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senseless whiskey

topless rock quarry

loveless puff pastry

nerveless dump-monday

jealous mad money

listless litany

heinous found guilty

seditious conspiracy

Two metronomes walk into a bar

One beats out a tune, while the other beats it to a drink.

Guess that goes to show you everyone’s song don’t remain the same.

It’s a bit like putting six strings on a machine gun and expecting to hear a peaceful melody.

That’s not the way most of us hear it.

If murder is the only thing you can think to do with your two hands, try prayer or playing the piano.

The end results may sound different, but if you run a comb through America’s hair, you won’t find bullets stuck in the teeth.

When she calls me on a Friday night

It’s like I’m speaking to the cosmos, space and time all rolled into a single conversation.

Planets, constellations, and stardust produce a series of mind-blowing hellos and how are yous.

Giant clouds of hydrogen and helium whisk away all the dark matter in my head.

From somewhere far off, the subatomic particles of her intergalactic piano gather to play in the key of remember. I sing back, I do.

Ancient philosophers and their cosmological models of the beyond don’t quite capture the Big Bang theory of our Friday night conversation;

how small matter-of-fact moments lead to a flood of dreaming matters;

how our darkest moments expand into an abundance of light.

Before we say our goodbyes, the entire history of the universe flashes before our eyes.

Black Friday

Whether it’s black Friday, mahogany Monday, or lavender Saturday, there’ll always be demons and haters, sewers filled with murderers, liars and swamp-throated choirs.

Dreadful days with hellitosis and teeth looking like they chewed too long on a cannonball jawbreaker.

Heartbreaks and soulquakes, gospels of broken bottles, and vasectomied sirens still giving birth to screaming emergencies.

There’ll also be days bright as fresh flowers in old graveyards.

Days when your brain-dead boomerang gets an anti-lobotomy and returns to you zinging and singing.

When your collide and collapse comes back new and refreshed.

When it feels like you can crawl into the womb of a feather, and be reborn as something lighter than air.

In Gratitude (11.24.22)

So grateful for my family, friends and pets. Thankful for our health and well-being, breath & heartbeat symphony.

Gratitude for all my teachers and those that continually fight for justice, equality and social consciousness.

Enlivened by the sun and rain, animals, insects and trees, Mother Nature in all her glorious seasonal striptease.

Road trips and back flips, happy dogs and dog-eared books, #beatnotbeat and the poetry community. Wanda Coleman, Diane di Prima, Louis Armstrong and Louis Prima.

Thankful for halos and drum solos, stereo-blasted rock and Schoolhouse Rock.

Bruce Lee, Steve McQueen, Scooby-Doo and Sojourner Truth.

All the magic, forethought and happy accidents that’ve conjured our paths crossing.

Books, yoga, art, my car and two feet.

Grateful for my job and students. Thankful I’m not in the poorhouse or madhouse.

That I can go to sleep and wake up every morning with a fresh cup of coffee in hand.

Before Your Head Rises From the Pillow, Say to Yourself

A new day to remove all unwanted myths and mirages piled high at the door.

A new day to burn away gasoline proclamations, to avoid taking the exit to bad karma highway.

These bodies of ours, held together by grace and all that pushes against us.

A new day to realize kindness is a bold light in a broken world.

When you hear this, you’ll probably know it’s about you, but will still deny it

So much for your lies and entitlement. The double talk and babblesquawk.

Coming off as lame, playing the same old blame game.

So much for singing your out-of-tune blues, seventy minutes of clueless subterfuge.

Tweetless and double impeached.

A shell of your cruel self, chubby gums bristling QAnon dog whistles.

So much for thinking you’re unshakable, unearthquakable.

You and your hollow fame, all the exaggerated and boastful claims.

So much for your taunts and threats, leaving your election-denying audience rushing for the exits.

The first step in making America great is without you as our next president.

What the world needs now

More poets and songbirds. Shopaholics at the mall of mercy.

A Congress that engages in friendly congress.

For the homeless to become homeful. Wildfires to take a chill pill.

Gun muzzles to nuzzle love.

More artists and dancers, fewer damagers and arch enemies.

For war to take up watercolors. Nazis to take up needlepointing open hearts for one and all.

Red and blue states to find more complimentary color combinations.

For citizens to be trained in the acrobatics of affability.

Lynching ropes to be repurposed as glittery ribbons on presents of presence.

Mercy and Metaphor

At the intersection of mercy and metaphor, you won’t encounter demons forcing you to dig your grave with a guitar pic.

You won’t hear the same old thunder of war storms, nor will you witness the pistol-whipped whimper of a blood-red sunrise.

Instead, you’ll be rewarded with the manna of cherished memories.

You’ll develop an ear tuned to the river’s flowing strings.

At the intersection of mercy and metaphor, contentment will sing down your troubled guitar from the cross.

A vibrant electricity will move through all that leads you to the root core of a kiss.

So Many Battlegrounds, So Little Time to Breathe

Rape and human trafficking, harassment and domestic violence.

Opposition and resistance. Objectification, payraise disqualification.

Gender inequality, minority in the executive seat.

From boardrooms to bedrooms, abortion clinics to politics, Somalia to Hollywood—

all the wars women still endure.