Who Wears Casey Jones's Bandana at Bandana Square?

Daddy, what’s a
train? Is it
something I can ride?

Bored in 1959 when Grandpa
brought me to see
the Chicago L.

The Children’s
Museum's now a business-
and-rehabilitation center.

Yellow brick railroad buildings –
entire expanse in back –
a chain-link fence.

Metal shopping cart rammed into it
on the other side
where the real tracks run.

Blue spray-paint script.
I love it,
but I can’t read it.

Chapstick Girl (Whatever You Wanna Do)

South Padre Island

South beach, you sheet, you glide, you always nearer.

You stilt the cloud-high friendly kissy-kissy.

Shore tracks you socket, briny, clearer-clearer.

You racing bracking sud-surf, stiff and hissy.

Gulf inside the line, you, fat brown curves.

Your never-far horizon drops apart.

Your sandals crush, your viper smacks and swerves.

Jujube watermelon hips. My cherry heart.

Stabbing in Padre man-o-war—ai, ai.

My foot, my hand, my other foot, my lips.

My knees of sand, my well-sung song, my sky.

Coral, your smooth stick, melting away the tips.

Wailing a J. Lo song to any hearer.

Girl in my selfie eye, girl in my mirror.

Twist and Shout

Poetry is the art of consciousness.

Even in my most desperate days—writing about

        spears of grass like warrior's shields—

I knew that the poem is about the present moment—
already a cold abstraction as soon as thought.

        From this high woods

        to the street I walk,

        daisies in ditches.

        Waiting

        on the season

        in the tall grass,

        I crane up staring

        to see all that blue.

        Starting
        at first stone.

Stumbling through my life,
heading for the moment when existence slugged me in the face—

still preconscious today—
walking down a mountain slope at dusk,
night at the canyon bottom.
What did I not say in those days? I said,

        Water,
        the moon lives.

        Rock,
        the fingers test

        rock with moss

        by fingers smoothed over.
        life like honey
        spreading over the mountain.

—the fingers, I said.
Whose fingers were they?
Fingers and toes.
Dionysian mountain ecstasy.
And I even thought of Hans Castorp skiing in the alpine blizzard.
I was lascerated
by how bad my poetry was, and I knew it.

Happily, that episode closed
with a Yeatsian twilight wail,

and I wrote it with a ladle:

Three men up bourn,

three forewarned.

Last of all,

the final throes

v          Cease wail,

turn far

your gaze –

all green fields.

Before the fire

tell us your will.

Now rise in flame

holding sword.

Release all pains

from the deepest reach,

those depths,

burning flowers.

Face yellow, steel

the face of peace

Steel and the fire

in the most all death.

Nothing particularly edifying there.
But never neglecting my auto-erotic life—
that was time well-spent,
and I really did read a lot about ancient Greek religion,
and the writing was good practice.
And now there’s nothing about those times I regret.

The poetry 
works it on out.

Hymn to Aphrodite, Sappho

Many-throned, ever-living Aphrodite,

meddlesome child of God, I beg you,

please don’t crush me with your yellow taxi!

 Vengeful one, spare me!

Be with me now if at any time

my singing wafted to your ears from far,

and you listened, leaving your father’s shining

  heavens to join me –

driving your bird-car, golden sparrows
drawing you over the dark earth,

dense wings whirring from the sky down
  through middle air...

And suddenly you appeared, O blessed one, a smile
playing over your lips, asking,

“Sappho, what’s the matter?
  "Why are you crying?”

And what in my crazy heart did I most
want to happen? – "Sappho, dearest,” you said,

“on whom shall I use my powers of persuasion?

  “Who, Sappho, hurts you?

“If she runs away now, she’ll soon run after you.

"If she once scorned your gifts, she’ll use extortion.

"She doesn’t want to love you, but she will.

  "She can't refuse."

So, Goddess, please return and wipe away

my worry. What my heart craves, make it
happen! – Do it! – You, my

  invincible conniver.

Lust for Life

Amazing, 
when I got up this morning my long, unbrushed 
white hair looked fine. 
Mr Natural.
Haven’t emitted for two days either,
so I’m inclined to remain disrobed
like Arjuna in the room of courtesans,
not having yet;
but I have been posting some challenging poems –
particularly yesterday’s, the one about me as a naked roof lizard.
Why would you tell people these things about yourself?
I’d rather be entertained by a naked poet on the roof than be one. 
But for me, 
the self-liking that makes my limbs tingle and pricks me to perform 
is the core of all poetry.
Best comment was Jim Griffin’s:
Be proud of your body, man.
Iggy Pop has to skip to walk.
Half a song, the shirt was off
and he was ghost-fucking a security guard.

