The Thief

I've stolen breath from luffing air,
and water from blue seas,
warmth from winter suns,
and cool from summer's breeze.
I've stolen thoughts from purling streams,
and sleep from thieving time,
shade from bosky greens,
it’s sure I've led a life of crime.
I've stolen mist from cataracts,
and views from mountain climbs.
My gold's from autumn leaves,
my diamonds all from rime.
Such wealth though stolen’s never grudged,
though some of virtue be,
who'd never steal an hour from toil,
to steal what's had for free.

Bazookamouth

It mails lighting bugs
through my vertebrae,
remembering that first time,
and with me now bold-hued in the
encaustic
of you, there's nothing,
nothing, I wouldn't say
or do. I'd

dogpaddle across the foamstorming
whitewaters of Iguacu Falls,
drink all the frog spit
in the Okefenokee, lip-skimming
thick algal mats like the froth off
freshly brewed lager-wort.
I'd bobsled clearcut old-growth redwoods down
Cascade lumber flumes,
through the middle
of an EarthFirst skeetshooting range.
I'd front unedited jeremiads
ghostwritten by Salmon Rushdie
ridiculing missile-toting,
mandatorily bearded,
fundamentalist Shiites.
I'd go angling for cavefish
in Tora Bora after
taunting Norman Schwarzkopf
and Donald Rumsfeld,
and stealing all the warlord baksheesh
in Peshawar. I'd field Barry Bonds
line drives with my teeth. Memorize
the collected works of
Carl Jung, Leo Tolstoy, Iggy Pop and Sting,
Noam Chomsky, T.S. Eliot, Henry Miller and
Yahyah Ling. I'd amble barefoot
across Saharan runway tarmacs.
Pucker for Rottweilers.
Dicker with aircraft carriers.
Flutterkick through lava flows.

I would milk a menstruating grizzly.

I wanna be your veejay,
my liquid crystal display
dancing in opaque patterns to you like
an electric sandwich.

I don't wanna be no roué,
lecherously dissipating my
dwindling years away,
no human shield
protecting the coward
inside of me.
I don't want to live my life
like a grammar teacher in a ghetto high school,
correcting spelling errors
on suicide notes.
I would rather flatline
than be a concierge
in the overeducated concentration camp
of a world without you,
gnarling like a bonsai in a
potted premise.
Without you I’d be so empty
you'd need a scanning tunneling electron microscope
to find the purpose in me.
Besides you there is no solace for
shambling through this boomtown whorehouse,
no matter how much cheap whiskey
you chase it with.
This activated charcoal only gets
one chance, and being without you is like
being swaddled in wasps and eating bees.

Save for the moveable feast of you,
your eyes bluer than all the bluebonnets in Texas,
save for the chance of my fingers
dancing the macramed geography
of our shared embrace,
my biography would be a
diorama of a bread line.

A landlocked navy.

When the picked bones of my
fully procured cadaver lodge
beneath six feet of the ultimate DNR,
I don't want to be remembered
as an eponymous invective
for impacted bowels,
or toothless smell-bitten
scurvy-laughter.
And that is what has made me
the wadded
dayglo-pink-gummed
Bazooka-mouth who is
trying to bolt the here-and-now,
to your vervetrumping

wow.

If Time Were Music

No sooner does a thing become final than I
recant it. Finding enchantment in the recanting,
enchained by the refrain,
circumscribed by the reprisal,
the lines of the round
decline defining, as if definition were an
end instead of a worm in the beak
of a mother robin whose nurture
proceeds from clutch
to brood. Verve,
to vibe, tremble,
to quake. Minuet to march,
as the end-systole s-s-s
syncopates to the enthralling chanteuse
of gothic romance, a pas-de-deux with the
last or the next diastole, the four-chambered
hypocrite vetoing the proclaimed intentions of truth,
while diction evaporates like fire the strawmen logic erects,
and rues. If water were ink
then oceans would publish,
and if time were music then air
would sing. Final vocabularies
riff and string. Skep and skeptic,
honey,
sting,
lavish and perish
desert,
spring.

Like water making light of fire,
and murdered beggars defining kings,
this worm-like word is death and hope,
love and need, child
and parent,
sacrifice,
greed.
Bait and purpose,
earth and flight,
nest and office,
gloom and sprite.
In a tongue upheaved
by unspoken sins,
all ends are quickly ended,
and the means of words begin
to mean, where words are found
transcended.

Career Day

Let's review:
high paying manufacturing jobs:
thing of the past. There's still
manufacturing work to be had but
only for the same wage they're paying
the illegals. Healthcare is growing, and not a bad option
as long as you don't mind denying services to the mothers
of poor children, or taking away the houses of frail
elderly grandmothers, filling out
thousands of pages of reimbursement forms
and you aren't too upset by the people who die
while yer preoccupied with all that timbertrashing
topsoil depleting flash flood paperwork.
Working with children's another fastgrowing
career path because after all,
the children are our future. Course the goin rate
on the future's a bit shy of minimum wage, truth-be-told,
and then there's all those licensures and regulations they're imposing now
cos you can't be too safe with our kids.
And ya'd better not be above a fair bit
of pokin and proddin, needle's wortha blood here,
vial a urine there, battery of psychological profile tests,
maybe a few questions round to the neighbors, FBI,
local police, fingerprints, maybe even a polygraph…maybe.
Not that all that sophisticated testing'll keep people from lookin at ya
sideways, like yer the biggest pederast since Father Geoghan.
Careers in TV, now that's the job ta be had if there's a having any.
Pay's like you wouldn't believe, and all the notoriety and celebrity
and there's always plenty of the opposite sex eager for a taste of fame
if you know what I mean. Course there's a thousand unemployed for every
liposucked, botoxed, blowdried, rhinoplastied tribute to good grooming
that gets their face up on the screen but that's no reason for not
following your dreams. Which is the least of your problems
since if you have any talent well that's the
meanest aspect of the whole thing, the way you have to watch
people who sing like gorillas, act like cardboard, and think like fleas
rise to the top cuz their one true genius is for getting the tongue
in deep when it comes time for some serious --- career climbing.
If you don't mind lying and beating the crap out of people for
demanding a fair day's pay for a fair day's labor,
firing rubber bullets that are only
occasionally lethal into people demanding peace, or freedom,
or whatever nefarious cause the case may be, well, there's a
pretty good future if you want to join
the police. But if you can keep your smile
when all about you, are losing their jobs,
and blaming it on those silly little pink slips
yer handing out by the thousands, and the oinking
multi-million dollar stock option stocking stuffers
you use to grease the political campaigns for
regulatory reforms that turn grand theft into
aggressive offshore accounting irregularities
well yours is the high skills high tech
job market of the
free trade agreement future.
Yours is the career path of unlimited
prosperity, the path that assures this great land will always be
number one; the path of rewriting the rules and
controlling the biggest guns.
A titan of industry, an entrepreneur, a CEO,
teaching a lesson they don't teach you in school,
that if you want to make it
in a neo-liberal, fascist state economy:
the thing that matters most is
who they fear,
not what you know.