Skinny as a rail

But inside I’m bursting

I guess every writer

Is pregnant and nursing

Two scripts on my hips

And three straggling behind

All needing rewrites

My agent whines

Is this how to be prosperous? 

Well encapsled in blubber?

Cause if another script calls

I'll probably just wear a rubber

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You write like a drunk

three gins in

Where small talk unravels

And truth begins

But there’s a tightrope to walk

And no net to save

And If you fall

You’ll be buried in a maudlin grave

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NECK TO NECK AND FACE TO FACE

GRACE

DANCED WITH A CANEBRAKE RATTLESNAKE

WHILE RATS AND CHIPMUNKS AND RABBITS AND MICE

WATCHED FROM THE RAFTERS ON SATURDAY NIGHT

NOW

IT SAYS IN MARK THAT THE SPIRITUALLY FIT

CAN TAKE UP SERPENTS AND NOT GET BIT

BUT IVE READ THE GOOD BOOK AND NOWHERE DOES IT SAY

THAT WITH VIPERS YOU TANGO THE NIGHT AWAY

STILL SHE MAMBOED WITH MAMBAS

D...

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All my momma's dogs died fat and ugly

She loved to spoil them

She loved to spoil me too

There's a certain damage done

When you're momma's only son

And every sins forgiven

Before it is begun.

So now I  simply live inside my fiction

If I'm writing about thieves, I steal candy bars

If I'm writing about a foreigner I change my diction

If I'm writing about love

I just s...

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It took me a while to be friends with your poem

At first, I thought she was stuck-up

But I asked her to dance seven or eight times

And I found her rhythm

And she opened up

Sometimes the deeper ones don’t come easy

Anyways the night is young

And so am I

And there are so many complicated needy poems still to unravel 

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Man I didn’t get a lot accomplished today.

I’m not moving towards my goals like I wanted too.

You call this fresh?

No you shut the fuck up!

Take Notes…It’s all funny.

Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

I’d love to but I am married.

I possess the qualities needed to be extremely successful.

I before e except after c

The Buddha was right.

D...

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You should have dropped your seeds farther

I tell Big Daddy pine at the edge of the forrest

In whose shade grow five saplings.

Maybe bribed a squirrel to carry your nuts to that open space …

I point

Hell, I’ve been quarantined with my teen age daughter for six months now and I’m about to lose my fucking mind.

Besides your kids aren’t going anywhere...

No graduation ceremonies ...

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My fifteen minutes of fame 

will be spread across all the accidental photographs 

I‘ve sauntered into 

There I am in the back of your shot at the Lincoln Memorial

Or behind your family at New Smyrna beach…

Or at your wedding party at the Chateau

I’m the one with the rakish hat with the brim twisted up

And the silly smile

Like an eager extra on a movie set

trying to catch...

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I met him at the edge of the forest

where he told me stories of the Chumash.

He told me what his  friend had seen up in the mountains

And he hadn’t been the same since.

When he spoke

I felt a strange

coolness pass through me.

Later that night, I slept I on the mattress in the basement,

and dreamt of Indians trying to find their way back home...

guided by beads on the gro...

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Brother Ocey Rucker

On the exact spot where you pitched your revival tent 60 years ago

On the exact spot where you railed about Gog and Magog-America and China and the fires of heaven that will destroy them

On the same spot where you extolled Catholic priests and Jewish Rabbis to climb their roofs and shout” Jesus is Coming any day now.”

In that same dusty lot, where your beautiful wif...

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Quarantining with a teen

Can be challenging …. I mean

Making me into a mad mad man.

So off to the park to jog again.

At the park is an aging pine

I trip over his roots sometimes

Right below his shade I find

Five of his offspring sharply lined

“You should have further dropped your seeds

You’ll have to fight for all your needs

They’re never going to roam from ...

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If you are a cook at Coney Island, and you buy a guitar in a pawn shop before work one day, most likely Sam the dishwasher will come out of the back and tell you you’re in the band.