Something in the Way She Moves. April 21, 2016

     Why should I fill
     earth's gray frame
     with my lonesome, radiant self? Vladimir Mayakovsky        

     The sex aliens are all dying, Ingrid Meyer Case

Sun on my side.
Back porch in my cut-offs.
Cat crying and fussing, upset because
he sees me out here through the screen door –
still crying after minutes –
I’d better go look after him.

Worried about
the gig this evening, but
no need. Can let the performance play me.
Listen and pay attention. Enjoy.
It’s chilly out here when the
breeze kicks up. Cardinal in my

neighbor’s giant
boxwood tree. There’s a big
hole eight feet up the trunk. It rang heart wood
when someone palpated it with a
sledge hammer last summer, but
it would crush my house if it fell.

Whatever it
may be. Last August, I
painted the wood-slat siding above my
back porch – always in cutoffs, barefoot,
shirtless. It sure was fun to
be the naked painter! – though now

I’m crossing the
too-much-information
line. I managed to clean out the gutters
too, crawling along the edge of the
roof like a lizard, reaching
and scooping out muck with one hand –

my soul asking
how to articulate
this ardor, this insolent self-liking
shining out strong in the face of sure
extinction, this truffle scent,
this zest, this spur, this whiff of rot.

Bernart de Ventadorn, Lo tems vai e ven e vire

Time turns and comes and goes
through days, through months, through years,
and, sadly, the only thing I know is
I have a single hunger
that lasts on and on and never changes
for the one I love and always will,
though I get no satisfaction.

They are as good as dead

who no longer feel love in their hearts,
lacking all charm and only annoying others.
May God not hate me so much as to let
me live one year, one month, one single day
with the boredom
of having no taste for love.

Ventadorn is a twelfth-century Provencal troubadour poet who wrote in the Occitan language. My translation is partly based on Google's attempt to translate the poem from Catalan. (:

Reading My Own Poems

My
words
glow

and when
I say My
I mean

my bones
in my
own eyes

alone in
my

mirror pool.

Will someone

come swimming
with me?

Senryu: Panhandler by Cretin Ave. Freeway Entrance

*
my hat decal
frog?
no horny toad

*
we’re all horny
toads smiley
goat teeth

*
or else
civilization
would end

*
life
I said
touching knuckles

More Senryu (My Shoes)

  *

Path muddy

more rain
than I thought

  *

Spongy orthodics
two-hundred-dollar
Eccos

  *

Mud-caked
soles heels
slippery walking stick

  *

Bending clutching
tree roots leaning
uphill

  *
Big mud monster
ravine
can’t suck me in

  *
Complaints
I might have in life
never about my shoes

James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges

In a day of humanity are all the days
of time, from that inconceivable
first day to which a terrible God
affixed all days and agonies,
to that other when the ubiquitous river
of earthly time becomes an eternal
sea and writes itself in the present,
the future, yesterday, and - for me - today.
Between the dawn and dark lives
universal history, out of night spreading
before my feet the wandering roads.
Carthage annihilated, Hell and Glory.
Give me, God, the joy and courage
to scale the summit of this day.
 

Looking Toward Namancos

    A burlesque of the first 14 lines of Milton’s Lycidas

Racing down, noisome smellers, ranking tunes

involving Aguilar, she never would.

I have the fair muchacha in my scope,

one two three, skip a rope,

jangling her starry chachalaca bling.

Elephant mane with scissored muffin wing

KYs me with a shmart shmeer ‘neath the hood.

For foamy bilge will seep that ever could,

coy phallarope and feckless bagatelle,

backgammon hound with pistol bright, eftsoons.

Dagnabbitall, we’re winners, are we not?

We know, we grow, and afterwards we gloat.

A flop, a scrannel pie, a flower from hell!

No one to ball, no one to fuck the goat. 

