-cheers, gl

-cheers, GL

deck used now for coasters

& bookmarks.  A stay in the course

of days.  A jack of spades as

signpost, directions despite the

mathematical certainty.

The closest of Jupiter’s moons spills

magma gained solely through gravity

& compression.

As if spandex were enough.

The man on stage splitting the 32-20 blues like

an ingrown hair knows the truth of it,

& wears it like scar tissue, calloused

like volcanic ash.

_________________________________

2.

The executioner left the gallows when he found

Staggolee’s neck unbroken despite

the hanging.  Mars is a dead planet though

its valleys belie a narrative

as yet untold.  Patton

was killed in a jeep driving 10 miles an hour.

Isolated instances,

perhaps, but the certainty

of history.  The collection of facts nothing

more than the building of a case

already won.

Economists claim that abortion

reduces crime thus the church demands

humanity at the expense

of humanity.  All the better to sing hymns

for an eternity in his name, unless

you get that name

wrong.  There can be

no mistaking

certainty.

_____________________________________

3.

Marx claimed All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, as if

capitalism were merely matter like

the rest of us.  He foresaw and underestimated

the efficiency in our ability to compromise

one another, a flaw in his humanity.  The blues

does not make the same mistake.

You lock a man out of his house,

he breaks down the door.  You stop loving a man, he tries

your sister.  An atmosphere is like skin, thus pierced

altogether pelted with rock enough to scar

the surface.  The defining nature inside us &

the universe the card unturned

& full of gamble.

_____________________________________

4.

Summer has broken & with it

a burning sphere

backlit now upon the green felt

of the stars & their whirling suites of

worth.  Fall has set his foot in

the doorstop and denies closure,

the expected intruder still

yet to deal.

My son scored a goal yesterday

the ball curling inside the far post

like mathematics expects

while my dog barks into the darkness

at what she doesn’t know.

-BT

Cheers, GL

Elephant Doppelganger/acrylic on wood:

in London tonight that neither Adam

Smith or Karl Marx prepared us

for.  And lessons are a thing without

grace or humor or

sedatives.  And it will be publically denounced,

the riots, as some youth experiment

gone awry, some angry gangs

(since loner won’t work), some cautionary

tale on minority entitlement.

The one-sided missive will be

in print, in your face

today and tomorrow and to when it loses interest

when the water-canons open up

and the gangs have lost the fire to put out the water

and go into hiding, back where they came from the cracked wall

public housing, the welfare entitled to them from grandfathers

who fought for you (and you for them?)

we will see who

believes.  The Molotov

Cocktail that smashes the window

And sets alight the floorboards

so tonight I may see

the animal boy

with no agenda no endgame

but to tantrum

as a diamond-ringed woman

looks over the bull’s balls on a menu

somewhere in Montana.

China is increasing its baby food demand by twenty-one percent.

I like my supermarkets to stay open.

I like my electricity to work.

I tolerate tea baggers patronizing places like “The Anvil”

where they can talk about UFOs and Jesus

and the stupid race we are

bashing down its own walls

the bureaucracy that ideology beheads

the light under our asses, in our holes

everythingterrifying

and the only thing

that matters, bends us over

in sympathy like the incestuous uncle

whose inheritance we will never see

like a Fitzgerald novel we torment ourselves in

again and again.

But that is London.

Our grandfathers did things they never told us about

to get into and through

the depression, and here we are

complaining about bankruptcy

and spoiled promise.  America

is in the steel bolts of skyscrapers

and the grease of classic cars.  Our

bitching is a disservice to every

ancestor we never liked.  Every

hero we failed.

Yet they riot in London.

Not here, in America.

Here, we are too obese with the process of food

to walk up subway steps.

We have enough to eat, even if it comes fast.

We have places to stay even if we haven’t made a payment in two years.

And we look like what’s in magazines.

