So my Lawnmower Repair Guy...

                                   The wind that blows
                                Is all that anyone knows

                                  -Henry David Thoreau

And is the man all right? Nobody knows

And my lawnmower is hidden behind a fence
A chain-link fence, among mowers in rows
The owner lost a gunfight; he was taken hence
And what about the mowers? Nobody knows

And is the man all right? Nobody knows

UPS has left notes; the door is locked
There is no sound of man or machine
No one has answered when customers knocked
Only the guard-dogs (yep, they’re really mean)

And is the man all right? Nobody knows

Sergeant Schultz at the cop-shop - she knows nothink
She’s busy with her personal smartphone
Her eyes are fixed; they do not move or blink
And I am all alone in The Twilight Zone

And is the man all right? Nobody knows

So what really happened? Nobody knows

And is the man all right? Nobody knows

So who can I contact? Nobody knows

And is the man all right? Nobody knows


Only the wind...

We were admiring the summer muscadines
I mentioned that my one experiment
In making wine resulted in only
A series of dramatic explosions

And he spake unto me:

Better that, far better, than to be Condemned
Grapes are for jelly, or you’ll be Condemned
Not for Strong Drink, no, or you’ll be Condemned
If you use grapes for wine you’ll be Condemned

He said on a hellishly hot summer day
Then he returned to baling my Catholic hay

The Church and the Pub:



                                                I.

     ­            No One was Before the Blessed Sacrament
      Between the Hours of 8:00-9:20, 10:20-11:45, & 1:10-1:50

                                 -the parish bulletin

And yet we are always before something:
A pint of beer, a tv football match
A darts game where the plastic feathers fly
Miss Swivelly-Hips in her *****-boots

But still, the small red lamp alone in the dark
Shines on for us, for Miss Swivelly too
Throughout the careless hours when we neglect
Duty for the fellowship of the pub

“No one was before the Blessed Sacrament…”
And yet we are always before something

                                                  II.
­
            “No One was Here for the Weekly Darts Tournament”

                           -the old geezer in the corner

And yet there is much to be said for the pub:
A pint of beer, a tv football match
A darts game where the plastic feathers fly
Miss Swivelly-Hips – but we have mentioned her

That fluorescent beer ad’s a kind of red
The old geezer’s cheeks shine, especially when
Miss Swivelley-Hips flirts him for a beer
There is an honest joy in fellowship

“No one was here for the darts tournament”
(Maybe they were before the Sacrament?)

They Say the Prisoner...

With references to Article 58, Senator McCarthy, and Casablanca

He’s one of them
That is, he was
And now he’s dead

If he’s not safe
Then you’re not safe
It only takes
An accusation

They have a list
It’s on the ‘net
You’re on the list
You’re on the ‘net
They’re at your door

You didn’t do it?
You all say that

They haven’t decided
If you will suffer
A heart attack
Or die while trying

To escape

What Can We Do...?

                         They may break our bodies…
                   but they need not dominate our minds.

                                          -C. S. Lewis

Every book we read to a little child
Every kindness we work for another soul
Every bowl we fill while serving the poor
Every prayer whispered, spoken, or dreamed

Every cup of coffee shared with a pal
Every wheezy old joke about Pat and Mike
(Or, to be fair, about Trevor and Neville)
Every small joy sung to the universe

Is a beginning

The heat of August does not rise; it sinks
Space-planting on the earth like hopes collapsed
Guarding the air against all happiness
With damp and rust and rot and air-thick sighs

The heat of August does not heal; it stinks
Of everything gone wrong at once, of either
Stepping outside to a witch-slap of pain
Or lurking inside with headaches and ennui

The heat of August is an emptied man
On a Sunday afternoon when love has died

“...Poisoned Chalice”

              -Macbeth I.vii.10-12

We commend each other with curses exchanged
Between a cop and a hard place in space
Red MAGA caps against ****** berets
All of these accessories China-made

Our battleground an asphalt parking lot
Our forward first-aid post a coffee shop
Where Communists glare over their nitros cold
And Fascists froth their frappuccinos hot

