Death In Venice

To confront, night, storms, hunger, accidents, rebuffs…
                                        Walt Whitman

The gondolas were crashing into fabled walls,
pale gondoliers were struggling against the dirges.

They say the town is sinking,
they say Emma’s thighs were blinking one last time.

But who can build a seawall out of art,
greater ones have tried and failed?

Poetry is not substitute for the mechanical
extorted the foreigner Da Vinci.

And how could one young girl hold back the tide
when her amphibian God refused to get his feet wet?

The Sadoff Holocaust

[israeli rockets(dead children)israeli rockets]

Bronco Nagurski tackles ShirleyT

That's Our Gang,Baby!

Decent Poem # 9


[place funny chipmunk here]

 



               At East River

                               after may swenson

Tugboat:             Dark manhood
                     looking for scantily clad
                     office girls.

Floating Gulls:      The girls panic.
                     They wonder if it will be
                     boy or girl.   

The Bay:             In their roundness
                     even their belly buttons
                     have relocated like immigrants.

On The Bridge:       The construction workers
                     do not whistle
                     rudely anymore.

A Plane:             Paris, London, Bangkok,
                     Tokyo, only a wing
                     and a prayer away.

Brooklyn:            Reality of greasy, dirty streets,
                     ancient buildings,
                     distant, distant races.

The End Of Man

The rough beast, true to form,
is indeed born in Bethlehem.

It’s slimy belly still digesting
the falcon and the falconer.

It has no need of right or wrong,
and no silly in between.

The center never held,
it was just imagination.

No one was ever innocent,
no one was ever God.

And now indignant desert birds
frolic in the burning sand’s reward.

I Met A Traveller

I met a traveller from a brand new land
who said: My ancestors bought the island cheap,

moved westward into the fertile valleys,
had to murder redskins left and right,

damn savages never cut down any trees,
seemed to live from hand to mouth,

dressed themselves in fur and skins,
we kept slaughtering the bastards

until the Pacific Ocean put a stop to us,
we created this great nation of ours,

the richest country in the world
he said while the bank repossessed his house.

Composed upon Westminster Bridge

   December 17, 2008     

The murky water of the Thames
admired by gullible tourists.

The city wears its garment of morning
made in China.

Ships, towers, domes, theatres
and temples lie.

Big Ben strikes nine into
the gray, gray sky.

Parliament meets high and mighty,
unaware the Empire died long ago.

The very houses seem to struggle with insomnia.
In a small window, a Mexican writes his dissertation.

After Blackburn

The Hispanic girl

                             in the short skirt

sits in the subway car

                                  covers up
as best she can

                                  from the

peering eyes of 
a young punk

old men

young men

envious married women
and me

I count her attributes

dark thighs,                perky breasts


I had already assessed her derrière as ample

                            before she sat down


just now with a glance
             she has tried to sacrifice her own race,

we come out of the tunnel
                                  
                                 into Brooklyn Heights,

have I missed my stop
         
                   I say to myself 
loud enough for her to hear,

the young punk glares at me
                  not realizing we are equals

Tidbits from my weekend…

Read half of The Savage Detectives. Couldn’t stomach
the crap anymore. North American critics are always such
suckers for Third World writers. But, this rant is not about that.
It's about the new movie The Day The Earth Stood Still.
Terrible shit,really. It’s kind of a cross between Star Man
and TDTESS. Certainly Star Man is a much better movie
than this new one. With as many new tricks and new tech
developed since 1951, you’d think they coulda done better.

The premise of both movies is that man is a threat to the
surrounding planetary civilizations. Wink. In 59 years
of trying to destroy himself ( between each movie) he ain’t
succeeded yet. What a lousy species.

Found nothing in the whole damn movie that stood out,
or stood still. The two Klaatus are about the same, both
get to know humans and change their minds about des-
troying the human race. Luckily, neither Klaatu had to
get to know the human race by interacting with poets.
That would have been the pits, huh? Also saw Gran
Torino with Clint Eastwood in a predictable but better
entertainment than TDTESS. Who woulda thunk it that
Clint would arrive here from being Rowdy Yates in
Rawhide. Oh, yeah, and before I forget, that damn robot
in the new movie is horrible, poor Gort, I could have
made a better robot with the rubber from an inner tube
off a bicycle. Actually, this new Earth stole the concept
of the donor body from Star Man,except that in Earth
there is no girl in panties.

This Ain’t Your Abuela’s Llorona

The house waits patiently for La Llorona
with the red stain of periwinkle.

The floating, little socks in the blue arroyo
now quite yellow.

La Llorona’s drunk husband
knocks over beer bottles in green haste.

He slaps her, kicks her, fucks her,
but soon he’ll don the purple.

What color have I left out,
she screams along the flooded dark arroyo,

pulling at her wet, black hair
with her bloody, brown hands.

The Cuban Sylvia Plath

The Cuban Sylvia Plath joined the villagers
dancing and stamping incognito.

Her Communist Manifesto and her copy
of Mein Kampf hidden in her poetry library.

Once she walked in on her Daddy and Mommy
having sex with Karl.

It was like allowing a panzer division
to run over a little girl over and over again.

The vampires drank her blood
and spit it out all over Miami.

The Cuban Sylvia Plath was in love with Che,
but Che only had eyes for Olivia.

For The Ice Princess

Your burnt mouth smiling on the ice,
the crowd is chanting Beatle songs.

On the other side of the globe,
a yeti girl struggles to free granite.

Of course she knows the Indian subcontinent
will slam into Asia.

What do you take her for?
You kiss me with water,

you drape me with water.
How do you get sweeter and prosper?

I have carved up my language,
have let it rot---and still nothing.

Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds

A black girl’s lips become a diminutive of red
when she spreads her wings:

The lions and their prey
have run away,

grasslands ebb and flow from the foothills,
a snow-capped mountain triggers the advance.

What brought this on,
you ask matter-of-factly?

By now the wind has tasted of the auger,
and spills dust in your face.

We have sex in front of the children,
your moans Australopithecus put them to sleep.

Victor Jara, Forgive Us Our Trespasses

They crushed his hands in the stadium,
there was silence in Santiago.

Silence, the likes of which had never been heard before.
There was no wind at windy Isla Negra.

Down at the tip of Chile,
the penguins wore only black.

There was no such instrument called guitar.
The military had confiscated all the wood.

The dictator had the people wash his balls.
But poetry and song can only vomit so much.

Today the crowds invent their own history,
one so beautiful and white as milk---

you’d think that cows
were never slaughtered.

Sleepy Little Town

One of the first Mexican-American cops in this little town,
Joe Carrillo, was shot on Court Street,

near the intersection where the last horse-shoeing place
once stood.

They used to hang Negroes and Mexicans from that oak tree
by Central Park which now honors Juan Seguin.

Nearby, some asshole raped and killed
that young girl during Freedom Fiesta.

On Austin Street, some punks picked up mentally-handicapped Martin,
and sodomized him with a broomstick.

New arrivals carjacked an old white lady
in front of the public library on the right side town.

It’s a boring, sleepy little town
which only wakes up for nightmares.