There is a spell among the poor in America

There is a spell among the poor in America

there is something stirring

burn down the satellite feeds

burn down the mansions of stone walls, of the ones that control your contentment

and squeeze out what you owe them, the “man” we sing songs of

and fear.  Perhaps we would riot under these lines

for something at the end of all the destruction and murder and death and rape and pillaging of the electronic stores for worthless plasma televisions , the ipad between our legs, dripping want, want, WANT

for an endgame that burns out of control

in London

and plays out the hand that we, the masses of desperation

have no hope in taking over anymore. It’s exactly what you want to hear.

And exactly what you won’t do.

1984 came and went but Orwell

got it wrong

they don’t need to watch over us without us knowing

we give it away freely

for the newest cell phone. We don’t need to be fooled again.

We are the fools everlasting.

This is about London,

and here, and the world.

The connections therein and

the xenophobes arrogantly

focusing on borders.

Spare the rod, spoil the child

Spare the rod, spoil the child

We are the spoiled children.

They are rioting in London.

We are the global village.  Beware the global village.

-EE

of sun, or vice versa, the dancing girls

snoring as light unwrinkles the

landscape like sight itself.  The digging

must have taken a sum of effort,

hours lost

to a hole.

A whole world in the digging

up of rainlessness

this week, this month

this time of year

overflowing the open doors of the village

medicine man

while bones like fossils unearthed

for the nonbelievers

the uninitiated

the naïve and otherwise

occupied. Each available

to an ordinary morning,

shaving and shitting.

And the farmers, and the merchants and migrants

with their arms folded over their chests

and rivals of the men who would change you

and the faced down women, who one day

a time ago, dreamt of being of noble blood

bending over the low tide for mussels.

And now the digging continues

a modern excavation of bullet holed bodies.

Nothing available

to redeem anyone.

And so they swallowed their sighs in

regret and pulled loose what came. They

sung heartful upon the anonymous

with shame soulbent for the loved ones

missing. Some stopped and bent

choking in tearful lament for

a ring recognized. But always more

hands, more rings.

And the exhaustion of the bodies with badges

digging on, thinking to find the devil itself

into the rabbit hole

as medicine men shake rattles to stop the bodies from showing

down deeper they dig.

How many are buried into the abyss

generations of the abyss

without a Moses or Clint Eastwood to save them?

Not the Yanks dropping bombs over walls.

And just maybe the raids that dig the holes

come from foreign fingers and cash and sex and holes.

Each person pulled loose with a lostness

of past and identity like stray paragraphs

without the context of what surrounds them.

It is nonsense, each of them thinks but

somehow biblical, as if the seen world

were replaced by something akin to

Lucifer’s playground as the sun beats down

upon the topsoil.

He used to think tribal existence was wiped out with Manifest Destiny

and somehow, as he circles the widening gap in the earth

his gps to headquarters, he thinks, “I am part of a tribe too.”

And thus spited the land, spited everything he was against,

what he was for, because it made no difference to damn any god

for the mass graves that bed the planet

308 this time

279 in Durango

116 in Matamoros

227 in Srebrenica

7000 and plus and plus and plus and plus

In Mabanza

and each of us

the gift of moonlight and sunrise and pig scraps.

Some swollen light

something given back, offered to the earth

amid the digging of these

modern excavations.

-EE

For we are war starters
War fighters
War enablers
War finishers

I sing to love of women
To love of men
Within rain stamps on city gardens
flooded fields along the Mississippi

And sitting at cafe
In these ever times of warring
When our plans are on hold
Houses falling
Bread too expensive to buy
Millions of brothers and sisters out of work
A million more eventually returning from war
Some of them in pieces, parts

Our plans are on hold too
With some of our insides
Age and crumble
Weight of generations
taxes
We too pay for war, at home

And far away from war
Is where I stop on the avenues
In the center of New York
And embrace my warrior brethren
Making killing their business
Mixing peace with the paper business
We work out on the Street

Singing around the fire, together

–Tobias Deehan