We commend each other with a chalice defiled
Over the broken body of a Child

You can’t be serious all of the time
Because there are bellowing tyrants around
Who bully and demand, who preach and screech
Whose arguments are threats and censorship

Recusancy is their worst enemy
A casual indifference to their demands
A refusal to wear their branded livery
And clenching one’s fist around only

A brush
A pen
A wrench
A book
A thought
A hope

If all you do is to react, they win -
You can’t be serious all of the time

Ill-lettered functionaries at PBS
Are pleased to announce that Woodstock defined
A generation. In reality,
Generations are not defined at all:

My argument is that women and men
Of conscience, courage, character, and class
Define themselves, and stubbornly refuse
To be counted, conned, or categorized

And only followers would acquiesce

To

Ill-lettered functionaries at PBS

A five-dollar garage-sale record player
A five-cent-piece Scotch-taped onto the arm
A plastic K-Mart special from long ago
A groovy thing for a junior high kid

But he was a thirty-something day-laborer
And in the silent cell of his solitude
Wanted to spin some tunes in the darkness
Just like he did when he was a junior high kid

A five-dollar garage-sale record player
Wagner, Sinatra, McKuen - and hope

Bulletproof School Backpacks...

                DeLuxe model with emojis and a charging port

School days, school days
Dear old shooting drill days
Coding and walkouts and smart pad functions
Taught to a federal court’s latest injunctions
You were my queen in tats (Day-Glo®)
I was your Trump at every gun show
You carved in my skin “i luv U ‘n’ Che Guevara so”
When we were a couple of latch-key kids




As of 3 August 2019 bulletproof backpacks were not on the approved list for the Texas Comptroller’s tax-free school supplies weekend; bulletproof vests are on the list as taxable (https://comptroller.texas.gov/taxes/publications/98-490/clothing-footwear.php).

She was restless in Mass, a three-years’ child
And in her patient father’s loving arms

She wriggled
She squiggled
She giggled

And then she lay ‘way back and looked ‘way up

What went she into the desert to see -
A light fixture? An air-conditioning vent?

Oh, no

Her eyes were large
Her lips were still
Her breaths were soft

- she saw much more

She was happy in Mass, a three-years’ child
And from her father’s arms something she saw…

What?

Who?

She smiled



(And of course she may have been delighted with the vision of an air-conditioning vent after all; a small child’s learning curve is more open to joy than ours)

Grapevines are the first songs of civilization
Their leaves, their tendrils, their late-summer grapes
As given in the Mass: fruit of the vine
And work of human hands, of human love

But when a vine neglects its ancient realm
And reaches out to grasp and colonize
Its peaceful neighbors, privet and rose and oak
It must be brought to heel with sweat and steel

And in its healing recover its purposes:
Grapevines are the first songs of civilization

Slouching...

                   From an idea suggested by Robert Graves in
                                       On English Poetry

I. Thesis

Formalist poetry to attention stands
In ordered meters, ranks and files and lines
Of scansion as determined by disciplined minds
And set in place through skillful strategy

II. Antithesis

Other poetry slouches indolently, insolently with its louche trilby askew
Sleeping late, smoking cigarettes,
                                                     sauntering off
                                                                ­              for a beer
Through scansion as admitted by the heart or the pancreas or something
And seldom set in place at all unless it just sort of happens

III. A Perhaps Unnecessary but Useful Conjunction

But

IV. Synthesis

All poems ramble the same neighborhood
In quest of the true, the beautiful, the good

No meaning obtains in calendars and clocks
High on a wall, beyond a small boy’s reach
A childhood summer shimmers out of time
July is but another butterfly

To dance and play among young apple trees
A re-Creation thus remembering
Before-Time when we danced among the stars
And played with them like little fairy-lamps

In August falls the magic when, stained with scales,
Foul Satan hisses to us: “Back-to-school sales”

