Bare Feet and Feathers

We've got bone We've got muscle and feet on the earth.  Arms that reach Eyes that see and hearts to bleed.  Infect us with magic.  Irradiate us with light.  Expel us from a planet.  Enervate the vigilante. Crack every chrysalis Let the mutant emerge.  Celebrate mutation in unique dance Spread your cape over the earth Spin your web and fly Conceive of every device against evil. Get drunk on the possibilities of becoming.  Explode into solitary martial violence.  Bam! You'll slam against a wall of evil.  Crash! You'll bash the body of your villain.  Wham! Your heart and hate will jam your soul. Smash! Love will slash itself from within Whoosh! All that is you will fly into space And your feet will stand on the earth.  We lost you when you left to become  Muscle and bone beyond your suit.  You rose above us for us to reach A spot in heaven for us to aim More than you ever knew, that is you For us to be. Fo

Apprehending the Atlas, Pondering its problems. Its all wrong. Stay calm world, I've got this. Got a box of Crayolas. Look from the box to the map. Is sixty-four enough? There's a lot of work to do. Colored wax to the rescue! Where to start? Where to start? Where to start? Big problems. That's it. Hot spots. Get them fixed. Jerusalem. Everyone wants it. Jews. Muslims. Christians. We take complex toys from toddlers and shelve them So, out goes Jerusalem. (I'm going to need the Holy Blue Uh, Cerulean? Close enough) Where to put it? Greenland! Perfect. Plop it down. The Dome of the Rock. The Wailing Wall and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre resting on glaciers and Inuit bones. Denmark controls Greenland? Whoops, sorry about that Danes. Think of the tourism A hundred million pilgrims are pointed your way. You might want to put on the coffee. Australia catches my eye. It looks suspicious loitering down there in the corner All of th

Charisma don't matter It don't matter a damn Whilst my blood Pour through your hands You gonna tell me I'm ugly Or, you gonna tell me I'm pretty When I'm a-holding your heart In the palm of my hand Yeah, that 's what I thought You're soft, You might be a poet But you ain't no preacher And you got no charisma Pick up your arms Step in line Shoulder up Get some blood on your hands We got a world to build

The Pacific pitches a fit behind me as if someone in Japan snapped their end of the sheet and fired a rolling riot of wet over the earth to crash into the edge of Laguna. Laguna splays out from the sand between my toes It seeps and spreads and the piles and agglomerates from the beach to the boardwalk into the streets and through the shops up, up over the steep hills and out through the canyon road. I'm stretching my eyeballs I'm trying to see through it all Straight, right on through, across the continent all the way home to Connecticut. That's when Laguna stops being Laguna and I see it for what it is... the edge of America. Coming back toward me, from the east, and beating back my sight right into my eye sockets, is the whole of history. An impenetrable phalanx A phalanx of hominids but its not a parade. There's no order to it. Just the chaos of America. All of it. The Chumash, Pomo and Salinan bleed right through the Navaho and Apache.

The cat bathes with gravity in a taffy of light pulled from our star and knotted to a home made afghan, a hand-knit event horizon. A cat bath is an infinite Sunday condensed into a self-absorbed mass of luxury and fur.

(inspired by two poems. The first is "Memo from the Desk of X" by Donald Justice. The second is "Like Gods" by John Koethe) God, make this desk bleed the consubstantiation of me. What Divinity I might have, make its stain spill out in letters in words, in imagery, in faith, in raspberries, in feathers, in heaven. I'm crying citrus to an aluminum ceiling Hard rain splatters back. Silence. Mine is a desk of flat packed pressed wood. My shoe is as real as my sole. It walks on earth, on concrete, on asphalt in rain, in snow, in heat, in gloom of night. This is a field divided the poetry of possibilities versus the prose of facts. My soles stamping out rhythm My soul exiled into night A stanza as vivid as a crow in the snow. Good night to dreams no night for dreams Let wine be for forgetting. Step over the wire and embrace the facts. The Justice Memo received let poems go extinct.