When you tell him you’ve never played guitar before in your life, most likely he will say its punk rock, you don’t need to know how to play. Then he will say he can teach you.

After a month of practicing in a hum...

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Gas light

Chevys cruising by

With longhairs jamming to metal tunes

Come drive in an FM night with me

Waving a yellow light hurries us through

As the raspy-voiced DJ settles in

And brings us a few from Mick and the gang

Emotional rescue and Only Rock and Roll

But I like it… I like it…Hell yeah…you scream

Cool mix... 

Wait…

County line static you pop in a tape.

As...

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I'm banished for life to the childrens table

The way grown-ups talk gives me strife

I placed all my stock in fairy tales and fables

And I still believe in love

Like a child does

I don't have big face in the family circles

I can't dole out jobs or advice

And talk about money

I just find distasteful

Cause I still believe in love

Like a child does

One day th...

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My first lover fast and wild

Went and robbed herself a liquor store as a child

I met her after her ways with a gun

She didn’t need no bullets to make me dance none... son

My second lover loved the Grateful Dead

She had stars in her eyes, acid in her head

She danced to music like a woman possessed

Feet firmly in the clouds and dancing breasts

Yet I digress

Cause...

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Because his Swami Baba had fled

With the women and the money

Shouting desire is suffering

Leaving his computer buffering

With images of young ladies in their flowering youth.

Because of that shit,

He yearned for the old-timey truth.

So he put the Cross of Jesus,

Carved in the 70s

By a long-haired freak

In polyester slacks,

And a hang-ten shirt

Channeling Rodin,

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The glass tile window throws a rainbow across your sad poem.

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There is hope 

Even in the eyes of monsters….

Right behind their fury

Can’t you see how they secretly root for you…my hero

……even willing to sacrifice their own self 

so you can overcome your fear.

And what will you find when you draw your sword?

Illusion upon illusion?

Quick!

Lay your blade through it

Like vapor trails through the sky.

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Baby Dies in Drive-by Shooting

What the Times did not say

About the baby who caught the stray bullet

Was...that shot was fired a long time ago

And my sources from the other side say

That he is in fine spirits

And very happy

To be done with that karma

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The dog with the ghost eye 

down the street sees my true form

Loving you has made me transparent

Goodbye my love and hello my love are the same to a ghost

They are just windows to a building that stretches to eternity

Fashioned from eternity

Had I seen you once that would have been enough

Had I kissed you once that would have been enough

Had I never seen or kissed you that ...

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Mrs. Jobe complains about her class…again

“I even give them the page number….but they’re too lazy to look the answer up.

With kids that lazy, how do they expect me to do my job?”

Teaching is a crazy way to put food on the table.

But then again, I could tell her about Uten the Yak herder in Tibet who has to carry a wounded calf down a dangerous mountain gorge

or Perri the Amazon fish...

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You outflanked me a thousand times

But I outlived you

General Sherman. 

And after all the meaningless debates on generalship

I find it far more noble

to be able to draw another breath. 

So I will dance a little jig

as I carry your coffin

straight

to your resting place. 

Confident

You won't outflank me this time.

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Which trail did you run down dreams?

Why did you leave me?

I forswore even the deepest memory of myself to chase you.

Now I am old and tired and I can't remeber what I forgot.

Hazy hazy me.

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I had a beat-up Ford

That wouldn't go in reverse.

I lent it to my girlfriend

Who drove away........ 

and never came back.

Now I drink to lessons learned

And pray tomorrow's sunny.

And I hope your taking notes boy,

Because everything is funny.

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I thought I could carry this love for two.

My back was strong

Besides...

shouldn't true love be light as a feather?

I thought about it stooped with the weight while waiting.

My father used to recycle aluminum cans for money.

When 

he carried his garbage bag

full of cans

down to the weigh-in station,

they would

check to make sure there was no steel hidden in there t...