I wish I wuz a sheriff’s deputy
The traffic laws would mean nothing to me

I’d cruise through the red lights and all them stop signs
But give everyone else lots of tickety-fines

At the café  I’d park in the handicapped zone
Then drive by the school yakking on my cell phone

Turn signals for me? A thing of the past!
And when scooting through town I’d drive real fast

Yeah, if I wuz a sheriff’s deputy
The traffic laws would mean nothing to me

Snakes fighting in a rutted logging trail
A chicken snake against a rattlesnake
Whipping the dust with their reptilian lust
For death among the ridings of despair

The rattlesnake is an endangered species
The chicken snake is okay with that, and strikes
The thrashers poise and pounce, loathsome and foul
Until the chicken snake slowly takes the rattler

Through peristalsis down into its maw

with the rattlesnake

Writhing desperately for a forced recount

Since Mickey’s hands are now at two ‘til twelve
Let’s pour our poor doomed selves another glass
We’ll have only our ashes then to shelve
When that great big explosion comes to pass

And as that big bang bangs I’ll kiss my kvass
Goodbye. My watch needs charging anyway
The Gotterdammerung should give it some gas
To tell the time on that Wagnerian new day

Oh! Mickey’s hands are now at that midnight -
Farewell, dear friends; it’s been a wild delight!



(What? Are you still here…?)

Wisteria, ivy, and grape: they cling
To the oak tree’s shaggy, craggy old bark
And up it and down it themselves they fling
Wandering paths with many a loop and arc

Among wisteria, ivy, and grape

Almost hidden highways, up to the sky
That make green pilgrim roads for little folk
For tiny bugs and ants, who cannot fly
But in their journeys play and peek and poke

Among wisteria, ivy, and grape

The little creatures climb along leaf and limb -
Oh, wouldn’t you like to be one of them!

Among wisteria, ivy, and grape

Playin’ on the back porch, got an old dog
Chewed my toy car from the ten-cent store
Scared my dear momma with a green toad-frog
When she told my daddy I got my britches wore

(If you see a log truck you’ll have good luck)

Early get the cows up, early off to school
Running up the lane to catch the yaller bus
Paddled by the principal for actin’ like a fool
Hours in the classroom hearin’ Teacher fuss

(If you see a log truck you’ll have good luck)

Then in the afternoon to the locker room
With hardly any time for a ***** stop
Coach-Bubba’s rolling bassy voice of doom
Bellowing “I WANNA HEAR THE LEATHER POP!

(If you see a log truck you’ll have good luck)

Runnin’ the roads in an old-timey Ford
A fifth of Jack Daniels underneath the seat
Stupidly standin’ on the running board
Singin’ to the radio, O so sweet!

(If you see a log truck you’ll have good luck)

Runnin’ the roads on graduation night
Well, hello, great big world, and here I am
They say I got to get a job now, sure, that’s right
Say, buddy, what’s this place called Viet-Nam?

But

If you see a log truck
                                       you’ll have
                                                             good luck

Corpses for...

                      If any question why we died,
                 Tell them, because our fathers lied.

                                       -Kipling

Drones fall like broken promises upon
The burning decks while errant missiles fly
From sea to murky sea keeping the peace
Of headless bodies bobbing in the surf

Our leaders’ wars are yeah-boy video games
(With single-malt) across a shiny screen
But workers’ wars are blood and dirt and death
And “Thank you for your service” (now go away)

The good die young, so do the bad, but not
The sons and daughters of our nomenklatura

When meteors on dinosaurs
Fall crashing like the Temple of Dagon
And signals beam from ****** Mars
And mastodons make war on dragons

We little ones must run and hide
In rocky cleft and burrowed cave
While monsters in their wars decide
Just whom to **** and whom to save

When dragons make war on mastodons
Let’s disappear like leprechauns

Maybe.

Or not.