Bee-ber

Pricked by the cedar back porch warmth,
April 17th morning.
Black in the garage window, 
gleam of my red corolla.
A chickadee 
I could hear in bed earlier, but I don’t hear it now.
Car tires on asphalt
two hundred yards away on Summit.
My wife Robin
knows all the neighborhood birds by their songs.
I’m hearing a monotonous chip chip to my right,
to my left a descending pee-you, whit-whit-whit,
followed by a rapid chirp like a frog in a pond.
Robin said she could hear a cardinal, 
and maybe that’s what I’m hearing to my left:
What a show-off!
But she couldn’t hear the chickadee I was hearing 
as we lay together in bed this morning. 
Robin’s off birding right now with friends.
I wonder if she’ll be able to identify the bird to my left
from my deaf-and-dumb description when she gets home.

There’s the chickadee:
Bee-ber.

For a Version of the I Ching, Jorge Luis Borges

The future is as irrevocable 
as the past is rigid. Nothing is not
silent writing 
of the eternally indescribable,
whose book is time. Who departs 
your house has already returned. Our life
is a future and a beaten track. 
Nothing says goodbye. Nothing abandons us. 
Do not give up. The cage is dark,
the wires incessant iron,
but in some bend of your enclosure
there may be a carelessness, a slip—
the road as fatal as an arrow, 
but in the cracks God waits in ambush.

Donna me prega, Guido Cavalcanti

The poem is five sonnets, plus a 4-line concluding tag. In this version, I'm trying to avoid gendered language – Love isn't he/him, but they/them – and also the mystical use of the word white – In the Pisan Cantos, Pound came up with a great alternative – candor.

     1
Because a woman asks me, I speak
of an accident, fierce
and haughty, which is called love.
Let the haters hate.
I call those who know,
I hold my breath and cast my heart low.
To bring the base-hearted to
understanding, I have no way
but to say where love lives, by what created,
what their quality and force,
their essence, each movement
of their delight, what it means to love,
all that can be shown to gazing.

     2
They dwell in the fields of memory, 
veined and demure,
under Mars’s protection,
formed of a spume of light. 
Clothed in soul, will from the heart,
they come to sense and name among
those visible forms which take on
and embrace all possible  
intellect.  Yet they have no
weight, since they are not qualities
falling, but shine out of themselves.
Nothing can scatter their picture,
perpetual impression, 
taking delight in awareness alone.

     3
There is no virtue that does not spring from
their presence, self-created through feeling.
Not rational, I say, 
beyond balance, proclaiming 
that will itself, not reason, is valid – 
though poor in discernment
so that vice is their friend, 
and death often follows.
To oppose their strength 
goes against what brings succor –
not opposed to perfection by nature,
but twisted awry by fate.
No one alive can say they aren’t in charge.
They have the power, though we forget.

     4
They come to being when the heart 
is pricked so full 
that nature herself cannot rest,
but moves, changes color, weeps,
her features contorted as if from fear;
yet you’ll notice
they’re found most often with people of worth
whom they move to sighs
aroused by blazes of the fire they send –
not moving but drawing 
to stillness, not turning 
about to behold their joy,
imagining already beyond proving,
not minded to know the details.

     5
Like from like, complexion matching
the delight of the eye, not some hidden star.
Coming as friends, 
beauty their dart, because desire follows 
fearlessly the breath of liking
even to the arrow point. 
Nor to be known by sight, comprised 
of so much candor falling on everything,
touched deeply, yet seeing nothing
but the aim proceeding 
from spectrum to single beam.
Seated in half-dark, winnowing light.
remote from all falsity – I say,
the one who knows them wins the prize.

___________

Song, you certainly turned out well –
seeking the praise
of people of understanding;
others were never addressed.

Four Senryu

            *

below the river road
looking for a place
to smoke

            *

Mississippi 45° slope
damp leaf muck
fallen limb for a walking stick

            *

brown cinder-block wall above a culvert
blue graffitti tag
R A R E

            *

path around above
other side of Shadow Falls
WWI obelisk

Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, First Series, Number 15

Hail the spirit that wants to join us together;

because we live truly in the virtual.

And the clock hands creep in tiny paces

beside our actual day.

Without knowing our true places,

we behave as we are related to things.

The antennas feel the antennas
and the empty distances echo . . .

Pure impression. O music of the powers!

Through easy commerce is not

each trouble diverted from you?

Even the grower’s care and cultivation,
as the seed transmutes itself in summer,

isn’t what matters. The earth bestows.

