Irises

Mockingbird

   LITTLE GIRL
The little girl
holding her mother’s hand
a moon orbiting around her planet
still shines with the embers
nursery rhymes of earlier years.

When she died as they loved
tortured by the black priests’ dark technologies
this excised shadow adumbrate of night
like sleep deprived grief, her corpse,
eternally engraved on the retina
mother-murder-instrument,
while her future in hair and fingernails
sprouts from her grave.

       DREAD
I live in deep dread,
for a lady who gave herself to me;
its plain for her to see,
I love her this side of sin.

At first I tried to deceive myself
that she was not all to me,
but, now the days are dull and dreary
whenever she’s not here fussing like a brood hen.

I wish my love were near
so that we’d share our bed
and roll naked in each others’ arms
‘til exhausted we’d sleep ‘till early morn.

I’m more in love with her
than any of fiction’s story book lovers.
She’s mistress of my life,
my love, and my heart - now torn

My sweet and sincere, and well loved friend
when will we be as one
that I might be with you
and caress you ‘till my life is done.

How great to feel your lover’s fire,
while I embrace you in your wife’s place;
And, watch you grow ripe with years,
while developing freely- mother of a family.

But, the greatest thrill of all
was when your dream merged with mine
and you choose, of your own free will,
to grow old with me.

A MYSTERIOUS STREET
A mysterious street, then Mozart
floats from an unseen radio
then strutting crows come complaining and distant thunder
rumbling nearer - then before me waits a bus,

which somehow, with a leap, I catch,
clinging to a bar and discover myself standing
dazed and confused, staring at the emergency lights
of a fire engine that looks like lasers.

A storm hurtling along on wheels
the lost bus blunders on
between time’s twin mirrors…. Where I anxiously
tug at the stop chord - wanting off, now!

No. We sail over the river
with dark wings, plowing up asphalt
through the rain forest, past
the phony street scene,

and see the Eiffel Tower, and celluloid Sphinx
watching the street person with wizened eyes
the indigent from Atlanta,
who attained immortality, sort of:

Having never lived, they couldn’t die,
and wound up lost in a lie. Where are we?
I smell fear oozing out of pores
in perspiration. Did I miss the station?

They sell tickets there for the American
of the soul…. Over a doorway
in blood is a symbol
spelling supermarket;

but, better than cabbage
they sell decapitated heads,
so fresh they’re still bleeding.

The butcher at the counter
wears a fat mask that’s exactly
like all the customers.
His white shirt and apron are stained red.

Suddenly, he reaches forward
and grabs mine and carelessly tosses it
into the glass display case
among the other bleeding heads.

A suburban street, silent as a tomb,
the blue house, with a huge hedge,
grass and deck, I furiously tug at the chord.
This is my house!

Margy: we lived here, laughed and cried,
raised our children, I wrote you poems and promised….
What happened to our lives? Where are we now?
Freedom became light from another World.

Shadows take on fantastic forms,
as people wait, at the gate of the city zoo.
And then something nice and comfortable
like familiar furniture, or a sunbeam on a cold day.

Then, over the river
reaching out towards me,
inside the velvet glove, a steel fist smashes my face
and a roaring engine hurtles towards me.

My heart hurts.
Each day becomes a wound
with its immense pain and countless sorrows
Margy, I’m amazed at how much love and misery life brings.

   POLITICAL PRISONER
In county jail,
in this zero tolerant state
where time truly is dead,
I dink along incarcerated,

not an ornament
nor any decorations
personalize the steel bars
and blank institutional pastel walls!

Almost all women are beautiful
as they walk past below
across the prison’s narrow window,
they remind me of you,

your frank sensuality
and soft brown eyes, teeming with life
and brown hair and red lips,
whose soft smile holds life’s infinite mystery.

The trees outside stir restlessly,
in the wind’s happy flight;
they bring me thoughts of flowers and grass,
with the smiling Sun on their head and shoulders.

Bring me an Autumn leaf
to swirl against the pain
that’s painted in rustic colors
and felt the playful breeze in its hair;

instead of the artificial air conditioner,
and heaters and lights who insulate my unhappy soul
that I may know that Nature and God
still exist outside this prison.

Please permit me this happiness,
let me see, if only for a moment,
my children’s faces and something green
that I might dream this Winter!

   CROWDING IN
Sometimes life comes crowding in,
until your senses are bruised and battered,
by people who deliberately try to hurt -
just like chance does:

Life is for the strong,
so long as their strength
doesn’t blind and crush their sensitive souls
like a contemporary Samson.

I wander the city streets
watching the people pass by
sometimes whole families of would be sadists
there is so much darkness.
This is supposed to be Spring,
but it feels more like Winter.
I begin to write
when I feel darkness obliterating life.

And, so today it begins again
the nothing that devours
the people, places, and time -
everything before it.

Some times it seems
writing is a sterile act,
we write our little line or two,
on the surfaces of the waters of life;

and, then creep off and die.
What a barren prospect.
My blood is cold this morning,
there is a cold drizzle today.