Is reality filtered through one’s culture
No longer reality? Or is it
That reality without a cultural filter
Is not reality at all, but only
An unobserved function of biology
Chemistry, geology, or radiation
Whose purpose is unknowable because
Without the perception of God or man
It doesn’t exist

And neither does the snake, which might have been
But then, maybe it is Schrodinger’s snake
Or was
Or might be

They say that the first cultural bias you ****
Is the most difficult, that it becomes
Easier after that. But it isn’t so.

After a hard life along existential trails
Of assumptions examined to dust, you want
To put away your Hegelian dialectic
And settle down in a little cottage
In the country with a few good books, a garden,
And Aristotle’s unities, but there’s
Always a young concept-slinger who thinks
He’s faster on the synthesis than you
And calls you out on your legendary denial
Of the knowability of objective reality

For the rest of your life (but do you exist?)
No matter how carefully you sharpen your syllogisms
Somewhere out there in the darkness it lurks:
An ontological proposition with your name on it

“The Test of a Man...”

                              -Ecclesiasticus 27:5-8

Friends are the chief ornaments of a man’s life
Through fishing trips and schoolyard baseball games
The brotherhood of barracks and camp and field
And ideas served and volleyed in courtesy

Among those men who have seen something more
Of the world than movie screens and gossip ‘zines
Men as familiar with rifle and rosary
As with a crescent wrench and single-malt

Men who can work both plow and metered line
Then lift a glass in thanks when the first stars shine

Thirteen Reasons...


        We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny.
                           But what we put into it is ours.

                                  -Dag Hammarskjold

1. God made you; you can never be replaced
2. God made you for some purpose – live to find it
3. Someone is blessed each day in knowing you
4. You must live so that others may live
5. Someone desperately needs your kindness right now
6. You haven’t yet written your book, your story, your
song
7. When you offer up your suffering, you help others
8. Children running barefoot through the flowers of
spring
9. Children running barefoot through the leaves of
autumn
10. Dachshund puppies. And children. And flowers. And leaves
11. Coffee and a talk with a good friend
12. Breakfast and the Sunday morning funnies
13. That space in the pew God has saved for you


-from Coffee and a Dead Alligator to Go

Possibly a re-post

On the 20th of July in ‘69
I was on the Tien Sha peninsula
Probably shooting penicillin
Into some kid’s /ss for gonorrhea

(That too was a moon shot)

And listening to Radio AFVN
Not paying any attention at all
To Kennedys landing on the surface of
Their girlfriends and then leaving them to die

Soon I was sent to see the moon in Cambodia
More bodies floating in the water there

Two feathers lay upon the new-mown lawn
Like aircraft wreckage after a combat pass
Remembrances of violence in the sky
Of death and blood – now only souvenirs

It was as always an unequal fight
The hawk falling upon a smaller bird
With superior stealth and strength and speed
And grappling-hook talons of screaming death

The little fellow made a good show of it
But he didn’t escape:
                                           hawks never lose

Stump Junction...



              “How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm
                          (After They've Seen Paree)?”

                       -a song of the First World War

Speak not to us of Paris by moonlight -
How are they gonna keep us down on the Seine
When we have seen the gaiety of Stump Junction
By the romantic glow of sweet mary jane

The twinkle of gunfire from a .22
As Cousin Eloise potted beer bottles
While her new guy Kolby took a long ////
On her old guy Shane-Boy’s low-rider rims

The county mounties busted up the fight -
Speak not to us of Paris by moonlight

But Yevtushenko...

                      A tribute to Penguin paperbacks

When they
Someday
Take us away
For reading
For thinking
For writing

Those Penguin paperbacks all tattered and taped
Discovered when they empty our pockets
          Will
Be used against us in their courts of law

But Yevtushenko might corrupt our jailers

Fog...

