I Am Not In Love

I am not in love
with her
not in love with her
freckles, or her dimpled smile
or her rusty red hair,
her lisp for the gospel or
love for the harmonica.
I am not in love
with her;
I am a stranger passing through.

I am a stranger passing through
various states of emotion
and I've been them all before
I've been them all.
The truck stops are all familiar
and the bathrooms bear my graffiti.
I am buying .60 cent candy from machines
in vending sheds I've been to before.

I've been too optimistic
before, throwing hooks lightly and expecting
fish bites, tugs on the line, bobbers down
under the surface and then up, out,
into my lap! I've expected gold
glistening fish in breathless dawn
and gotten only flies, sunburn, and lazy beer cans all upright.
This time, I bait my line.

No, actually, this time I do not
bait my line. I do not fish. I stand
asking questions with an open hand
feet firmly standing on solid sand,
sinking quickly to knee-deep prayer
and a smile which reassures like summer wind.

Like summer wind, I am driving
home again, open air and open eyes.
dashboard skipped, sowing season
to match her quote, (yeah). I am not
in love with her, but this midnight peace
will suffice for now,
to speed towards...

what?

Strong Start, Short Finish

Dollar store poets fill the streets
with their dime bag prophesies
and post card revelations, seeping
into public water supply systems
via trechery, with intent to assault
good sense and common-minded friends
who hold loosely to their penny-change
ideas in the alleyway of truth.

We dispose of accents, bridle our
feather-brained hearts with
consumption-based policies
and beg for small mercies:
the avoidance of a hollocaust,
lower mortgage rates this year.

Carnival rides, like sedatives, cost money,
and the cash register gladly takes it
like the ferryman takes your dimes.
Pennies for the eyes! Pennies for the eyes!
This ride is called Pennies for the Eyes.

I haluscenate marmalaid fairytales and
hand-weeved basket dreams our of
souvenier threaded dreams in two-star
CHEAP hotels.

Bedsheets make breakfast table clothes
in our new home.

Maybe after today I'll finally find my way home.

Fragment, Unfinished, In Process

In the Liberty Valance afternoon
I shot myself
a glace
and painted Masserati dreams
with a stick shift and gloves for hands.

Separate from the sun but covalent
I wealth myself with gasoline and hopelessness
two pennies for the daily dreams
speaking tunes of drama-ship songs
and catch-dog foreheads.

Unbalanced
Brocade
Advanced
Unanimously
and I saw them all clearly.

White walls, Asylum by any other name
would be as corporate, and headquartered,
headmastered by a man named Senior Management
and look... can I really survive without these
400,000.00 copperheads?

//FRAGMENT.

I will be a walking talking poet

- we're all afraid, and everybody knows it

but we don't have to be afraid anymore

-mewithoutYou, Torches Together

We needs poems like beatdowns, like
beatnik streets: Dylan street,
and Dean street,
and even Kerouac street, too.
I am afraid.

On Dylan street
the smell of tuna-fish wafts past the hobos playing checkers
into the jellyfish corporate hazy afternoons of dawn.
I parade vehemently sideways, left of the bullshit, right of the
simultaneous corporate factories,
controlled in a Frankensteinian way,
headed towards nowhere.

In stacks of brick and concrete,
my name shines rapier sharp and
diamond quick through the hearts
of corporate theives waving moneylikesticks
aimlessly oblivious of the things they hit,
hiring up another man just to see him quit,
waiting
for the four-o-clock train and a heavy lunch.

I will be a walking, talking poet, and
I will see my verse in the way people stare
Open-eyed, closed mouthed, head's turned
everywhere I go, blinkers in the alley and afternoon breakfasts
in the afternoons.

I bite mayonnaise teeth into liquorish gums
waiting for my nine-to-five princess to come.
A man in a suit picks delicatessen trash bags
from the sick-mouthed end of a golden trash compactor.
Behind a Hilton a goldfished guest stays,
next to an oppressed freeway,
You are afraid.

We spread our deceit ever-forest green
and our lies as red as blood cells on the floor.
I put on sunglasses for dawn, and stretch
playlisted hands into dead-mouth pockets.
Can you speak, teeth? Breathe deep of this
only-free-once air.

In the city streets trees bloom expectantly,
Stretching towards their brothers in the country
But the leaves fall and die, just past second street
and we are left in the center with a question,
"Why?"

Find meaning like quarters and dimes in the sidewalk grates,
put them together and what do you have? Not enough.

I will be a walking talking poet.

I bite, sympathetically, into my orchestra
toned McSymphony of sandwiches, and check
my reputation in the mirror next to last days lunch.

We need poems like orange juice poured

into wounds and acid rain on the roofs
of houses owned by fair weather friends.
We need poems like the blood of demons
poured onto sacrificial alters for the daily news,
photographed and video-taped victoriously,
disseminated via brochure, and cable anchor,
and gossip over the back fence, too.
We are afraid.

As usual

In my desire for some sort of idealistic perfection, I deleted my first post. Blah.