After years of isolation
there is a vast abyss
between people and me
whose faces seem stupid and brutal,

like a Brugal the elder peasant scene.
Each face is deformed
by this sorrowful something.
I feel infinitely remote.

Life has its compensations.
Unfortunately, most of it -
whose exteriors are superficial,
and which is where most life transpires - expires;

their surfaces transparent reflections
of their insides, right down
to the frozen core,
which tragically usually has dry rot.
Glutinous mass.
Wood devourers.
Brittle exoderm with thin limbs.
Night is their natural environment.
Their light step tickles, but their bite hurts.

This ancient nest -
outside there’s no visible sign -
resembles the Sistine Chapel
of the Vatican City.

Inside, everything is dark.
The dust of ages relentlessly
accumulates ashes to ashes
dust to dust.

I sleep a lot these days,
even during daytime.
I’m told I Stop breathing
during my sleep,

a rehearsal for the great event.
I loath these black holes
that disfigure my life.
Laying like a corpse

subtracting their angles
that diminishes us.
Formidably dressed in black, it stoops down
and removes its mask.

Behind its skull
you discover,
your looking at
your own face.

   WRITING IS WORTHLESS
Writing is worthless,
unless it comes from the heart;
nor, can it be from the heart,
unless you’ve lived every word.

Malevolent fools, failing at life, boast,
but, love isn’t bought or sold,
for then it rots and countered
by love nurtures, fulfills and grows solid.

A fool’s love is like bad poetry
all poesy and rhyme with couplets and
rigid numbers of syllables per line,
with only the name and empty form.

For love is not a fool,
it loves nothing but love itself;
it asks for nothing
and takes nothing from good,

Their anemic poems aren’t worth a plug nickel,
whose songs aren’t from the heart;
Love is vapid that doesn’t sink its roots there -
it soon withers and dies.

My poems flow from the heart,
where they robustly laugh and sing,
joyously like a brook in Spring;
because, they’re real.

The earnest glance anchors it,
and the entrails being wretched still warm,
and if love isn’t intense and reciprocated
its insipid!

   THOSE WHO DIED TODAY
Slowly, Sun descends from the sky
a relief to the old men sweltering in doorways.
Stealthily, crouching between buildings the Sphinx waits
for the next unwary wanderer.

Watching while the moon-
a fantastic eyeball-
that blindly stares unblinking between boughs,
as it ascends among the growing darkness.

The hour when whoring U.S. perverts her children,
tossing them to the rapacious streets
their cold underdeveloped breasts prey,
with predatory eyes under anemic street lights.

The anesthetized night stretches tediously out
like a dull discussion
between stupid people.

I meditate from the confines of my window
thinking of the ancient World’s newborn beginning;
thinking of those children who were murdered today.

I imagine myself being carried by pallbearers
entombed by a faceless crowd of endumbrated mourners,
my life entered, alongside those who died today.

           DOWN HERE
They would occasionally go there before mortgages and kids’ schooling,
a warm Winter coat, self-satisfied, gold framed designer glasses.
Spying on the jazz and nightclub scenes-
they started exterminating artists, civilization came later-
seemed stimulating and satisfied a sense of vengeance
for bruised egos, the snubs that made some feel small and insignificant
still others finally belonged, the bad booze, boredom and Time’s existential dilemmas
superficially debated and Time tediously lost night after night.

Now Time has survived and surveys revenge’s engorged remains.
Young faces flock to new places; corporate rock, or new nostalgic dances
daring grandparents used to do, blare out. But, before you order
the next drinks for you and your interrogator, you feel strangely uneasy.
Atmosphere is everywhere, poisoning the place,
the dilute drinks taste strangely medicinal.
Sometime before closing, they enter straight from a movie
arrogantly impressed with their depressing selves, as if they invented vice.

When arriving the whole mass sets up a ruckus.
Some there do their duty, others their perverse pleasure
insouciant stances, canned comments - absolutely special.
They give the night back its cold biting darkness.
They drink their micro-fizz, and eat bar nuts and pretzels,
while like a division of dunciads perched on stools
egotistically they try to resurrect the recycled dead:
if only they could join us down here.

   RELATIVE COURSE
I was floating among the stars.
When rending the veil of darkness,
a flash, vertigous instant, electric excitement,
wind blast, thunderous sound
illuminated the infinite labyrinth-
iterating into eternity.
Merging together, everything one.
Where am I? A spark,
point of consciousness
lost in the void.
Rolling round an invisible axis,
with this mass, not knowing,
to where, not knowing.
Tolling depart, Time measuring intervals
relatively of course.

   GOD GRANTS
God grants no artificial restraints,
to prevent me soaring to the stars.
Yet I wonder at reasons’ arbitrary restrictions
responsible for what we know of it.

And yet the heart, too, has reasons of its own;
there are those who would claim
each day is a torment; but, they lie.
Fine thought keeps constant company.

