Screen Play

So all its about is this guy, this guy who just wants to walk
Walk on a beach.  You know:  he's just a regular guy, a guy
Who goes to work, who has his wife, and they have kids
And you know, it isn't such a bad life, but then all of a sudden

How Men and Women Got Together

And now, for your listening pleasure, a tale of woe, intrigue, and joy:  How Men and Women Got Together.

It is based on fragments of a Blood-Piegan tale.

Poems for a lost love: Magic

Once you told me that you wanted to see
Me grow old:  my temples grey; my ruddy
Visage wrinkled with wise distinction
You used words like that, then.  I remember.

I wonder when I look for you on the wires
If those words ever come back to you
While changing the diaper of your daughter
Who would have been ours, if the words
Had been right.

A young friend now tells me that words
Spoken or written shape his existence
You know that I know that you know that we
Know nothing is less real than the words we
Cast into the boiling pot of our lives
An incantation of being simply cannot exist

Still, I sit and scribble the words, casting back
To a time when you loved me and I loved you
And words really did make our love real and
Solid like the slick concrete I once cracked
My head against, having fallen while catching
You before you fell.

The Scheme

The wheeler-dealer on the bus has a wireless headset
"I am in the back of the bus by the fan, so it is noisy,"
He shouts into it.  The cockney gym rat stares him down.
The wheeler-dealer is not phased and continues to wheel,
"I'll call you back, but I just wanted to touch base and
Make sure we are on for Friday.  I mean it is time to
Move."

Two more stops and three more calls and he bounds
Off the bus to his dollar store destination.  Everyone
Knows but he, that he is talking to no one and nothing
Is on.

What dreams may come

You would think you wouldn't nightmare him
Thirty years buried in the sticky clay of your town
But then you wake at 3:23 in the morning and he
Has transmogrified into a drooling demon who
Murders your sister, who threatens to slit your throat

And you spend the whole of the next day secretly
Aghast, since his ghost now haunts you
Not the demon that your unwaking mind made him
To be, but the man who was; the man who built
You a boat to sail in the drain ditch out front

Why now has he transformed for you?
What have you done that has made him change?
What have you given up?  What have you kept?
So you walk out into the storm, clutching your
Collar close, wondering if you will find him
Again.

Care Service

You worried about people thinking that you're ridiculous
But the ridicule that dropped from your lips stained your
Best dress shirt with a jagged pool of yellowing hate

Sneering, you wondered why people would turn on you
It was them, of course, not your stained shirt, not the bitter
Spell bubbling away in the cauldron of your soul

So what is to be done?  Where do you go with all the seething
Mockery that wants to boil over and cover the stove in a sticky
Syrup of jeers that you once thought built the body of your

Existence?

Inclination

High tension wires strain into the distance
Where mountain range nearly touches mountain range
God to Adam at the bottom of the valley
One arm inclined in lackadaisical acceptance
The other disinclined in active indifference
A sea gull follows the wire through the morning haze
Never reaching the point where man and divine
Join together in a rocky embrace