angry bards, text

angry bards in battle crying
more vehemence than melody
eardrums punctured by the icepicks of our days
quotidian assaults of capital and dumbshow plays
a broken trumpet in the night
defiant globes of sound
heralding the light

angry bards

reading from "dispatches from the frontal lobe"

still life with absent portrait

3 Political Poems

atv army in utah, mother's day

o mother i sorrow at
your rape.  your violation.
a thousand bully boys
on atvs, headpiece filled
with big-gulp oxy-
addled rush incontinence

they will be the death of us
a thousand thousand
children-pigs, armed inciting
flailing fatboy tantrums
reciting constitution mis-
quotation backward crapping
anal leakage lies in giant
jingo boxer flags


they're missing you mother:
spoiling for each other's love.

or a fight.

tragedy/comedy sonnet

my introduction to your life
was tragedy.  the deaths
of all those men.
1980.  you were all so thin.

a tragedy ends in death
(or ronald reagan).  who
could have seen the comedy
coming, 30 years from then?

two men walking
down the aisle, promising
impossibilities: that life
could be happy.  a comedy ends

in marriage.  & now
everything begins.

nostalgia sunshine poem for steve sterling

Greece

greece

give us your rubble     give us
your fallen columns & your
beaches     give us your wine-dark
blood & your fated old women
tossed like doves' divining entrails
to the street.

give the haunches of your muses
to our grinning usurers.  they will
usurer them good.

you began this satyr play
3,000 years ago. now your ships
are lost & your wanderers
will never find their home.