                  From an idea suggested by Pharaohnica

                              And with a tip of that cat to
                           Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost

Invisible to radar, mizzle falls
Itself making the distance invisible
Sandburg said that fog creeps in on little cat feet
But rain-fog is sometimes the entire cat

And if you walk outside into the cat
Beyond the cat, the paws, what will you find
Perhaps, like Schrodinger, the cat is not
But then again, like you, maybe it is

The mystery is lovely, dark, and deep
But we have chores to tend, and they won’t keep

The Farmer to Saint Swithin

O good Saint Swithin, please, to you we pray
On this your high-summer rain-making day

Of your blest kindness send us soft, sweet showers
The kind that gently fall for hours and hours

To heal the sunburnt land of thirst and drought
And nourish the corn that sees the winter out

And if you grant the boon we humbly ask
We’ll work the harder on each rural task:

We’ll ditch and fence and plough, and milk the cow
Share with the widder-folk, and feed the sow

Count out some plantful seeds for poor men’s needs
And tell God’s Mysteries daily on our beads

Why should I do that? I can hear all right
And I can’t see behind my ears anyway
I never use my ears for work or play -
I’ll just give them a washrag-wash tonight

Why is that old woman talkin’ at me
I wasn’t botherin’ that bossy old cow
Ain’t none of her busy beeswax anyhow -
I wish all them women would let me be

Old women asked if I washed behind my ears -
So long ago –
                          I kinda miss the nosy old dears

Four Psalms to be Sung



             “Vespers each day has four psalms to be sung”

                                    -Saint Benedict

Soft Vespers is the evening’s liturgical hour
In the natural rhythm of each life
A song of the ordered world now hymned into
The verses of that Song He sings through us

This hour is given to us when sunbeams slant
Across the floor and up onto the Cross
And there we leave the labors of our day
Our works of hand and heart and mind and soul

Eternal truths chanted by every tongue:
“Vespers each day has four psalms to be sung” 1


1 Saint Benedict’s Rule, Ampleforth Abbey

Mashing Up Book Store Titles Again...


The Boys in the real Harry Potter Wand
The Girls Who Made America Hermione
I Wrote This for You and Only You (sure)
Pontius Pilate recycles the end of time

The Last Pope is hiding out on Oak Island
You are my identity group breaking ground
And it’s all the better if you like trains
For you alone are my identity group

Women writers breaking the mold trailblazing
Second feminist wave decolonizing

For us there is no Stray Dog Cabaret -
Our art burns at the end of a welding rod
And in the muscled turning of a wrench
In heat and sweat against a frozen bolt

Old work trucks parked in an oyster shell lot
Eaten with rust from the chemical air
And past the gates, cracking units, and tanks
A plywood paradise with ice-cold beer

Some of us work the night shift to pay our way
Through college, where we learn that we are

                                                             privileged

The Grand Duke says “f//k”
The Czar says “s//t”
Rasputin is a schmuck
There’s not much more to it

Some seals are applied to signatures and such
Ratifying the documents of abbots and kings
Applied with dignity, a royal touch
From carven images or profiled rings

And then there are seals as toilet bowl rings
Beneath the throne, a regal crown of wax
One of the kingdom’s many needful things
Restraining with dignity certain personal acts

The throne upon which His Majesty, um, sits
Unsealed it came, and gave the plumber royal fits

You’d better think but holy thoughts, old man
Attend to your Bible and your daily prayers
Ignore those bare feet prancing in the sand
This summer day is soft and warm - and theirs

Sweet leggy girls in shorts or flippy skirts
They pause and chat before muscled young lads
It’s not with you that any of them flirts
For you remind them only of their dads!

You’d better think but holy thoughts, old man
And ignore the pretty girls all lithe and tan

(If you can…)

You have mislaid your keys, but that’s okay
I can help you find them, as you found me
Among the wreckage of my scheduled days
Unscheduled nights and, yes, unscheduled dreams

I like the way you lose your keys, the way
You stir your coffee counter-clockwise
And fiddle with the sweetener ‘til it’s right
And take a sip, and love me with your eyes

You have mislaid your keys, but that’s okay -
Before there was you, I had mislaid my life

Perhaps we are always alone, you know
Even when we breathe each other
And touch each other
We’re not each other

And life is probably better this way
For if you find fault with yourself
The blame is one
And not two

It’s much better waking up in the morning
Alone, and not being wrong about anything

