i.
How wtf weird, this weirdass world
Of once again touch again
Random things, barely glanced surfaces
And subtle countertops, the odd park post
That holds doggie shit bags.
We did not want to touch it
For so long, that our fingers became accustomed
To only the uttermost familiar: whatever lurked,
Dustmite-gathering, in the bubblish confines
Of home, where no mightbelethal Virus
Could plant His predatory microbes,
And lay waste to formerly robust humans
With eager joy, plus a statistical advantage.
The Devil that incites such glee
is the Pandemic inside you and me:
adherence to what we can never see
becomes the daily norm and essential form.
Our dwindled domiciles: perpetual dorm,
leave at your own risk, to breathe
the impossible seethe, each stranger respiration
causing undue duress
and sheer, titanic stress.
ii.
these december days wake cold,
and grow constantly shorter.
I suggest:
none of us have any rest,
this whole wizened world
is so extensively out of order:
blistered refugee denied at most border,
suppression of witness from a vigilant reporter.
When, exactly, we gonna beheading towarder?
iii.
“wut yah wan?”
handcuffed by world-woe,
a drooping dread-thicket
that collapses upon shoulder plains.
“howz ‘bout a dollar?”
strait-jacketed by planet-pain,
a withered gray nest
that pokes across a scalpy mesa.
near-nocturne, on a bussy boulevard,
where the whirring wheeze of rushed hour
farts out carbon and shants all the birds away.
unsteady pedestrians amble aimlessly,
shadows emerge suddenly,
hoping for reluctant generosity
from the hapless handouts
of hollowing hearts.
iv.
affecting poetry is mostly
pearls of perspiration
plus underthought inspiration.
nimble neurons and sage synapses sweat nobly,
shedding out strength of feeling
plus the depth of an idea finessed,
blots of man-made moisture to blinker
my endless rhyme pages,
dabbles of drip that rorschach-dot
my latest chapbook.
perhaps, the mind just perspires in torrential attire,
while the hand and the pen try to dampen the fire,
the brain akin to a spongy, spherical sauna,
raising the temperature of composition-
and then begging for the polar plunge
that inscribes such an inky infinity, pledges
such a papered perpetuity, touches
such a textual timelessness.
v.
war-words don’t arrive in big-heart emojis,
or come sprinkled in tweets of gentlest snowfall.
sparked syllables tend to bombard bigoted bluster
and bayonet beastly braggadocio.
staccatoed stanzas, brief bursts
of gunfire verse, tossed grenades
of reckless metaphor and audacious simile,
making enemy heads peek out from trenches,
as their flesh becomes periscope, and, still,
such shelling does not mean they will surrender.
words should always be wielded weapons,
there is no true poetry of non-violence
and it’s always okay to punch a nazi
-with both fists, and keyboards.
vi.
they told me that
it would all be here, all of it,
they even called it a retreat.
put yer feetup, and slink yer legslong,
eyes doomsday prepped
to be inspired
by the lie
of a 60 mile view.
this forgotten yurt, with its feeble patio, as vulnerable
in the blender churn of alpine wind
as a schooner in the good eye of a hurricane,
yet still,
the devil cannot find me work.
no mental perspiration results from this ocular inspiration,
yet another turboed breeze unmoors my deck chair,
shakes the generic red pen from a trembling palm,
while the hope of either rescue or composition
fades like the furthest star on the twilit horizon.
they told me it would all be here, they even
called it a retreat. and if writing real poetry
makes me a combatant, then this retreat
is akin to surrender, and my naked page
a white flag, and the possibility of a treaty
that would leave foreign troops
to neo-colonize my mind
dangles like the chocolate bars
they like to hand out first.