Eugene, Norman, and Robert

Mike Hazard just posted “In Memory of Senator Eugene McCarthy”
on the League of Minnesota Poets page,
written by Louise Klas, in whose home McCarthy stayed many times over the years:
“Nicknamed Lulu, Louise celebrates the centennial of the late politician and poet
with a lulu of a poem which she read after she said, “I’m not a poet.”
A lovely, apt tribute to a man I never met.
McCarthy was a year younger than my dad, whose centennial was last year, 2015.
Impossible for me not to think of Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night,
one of whose main characters is Robert Lowell, who worked for McCarthy,
and who in Mailer's novel compliments Mailer as “our greatest journalist”—
“No, our greatest writer,” Mailer counters.
Mailer disgraces himself by bringing a tumblerful of bourbon along to his speech,
having to go on late and annoyed because it took him half an hour wandering around the Ambassador Theater
to find the bathroom. That was the night before he took part in the 1967 March on the Pentagon.
At least, he got to see Ed Sanders’s and Tuli Kupferberg’s performance there in The Fugs,
before he had to get himself arrested quick so he’d be processed in time
to go to a party in New Jersey (he didn’t make it). I wish
I could determine that Eugene McCarthy spoke at the 1967 March on the Pentagon,
or that he’s mentioned in Armies of the Night, but so far I have not,
and the tenuous Robert Lowell connection is all I’ve got.
McCarthy loomed up for me in 1968.
There was a Time article about his poetry, which didn’t seem very good to me.
I never thought he had a chance of becoming the Democratic nominee—
a cold presence among all those cracked heads in Chicago,
and then Martin and then Bobby shot.
The disillusionment of 1968 rocks me when I think of it.
I never really forgave McCarthy for just sputtering out,
a big narcissistic windbag who didn’t really care (it seemed to me,
though, as I said, I didn’t know him, to be fair)—
as we all had to make way for Nixon.
And my father died a sad man, all the euphoria of his youth dried up,
his ambition to be a recognized writer.
It’s Lowell who should get the last word, though.
Before he died in 1977 in the back of a cab in New York City,
Lowell wrote that, somehow, after all his prodigious writing and rewriting,
nothing seemed to stick, nothing remained
to really hold onto.
“All’s misalliance,” he famously said in Epilogue, “but why not say what happened?”
Still, I think
the line that comes later about Vermeer’s
“girl solid with longing”
is awful.

Be Kind to Yourself

Almost home from a very long walk.
had to cross Summit Parkway, with the traffic light.
Saw a little girl whimpering,
lagging just behind her father,
who looked angry—I thought,
only my presence kept him from grabbing
her roughly and dragging her across
the median bawling. I stayed
back as they crossed in front
of the stopped east-headed traffic,
and then the west, relieved
when the little girl ran and threw her arms
around the waist of a chubby woman who’d just walked up.
“Thank god she has her mommy now!”
I thought as the man approached,
wanting to say to him
(as if I rightly comprehended the situation):
“Be kind to yourself, sir, so that you can be kind
to your precious daughter!”

Ode to a Common Person, Pablo Neruda

I'm going to tell you in secret

who I am,

so, in a loud voice,

tell me who you are

(I want to know who you are)

how much you make, in what workshop you work,

what mine,

what pharmacy,

I have a terrible obligation

to know,

know all:

day and night to know your name,

that's my duty,

to know a life

is not enough,

nor to know
all lives.

it is necessary,

you see,

necessary to unravel,

to touch bottom,

and as in a cloth

the threads hide

in the color, the weft

of the weave,

I erase the colors

and search to find

the deep fabric,

in that way also I find

the unity of humanity,

and in the bread I search
beyond the shape,

I love the bread,

I bite it,

and then

I see the wheat,

the early wheat fields,

the green forms

of the spring,

the roots, the water,

in this way,

beyond the bread,

I see the earth,

the unity of the land,

water,

human beings,

and so I stop at nothing,

looking for you

in everything,

walking, swimming, sailing
until I find you,
and then I wonder

what your name is,

your street and number,

so that you may
receive my letters,

so I tell you

who I am and how much I make,

where I live,

and who my father was,
you see how common I am,

how common you are,

we don’t try to do

anything complicated,

I work with you,

you live and come and go

from one neighborhood or another,

it is very simple,

you are life,

you are as transparent

as water,

and so am I,

my duty is just

to be transparent,

every day

I comb,

every day I groom myself,

thinking as you think,
and I walk

as you walk,

eat as you eat,

take into my arms

my lover

as you hold your own,

and then

when this

is all proved out,

when we are the same,

I write,

write with your life

and with mine,

with your love and mine,

with all your pain,

and then

we are already different,

because, my hand

on your shoulder,

like old friends,

I say in your ear:
don’t worry,

now comes the day,

come, come with me,

come with all

those who seem
the most common.
Come, don't worry,

come with me,

because although

you don't know it,

I know this thing for sure:

I know where we go,

and this is the word:
don't worry,

because we will win,

we will win,

the most common,

we will win,

even if you don't believe it,

we will win.