At dawn
               thunder rises and lightning falls
A black spot in middle of a road
Closer and closer – a wobbling black spot
A bicyclist unaware of the gods

Slow-pedaling through a nowhere of despair
A corpse, fragments of skin still on its bones
It turns and grins, a crewman on that ship
And in its veins that rotting albatross

At dawn
              grimacing through rotting-teeth breath
A wereling wobbling in existential death

Metallic blue, a star among the weeds
Along the road, pulling against its string
With the little helium left in it
But weak, unable to launch itself again

Some say the downed balloon has had its moment
That its brief joy in a birthday escape
Should be enough for any bright balloon
And now, like wise balloons, must settle down

Oh, no; just give the string a tug!
                                                   More room!
                                                        More air!
There must be another party somewhere!

We are against the death penalty, and so
Of thoughtful caritas one recommends
Life sentences with no chance for parole
(And endless-loop re-runs of Lost in Space)

For

1. The manufacturers of this new computer
2. The famous software company who couldn’t
         Program their ///es out of a pay toilet
3. And the electronics chain who replies
        To emails with “Dear Valued Customer”

And vaporous words which say nothing at all

And now may Olivetti Underwood
Have mercy upon their polluted souls

Cold showers did not work; they only made
Me want to cuddle up with someone warm

God bless Canada

                   Come Laughing Home at Twilight

                           Beaumont-Hamel, 1916

And, O!  Wasn’t he just the Jack the Lad,
A’swellin’ down the Water Street as if –
As if he owned the very paving stones!
He was my beautiful boy, and, sure,
The girls they thought so too: his eyes, his walk;
A man of Newfoundland, my small big man,
Just seventeen, but strong and bold and sure.

Where is he now?  Can you tell me?  Can you?

Don’t tell me he was England’s finest, no –
He was my finest, him and his Da,
His Da, who breathed in sorrow, and was lost,
They say, lost in the fog, among the ice.
But no, he too was killed on the first of July
Only it took him months to cast away,
And drift away, far away, into the mist.

Where is he now?  Can you tell me?  Can you?

I need no Kings nor no Kaisers, no,
Nor no statues with fine words writ on’em,
Nor no flags nor no Last Post today:
I only want to see my men come home,
Come laughing home at twilight, boots all mucky,
An’ me fussin’ at ‘em for bein’ late,
Come laughing home at twilight.

My father painted his dairy barn yellow
Maybe because he found some bargain paint
Then came along the inspector fellow
With his clipboard, and he said that yellow ain’t

Legal, that dairy barn paint had to be white
My father had The Book, and from it he read
That a dairy barn’s color only had to be light
“Well, I’ll find something else,” the inspector said

He found a fly speck on an old cow bell -
May Texas milk inspectors just go to (Newark)

“No doubt they’ll sing in tune after the revolution.”

                         -Kamarovsky in Doctor Zhivago (film)

Kerenskys marshaled in two ordered lines
Unsure exactly how to stand, to pose
Merry banter, backpats, handshakes, and smiles
A show, a glow of Party unity

And then – a hiss, a strike, a spit, a spat
In sixty-second bursts atop the tomb
Comrade against comrade, a free for none
The audience applauds the ****** fun

Who is the Trotsky, and who the Stalin, then;
Who will die in exile, and who will win?

I ate my lunch on a tectonic plate
It drifted away - my dessert is late!

You send the pups outside to play
This so-soft, sunny summer day

The yard is big and safely fenced
A paradise nicely condensed

And there the dogs have cats to chase
Bugs to eat, each other to race

Soft rubber toys to squeak and chew
Bowls of water and dog-food stew

And naps to take beneath oak trees
Tummies up in the soft, soft breeze

And yet –

As soon as you have let them out
Then all they seem to do is pout

Unhappy with their vast estate
They glare at you and seem to hate

They hate the cats, they hate their toys
You have denied them all their joys

They bark and scratch at all the doors
They’re kinda cute – like sophomores

We broke at last the secretive dress code
With an Enigma machine from Singer