all with my clingy attachment to her and my jealousy.
Our dating ended with me in tears when she broke up with me while we were studying for a Spanish final at the end of the freshman school year.

Memorial Day 2012

so many shades
of blue and green
and mist and forgetfulness

so many paths
across the lake
on the seer-sainted water

the white blurs of motorboats,
in a fury of wanting,
rumble across the already streaked surface

the breeze is on me
like the hand of a nursemaid
on a child's feverish forehead

and the stinging flies
hope for moments away from their hell
in the pinpricks of blood
that erupt over their mouths

and my hopes
of a happier Memorial Day spent alone,
decades dead in Syria,
cannot keep down my life,
shifting indiscriminately
underfoot
for future generations
to solemnly
dis(re)member

Beatles -- coffeeshop 6

Steve Rowe was an object of ridicule from at least the time I met him in 6th grade camp. I remember him being ordered to run 5 laps around the track because of some prank; all the kids laughed gleefully. But a year later, when the story went around in school that a kid had caught him “whacking off” in the boys’ locker room after gym class, Steve’s fate was sealed.



Personally, I had never known Steve to hurt anybody. And, incidentally, his presence in school was instrumental, if indirectly, to my finding my way through adolescent life.



“You listen to NCX?” he asked while we were working on a lab in chemistry class. He was referring to WNCX, 98.5FM, a classic rock station in Cleveland.



“No, not really.” Although I had taken an interest in playing guitar, I wasn’t much of a fan of any radio station.



“You like the Beatles?”



I had to think about this, as I had never put thought into what music I liked or didn’t like. The summation of the Mannheimer family music collection was the awful pop and disco music my sister bought for our stereo and two reel to reels my Dad had -- Sousa marches and a recording by Hispanic folk-singer, Trini Lopez.



WNCX, as Steve informed me, was going to be playing 24 hours straight of Beatles songs beginning at 5PM. I decided, out of sudden inexplicable intrigue, that I was going to listen.



I ended up putting about 4 hours of the show on 8-track tape and listening to it over and over again for the next couple of weeks.



In the next year, from birthday presents, to Hanukah and whenever I could talk my Mom into treating me, I collected most of the Beatles major albums, bought a fan book and attempted to learn some of their songs to accompany my white-haired, old-school guitar teacher, Mr. Guzzo.



I read an interview in the fan book between a news journalist and Beatles George Harrison and John Lennon. They were talking about the band members’ use of LSD and the ensuing “psychedelic experiences”. I didn’t get what they were talking about, but it sounded fascinating. From this was born a secret longing for a taste of whatever they had experienced.

Neighbor

I carry too much synchronicity today
Packed per square inch,
Jammed into my heart,
A Universe of energy
In a space pinched by my thumb and forefinger.

I walk the Hessler Street Fair
And fall on a table of simple Chinese line drawings,
Beautiful, ink-drawn and watercolor washed with shaky hand,.

I study them,
So many, a booth full of them,
Small ones – birds, pools, flowers
Larger landscapes hang – of the sky, the forests, mountains.

And then my neighbor materializes,
Haggling with a bearded man,
My 5’3” Asian acquaintance from the apartment building
Who yells, animated, on his cellphone to someone in Mandarin
downstairs in the lobby some nights.

“Who painted these?” I ask him.
He replies, with eyebrows awash in brow,
Implying a punchline to the situation,
“I did! Haha!!...”

I shake his hand, appreciative,
Thinking how I must visit his apartment,
With 20 dollars in pocket, speak a few words,
Patronize the arts….

Stan

I was jealous of his easy sociability, his ability to maneuver 7th grade, his status -- not quite popular but conversant with the popular kids. He was, in every sense of the words, friendly and extraverted, by appearance a different soul than me.
As I’ve gotten to know Stan through the years, he’s struck me more and more as a Zen student. Riding the waves of good times and difficult blows, he celebrates and grieves but always remains true to his guiding principle, kindness.
My jealousy dropped the first time I spoke with him in history class the last day of 7th grade. He talked with a familiarity that wrapped me in his warmth and humor. It was just one conversation (in which he recounted a horror story he had read), but I knew I wanted to be friends with him.
At a football game the next autumn, we got to talk for a second time. For some reason, I broke the ice by throwing him down the hill from where the bleachers looked over our junior high school’s cleat-munched football field. I think that was some kind of initiation for Stan, and it was an expression of the rage that hovered below my frozen façade, come to the surface now that, in his presence, I felt totally myself. Call it an exaggerated “male-bonding” experience, Stan still remembers that incident and recalls it with laughter and some puzzlement.
I loved going over his house in South Euclid (the city just west of Lyndhurst). There was love there, in a way that may have been absent from my house. His parents were easy-going and they loved each other truly and devotedly.
If Stan was a Zen student, his father, Herb, was the guru on top of the mountain. Soft-spoken behind his green-tinted glasses (he had injured his eye in World War II), when I came over he treated me like a second son. His gentle wisdom and ironic laugh were soothing.
My friendship with Stan introduced me to emotional intimacy in which I could share anything -- my dreams and my failings. For the first time, I was accepted and respected as an intelligent kid, as he was, instead of made fun of for it. The relationship went a long way toward healing the loss of “home”, the disengagement with “Self” I had experienced all of my life due to being given up by my mother.

