Endings

Calypso 91
Remembering fascination in memorial:
Palm, hand, nail.
The opera tours on shoulders that
Turn quickly to sand.

The hand-struck cheek
Has been said to have known
A fair drink or two
On its way to
Big Powerful Change

*Note from Mike:

This is the last entry for 2008. I will be off to the beach with wife and dog for a couple of days and, while I will take my sketchbook and camera, I will not be taking a computer. I will be taking a break.

Thank you, everyone who traveled with me this year, I wish you all a happy, healthy, prosperous New Year! I'll be back here January 2nd, 2009.

The Shade Leans In

Circe 514
The prick objects
The cock the whore
Cracking chewing relaxing in
A gas-powered overcoat

Snap and bite nibbled kittenish
Opens silverfoil
Conjured impelling fingers to go
Up piece by given piece
Til passing the door

Empty Rooms

The Wandering Rocks 284

Shout the organ!
Tap the tuning fork!
Now, start to strike the song
Played like mermaids, breaking wind.

The summer father
Has the keys he
Who growls and sometimes shrieks
Pouring bronze he
Sits at home he
Plays the skin of
The dead wife he

Rehearses with the blind asses he
Seems to be what you call
Jolly fate.

Now, What's Wrong With A Withered Hand?

The Sirens 312



The exercise of violence
Has a reputation for pocketing the change
And leaning in
With the agility of fear

Meanwhile, indifferent clergy
Betting on execution
Applauds the sleeping audience
Before circulating the truest of blood

Christmas

Id-Less Creatures

The Lotus Eaters 130


Daedalus holding out a hand
The torn foot
The elocutionary obsession

With toga and cloacca
Are not shit and death
One and the same?

Suppliant youth
Rushed to forgetting
Your Governor is gone

Solstice

Circe 552
A simple prostitute with
Mouth full of cream her
idols are dead winter strawberries
Seen by an eye through a keyhole

Whispered lovewords under
Lukewarm water
To take a snapshot and be brought back

Like a stamped receipt
Signed with open mouth

In the Valley -Telemachus 28

Burying the edges
Beyond the trampled bones
Saved from love
But given up to loneliness

The lean neck of the snail
The sums of stained dismay
The bed of ashes
The blind tongue

A poor soul gone to heaven

197 Laestrygonians

Buck Mulligan,
We sit and drink our money
Murmurs of murder the
Gargoylian creeping over to the arts
Of December.

In the meantime the Sentimentalists
Brandish wine bottles and gleefully threaten
The newly dead while
The priests piss on the vestibule door

This is the reason for our vertigo.

101 Calypso

A good man’s fault
Lost into the ground
born subdued, in silence and wonder

The awe of hearing one’s name
Barely whispered over a shoulder
Fearful turning

Finding nothing there

Finding no one

145 Hades

Arms thrown away
Through returning hoops of thought
Yachting around the muck
The royal wind in his face

Eating fingers then
We rush to the railings
And watch Nelson’s Pillar go by (in rubber boots and epaulets)
(What was Daedalus doing in Irish town?)

Well, you can kiss my ass
And send me the bill.

ReBirthDay

Pink Square here, you
average savage fish.
The red you seek is
over there.

Here are bread and circuses
and foxy boxers
and too-tanned dancers


all now eating the table cloths
and silverware
at the celebrity buffet

and to me:
Happy Rebirthday!

Useful Madness

These wings
that took so long
to learn to use

Are now useless against the sky-

turned to water

turned to fire

turned to stone

216 Scylla and Charybdis

Very well,
said through jets of cleaned teeth
ending their days in silk hats
practicing good Catholicism and
useful Charity.

Treeshade inkstained here comes the
wife droll and zealotry
crossing soldiers for sailors
“If I had served my god as I had served my king he would not have abandoned me in my old days”


A great success

very well,
Very well, indeed.

Telemachus 6

How long will you stay in the tower?

You, who saved us from drowning

will soon cease to be

like the God of English

like the God of Gentlemen

You’re a dark man, a panther really,

shot from a cannon

and now having a snotty nose you show

your shaven cheek

your dreadful blade

and you wipe it clean then

gaze from the parapet again,
at the snotgreen sea.

You think of Mulligan and other dactyls

Ithaca 658

The accomplishment of temperature
The velocity of incisions
The absence of light
The presence of sound

If Bertrand shaves himself
Does Bertrand shave himself?
And what about all those other citizens of Berkley
Who do not shave themselves?

In the meantime, what to do with all those clattering reflections?

Calypso 78

Kind Henry,
All leather barrels and jars of nonsense
Tell me about the places you have been:
Waiting for trains
Breeding lice
Burning sermons.

You are an Old Master faked for money
An envelope shredded beneath an archway
The paper flakes fluttering off

As the white slips fluttered (no two the same)
You sank beneath the surface of their swirling trail.

Toy Heart

Toy Heart
Mugged by the saints of fortune,
Dropped from high places,
Lamentation becomes an explanation.

Toy Heart,
the truth is inconvenient

The high wire is nowhere for
you to play on once
the skin of luck is lost

But there are sins and there are sins
And these skins are skins
For dancing in.