For I have a good heart,
and work at being honorable with all mankind;
making my thoughts, my words, and my deeds one.
Otherwise I am a man with nothing.

Yet Margy has made me rich,
a man with nothing. She is beautiful,
and the more I see her comely body
and candid expression, the more I love her and desire her.

Yet, as the days demands pile on,
the less chance I have,
to gaze on her and strive to be worthy:

and yet, the greater our equal love is
the darker grows her pending absence,
and the doom of the inevitable future.

               RUMOR MILL
   The radical right have been busy this election year. The public has had a variety of events internationally and nationally to distract their attention and make them feel as if they were under siege, as indeed they are. However, the enemy is not, according to the opinion of the Rumor Mill, who the public is being mislead into believing it is. The Rumor Mill contends it is America’s own radical right.
   According to what the Rumor Mill believes, domestically the radical right have been recently recycling a tragic wave of violence. They have once again picked Mothers, as their victims by subliminally destabilizing them; and, then inducing them to commit the murder, Media style, of their children. All the mothers this time around asphyxiated (last time they all shot and killed) their children either by drowning &/or strangling. It is believed that the radical right caused these acts to occur to obtain certain objectives including to vilify their (the mothers) victims, prove (if only to themselves) their necessity, and gain heinous headlines in order to divert the public from other issues. In Oregon they have been around this block before, when in a little over a week period in a limited geographical region they witnessed three times this tragedy re-enacted, a tragedy so unnatural and so ghastly that the Greeks, in their violent era, made a tragedy out of it called THE MEDEA by Euripides. As noted by the Rumor Mill at the time (see previous issues) for one community to be afflicted with something fortunately so rare in such a short time in such a limited geographical region was impossible to explain statistically, without some external causative agent involved. The Rumor Mill believes that its not as if the radical right have not an unfortunate previous involvement in this type of sinful-criminal activity. Now, once again, we are confronted with fanatical elements, who the Rumor Mill thinks are the radical right, which claim to be engaging in justice and not a misguided organization of extremists’ executing their personalized agenda’s revenge; but, who in fact are stripping society of its egalitarian safeguards and creating a criminal organization whose resources have enabled it to commit crimes with impunity here on Earth. MOVING ON….
   Politically we have less than 100 days to worry about election year politically motivated violence. The Rumor Mill would like to change topics and discuss politics. What have we to be thankful for from what some believe was a fraudulently selected President?    What has been the record of the usurper KING George Jr.. What has the Republican party accomplished while in WHITE HOUSE?
   1.)OVER $160,000,000,000 + that’s right over $160+ billion of debt for just one year. The largest single year accumulation of debt in the history of the World!!!! At least his dad Reagon/Bush bought an obsolete navy, when they were running up the WORLD’S LARGEST DEBT thanks to those big spending Republican’s.
   2.)What about years of Republican rhetoric to balance the budget? When the Democrats held the White House they did balance the budget.
   3.)What about years of Republican rhetoric to eliminate the National Debt? When the Democrats held the White House they dramatically reduced the National Debt.
   4.)What was the Trade Deficit in the last two years? With U.S. dependence, which the Republican’s have done nothing about, on foreign sources of oil and an astronomical escalation in those oil prices the Trade Deficit has got to be bigger than ever before! And, during this time frame King George Jr. and his vice have done nothing effective.
5.)What has happened to the U.S. Standard of Living over the last two years? During the last time a Republican held the White House we free fell from #1 to not even in the top 10. When the Democrats held the White House that statistic improved appreciably.
6.)What did we get for over $160 billion in Nat’l. Debt?
Were U.S. schools improved? No.
Was U.S. family Health Care improved? No.
Did the U.S. get prescription relief that was not a disguised rip off of our fundamental rights? No.
Was U.S. children’s Health Care improved? No.
Was infrastructure improved significantly? No.
Were we any safer in spite of proliferating gov’t. bureaucracies? No, and no again.
   7.)Has the war time economy helped? Absolutely not, as a matter of fact it significantly worsened the economic environment in the U.S..
   8.)What did King George Jr. do to stop a 2 yr. Depression? Nothing that worked! When the Democrats had the White House they managed the economy to an unprecedented period of prosperity with 8 years of sustained economic growth. To be Continued on the next page…
   9.)Is the SOCIAL SECURITY SYSTEM more secure after 2 years under Republican control? Unfortunately, no! When the Democrats were in charge of the White House, Social Security was secure for the foreseeable future.
   10.)In 2 years has the combined military might of the U.S., the World’s largest military, been able to defeat 1 tribe which constitutes the primary power base (besides Rumor Mill believes our own radical right) of the Taliban? When the Democrats held the White House they defeated a war in the Balkans without one fatality spending less money than granted by the big spending Republicans in Congress, which was substantially less than the $10 billion it was given, as opposed to the $160 + billion performance (not all of which was spent in Afghanistan) of the incompetent and corrupt Republicans.