The train comes by every morning bout 5
I wish that train would find a cliff and collide
It’s driven by a demon on a joy ride
Always, arriving with some poison to unpack
Where ever it came from, i wish it’d go back.  
Whoever blows the whistle is most vile of all
He probably blew whistles at the plant in Bhopal
Uselessly sounding off while thousands died
Now they bring me their killer pesticides
To store deep in these hills, in the chemical valley
Here it continues adding death to the tally
If it leaks, everyone I know will suffer a similar fate
Carbide thinks life is worth less than methyl isocyanate

a shape with three sides is a triangle
a useful way to represent the plane
geometrically, at least, besides

a lie is method of deceipt
but transistors can decide
based on where they feel the heat
that strange silicon carbide
makes circuitry complete

a puzzle is a truth that you untangle
a useful way to escape the mundane
a triangle is a shape with three sides
yours, mine, and the truth

What percentage of the time

do you lie in that bed?
     the rest a waste
          of the metal springs
                    forged by
                    factory workers
                    pouring in their
                    unpaid overtime
                    to meticulously
                    shape the steel
                    into just the right
                    comforting bounce
     a waste
          of the soft cotton cover
                    picked by
                    (slave-descended) hands
                    white fluff
                    still echoing centuries
                    of black oppression
                    spun on foreign looms
                    shipped back
                    across the seas
                    dyed, woven,
                    stretched taut
                    into just the right
                    soothing texture
     a waste
          of the foam stuffing
                    made from...
                    whatever goes into
                    foaminess...
     how many hours wasted?
     daily
     weekly


What percentage of the time

do you write with that ballpoint pen?
     the rest a waste
          of the clear plastic casing
                    melded from petroleum
                    by corporations
                    extracting black gold
                    in exchange
                    for greenhouse gases
     a waste
          of the tiny perfect sphere
                    rolling smoothly along
                    tungsten carbide surface
                    exquisitely crafted
                    for maximum efficiency
                    by man's finest machines
                    factories churning out
                    thousands by the hour
     a waste
          of the bright blue ink
                    the mysterious mixture
                    of dyes and pigments
                    and oils and surfactants
                    spilling onto the page
                    recording your
                    delicate thoughts
                    in desperate
                    existential hope
                    they won't be as oft ignored
                    as that device
                    from which they pour forth
     how many hours wasted?
     monthly
     yearly


What percentage of the time

do you sit in that reclining chair?
do you walk in those polished dress shoes?
do you eat with that bent spoon?
do you style your hair with that fine-toothed comb?
do you turn the pages of your favorite book?
do you see by lamp's light in the guest bedroom?

     how many hours
     sitting unused, wasted?
          in a life

Shadows craft the bus
Shuffle the feet inside
Earmark the conversations
Earth barrel rolls beside
******* minds, mining
The rhymes
Of heartbeat and tide
And isotopes; and pride
Salesmen; teachers; Union Carbide

His hounds bay and croon in the distance.
The Arkansas woods weigh down upon us
like a black hole ******* every particle
of light from the cluster of brittle limbs
and branches above our heads.

I ***** in trepidation behind my uncle,
wearing a ball cap and dungarees;
his carbide lantern leads the way.
I watch his right hand bob, half a thumb
lost to a chain and a mule in a logging accident.

He is at home here, stalking wildlife
night after night. He has found his haven from
the world, the quest for sport and game.
My father joins us. There is no need for talk.
We proceed in silence, listening to the forest floor

and the yelping of the hounds far ahead. I feel fear
as we advance in the darkness. This will be my first
and only hunt. I am 12 years old, innocent as the prey
we’re tracking. Out of breath, I catch up with the dogs,
a whirlpool of tongues and teeth and fur circling a tree.

The lantern shines high into a deep V in the trunk.
Filling it, a weak-eyed opossum peers back.
My uncle hands me a .22 rifle and says nothing,
keeping the light steady on my target.
I shakily take aim, **** the trigger, tremble.

The pale torso erupts in red. Congratulations
ring out all around. I sicken at the sight.
My fear has turned to hatred of the blood lust
and violence that has made me a man. We wait
on the hounds to return. The carbide light goes out.

