A Good Mourning

 .
It's no wonder I write so many
aubades (self-styled), staying
up like I do, till morning and
beyond, two, three, four nights
every week; until I'm weak,
and sick as well, with an exhaustion
not the least bit tired; but just plain ...
uncut awful; like snorting No-Doz
at 8:00 AM, somewhere along the
dirty corridor, Delaware, say,
tucked up tight beneath an interstate
on the narrow ledge above the crotch
it makes with the crossing roadway;
there's an acid bite you may or
may not recall, to the urine of the
slowly dying, and you aren't ready
to lie down yet (you've still got
standards, hey, old boy?) amidst
the pigeon shit and broken glass,
the discarded empty pints of
vodka, whiskey, rotgut wine, and
limp and crackling underfoot,
the drying condoms, coming from
god knows where. but furthest
beyond weird is the single shoes,
scores of them, abandoned, none
with mates. what the hell?
It looks like a lonely lot, my friend,
and can feel like you're having
your extremities singed away with
a rusting but serviceable
curling iron, and sometimes,
quite naturally, you (like anyone)
can get your eyes plucked out
with a red-hot rod (this to see if
you're paying attention). and all the
while you remain staid, unmoved,
erect; upright, that is, as if you were
fifteen, always fifteen, always on
the money, and your whole life coming,
and coming still more; always keeping
on with it, always more coming, as if
it will keep it up until you're quite
dead, which could come soon.

Heart

Heart-
...............for James Davis
.
like, and not so much, in-house;
as much much more: the homie,
never so home in his swank abode,
his cush-crazy comfort crib, as when
loosed on the freed land, empty-handed,
beneath a mythic moon. Night moves
turning the ghost-white flora blue, ...
tucked in hard by a prairie named
Payne's. And don't we know it now,
know just what they meant, and who
they meant it for; it's only all too
well we know, just who got hurt,
and how that went, as well as
who might be saved. And fuck all
and hell no, we ain't forgetting
where and when, nor who
the red deer ran from, spitting
a blood-flecked froth, and breaking
legs of glass, all the night long,
from here to home.

Drughounds of the Silver Basking Buddha

the SBB being a small  organization, one so demanding
in its designated qualifying talents, that no one member
is likely to even know any other, or if they do, they
little suspect that their everyday boon companion,

as well, like themselves, is an inveterate bounder
of the heaving main, a spirit quite as discriminating
as they, yet never would neither ever know it
in the other, though they pull quite side by side;

and the juxtaposed disacquaintance between them
is probably due mostly to this salient accompanying
indisputable fact: the more nuanced the strategy
one employs for getting at the heart of things,

the more likely it is that that activity will subsume
one's entire attention and mentational faculties,
if to do it well; moreover such missions, those consisting
mainly of paying very close attention are nearly

always conducted completely in silence, alone,
and utterly without any sort of distraction.
All to say, and what this then means is: it's
not the kind of thing you talk about, anyway,

things you actually take seriously, would be
willing to die for, say, these life-extending
heirlooms passed down to us, intact and
disguised in the homily of our native tongue.