Bait Sein Dance

Virtual waves break in the background muffling out humanity's insomnia

Cry yourself to sleep,  brackish tears drifting into a riptide

All I have are scribbles with broken lines, empty ink fountains of jerk bait lost at sea

Bait-sein dance, you and I holding taut in our rental pond

This entangled net between us

A cement boat block on a dock with no accessible deck

No view of the horizon, nor hope of  any sky

Might as well be in a nuclear submarine in a contentious strait

With 10,000 missiles pointed at me

Tied inside my Neoprene straight jacket, restrained

As I'm hunted daily by a pirate, the apartment terrorist

The adolescent monster I myself created

Her flag is black and her heart is broken 

I float out token offerings, chumming candle apologies on the water, a maternal puja

But the tide returns their ripped, rejected, saturated shreds as small as phytoplankton

I gather their bits spying my shattered reflection on the polluted sea surface

Shame covers the oceanic expanse like an oil spill down a once pristine coast

Forgiveness is like a fisherman throwing his hooks into the abyss 

Toiling for any return

An imperfect catch, explosive mismatch

Face to face with the Leviathan

Find me in the inlet and come aboard

Mend the holes in the broken net, ensure no future bycatch

Embrace The Recovery

 Embrace the recovery

Your weakness, fragility

Like an old man after surviving pneumonia

Drowning in phlegmatic denial, an unspoken mucous grief

Coughing up bits of the neighborhood grave

In a collective catatonic feeling of dread

Students memorialize their beloved mentor

Orphaned children lay awake in their beds

Summer sums long surged past the Spanish Flu

Breaking records and folk still don't know what to do

A con man in a caravan peddling out quack therapies

Nurses and doctors exhausted from fools self practicing animal medicine

Burden cracked systems, overflowing tent morgues farming passed souls

I pray you don't join them

We've survived up 'til now

Empowered with first world second chances

Every day contains a Spring and Fall

Somewhere Along the Rivulet

Somewhere along the rivulet, I stopped trusting the ebb and flow
Trapped ego blood circulating conspiracies inseparable
From my body other than vehicle or vice
More a dinghy or raft, than a yacht or ark
I embark, I launch an undistinguished pedestrian

Lost and stuck in the marsh of a grey estuary we hear a whistle
Secret whispers of oral traditions, first river civilizations
The fiery sky chariot vessels of Hindu and Hebrew lore
Like a waterfowl alone in the reeds, a lost rune on the path
Pictograph scripts written from right to left on papyrus scrolls float past
The first sound expressed, a ripple on the wadi, funeral epitaph

My mind is the train in the distance, thoughts disappearing in mountain tunnels
Swallowed in ebony brushstrokes of granite cathedrals
Mine those precious metals hidden in the cauldron bowels
Wailing like a glittering newborn, a flickering candle in the dark
In the crumbling castle fortress commanding the view above the tributary

Girded loins on dusty tapestries hang besides gilded family crests, cobwebs, dusty shields 

Downstream reveal the lush valley opportunity, reduce me
To a greater majesty, unearth the essence of this vestal bucket
Evaporate like wavy heat in the horizon, where sky and earth meet
I see a chest with a lock
Find the key in the secret chamber of mystic union
Reduced to tears I smelt into the stream

Spring Monsoon

We're number one!
Flag-waving champions blown to shreds in the March winds
Blowing players off the board game, our turn has come
Up to bat, bases full, pandemic epicenter, invoking useless authoritarian powers
Trading one loss for the other
They make us think in the language of war
Invisible enemy growing stronger in the unknown, untestable
Like a Pacific typhoon grown preeminent
Our lungs are the target, organ of grief and of metal
Collective imbalances, expressed in microbic mushroom spores of sadness blowing
Slowing down together, a global chrysalis of shared personal introspection
On what is essential after all
Transforming this communal lamentation into something more

Take the dog for one last walk
While dark clouds collect on the neighborhood periphery
A known presence, Biblical plague,
With what do you paint the frame of your door?
Lock the shutters its starting to pour
Contaminated tears from the Atlantic
Tsunami rolling  quickly from the East
NYC, Detroit, all along the Mississippi
Coming from the Western California cities
Two tides from both sides run for the Rockies like a refugee
We are all asylum seekers now

Governors in their mansions race for time and hoard supplies
From each other like the shoppers in the stores
While the Big Apple rots by the sea abandoned
We ride out the hurricane with windows shattering, leaking
Flooded floors, whistling sirens in the cracks
Huddle together on the sofa trying to sleep
Find a little peace in the turbulent night