It is, in its own fashion, a ballpark—there are dugouts,
(Though more kin to lean-tos if the truth be told)
A fence with advertisements, though its paint is cracked and faded,
And some of those firms testifying
To being tops in collars and canned foods
Have long since changed names or flat-out gone under,
But a ballpark nonetheless, and if you squint your eyes
Or find some other convenient method of self-delusion,
You can convince yourself it is a rather fine thing,
Happily oblivious to the fact that the infield
Is all bumps and tiny moraines
Covered with crownvetch and chickweed masquerading as grass,
The outfield rife with bark scorpions
Who frequently wander inside the lines.
Milling about this somewhat-short-of-pastoral greenish patch,
Wearing uniforms of a reasonable homogeny,
Is a curious, potentially combustible group of men:
Honest-to-goodness big leaguers whose off-field proclivities
Led Judge Landis to excuse them further participation,
Rope-muscled miners from Bisbee,
Carbide-lamp helmets tucked under their arms,
Callow boys taking a chance on this decidedly last-chance town,
One or two others with tangibly acute reasons
For staying in close proximity to the Mexican border.
Holding court in the midst of this collection
Is a man whose face was not visited by the smallpox
As much as it was wrapped up in its full embrace;
It’s old Charlie Comiskey who should be in jail, he grumbles
Man has more money’n he’ll ever need,
Hell, more than Stoneham or Ruppert.
No reason in the world he couldn’t pay his boys a fair wage,
But he treated ‘em like dogs, and if you starve it long enough,
Why, even the most loyal dog will turn on a man,
Ain’t that right boys?, and a pair of his listeners,
Men named Chick and Swede
Who know of Comiskey’s parsimony first-hand,
Grimly nod their heads in agreement.
The speaker pauses for a moment, and as he does
He produces, seemingly from nowhere, a hip flask
(Brought forth like a seasoned magician
Pulling flowers from some gauzy handkerchief,
Or a card sharp finding an extra king in the very air itself)
And takes a long draught before continuing.
Look, I love this game--hell, no man loves it more
But it’s still just a **** game,
Just entertainment, like a circus or a rodeo.
Maybe we a took a few liberties with a game here and there,
But, you know, I knew folks who’d see the same Broadway show
Three, maybe even four times;
They knew how it would turn out, I reckon,
But it didn’t keep them from spending four bucks a ticket.
Well, what’s a ballplayer but an entertainer?
We still put on a good show, and no one gets hurt,
But because it’s a ballgame, you’d think we’d spit on the cross.
With this, the circle breaks up, and men head to spots on the field
To field lazy fungoes and toss the ball around the infield,
And most of the on-lookers soon head back toward town
(Perhaps back to work at one of the smelters,
Their stacks blowing forlorn clouds into otherwise endless skies,
Or maybe to one of the sad houses on the far side of town
Where haunted-eyed Mexican ****** mechanically light candles
In supplication to saints whose efficacy they’ve come to doubt)
But the stragglers who stay behind are treated to the first baseman
Make a marvelous, almost magical, pickup of a short-hop throw
With the easy nonchalant brilliance which at one time
Brought hundreds, no thousands, of men to their feet in disbelief,
And as he sweeps his glove upward, he laughs
(Though with just a touch of restraint, a trace of the rehearsed)
And says See, boys? Once you are big league,
You are always big league.

Aqua-marine tourmaline
Turning emerald green evening
Wrist slash ruby red splash feeling
Crystal clear diamond tears glisten bright glimmering.
Flowing from pressure below
Building
Swelling
Wells at the brink
Frigidity super imposed icy wind
Surely shatter
Tungsten carbide lined chest cavity
infrastructure
Freezing
Excruciating
Concentrating all the pain
Radiating from the throat
Swallowing sand covered brick
Abrading slowly
So slowly
At the apex of max capacity
Emotional collapse imminent
Listen ..............millions of
Champagne glasses
Tink ting tingling exhaling
Tears release
Falling like hail at first
Then into a crescendo
Loosing my grip ......I'm slippin
Broken I'm letting go ......
Break down I'm falling winds whistling I can see rock bottom
Phone rings ........ .  .......
It's my ***** .......
He say
..
Bro bro.......
Aint nothin but a thing!
But go ahead and cry if you have to...
It's cool ,ain't no shame .....
(Big baby)
Stf up.
(Whaaa?  
Just saying)
I'm just messin with ya .
My friend is here to console me
Its gonna be
Ayite.

