Summertime Blues

Whee haw! The new Blogger editor will allow the typographic stunts in my poems! Below are some more poems from the summer we just closed out.

19.

your trumpet loop refuses to fade

an annoying bit of immortality

twisting lopsided

into the dark beyond the window -

one hears of tropical violence

violence in shimmering white concrete jungles

or on the banks of brackish creeks

  run low and dry

machetes hacking limbs

nines & AKs hosing down old storefronts

shotguns and shovels

loamy soil back in the pines -

the trumpet clicks on in the dark

the projector's broken

the film's skipping it's sprockets

          - but the present will not be

                                     rewritten

by a broken trumpet

and misaligned shards of memory

2.

"old rust" breathes cold with

   a shudder and a roar

mariachi & electrical pop

it's a rockabilly night

a knife blade

shakin' down

horns & yodels at cross purpose

          define the dark

                    other side of streaked glass

           air conditioned night,

        mare -

sure, it's a retreat

sometimes you gotta cocoon

         without expecting to turn

you live

to another brown day

          as

a blade rattles against the neck

steel drift fade out vaporizes

18.

this summer's been tuned to E

but played slow, broken, & incomplete

verses can't latch onto choruses

choruses drift off into nothing

   split through with

   metallic tastes and cramped styles

broken, sprung

wrong in ways definite & imprecise both

just wrong -

a dream of gray-green fever

which burns, leaden,

but doesn't consume

& all the air conditioners

rusty and toiling

won't take the edge off this

broken tango

this three part invention in E

which never lives, never blooms into its nature

but will not quit

14.

it's good to get out of the heat

cold windy sun

clouds sprint by the opposite bank

as clear, clearer than day

giants walk the earth

clouds the beards of

         weather systems

things larger than

   specks human

   politics forgotten

a weather system wipes you out

brushes you off the globe

you may care, like the spider crushed cares

hunker down, sun's down now

water foam waves

branches spearing leaves white against the wind

tucked down just out of the wind

close, but safe

9.

hello, then!

the grass grows thinner, browns out

sandy, sandy pine

gone white

clarity in the air

who knows

what runs in the clear pines

"Take to the mountains," he said,

"if the government is a problem.

Make them come get you

& then shoot down on them

from high rocks."

          not the same, perhaps

but mixed oak, maple, birch

pine

provide cover

white nation, white nation

curtain drawn, it's here

it's down the street

"no one gets my gun"

5.

hey peacekeeper!

what'cha packin'?

           Ford F-250!

           big-ass knobby tires!

           Armour-alled!

keeping America

           safe

for bumper stickers and petulance

           haters

behind every bush these days

"it's not you, it's

          the bosses"

but at what point

is imperialism? at what point

blood sacrifice

to a V-8

and the right to

live life unexamined

semper fi,

blade of capital -

when do you take the blame?