Lonesome Highway Blues


Lonesome highway blues,
eyes itch, head aches after a midnight run.

Rickety van ambles on 
from my confinement before the reaper came.

Interstate highway west,
creative life blood, soother of my soul.

Sitting on a bench
the last stop before Wyoming emptiness.

She sat betraying sadness
only the poet knows, only the poet suffers.

Paisley gypsy dress
long blond dirty hair hanging to taut waist.

“A rIde mister?”
a voice asked, no words spoken.

Her soul and backpack
fell onto my raggedy salvation mattress,

Already asleep
with dreams of a sage desert plain.

We danced a song
on Medicine Bow Peak at the dawn of life.

I dropped the sacred crystal
into the magic cairn for a pagan mountain god.

She smiled her approval
with a heart kiss from smiling Hera

An eagle flies circles
above prayer flags fluttering in still air.

A wolf pup howls for its mother.

			

The Way We Talked


The way we talked
sad mumble jumble
incomplete thoughts
on a silly sultry
summer night when June kissed Luna goodnight.

That night we 
danced slowly
to a Viennese waltz
played by a 
rock band in
the empty street of shuttered store fronts where the dreamless slept.

Have we ever
learned anything
of each other
from the endless discourse of incomplete sentences without noun or verb?

At the dawn
Morrigan played
her silver flute
with her black
feathered fingers
and you became me
and I became you the final battle lost forever and we were now immortal.

Aphrodite found
her revenge
as we drank our 
morning coffee
with our croissants
that fed our bliss
and we wrote
our new poetry
and sonnets about futility of love we would share for eternity. 

A Past Life Experience


A week before tomorrow a
past life found me in a smoke free bar on 
life's boulevard
watching FIFA soccer on a fifty two inch
flatscreen.

I finished my 
extra dry martini with two olives
stirred, not shaken and 
left for the be-bop time of
smokey jazz clubs in 
dark basements below the 
sad city of lights.

The horn man blew his
wailing melodies to our despondent generation who 
gave their souls to words and sutras . . . 
we dressed in black.

Our deep dialectics were 
concerned with slow time when the  
tribe of hedonists gathered
for alcohol
for drugs
for sex
for pleasure in the cold room flat above the
shop keepers shop.

Our poetry played the 
crazy rhythm of the jazz free
discourse that fed us our 
left over life
free of mammon's rules.

I returned from my fantasy
past life trip to an extra dry martini with two olives
shaken, not stirred and FIFA soccer
still nil - nil on a 
fifty two inch flat screen.

And I went home to
my cold room flat above a  
shop keeper's shop to 
write a new sutra of 
that time when
life was still free.

The Backdoor


It was a foggy frosty morning when I took this picture. It reminded me of a poem I wrote a few years ago.

I walked out the backdoor of my life
into desolate bleak grey snow 
blending into a steel grey sky —
with no beginning, with no end.

No shadows defined my place
in this universe of horizonless space —
nothing moved as all were petrified  
like a garden of lifeless stone.

I wandered away into emptiness — 
an unforgiving frigid desert
lost to visual perspective —
searching for a lost memory.

In a far distance that did not exist
I heard a coyote scream her hunger.