The stormy morning sky, heavy and full of noise,
pours its grief to the ground. A bright gold torch,
acerbatic and ambiguous, trembles deep in the fearful now
with an iridescent splendor, intoxicating and yellow.
What the Autumn tree wounds, like a cry of pain bursting into flame;
the sylvan hillsides are crimson and gold;
the trees ignite, in a carnage of livid flames,
pouring onto the black river, tragically insane.
Furious winds brutally beat, profane and demented,
against the demascend of the distorted day;
and an amazing allegory, out of the depths of the glaucous West,
a false Sunset transpires, as clouds strive to overwhelm the
insistent light.
All these strange suicides
filling morgues with husks of hides over hidden bones.
My but the right wing reticulates
surreptitiously receive their rewards,
senseless excrements, discrete murderous insanity,
living in the bottom of an abyss,
where they've become used to the stench.
It does weigh down unnoticed on our senile society though,
they are a weary load, these foul murderous deeds.
I walk through fall rains,
grey days etched with pain,
having seen so much horror-
such suffering and so many tears
that each minute seems like a year.
Mass media propaganda, propagates their prefabricated myths-
that still another couple of people have freely chosen
to "go on and get it over with",
and crawled into today's grave:
when in truth they've been robbed
of their fair share of life.
I wear these clothes that are aged,
and though outside they may look presentable
inside they are wearing thin;
I've grown old and my hair is grey
it has been my fate to watch a society sicken
an in the convulsions of an identity crises
where the radical right that now pretends to be moderate
has become militant sanctifying it
with secretive murderous religion.
My soul is left scarred,
with wounds that do not show on my face;
but they're there anyway,
lines engraved deep in my heart.
I have always loved the moon!
I remember the gracious moon, now as the year turns grey,
when I drove to Council Crest, weary with sorrow,
and on this nude knoll gazed at you,
then as now you rolled across the vertigoes sky
unnoticed by the guilded city. But, to me
your beautiful pock marked face seemed sad, sympathetic
so intensely painful was my life: and is,
my sweet moon; its rhythms never change.
And yet, vanity gives pleasure in recounting the stages
of my grief. How happy
in those young days - when hope is bright
and memory brief - is the recollection even
of past misery whose pain endures.
With white flowing robes
and flaming swords drawn,
two angels hovered above the street,
in the black wretched night.
I walked alone, past the storefronts'
with cold panes gaudily displaying their wares;
and, along the rain drenched sidewalks,
where I watched the malevolent and deceitful right wing whores
and thugs.
My glance encompassed them all, some who
were mere children, like images from hell,
which were deliberately hustling concuspicuous desires,
in the hazy golden pools of harsh glistening street lights.
I looked while my flock of words took flight,
at the weary travail-tortured sleep they called life;
and repelled from the abyss,
I took stock of the horror of their totalitarian misery.
But above! The lambent angels were weeping,
as their glances seemed to say, "Poor piteous people,
don't you know even yet, "all is vanity"-
life has no meaning without felicity."
When exhausted from pouring over ancient tomes,
and sleep brushes my eyes with its shadowy fingers;
the dark depths of the starless sky seek me out,
and consciousness flees heedless into oblivion.
Its then that cab clouds carrying spirits
glance down into crystal clear houses,
past forms made invisible by countless redundancies, and at contents
who, with wrinkles and blemishes, are disagreeably growing older.
And, while fleets of vehicles sleep,
trees with mere tufts of leaves remaining and shrubs and weeds
scud through black city streets,
where ideas tower over tiny blind skyscrapers.
And life relaxes in one expansive sigh,
and the echo of turbid cries reflects
the previous days pains and pleasures
that streak like meteor showers across indigo heavens.
How can one tell which dreams are real,
when capacious reality molts skin so quickly?
But, what I do know in today's World,
of vice driven informants, I know many people I don't know.
In that room, where last night we slept together
like so many other nights, I lay down now
watching the night pass. The absent lover's half of bed
sits cold and empty, its sheets a vast desolate plain.
You are absorbed in other things
and now you are gone. It is the room
where, I came one night and lay beside you
and read one of Leopardi's poems
that echoed between your soft white breasts.
