Life On Mars

 

 Cabin fever come to its fruition 

– almost lost my head to the Empress this morning – 

the sky is falling down as rain, 

the snow has melted,  

 the Mississippi is about to consume the town, 

if not the entire world.

References to ‘magic lanterns’, 

‘floating worlds’ and 

‘backwards tintypes’ 

... applaudable, in my skewed view. 

Yet, should we exit on a ‘celebratory note’? 

golden years --
loose change in a jar
on top the 'fridge

Boris Yeltsin Standing On A Tank

Last Man

 

My best friend Steve is a Vietnam vet. Bless his heart, he never broached the subject, nor did I, until I’d known him for a few years.

he told me some tales, witty, sardonic, with some hilarious punchlines thrown in and, quite often, disturbingly surreal. He’d won a medal for stealing a jeep once … it’s a long story, I couldn’t tell it like he could.

We have a last man's club of sorts; one bottle Johnny Walker Black, one pair clean socks, a pack of Winston's, stuffed into a re-gifted wine box – everything a guy needs.

Someday, one of us will get to piss on the other's grave.

Dragon's Breath
the forest alight in flame,
red, green, orange, black!
laughing, a ghost beckons,
beautiful and serene

 

Black Helicopters

 

 

I remember the Black Helicopters. That's right, I saw them. They hovered right over the crib, shaking the rafters, the pulse of their rotors like a bass drum played double time deep in a black cat bone. I didn't know whether to fall screaming to the floor or run into the street shouting platitudes to glory and firing my riot gun at erstwhile targets hidden in shadows. 

 

I wasn't the only one. It seems our own River City had been chosen, along with other metropolises across the nation, as practice grounds for doppelganger constructions born of the sands of Araby and beyond. San Diego was one, among others, all without prior notice and a mere decade or so after the Big One - 9/11. 

 

Actually, I stepped out on the roof to observe a squad of choppers a hairsbreadth over 100 feet overhead maneuvering like the bats that rose from the Mississippi on many a summer evening, door gunners and missiles glinting menace on that moonlight night. I could almost reach out and touch them.

 

The paper was headlined with explanations the next morning. It had been an exercise to save our freedoms after all, in league with our now infamous efforts to save the world from "terr'ists" while spreading Democracy afar. 

 

Visiting the supermarket later in the day I questioned the two off duty policeman there if they had been informed, and, to the purpose of such an exercise. 

 

"You don't want Bin Laden attacking us again, do you?", in proper authoritative tones from the officer responding.

 

I didn't have the heart to remind him he had died, of kidney disease in Pakistan, just ten years before.

the fog of war --

even the general 

dons his battle fatigues

 

ISP

(con't)

This correspondence was drafted July 10, 2017.

In the meantime, I've discovered my address never was in an area you serve. I did not receive that information from your offices, by the way. I had to go to a competitor before verifying with another one of your representatives ... if only they had been so forthcoming earlier. Was the first agent I spoke to able to retain his commission?

Now, here we are in September, after quite a few twists and convolutions, while you people must have stood around the water cooler, making predictions with chicken bones and which way the wind would be blowing until Voila! the computer program pipes up with a number, a different one on each day in fact, and makes its predictions, one of which is the most auspicious charge to bill my non-existent account.

Well, I have news for you. My account doesn't exist, nor was any service rendered. Therefore, I have deduced your accounting department is a figment of my imagination. I don't owe REDACTED a bill conjured from the ether and remitted to your dreams. Nor can I sue a ghost for lost time, seek damages incurred in a nightmare, let alone deny your staff complicit as I ran around in circles.
 
Noting these difficulties, I suggest you look for other work - I don't know how you're getting paid.
 
You should look into it.

can't tap my feet
for fear they'll hear it
through the floor --
musk melons

it rained

 

I remember those crazy shads. Nemesis brand. Secret agent wrap around style, they kept the dust out and wouldn't fall off. I wore them all summer. 16 hours a day in 100 degree heat, and it only rained once. Every body had a pair on.

