Baneful Bagatelles

with wisdom disillusionment

saw a guy with two lobes on one ear
wonder if he had a secret twin listening in


the winter wind
sweeps the old house
asking for my whereabouts

a curious lamp from long ago
flickers when the wind
blows shut my window

a haunted tin pot
rattles off somewhere
a dinner for ghosts consisting of air

leave me alone I desperately say
and just for the moment
the wind went away



the cathedral of meth
 is lit from within
by the sensory impressions
 of its strange denizens

a patch of nowhere forever


silence in the street today
was stunning
like another door closing on deafness

motionless sunlight on the hills
added to this effect
no one else in the world
for a moment


the death mask an actor wears is apt to become his face

two gloomy ravens
hung low in a winter tree
sky turned charcoal gray

the past is something we drag with us like a grand piano stuffed with viscous horses

heavy wind and rain
came down the street
like everything else

 I'm sick of all the squares on the sidewalk

a dream
on the night of the solstice
full lunar eclipse
a pattern of ants
on the wall

the stars' mockery

tule fog came
ushering in vagueness
trees appear as the heads
of old acquaintances
houses vanish behind
diffuse street lights
tail-lights red shift
exaggerated silence

memories are corridors
countless in number
leading in all directions
from the mirror ball
at the center of the mind

the past is not far away
it's not even the past anyway

I pull over for repair
the murderous world of traffic
plunges on without me


owsley stanley
gone into the convulsive australian 
with the other large early carnivores
with the devils with the zebra wolves
with the giant flightless parrots

open another room in a mansion in the sky
you floated all boats
my own bateau ivre in sixty-eight
has to be the hand of fate
how inscrutable and vast a reckoning


through the night time fog
a distant television
someone else up late

siren's soft finial
lashed to a lathe
rain parades
streets end at the water
supper clubs on the pier

momentary ireland
clouds land on green hills
thought of sheep

a dream
george zimmer in a business suit
walking on a financial district sidewalk
shooting up with a glass syringe


every time I look out the window
I see the same guy
standing in my backyard
looking in
with his eyes closed

it's my wife's ex-husband
old stage-door johnny
and two pastures away
there's another guy standing
her third husband a painter

way off on the hillside
I can still see her first husband
nonchalant as ever
somewhat weathered by the years
no one recalls his name anymore

Her second husband is out there too
he's hidden in a glade
down by the creek
I glimpse him through the trees
when the leaves are down on the old logging road

They're all dead of course
and in my own season
I'll join them out there one day
tough in winter flowers in spring
the long slow summer the gaudy falling leaves

 

torn clouds
squid maps
a twisted sky

the past is a bed of nails

the abominable snow lady

paroxysms of extinction

clive evil

catacombs honeycomb remembrance

the stars' mockery