Oda al Hombre Sencillo

Voy a contarte en secreto
quién soy yo,
así, en voz alta,
me dirás quién eres,
quiero saber quién eres,
cuánto ganas,
en qué taller trabajas,
en qué mina,
en qué farmacia,
tengo una obligación terrible
y es saberlo,
saberlo todo,
día y noche saber
cómo te llamas,
ése es mi oficio,
conocer una vida
no es bastante
ni conocer todas las vidas
es necesario,
verás,
hay que desentrañar,
rascar a fondo
y como en una tela
las líneas ocultaron,
con el color, la trama
del tejido,
yo borro los colores
y busco hasta encontrar
el tejido profundo,
así también encuentro
la unidad de los hombres,
y en el pan
busco
más allá de la forma:
me gusta el pan, lo muerdo,
y entonces
veo el trigo,
los trigales tempranos,
la verde forma de la primavera
las raíces, el agua,
por eso
más allá del pan,
veo la tierra,
la unidad de la tierra,
el agua,
el hombre,
y así todo lo pruebo
buscándote
en todo,
ando, nado, navego
hasta encontrarte,
y entonces te pregunto
cómo te llamas,
calle y número,
para que tú recibas
mis cartas,
para que yo te diga
quién soy y cuánto gano,
dónde vivo,
y cómo era mi padre.
Ves tú qué simple soy,
qué simple eres,
no se trata
de nada complicado,
yo trabajo contigo,
tú vives, vas y vienes
de un lado a otro,
es muy sencillo:
eres la vida,
eres tan transparente
como el agua,
y así soy yo,
mi obligación es ésa:
ser transparente,
cada día
me educo,
cada día me peino
pensando como piensas,
y ando
como tú andas,
como, como tú comes,
tengo en mis brazos a mi amor
como a tu novia tú,
y entonces
cuando esto está probado,
cuando somos iguales
escribo,
escribo con tu vida y con la mía,
con tu amor y los míos,
con todos tus dolores
y entonces
ya somos diferentes
porque, mi mano en tu hombro,
como viejos amigos
te digo en las orejas;
no sufras,
ya llega el día,
ven,
ven conmigo,
ven
con todos
los que a ti se parecen,
los más sencillos,
ven,
no sufras,
ven conmigo,
porque aunque no lo sepas,
eso yo sí lo sé:
yo sé hacia dónde vamos,
y es ésta la palabra:
no sufras
porque ganaremos,
ganaremos nosotros,
los más sencillos,
ganaremos,
aunque tú no lo creas,
ganaremos.

Song of the Sexual Abuse Victim

Big cheese director, he right
up and pointing, he make
naked boy de-
liberately, well it's
specially forgivable, he
requested me to 
take the size of his
big screwdriver with a
shiny ruler made of
Swedish pine, sticks his
Baptist thumb in a
groove of mine. 
                                    But you
can't touch me.
Man, you can’t touch me.
Cause if you get too close, I’m
gone like a cool
breeze.
                                    Had some
tough times with my
bitter mother, she so
sad-jaded, she helped
set the table, where it’s
butt to broad, and he
played on my sitar, and he
made me corrupt my little
trying smile, Johnny,
made me take my
own pants down for the
steel-tipped arrow, Father,
my one and only, where his 
saved snow-white in-
demnity bit me. 
                                    But you
cant touch me.
Man, you can’t touch me,
Cause if you get too close, I’m
gone like a cool
breeze.

                                    Well I
got my scourge, got it
through a screwer, got my
long night thrashing, till he
gave me distance, then he
sighed when he saw my poor 
heart a-cryin', made him 
feel much better, made him
feel less guilty than he 
did before with my
pants pulled down a-
round my ankles for the
blow to strike that
tiny magician, Johnny,
in the schoolyard, who 
looked me up and who
looked me down with those
clear blue eyes that
charmed me white. 
                                    But you
can’t touch me.
Man, you can’t touch me.
Cause if you get too close, I’m
gone like a coooooool
breeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeze.