I sing my faux songs
to the stale air:
untrained
unfortunate songs
sung out to the dead
air with yellowed notes,
tangled thoughts,
unkempt words – sad
intimations of warblers
in winter
singing out to the dead
earth their green notes,
hints of springs
wafted by olive wings
through a white land.

You hear the sounds
of my antique songs
and squint your eyes,
furrow your brow:
straining for the hint
of the winter parula
to instruct my waning
dim words.

Silence.

You would not be impressed
were I to fly to heaven
and return with the songs
of seraphim, melodious dragons
singing since creation
exploded in light bursts;
you will not cry
at dead repackaged words.

So I will not try.

Variation on a familiar theme

And the sun stretched forth his orange-yellow
hand, and groomed the city streets, and
followed the country roads, and even scanned
the island retreats for the slender hand he so
longed to hold; and finding none of his
desired worth strolling through the day,
He reclined – to reflect on Cabernet, and
determined to assign his son the task;
the son, who with his father’s borrowed light
patrols the undeserted streets at night;

And through the dank alleyways of beer-glass broken gutters,
his pale arm crept softly over our simple heads, and
under concrete bridges and over cardboard beds,
in over-populated three-in-the-morning bars, and
theatres filled with song and dance and weeping bards –
he filtered through those sound awake and sleeping
to find the earthy hand his father now desired instead
of the emaciated sky;
but nothing here on earth – and nothing through the sea
could be gathered to compare
with her infinitely finite blue supply
of cloud-swept grace and star-borne flare.

‘O lank-eared Phantoms of black-weeded Pools’
-Keats, Hyperion

Redowned in scrophulous hives – cloistered
in penumbral shadows of sacrosanct erudition,
she quivered in her slithy seat, and outgrabe
in tendentious fear. Her fallowed heart crooned
for a woofed gueredon to fulfill her scancious
dreams. Her hoary eyes creaked when thrown
around her doleful cubicle. Could she sing
in royal diapason, forsooth she would; Eftsoones
her vorpal tongue will skate across the aspy
Locrian scale with florid agility and rath-like
steadiness;- her mimsy boss is fondling her
thoughts again. Serpentine in his briny retreat,
he spreads an etherized smile across his shiny buck-
toothed mouth, and she returns a smile as
effulgent as the new moon.

the blue world now
a gigantic marsh
of beautiful serpents

Rummaging through old photographs, I found a picture of a
distant relative holding his hands above his head, grabbing a
large curved tusk-like object. My imagination took over from there.

I was there under the fat black clouds,
Struggling with the jagged lightening –
Shouting through the tumultuous storm,
Groping like a half-dead man in the mud:
Cursing my dog for chasing that rabbit.
I was there when the wooden dam gave up,
And the river’s wrath was awakened –
Tearing trees, razing houses, drowning barns –
Carrying the debris of emptied lives:
Dolls, mitts, books; shoes, plates and loose pictures.

And then I found my dog pawing the water –
Desperate and loud in her frantic gyrations,
While I swallowed more river-water than grimy air.
And then I slammed into the strange tusk,
Strong like the bone of the ancient Behemoth:
Snatching the debris swept toward its ready claw,
Except my scared yelping dog.

The air is thick with automotive farts;
My eyes burn with the sewered scent.
The television warns our dimes are parched –
My pocket book weighs less than rent.

Sulfur isn’t so bad with the proper guard.
Tomorrow the leaves will die and fall,
Sautéed and golden: a perfect rosy park –
Removing the deer for the industrial mall.

I watch the air move and feint its way
Through dark clouds of labour-laden breath;
Mockingbirds, robins heave and sigh –
Songs deprecated for a small swallow’s death.

O I miss the sheared green grass:
Blue skies have mated with epic adultery.
Oil is brandished on our slippery lives –
Imputed for our swollen Uncle’s perjury.

            for Claibird

Martini-laced impartial laughter
Happens to most all
Who dance with friends and sisters
Toasting their cabal

Fountains have a Siren’s charm
Rules are no concern
We’re wet on the lit wet steps
Nothing to discern

Trees seem irresistible
In their silent bark
Up and down we climb and clown
Mooning in the park

Morning sun is always early
But, there is the table
Gifts Juice Honey and Bubbly
Recounting what we’re able

The northern parula pokes her blue head
out into the March morning steam
pining for the green and the bees

The frost still clings to the twigs
weighed down by the lugubrious winter storm
heaving itself on the heavy white roofs

Smiles on school children, exploding suns
melting the branches, stretching the leaves
as she sings out to the absent-minded spring

a hearty song reviving the hairless trees

I find it hard to replace my voice
with the sounds and the thoughts
of someone else, some other one with
a story to tell. Anne Marie I’m sure

Is replete with wisdom and overwhelmed
with the scars of words and glares,
permeated with a story that would shift
the soul of an emotionless engineer

(Caught in his cubicle with skipping fingers
on worn down keys, grimy and germy
with the smudges of cold brilliance
imprinted on the tight-lipped plastic).

I am not a medium. I do not know 
the craft of witches who can catch
another’s spirit in the earth’s windy
breath. I cannot re-present her eyes.

The musician takes you on a journey
over sewers and through teary fields
of smiling purple flowers, succumbing
to the wind’s dirty musical dancing.

I should take you on that shifting
journey. I should transport and transfer
the voice of your neglected neighbor
into your glassy eyes, bypassing sewage

Like a heart surgeon cleaning Pipes,
only I would put balloons in your mind
and your soul, not your trapped heart only.
Alas, I am dumb and deaf and clubbed.

I smile at all the right things and I
collect all the right books, but I can’t
dismiss the not misappropriate looks
of those who’ve read more than I write.

My voice is not diverse enough to thwart
the cat-calls of Ezra from the Pisan 
prison. Rilke too snickers in the corner.
My eyes are also panther blind, barred.