Ethereal Beauty #29

The ship? Docked. Docked in a funnel of Dr Pepper waves
Sloshing over metal casings and spanking the halyards
Like dumb nuns, blood-besotted breast-scarves blousing in wakes.

Readers! Manufacture me a new Love, the old one's gone, just
An imaginary heat-source. Stalking 'round the rigging,
I climb the jib boom in a jiffy in oversized jubbah.

Hubba, hubba! There's my Twinkle, I see! These binoculars
Are peachy, old specs I used to supervise the dank
Recesses of the cavernous barn to firm strokes of glory.

Pasted pic on the lens? God! Peglegging the travelled periphery,
With ineffectual sea-spray I salute as my south four
Has not saluted in a decade. Amour, scant vestiary,

I throb in desperation through a sick mariner's eyeglasses
Spoking the panorama of bluey air, my halluces
Visible to visiting barracuda who abjure appetites.

Quiet barquentine, ripped mizzenmast amidst clashing cables,
I’ll sail with you to my grave (the barnyard wouldn't have me)
Infecting the wind without remorse (my mic a symbol),

Eloping with Mabel (is there a Mabel for me?), ethereal
And (I hope) not gonorrheal. Haul from the yawl,
Yardarming yardapes! I sink, a perverse farm lubber flububbing

To the bottom of the sea, (un-) Amen.

Ethereal Beauty #28

I'm still on the main deck,
Beaded snot (crying softly)
In rust beard which twitches
Aggressively against
Flapping pyjama sleeve
Like a robin in heat.
Gramophone stylus arms
Intervolve with washroom
Attendants and barbequed
Chickens on oiled spits.
I can’t separate images
And it troubles me that
It once troubled me
But no longer does.

I’ve seen all the glories:
Milton atop a forty-six
Thousand foot Bible
Reading "Lost" as
The fallen furnace-stoker
Tickled his gonads
While crouching behind
His burning bush;
My ethereal mothball
Drifting from closet
To bed to my funeral.

Malfeasance in a series
Of mawkish memoirs,
The authority of
A bingo-card distributor
In a hall of retired hens,
I expurgate all responses.

The sea’s whitecaps brief shocks
In dark grey tumours.

Ethereal Beauty #27

The promontory recedes. Water-skiing vixens
With perma-smiles no longer shoot the ramp
In effervescent hilarity, so I stare
At grim Dick Dana folding his laundry
And grumbling when mismatched leggings
Tangle with the port rope. Naked
But for cinched Doc Martens,
I lean like a deflated rubber protractor
And spot Davy Jones’ locker scurrying me back,
My high school box
Holding remedial English papers,
Pin-ups of koala bears,
And the church bulletin which held my first poem.
Coagulating in crimson arroyos
Of curved birch creases, a backwash
Brushes my boots and the ship bosses a flow
Outside the underwater demilitarized zone.
Hail sun! And hail myrmidon-wavelets
Nudging the peeling hull in coy kisses!
I’ll stay aboveboard and play poker
With distracted Dana planning his lawyerly career
With the care of one with a future.
Four threes! Stale biscuits and Cap’n Morgan’s
Mauve juice under the cavernous turquoise bowl.
No one needs to talk to me
And God is a laughable shade
Collecting coins to stash in His broken reliquary.
Fine mist repeats its impotent frissons.
I’m light, fissile on open deck, the way,
Hatchdoors flapping, the truth, breaking up.

Ethereal Beauty #26

Answered prayer: “return to sender”.
Trumpetting mouth. War has broken.
Chants collect in a compost scrum.
Peckers tab my wooden scarecrow.

Trumpetting mouth. War has spoken.
Shelve those soldiers, toy with my wish.
Peckers stab my wooden scarecrow.
Atlas heaves my medicine chest.

Shelve those soldiers, destroy my wish.
The fast boat leaves the dock at eight.
Atlas thieves my medicine chest.
Buzzards perch on my black fence post.

The last boat leaves the dock at eight.
Rest Cs in head, rosined bow.
Buzzards perch on my blackened host.
Reported God-face down dark hall.

Press me in bed, skull-and-crossbones.
Free me, please, and rivet the page.
Distorted God-face down dark hall.
Immaculate basket on nascent path.

Fleer my pleas and rivet the cage.
Ants collect in a compost scrum.
Plaqueless casket in acid bath.
Rancid prayer: “return to sender”.

Ethereal Beauty #25

Curtsying in psychedelic lingerie,
I prattle with cauliflower lips, sugared
With licorice lemon Pledge. I dial up Flo
Who mangles my retreating organ on off days.

I saw an infomercial, wearing rabbit ears
Like Ray Walston of "My Favorite Martian",
And they advertised a Bow-Flex, backdrop curtains
Brushing a subliminal poem on ‘love‘.

Silly putty on eyes, hilly grey temples have I
Where no thought not adorned with religious soft soap
Permeates my mad-cowlike formulations.
I'd two-by-two your four-by-four, then deep six it

For gassing up in front of my "Welcome, Love!" mat.
Abandoned key in field, unknown symbol
To explore on sweaty hands. Roast my loins
In a double-blind study. Swallow my sermons.

Ethereal Beauty #24

Rimming surface dust on hospital oak tables
With elongated tongue: listen to my fable:

Razor burns cover my back, shoulders, toes, neck.
Now I'm smooth and hyped to go and write more dreck.

