Heathen Politicians

Heathen politicians think everyone should be armed and dangerous.

Heathen politicians believe everyone should be card-carrying members of the NRA—Never Real Affection.

Heathen politicians eat bombs for breakfast. Serial killers are their favorite cereal.

As the body count rises, they’re counting their cash.

Heathen politicians Grinch-grin at lynchings. Wanna pass the Civil Rights Bill #000.

They’ve gerrymandered the lines of truth to crossover into bald-faced lies.

No amount of soul can make their hollow thoughts and prayers whole.

They know the devil on a first-name basis.

Heathen politicians ain’t worried about climate change cause they all got prime real estate in hell.

From the Alphabet of City Sounds

Another sunrise offers us mourners and mystics, bringers of coffins and new opportunities.

Liars and the self-righteous.

Angelhearted beatboxers leaving syncopated salutations at the doorstep of every open ear.

Truth songs, blues songs.

If you scrounge through the alphabet of city sounds long enough, you can put together a pretty good love letter to the morning birds.

Happily ever afters aren’t what they used to be.

No story can be wrapped up so easily; nothing that can be told at the speed of desire or at twenty-four frames per second in the aching heart’s cinema.

These are words I’ve built from my morning city sounds.

This is a breath hymn for those who’ve died in the service of life.

Cracks In the Bell

When our pains become so great we can no longer bear them.

When our feelings seek release, when they move us to the ends of the earth,

our hearts desiring an Eden of our own making.

It’s then we create: sing, dance, paint, write, cry out.

Our expressions: beautiful cracks in the bell of a perfectly toned hallelujah.

Highway Song

When you set out on the road, look for the man by the bend in the highway.

Beneath a gun-trigger moon, he plays songs on a beat-up guitar.

To some, they sound like a wild dog’s howl. To others, like a woman’s whisper.

When I was 18, I spotted this man just before passing out behind the wheel and wrapping my car around a phone pole.

The man sang a song that brought me back into my blood and breath.

These days, I don’t see that man very often, but I do hear his songs.

Sometimes they sound like a rusty weathervane in a storm.

Other times, like the sound of angels threading water into river music.

Fugitive Music

Sometimes I’m kept up late at night by love and death playing double or nothing beneath my bedroom window.

Sometimes I sneak into cemeteries late at night and sleep in open graves, so I’ll know the feel of death when it comes my way.

If you ask me to tell you a story, I may start it by saying, once upon a breathing river.

Sooner or later, good fortune flows our way.

I was once a fugitive from a piano chain gang.

You shoulda heard the song I played that night of my great escape.

when that huge fireball of disco-ball dayglow can’t say no

Today, the sun rose later than usual as it spent the night with a woman it met on a dating app.

When the woman said she adored sunset walks on the beach, that huge fireball of disco-ball dayglow couldn’t say no.

Early this morning, a jogger found the sun and woman sleeping on the beach, both a bit love-dazed but stone-cold sober.

It promptly hopped back into the sky and got to work.

When the sun was reminded it was already a couple of hours late rising, it didn’t bother brushing itself clean.

If you look carefully, you can chart the sun’s path by the faint trail of beach sand it leaves in its wake.

Things Mother Nature Said to Passing Strangers

When we spend our days dodging bullets and police batons.

When kindness, science, and common sense are twisted into a zero-sum game where only cruel politicians and corporations win.

When fate’s deck is stacked against us.

When rootless and ruthless days strip our calendar minds of their pages—

May our instinct’s North Star guide us out of these dark woods.

May our muscle memory recall our most cherished embrace.

May our deepest longings ache us towards a sweeter home.

After di Prima

Songs of people learning how to get along,

may they never cease.

Symphonies of resistance when we’ve strayed too far from that song of we,

may they never cease.

Breath and drumbeat. Children whose unbound joy is a Morse code that speaks to the soul,

may they never cease.

Peace trains and midnight trains to Georgia. San Francisco foggy nights of forget-me-not poetry,

may they never cease.

Earth dwellers protecting the green lands and blue seas.

Love and empathy.

Trees that provide us with oxygen and two sticks to rub together when the lights go out,

may they never cease.

When Executioners Wander Gun Gardens

Far too many hate mongers strolling gun gardens.

Far too many bullets serving as the nails for other people’s coffins.

Imagine what it must feel like going to the store to put food on your table, only to find yourself staring down the barrel of a rifle.

Where is our night of star-spangled joy?

Where have all the maps gone to discover new territories of togetherness?

Far too many young minds trapping themselves in the burning bodies of executioners

with no good excuse for their actions.

How we roam the alphabet’s wild jungle

We aroused and blaze-glazed cartwheeling denizens of equanimity, fierce galaxies of harmony in our hearts.

Idealistic and unjetlagged, we kung fu lassitude until it mimics the nimble ongoings of a poem’s quintuplets.

We residents of Shakespeare-tilted universes all verbed-up, whirlwinding and willing to xerox our unrestrained yodels

to create playful new zodiacs of zest.