Role Call
Later for you, paratrooper.
The dawn just ate your target.
Another war will crop up before nightfall.
Otherwise, what will we do with our tanks?
Somewhere, another terrorist is born.
And a schoolkid shaves his head, anticipating.
Tavern Talk (1998)
We all elbowed up to the bar,
thinking Sunday/Monday
in a Tuesday kind of way.
On the t.v. came another launching.
Puppets on the railing
gave us shoeshines.
Everyone was thinking entertainment.
We had many colonies to dream of.
All the while the bottles danced with dust.
Rusty old men climbed inside the jukebox.
Sounded like an earthquake stirring pinballs.
Acolytes were washing hands in draft beer.
Someone passed a monkey begging peanuts.
"Witness the dawn," a paranoiac whispered.
And around us, the night crumbled.
Lewd Division
At first there was amorous addition,
soon followed by sexual subtraction.
And then came perverse multiplication,
leading naturally to lewd division.
Some drew the line at pornographic calculus,
after struggling through hot geometry,
Then they put away their slide rules and protractors
and went off on a tangent about the offensive nature
of numbers, how gross they found pi r squared,
and the first time they saw isosceles
in the hypotenuse position. The remainder
is a cube root, to be sure.
Death Decks Out (1999)
Death decks out in painful forms,
staggered hours and waiting lines,
fighting foul earth winds and storms,
searching for more grand designs.
Man is fruitless, funny, hollow,
trapped inside a shell of time.
Leaders fall and nations follow.
Death alone can solve the rhyme.
Tick on, clock with broken hands.
Comfort ages. Sorrow stands.
Hope eternal, spring anew,
as we bid our time adieu.
Push a button for a vision.
Drop a coin into a slot.
Man approaches his decision.
Time is slow but death is not.
Dig ye deep and dig ye plenty.
No one knows his length of stay.
Some bow out at ten or twenty.
Others crawl toward judgement day.
Turntable Earth
A pit full of waxed nostalgia
awaited the takers of sound,
a groove in the earth like a natural birth,
all the needles gone deep underground.
When a feathery wisp like a dancer
sifted up from the earth to the sky,
a spattering rain, a heartbeat in pain,
etched a music that made the world cry.
And the slow dance of wind that soon followed
brought on night which swept feeling away.
When the curtain of dawn opened up its bright yawn,
there arose the song of a new day.