Wake up to discern
The typhoon hatched into a Spring monsoon

The Coronavirus Blues

The world's shutting down imploding extremes of
Want and gratitude, necessities, and greed exacerbating inequalities you're still in denial to
A revolutionary's wet dream of possibilities, the capitalist politicians the first to gain
As people sneeze openly, don't wash their hands, don't believe the TV when it disagrees with how they're feeling

Global typhoon germ warfare spreading like a sigh, last goodbye, a mist of fear
The collective atmosphere, cloud pockets of death, unknowns, and false news
Dolphins and swans have magically appeared
You made it somehow a battle between faith and science
Adolescent defiance, sucking the geriatric teat,  Dementia tweet of misinformation
Bury your primeval head in the sand of unawareness

God's grace is bigger than your cowardice, but that won't stop the people from dying
It won't stop me from trying
To be a better human being, we have to do our own thing together

Canceled our Spring Break holiday in DC
Cherry blossoms bloom alone at the Tidal Basin quite oblivious to
All those eulogies and white marble totems
Vacant cities, abandoned national treasures behind chained gates, capitol lockdown
People's vernal dreams flying in ghost flights, hollow planes forced to turn around

More people are praying, fingering the rabbit foot, crossing toes
The banker prays to his Bull market deity, while I cry
For nonrefundable travel memories that couldn't be, the fragile line of poverty
Toeing the line, the balance of panic and preparedness
Hoarders still take as they please, pitiful emptiness carried away by anxiety

Colossal mythology, end of the world pathology
A throw of the dice, of numbers, Russian Roulette when the governor just invoked
The Grim Reaper in his state address
And Kenny Rogers just died, passed the night before
His last hand as The Gambler, a reminder of chance

The cosmic dance, daily yoga practice of self-quarantine and community
Isolating for morality, connecting to the righteousness in me
Crossing to the other street when I see my neighbor
A radius of 6-foot bubbles, bouncing like ions charging either way

Taking care of me taking care of you
Coronavirus blues, under azure Rocky Mt skies

Mirage

You're a false rumor of rain, a dream of mist, chimera in the barren dusk
All is rolling millennial dead ocean and you're the mirage in this wasteland.

Each parched grain once the body of living coral, antiquated anemone
Recycled fragments like a snowflake in its perfection
Desiccated to death, incessant scorched wind chiseled skeleton
I look at you never clear-eyed, sick vision stared too long at the sun
Surrounded in sand drifts and you my solitary hallucination

All around are ashes, decomposing dust,
The mummified neighbors and their pets greet us
With their brains and hearts enclosed in porcelain jars
They slave their lives for the construction of communal crypts

I lift my veil under a black moon, black coal lined eyes watch
Stars kiss the dunes in every direction
Waiting for you mirage in the desert, I flourish
Like Narcissus in love with his own watery image
I'm just a brambled Echo calling you across the badlands
Hear my faint psalm in the sand storm

I hum fragrant floret melodies of bubbling brooks of shared date and honey cakes
Mineral waters curing the weariness out of the vagabond

Remove your shroud quench your lifetime thirst
Inside me are lush rainforests temperate and forgiving
I'm a desert flower in bloom among the thorns
Speckled stone circles in holy groves kept secret
Ancient trees taller than pillars still hidden in this open horizon
I'm your intimate oasis in this wilderness
The crescent to your sun

Dirge for Anthony

Out of uniform reach for my hip
Self identify, whip out a badge or weapon, you decide
React in swift self-preservation
Man-child murder the law in its optical organ
Meth wild-eyed  in Texas on a sticky night  with sticky tears
Regret every day in this life sentence.

Parents' circled prayers, incensed swirls reach heaven's gate, not fate that
Restrained the hand of the lyncher, limp dick governer
The highest court rules mercy always
Any other sentence, a disguised decree of partiality

Groan a dirge for Anthony Haynes the cop killer
Kincaid the good cop ever in danger, his kin still hum his requiem
Ruled a capital crime, so stumbled the ignorant child
He's served his time, no societal danger, just too tired to appeal

On death row and nowhere to go but under
Elude the date with the executioner no longer
I pray for your contrite soul, no chance to live the life your mother conceived
To marry, have children with long black eyelashes full of heart, and father intended
Just hope for another judicial review extending
Your dead life in this purgatory cell

A coin in the pinball machine of justice for profit, the cop on the beat,
The black boy drowning
In crystal panic attacks, converging prism sorrows of his ancestors
Throw a pretty penny in the wishing well of vigorous dissent.