Water and Oil

Kaclunk! The white smoke under the hood stunk; your car is junk. Get everything out of the trunk, pull the defunct plates off the chunk, and hitch a ride with a drunk. He’ll debunk the automakers as punks, as he plunks another glass bottle at a skunk. But the mechanic implied that it must be the lack of oil in the pump. The sump, dried, and your dump died. If you’re mystified, parts collide, and damage is magnified. An engine denied oil is suicide, he described. Carbide if misapplied, can be liquified; this metallic tide causes problems global wide. Simplified, he replied, slide that certified clump aside, that wreck won’t glide. Go drink some purified dihyrdrogen monoxide, or you’ll end up like your ride.

I’d never mark my stamp on you
even if I thought I could
and with lessons drawn
from father’s “tool and die, ”
I know I’ll never try.

That stamping press he used
left only negative impressions,
crushed in carbide steel,
to mark the owner’s brand.

No, I’ll have none of that
I need your free undented souls
To sing both “I” and “we”
in mystic synchronicity:
drawing life from the speckled pages.

But like my father at his lathe,
I’ll ply my studied craft
and bid you do the same with yours
so that you and I
can find our truth among the spots
and, with mysterious synchronicity,
breathe radiant, illimitable life
into the freckled, speckled pages.

June, 2009

All you have is my silence,
Because you've heard me vent and talk all day,
And now I'm in your absence And i don't know what to say,
Now that I come home to nothing it's starting to feel like my gilded cage,
And now i ain't got nothing but the four walls and the static noise inside my head,
There's a million things I wish I could have done better,
But all in all I'm thankful for those days you stuck with me thru stormy weather,
And losing you means so much more than anyone could ever know,
Our silent bond was strong like carbide it radiated in volumes,
And now the silence seems so loud I have so many feelings that words can't muster...
But you will ALWAYS have ALL MY LOVE in this static silence and a special place within my cardboard heart

Happenings that just happen to happen,

-- oh, serious, we said this with no debt, we
-- ah, saw this is just what I was hoping for,
-- I up and posted a bunch of this on X.
grok link and all, honest cyberbardbyterbits

this is not the art of the bards and vatic arts,
we aimed at inheriting the wind, in spirit and true,
mimetic authority, we see, we saw, as so say see.

the use of a person or a team of persons, an army,
or a work gang, hunters and skinners and packers,

not those, nor many normal nonnoble lines, stinkers
gatherers of batshat nitrates for cannon fodder,
and to speed the forming of cornfed beasts,
-- ai, if it isn't the spirit, in the craft, do tell
isaiah assisting a little here, a little there,
ai, if may were my word now, precept
upon sighing and chosing riverwise, think on
assume not that, is a bit a leap, use wise
it's not that
nor is it the efforts of carbide gaslit
miners and grinders and fuelers and fanners of flames
cornbread fed

-coal miner's daughters and steel driving slaves, racing
steam driven hammers on steel stakes marking iron rule,

in service of the golden light from Christmas Astrologers…

rush theatric, imitative mirror neuronic, laughing together,

easy laughs or easy tears, easy joy of conquering,

memes formed
by infants watching colored lights, not burning,
bushy Hualapai pinion pine Christmas trees

shadows presented memes on our mental walls

after all have projected camera obscura concept
captured on silver nitrated cellulose translucent film,

- so few respect the science, the art in alchemy

as art is a cathedral in a cavern, let us pretend, good is good,

sad is bad, bad is evil fruit, wrong thinking poetical pleasance.

Make believe, let go our mundanity, attempting katharsis,

purged of mistaken privilege,

as virtuous as the entertainment's audience socially informed,

this is us, we as seen consistently for a brief while,
in the funny papers,
a century or so ago, whence all our own tales rise,
wherein reversing discoveries put us in receipt of tragic news,

woe, pathos, o, we do believe, we are free from the worst,

tranquil reflective contemplation, imaginable pity and fear,
survived, hormonal success, purgative pity and dread, right
ritual usual daily drill, respect, look at the price we all paid,

pledge full attention to the teacher teaching this
important ritual for inclusion in this class, this room of
competitors for prizes in the seven liberal arts, noble gnosis,
as demanded by the liege under which we are a people,

