StarPoet Newsletter Vol. X, No. L

We don't really care much
About the back story,
All we want to really know is
Who won the shootout,
The bloody details,
And the body count,
Who was laying where
And the extent of their injuries
After the hammer dropped

After life, the Afterlife
Is a hodge-podge construction
Of hope and conjecture
That after the light blows off
Consciousness rekindles,
As does existence, as does the I
That writes this, watching everything.

The I who has been near death
Saw nothing, remembers less,
And does not anticipate continuation
Past her last breath.

I do not expect a second act,
No second coming of blood and flesh,
No ethereal plane, no alternate dimension
That allows us to exist past our
The life sentence of our DNA.

We are here, then we're not,
And once gone, forever starts
Without our individual permissions.

What do want from me?
You know I'm never going to be able
To color within the lines, that's just not me;
If you want me to go from A to B,
You know I'm just as apt to end up at C
Or even 13 if I think that's a better destination.

It's nothing I do voluntarily,
We are nothing if not our neurobiology
And mine works tangentially,
Slipping through the folds in the continuum
When I least expect it.

If I were Columbus, I might have ended up
Somewhere along the western coast;
If I were Armstong, I might have been
The first astronaut to set foot on Mars,
An early colonist on Centauri or Tau Ceti,
Or travel back in time to visit Lucy or Leonardo.

Not that I wouldn't want to see the moon,
But I am saying that no matter how I start out,
No matter what my original intention might be,
I may not end up anywhere near where
Either of us expects me to be.

I swear it's not my fault,
I just can't do much of anything else;
Straight lines are exceedingly difficult creatures
And, most times, unexciting enough to set my attention
Deficiting into the great up and out,
And it's only after I remember to check in
That I catch back up with what's going on
Back on planet earth.

So what is it exactly that you want from me?

Snow in the 7 Day,
Here, there, somewhere,
Perhaps in the Shenandoah,
Perhaps in Denver,
Perhaps in the Sierras up at Tahoe.

Snow is the magic word,
Snow boosts the tv ratings,
Everyone wants to know
If they're going to get a day off
Or spend four hours or more
On the next morning's commute.

So snow it is,
Even if the snow is Some Other Place
Than anywhere near
Where I keep my tv set.

Close to the edge of Normal,
Somewhere north of Lost It
And south southwest
Of three margaritas over the line,
The poet, a writer
Of oddly sentient sentences,
Rumages through the backstory
Looking for some truthy metaphor
That will reveal the all and everything
Or maybe not.

Sometimes a poem is just a poem,
Sometimes a poem's just words,
Sometimes the poet is one for the ages
(Although sometimes the age is 12)
And sometimes the poet has strayed too long
At the Cumaean Bar and Grill.

Ted Bundy prowled the alleys of Seattle,
Scouring the University District for young females;
Judging from the photographs of his victims,
He had very good taste in women.

Perhaps his "almost" victims simply did not meet
His personal standards of feminine beauty;
Perhaps, in the end, the women simply
Did not turn him on enough for Ted to kill them.

He's dead now, fried in Florida, so we can't ask him;
Good riddance, but he, if anyone, deserved to be killed
Much more slowly that he actually was, day by day,
One for each murder, piece by piece, starting with his balls.

Iroquois, English, Sicilian,
Mediterranean and Euromongrel,
A breath of North Africa,
Christian and Muslim,
A touch of Rome, a touch of Greece,
Conqueror and conquered,
Pioneers, settlers, explorers, warriors,
Scholars, stone masons, teachers and farmers,
Laborers, soldiers, sailors and poets.
We do not run from our heritage
Or deny our genes and bloodlines;
Where once we were Quakers
And the Pope bade us not to sin,
We continue our journey,
Choosing who we follow and what we believe.
Some day in the not too distant future,
We will move off-earth, to the Moon,
To Mars, to Titan and beyond;
Someday the earth's sun will be a dim memory
In a constellation not yet named by humanity,
We will be there, working for our living,
Looking forward to the next frontier,
Migrating to the galactic rim
In preparation for our first journey
To the Magellanic Galaxies, and then,
At last, up and onward to great Andromeda
And the universe outside our milky home.

Plane go boom
Building shake

If alive
We go home

If we dead
We stay forever

Extra crispy
Bits and pieces

God rest our souls

Hawk, blue sky,
Trees fully bare of leaves,
Lunch in the underbrush
Scurrying for its life.

Poet,
Watching through a window
As she does her nails,
Wondering if she will want
A salad when she's done.

The Latin American art scene is booming,
The New York museums can hardly keep up;
Apparently the Americans are all so boring,
So last century and not impoverished enough.

Andy Warhol came to town, riding on publicity,
Sucked New Yorkers into his grift
And called his pop tarts art.

The Black Panthers were all the rage,
Everyone had one at their party;
Lesbians were hot and then transsexuals
and now it's the South Americans who have
A turn at their quince minutos de fama..