Don't know if them pipeliners or Latinos started it. They out numbered us white boys 10 to 1, but we spoke English, took and gave orders. Not me. I was the nigger of the outfit, the fuckin' new guy and, potentially, whipping boy. I stuck with the Mexicans and Hondurans mostly, steel or poly pipe, depending what work was. Nicer people than the drunked up cowboys, they were more tolerant of my lack of skill. You get teased, at best, along with the job description. Nice to know what they're saying about you, too, so you pick up the language little by little.




drought and dead weeds
a bullet hole
in every road sign





Not like my trade. That was life or death, and I'm Jack Black, mother fucker. There I'd worked with hundreds, besides, on thousands of spaces, a Metropolitan numbering millions. But don't rescue the schedule, however far behind, you might have to take your tools and go home. Until, finally, we all did. Here, your comeuppance was a meal of tamales wrapped in fresh corn stalk made by someone's loving spouse just before dawn, their sauce tempered sweetly with crisp green chilies emitting fire ... la familia producion l'amour. Auqi, no es tardes, amigo, de nada, primo, de nada.




pheasant chicks
in columns march
into the grass





Nope, this was a humbling experience. You see, there's just nowhere to hide on that plain. You might have to stand on a rock to get a cell signal. Ain't no trees ... but glory to God, there is wheat. Waving amber and sunlit on end, from it, you can observe the wind criss-cross the prairie from miles away. Pray, you might escape that splendor, for at night it becomes an Ocean, phosphorescence visible in the seed. You could chart a course by the moon or the stars where they meet the horizon, always ahead, your headlights egging you on, your destiny, perhaps, to just let go the wheel.




an Angus calf
got all caught up ...
loose strands of wire





Somewhere in deepest, darkest Honduras there's a video, taken on a phone in a place five cultural nightmares laid end to end and a little dictatorship away. It's protagonist is a laconic, gangling man tan as bark but for the raccoon lightness around his eyes - reeling like some mad shape shifting kami chasing the lads around and over the riven earth, snorting and stomping, pretending to be a bull - they made me do it. So little children would laugh. All little children share that laughter, yes?

Came the day I hit that deer, fiddling with my wipers in the convoy and a split second lost. I could have missed him, an immature buck, I'm quick because I have to be, I was so close ... the Hondurans boys finished the poor fella off with a penknife, his blood soaked up by the dust along side that perfectly straight road.

And later, leaning against the red wind carrying the earth's contents to the sky, they feasted on its haunches lit by the waning sun just before midnight on the only day it rained.




red sky at night -
curlews choose flight
over Black Tail Dam

City of Thieves

 They gave me the "tour", still in handcuffs, first up the infamous elevator (in that regard, there's a tale about a guy who instead beat up two St. Paul PD, but with his feet) and then, unscathed but still blinded, through the gauntlet between pens and holding cells on a warm Saturday night, cries of the detainees bemoaning the full moon.

In one cell a stunning young woman stood alone, defiant behind shatterproof glass, rake thin, proud of her screams as beautiful as any captured animal, intensity justified with a smile declaratory and mocking the injuries to my eyes as they met hers like some demand I be handed over to her, that liquid line from cheek to jaw taught, flexing and clenching.

And then at once, the trance broken - I found myself released into the rabble, with no visible organization to it, as if though that must disturb the incarcerated there.

So inured of the nature of anger and its frustration, I offered my own ministrations for calm, to be rejected and restated again without offense or sight, a blind monk among priests and kings in the City of Thieves


... tanuki *
for a few cups of sake
recites the sutras
recidivists crowd the shrine
offering prayers all night long

The Gulf

Oh, well, the smell of that expanse of water ...
the warmth of it, its salinity, the lay of the light from December skies, intense yet waning.
It's hard to describe, the distances benign.


 the Christmas catch
dumped on the deck -
they writhe in it's heat

Power Corrupts

Oh, no, you first, I'm right behind you - power corrupts.

And then BAM! a weight like a massive stone descending on its sunken chest, disrupting the FA Cup semi on the biggest screen available in this awkward sanctity, it's gauche decor with some really shoddy lighting ensconced in a musty old basement, with cobwebs hanging in every corner heavy with dust.

It's the space preserved for the winner's history. A lonely place, one adorned with all the self perpetuated trophies and thoughtless certificates of award to and from it's own image given away like toothpicks at one of those tawdry, low-buck functions, virtues described in a fiction by Louis L'amour, ineffectual and moot. All in all, and one after another, they demarcate the unintended consequences born of a self congratulatory, good old boy board of directors.

A republic, like any other that stood before it, it hasn't spoken to its insufferable spouse for days on end.

As it falls, in slow motion impossibly ridiculous for its sheer, dead weight and fathomless hubris, an arrested scream remains unresolved, stifled in its throat. But for the epiphany of knowing it's too late - there it hangs suspended for what seems an eon, then head first into its plate of beans and sausage, dead dead dead.

the full moon declines
and then
the next morning of spring
春の翌朝、満月の辞退