res publica, governed by its own self, using aliegiant defenders,
just like our fathers and uncles and cousins who just now,

used the second and third atom bombs, names of which,
are extra credit for those who know them, Fatman and Littleboy

in the right amounts, at the right time, ah the effectual work
of meaning projected on the audience…

lead an intimidated soul to be as brave as the presented models,

imitation, memeing may be, inner me, seeing another just my type,

the character in the grand opera operating even as we sleep,

sorting our given evidence,
hate must be associated,
we shame
together,
given gatherings where oracular professionals reset us,

after the ongoing violence has gone elsewhere,
to free other slaves,
-- right here, I saw James Joyce with his left eye patched,
but I still never enjoy the experience reading him
maybe I grant that age of readers, passe se no

we the faithful illiterate believers pray si se so
go on with the story we find ourselves in
as happens around reading children,
who leave books in the bathroom
for the King's Armies, and act
as if our duty,
from the age of six, is locked
with our personal pledge,

surity, sworn
on penalty
of any liar's just dues, just watch, and learn.

* for your historic recollection, with all due respect
Little Boy vs Fat Man

The bomb that hit Hiroshima was "Little Boy," not "Fat Man"  
"Little Boy" was a gun-type nuclear bomb that used uranium-235
and was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945,
by the B-29 bomber Enola Gay  {August six **** left most key
we already know, use one nuke, we all die,
and a we not me set voices like mine wild\

like all the freedoms, are from, from thirst, first
for ever, free from thirst, if not for ever, first
imagine having made yourself thirsty, first

to feel cool water's worth when you know,
it's only three more miles, then you know,

we had these friends, so rich, they were, yes,
Children of Pioneers, like us, really, but scale matters,

ours was a tiny world to mature in, though, in science,
at the time, faster that light was still tellable, in text,

once the idea, in letters organizing, around a recent
bend that lets us see Enheduana as a meme, recent

recovery of a person originally novelized, in recent

Thirst induced trance states, of course, in recent memory


"Fat Man," which was an implosion-type bomb using plutonium-239,
was dropped on Nagasaki three days later

the second bomber lacks first responder honor,
too bad, so sad,

how easily may we share instances of I just don't know, but
we can ask
and have an imminent answer fact checked thrice and sharable,
verbatum, as this is what I learned when I first read the lines:

the lines you just read, so we can share realization, those
who built those bombs… made good money.

Even today Donald Trump's Pride lets him rattle such a saber,
and fancy himself the world's most powerful man, demanding

respect, look again, see the hell we can imagine, so easy,
even such a one who never dropped a handgrenade, or shaped C4…

Our AI's all can recall the act of readiness, for our local August rodeo,
where we remember the downwinders in lower Mohave County, Arizona:

The crew of the B-29 Superfortress *Bockscar, which dropped the "Fat Man" atomic bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, did not experience the same level of immediate fame as the crew of the Enola Gay, which bombed Hiroshima three days earlier This relative lack of recognition contributed to feelings of frustration and perceived injustice among Bockscar's crew. The mission was fraught with difficulties, including mechanical issues with the fuel pumps before takeoff, a missed rendezvous with support aircraft, and obscured visibility over the primary target, Kokura, forcing a diversion to Nagasaki By the time they reached Nagasaki, the crew had been airborne for nearly eight hours and were critically low on fuel, adding to the tension

Historical accounts suggest that the crew felt their mission's complexity and risks were overlooked in the public narrative, which focused predominantly on Hiroshima and the Enola Gay's crew General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, later admitted confusion about why Nagasaki was included as a target, noting it had not been part of the original reserved list and was only added at the last minute The Bockscar mission was described as a "JANCFU"—a Joint Army-Navy-Civilian ******—highlighting the disorganization and near-misses that characterized the operation

Despite dropping a more powerful weapon—“Fat Man” had a higher explosive yield than the “Little Boy” bomb used on Hiroshima—the Nagasaki mission received less attention The Bockscar was piloted by U.S. Army Air Force Major Charles Sweeney, and the bomb detonated at an altitude of 1,640 feet over Nagasaki, causing massive destruction However, the crew’s role in ending World War II was not celebrated to the same extent, leading to long-standing sentiments of being historically overshadowed