Buddha in a bomb shelter

let go the razor-blade
the tangle of red
the broad field
slicked with blood
filled with bodies, limbs playing Twister

hold on to the heart
the part about love...
correlations...
breath and death
-- sister nations

bodies in bags in
crates and plates
in heads of dead run round
and pierced through
with largely ignored truths

but from the seat of the heart,
you witness
all this passing --
this ghastly miraculous fraction
of Universe you see as your Self
your limbs, your torso, your glasses
playing in front of you like a puppet’s;

gaudy day-glo version of your dream Self
more real than dream, only perhaps, because this version picks up
where it left off the day before –
each and every day

and while you are no larger than any other dream
you are no smaller than any other dream
no more important, no less
for we are all connected
by the light that drowns us all,
fish swimming in light, longing in light
colliding in light, killing in light
righting in light – placing broken bodies back together
shooting them through with souls retrieved from
a madman’s medicine shelf
and, from a moment of passion, reborn

The Once and Future King

Reading Robert Bly's Iron John. Absolutely amazing. "A book about men". Not at all in contrast to a book about women or a snooty writing that exculdes gay men or transgender, nor a book about tough guys or anythng of the sort. REALLY interesting...Jungian in tone.

He talks about the archetypal kings, the sacred king, which is the transcendent male motif -- Adonai, Jesus, Allah, Odin, Jupiter, etc, and the inner king, the sacred within each man (and woman for each matter, as each man has an inner queen as well.)

One statement that totally blew me away was that "addiction does not have to do with Colombian drug lords, but with the abscence of the King"...not having to do with a lot of inner city fathers not taking in their kids, but really the other way around. Because we have ousted "the King", the inner sacred, (if we ever really honored the inner sacred as a society), all below falls; because we don't know our sacred selves, the poor suffer and the rich glut. Thus we have politicans who care more for religious fundamentalism than for humans, corporations into money and power, millions of addicted souls, and everything in between.

I haven't gotten to the point in the book where Bly talks about transformation of self and society, but in my opinion, this transformation takes place in the growing consciousness movement, the infiltration of Eastern religion into the West, the restructuring of Western religion, things like the Occupy movement, artists, musicians, actors, activists, the common man becoming more environmentally and socially conscious, 12-step recovery, the women's movement (for it takes the discovery of the Inner Queen concurrent with the discovery of the Inner King to bring society afloat -- one without the other is not enough -- and a growing matriarchy does not preclude the arrival of the King -- the two can coexist).

One component, along with the missing King, that has been lacking is making peace with the father -- ones physical father. This does not mean that the father has to become a good father, or even be present. One may not even know ones father, but I think the more one knows about his father and his father's story and situation, his good and bad, the more one can reconcile.

Thus the men's movement. Okay ladies, please stop snickering. This in no way opposes the woman's movement but arises hand in hand with it. We have our issues, us men, straight, gay and transgender. We all have fathers and have issues with them. I will share a Robert Bly exercise for digesting ones relaionship with ones father in a later post. It is rather ingenious and has helped me so much with my perspective on my Dad.

.

two-points

I am okay
with being here
but not
with being alive

the murmuring from outside
the half open
isolation room door
the motion
of my shallow breaths –
in
and out

they’ve all put up
with my crap
for half the night
as have I

and now
in two-point leathers
my left wrist
and left ankle
strapped to the side
of the gurney

with nowhere to go
but on my back
or on my side
I'm relieved to finally be left
with no option
but to rest

Terra crying
terrifying
Mother of dry
crumbling Earth
slips in sieve
rivers give
way to dust
the oceans pray
in sickening floods
leaves turn ash
we’ve come at last
to drown in glut
and so much blood
we're covered
in cash
we cover
our ass
we cannot
turn back

easter #2 -- take-out

I see no sin
In this man
I wash my Hands
of This whole
Freakshow –
Left hand
Despising Right,
Cutting it off,
Not knowing
What it is doing,
A chicken with no head,
An eye
For an eye
For an eye --
The whole world
Burnt to the ground
To kill a mosquito
Please, sweet Savior,
Deliver us
Sweet and sour pork,
Chinese take-out
For the hungry
For the homeless
For the homosexual
For the ugly
Yes, even for the polished polygamist
For the political pimp
For the farthest shore
We must all reach someday
Each in our own way,
In shambles, shaken to the core,
The immensity of our pride and our vanity
Our cruelty and our simple thoughtlessness,
Likewise washed up,
Quivering sickening
Like beached Leviathan
Reminding us
Never to forget
The helpless
And the hopeful
Reaching down
To kiss our heads