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Come sit near me

Pretty senorita in the laundromat

I'll give you songs for your quarters

I'll give you a love straight out of a Mexican soap opera

I'm pining away here

Trying to look so nonchalant-that French for looking like I don't care when I really do

Black hair like down on your arms

T-shirt cut short showing ribs

I'm a songwriter.

I'm not known yet, and may never b...

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I found

In the apartment weed garden of Eden

A sun-Bleached Statute Of Shirdi Sai Baba

Weedwacker wounded

Hemorrhaging styrofoam

Abandoned by the immigrant Indian family he guided over the perilous ocean to aMerica.

I bondoed his wounds

And sprayed Fat Bollywood colors over his coat.

His skin tone I left to a true artist to paint.

Then I placed him on a pedestal

So he...

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My Muse

Drives a Chrysler barefoot…

And has three kids with a man

Stronger than me.

You know, she likes my poetry.

She said so so once.

When she called, I remembered every word.

I cracked them open looking for anything.

Then I used them to make jokes about myself… my only immunity against one-sided love.

My Muse

let me kiss her once.

My friends said I should have...

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You fell out the kicked window

What did that look like?

You jumped out the pushed window

What did that feel like?

You leapt from the punched window

Really?

Killing the monkeys in the lab must have upset you huh?

Didn't you learn that first you have to kill your feelings?

You big sissy.

Wait, you sailed out the manhandled window?

Can we take this step by step please?

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Desert Poem #1

Where are you now son?

Lost Horse Canyon

Outdoors

With the poets-an odd bunch

They try to wrangle the desert's beauty with their lassos

made of words

But.....

It always eludes them

Desert Poem #2

Sister Silver Cholla

Sleeping through the hard times

The desert kisses her every morning

But she only wakes up

When his breath smells like rai...

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Suki is a Sharpei

It takes lifetimes of breeding to turn a wolf into a Sharpei.

"More skin,' cries the breeder wife.

OK!

Beauty is only skin deep...functional too.

I've seen other dogs grab rolls and rolls of Suki's beauty and shake,

while she easily manuevers around to return the favor.

                            I should be so lucky.

My skin comes down from lines of carp...

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Dear Fundamentalist Friend

Have you stockpiled your food for the coming shit storm?

Do you have dreams of me banging on the doors of your bomb shelter… like a drowning man to Noah’s ark?

How you would hold my gaze like a prizefighter… confident that your God through you would win.

And in that way,

you lost.

Me.

Meekness

Have you ever known anything of it?

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My verses were seamless

My chorus was tight

But my bridge needed a C section with horns to be born. 

So another neighbor’s house I painted and 

another driveway of concrete pavers I laid…

to get paid…

to produce my songs.

Do the dreams of a young man have a shelf life?

Because I am still doing this at 50, 

And have not yet sold a single song.

But

my neighborhood su...

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Uncle Billy

Do you still have the gin bottle

that Uncle Teddy drowned in?

You know the one with the toothpick ship

wrecked upon the shore of an 80 proof sea.

We can trace those maritime lines

through our veins, salty and sad….

The ones I see in your watery eyes

with crushing waves

and capsized boats

and drunken tears

falling overboard.

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Your Majesty I am Pablos Juan

My story is so sad to tell

I was a true conquistador

And only lived to serve Spain well

I soldiered in St. Augustine

Master of both sword and pike

In your name I wielded both

Not afraid to give my life

At the fort were dogs of war

With most of them I got along

But one was like a rabid beast

The devil in his breast was strong

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What dragged the sides of your mouth down-down-down?

Heavy Burdens?

Bad dental work?

Did the papparazzi say “a little less smiley?"

Dark secrets? Rotten plums?

Did you want something from a noncommittal lover?

Was desire suffering? Isn’t it still?

Did you think you’re the doer?

Or were you a backward thinker in a forward thinking world?

Were you alone mixing medications ...

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