It is the bedroom of our love.
Do not mistake it, for just another room.
I resolve to remember the vanquished days
of Spring and Summer, your naps and bustling,
and those times, satisfied and sunny, through our house.
Tonight it is Autumn,
both of us are apart, I slowly rise
and close the house's two door's.
Two doors where the wind blows cold-
in from the dark, out into the dark.
I unfetter myself from the four corners of our cell
whenever I go down to the sea,
and always the waters come to me.
We should go out into the evening and taste its
bitter-sweetness with our tongues.
We should listen to the old songs already sung
with lights of desire, of fecund motherhood.
The cold salt breeze goes by.
In the distance I smell the estuary,
hear the profound notes from groping gulls,
the surge of the surf.
And if we dip our eyes this way into the absurd,
we will solace ourselves with the respect
of having nothing while pollinating
the unborn feather of the night
or the orphaned dawn,
which tries to be a wing but can't.
There are times during life when the Earth reels
quaking and immense chasms appear,
where Evil erupts in dark clouds
of all that is suffered
that should be damned inside the soul.
There are popular delusions, fortunately few,
which sweep the land. All pervading dark clouds
that possess the boldest expressions and most powerful
persons. Perhaps this age's brutal Caligula,
or the black death merchant ships send us.
They are the profound perversions of faith
of Christ, of soul from a loving God
cruelly blasphemed by fate,
whose bloody deeds are the cinders
of the consecrated body burned in the oven to a crisp.
And the poor wretched people stare past our persons,
as if not watching us being herded from behind
by a clap of thunder; they turn passion blind eyes
and all that has been hidden is damned like a lake
of accusations in the middle of a barren dessert.
There are times during life
when evil overwhelms the World.
The Sun moves relentlessly on,
with thoughtless assurance it devours the years.
How small are the months and metamorphasizing raisins,
days fade bleached colorless, removed from faceless clocks.
Time, melts away, the instant exploding
by that absurd, implacable bomber;
and, then a certain number of days are fixed,
a month, a year and the shadow is nailed to the ground,
whose Eastward growth signifies death.
No one can stem its tide, not thought, not love,
not even special interests; but, my memories skip backward
a smooth stone brushing over its impassive face.
Time, a loom that shuttles
through the moon's many phases
and other creatures, creating rhythms and eddies,
which are recorded in echoing words.
Until, exhausted, finally its our turn to dissolve,
and like the mountains and sea before us
that have vanished we will be gone, finished.
Then there will be death,
dragging us off by the heels
leaving behind a stain in the sand
no season of rain will wash clean,
no hot or cold, no light or dark,
no rain kissing our faces,
just the perturbations that was our lives.
And the streets and stores we'll know no more,
all will be empty the homes, memories and vanity.
Dear valley, deafened by wailing mourners
and the rumble of wheels, surrounded by a bister haze,
it is you they speak of in Hell,
devils osberously stating your names.
And opening your Gospel,
the story of your horrible, your vitiate lives,
they think of the devious new devices and demons
ordered, o merciless ones, to take care of you.
You, hanging like rotten fruit
on America's ancient liberty tree,
listen to what you've done, what you've become
the dirge of your bestial souls.
Blood, choked-stopped, directly linked to you,
I will tell of murderous "masters" casually dressed
leading mobs of sullen soldiers through dark streets
and to victory, because people don't realize your brutal ruthlessness;
of towns with quiet ways
you unobtrusively invade with evil, laughing lips,
and rabid wolves stalking about the towns
rumbling their tailpipes on their undercarriages.
I am the sum total of chance,
but my powers of observation have earned me a slight reputation;
let these words form a mirror,
a black river flooding red with your names.
And - a final fact,
before I go to the cemetery
to observe one more Benton berry picked and buried,
another Mary, choked to death, gone to rest with Christ.
Two more murders have been committed exactly the same way under remarkably similar circumstances within 20 miles in quiet
communities in mid-Willamette Valley, and both committed in less than half of a year - yet another murderous coincidence, will "they" never stop!