poete maudit

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

i do not smoke

in the house, no,

i accommodate my wife’s wishes

by smoking in

the filthy garage

but looking around

weed in hand

i see immeasurable

clutter, the reader

may enumerate

the reader’s own

affluent extravagance

everywhere i look

and then i recall

robin’s beloved

blue house

observations

realizing her craft

equals, maybe excels,

that of her

noteworthy friends

living and gone

time to submit

Saturday, July 28, 2018

On A Hunger: At Bottaio

reading slowly, precisely, these

exquisite hyperreal sentences, images

like Dalí’s ink drawings found in

that remote Catalan village

or dream paintings, dissolving

time, or an enlarged nightmare,

story, all process and

excellence of materials, stories

about materials themselves

a joke on the expertise

as it were, yet moving

into a thing indescribable

and then I wake up

Sunday, July 22, 2018

police story: a fragment

(for clancy sigal)

my ex-cop brother screws me over, so i go to his saloon, at foster and oakley, to have it out - we exchange words - i decide to punch him in the head, and start to walk around the bar to do so - his goons (regular customers) grab me and spread-eagle me on the pool table

should we fuck him up, danny?

nah, just throw him out

they throw me into the yard behind the joint, a weed patch filled with bricks, broken glass, and dog shit - i pick up a brick and walk around, planning to break his storefront window - i change my mind

instead i stop in the joint across the street and within 30 seconds i'm slugging it out with the asshole owner and land out on foster ave

i head home, foster ave bus to the L train - i wake up at the end on the line, at howard st, and start insulting two chicago cops, there on anti-mugging duty - i am taken into custody and deposited in the drunk tank at the summerdale station, down the street from the saloons - i use my phone call to contact my asshole saloon-keeper brother, home asleep after closing

he arrives in a cab, which waits, dukes the watch sergeant (whom he knows, or knows how to talk to), and i'm released into the night (no arrest record, no bail, nuttin') - big brother sends me home in the cab after he gets dropped off

this is going on your tab, is all he says

Sunday, April 8, 2018

WHAT'S HER NAME?

the barista sports some
extravagant get-ups
but best is her
black chunky boots, torn
fishnets with black
micro-mini skirt, usually
under a flowy large sweater
leaving much to the drinker's
imagination--yes!
a public service!

SMALL PLEASURES

a night cool, crisp

cloudless

tomorrow a full moon but

tonight my beloved

egg shaped

moon returns, severe

dazzling and white-silver

it obscures the half-dozen

brightish points

cosmologists call

stars, cosmology

my weakest suit

no stargazing here

in a suburb of the great

american city, no

only swirls

of smoke from my

unfiltered american cigaret

if i relax my gaze

the antique streetlamp

at the foot of my driveway

comes out of focus

and light swirls

as in a later van gogh

small pleasures

they . . . sustain

Monday, July 24, 2017

SUMMER 2017

cicadas chorus in waves, soft,

then loud then louder still

cho-weet, cho-weet, CHO-WEET

then soft, then softer still then

quiet until the next round

the neighbors' elegant detritus

fills the parkway since the deluge

the YOOGE inundation, their new digs

drowned by rain penetration in the

summer of Trump, sideshow

for the yahoos and greed mongers

oh, yes, we deserve his worst

as the soft yellow-green

fireflies, the females, settle

in the grass awaiting copulation

after which they devour the mate

or so i read, incorrectly i hope,

nature red in tooth and claw

as alfred the lord tennyson had it

when his young friend died young

death is in the air one way

and another - my wife's demented

mother delusionally says her dead

husband is alive but missing

then she reverses herself and says

it's all made up, she was just fooling

and apologizes deeply until 2 minutes

later when she says it all again, then

again, then again, almost cicada-like:

oh, yeah, my beloved clancy is dead

Thursday, July 13, 2017

THIRTY-SEVEN

even true love

encounters bumps

here and there

broken promises

pet peeves

disappointments

imperfections

unmet demands

even so, even so

true love persists

strengthens

mysteriously

some promises

are kept, some loving

and then the

grand surprises