I fell down the laundry chute by the dispensary
And became enmeshed in pale hose hoarding fleas.

Columns of smoke pour from my ears and addled ass
Waiting for Nurse Wooden Spoon to come and make a pass.

Termites in my cereal, vipers in my mind,
(Nurse, extract this carrot from my abused behind.)

Writing a sappy saga for a delusional Love,
I sicken even myself. Down the barf I shove.

"Tenderest angel of beauty in hearts of two";
Excuse while I join poor readers, and also spew.

They've repaired my dentures, I'm good to bite the bums
Of all the google-eyed fish in the aquarium.

Ethereal Beauty #23

I saw a cartoon in a tabloid today
About big-headed writers who sold Mary Kay
And pictures of Elvis for a buck on E-Bay.
(Sideburns puffed like my goiter, I'm carried away.)
The warden checked my shovel without delay
Since I started smashing pics of Tammy Faye.
It's round but pointy on top, just like me. Hey!
I've shoveled more shit than the KKK.
Gull droppings on my stanzas, but it's OK.
Even a river rat has its lucky day.
Love, come back to me, and never again stray
Along the boulevard looking for pimp Ray.
I turn myself on in the mirror, what say?
Poetic enemies have stolen the tray
Of birdseed put out for Olivia's bluejay.
Listening to R and B by Robert Cray,
I dance in pink panties and shock the pray
-Ing mantis (of Atlantis) into biting. Stay!
(Wooden mannequin) as my cat gets spayed
On the evening news, no more to join the fray
Of midnight mackerel bones, lovely fish fillet
Of dreams limping in a field without play.
Cover me in Dentu-Cream so I can get laid.

Ethereal Beauty #22

Gone, gone, the beauty of her eyes dispatched
To some other moping moron’s charms,
His bulging verses making me curse (natch),
Snatch rabbit pellets from her seaside farm.

Well, it's over. Stopped at six six nine four.
My heated emails unopened, what's new?
The county sheriff just showed me the door.
Matted residue still covers me, phew!

Over hills I streak, throw poems in air
And stuff my mug with grey spam all the while.
Autumn smoke encircles, I do declare
Even Hallmark laments I'm out of style.

A pocket of pellets, mangling a tune,
Ten minute classics and a life of ruin.

Ethereal Beauty #21

'POET':
I love the smell of formaldehyde in the morning.
My Love is finally here, I'm no longer in mourning.
Formal in shrew hides, 'beauty' kindling-sheaves stuffed in pipe.
God is on my side, now someone pass me the boiled tripe.

GOD:
Don't assume sides, morose niggler of horrendous verse.
I love all, yes, even you, prostate tickled by the nurse.

OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN:
You have to believe it is magic.
Nothing can stand in his way.
His love is certainly tragic
But at least the sheep gives its OK.

'POET':
Ah ha! My detractors will be filled with envy and sadness.
She’ll massage my swollen stanzas with gladness.
Studliness and brio are eventually recognized
In furry false teeth, corned horny toes, crossed pink eyes.

NURSE:
Time for your sedative, earth exile, show us your posterior.
Close those eyes. Though stewing, juice soon fills your anterior.

GOD:
Where is either Spock when you need him?
The 'poet's' drooling. Nurse, with Gerber please feed him.

NURSE:
Down the hatch, buttercup. Your next needle's not till six.
(Why am I cursed with this hospice out in the sticks?)

'POET':
Hosed down, of rose water I’m sceptic.
I was unwell in the well, septic.
Flinching shrug, Love, or witless baahnter?
My sheep by a nose in a cool canter.

ETHEREAL BEAUTY:
The pic he sent me was a Tom Selleck look-a-like,
But the 'poet' most closely resembles Eisenhower Ike.
I’ll make a getaway before he slobbers on my ankles.
I confess, the whole experience certainly rankles.

GOD:
This wraps up another episode of 'Swat The 'Poet's' Behind'.
The nurse has just injected the serum, it is most unkind
How, afflicted with expected pity, even I must endure
The illiterate lucubrations of a billboarding twit, impure.

Ethereal Beauty #20

Sedated, pink-and-tan nighties float under my eyelids.
My Love has flown, I'll not have those sheep-shearing kids.
I'll line up a Russian mail-order bride, put in a low bid.

Twisting in dreams, posing in a babe-magnet tractor,
Caking on make-up with zeal and a dash of Max Factor.
Wish it worked; the spinster downwind? Never faaked her.

I roll over, throat-farting, without a master.
Dick sore from misuse, protected by salve in a plaster.
My Beauty, chatting with a mainlander, can't get past her.

I'll trail my grief like a Liberace boa behind my florid past
And take a jackhammer to break up this plaster-of-paris cast.
Poetic acolytes I cherish, enjoying a dirt-and-bark repast.

Flying in dreams, flying off the handle, flies behind my fly,
Motor oil to my tenderest regions I liberally apply.
My Love will have to wait, ha! I'll get by by-and-by.

Ethereal Beauty #19

In beauty of a love
My love in beauty
As if a love was beautiful
All in God's love

Beautiful and beyond, all of eyes
And smiles to wonder
As if as if as if as if
In love beauty God's gift ….

Aaaaaahh! The letters blur.
Unstitched swaths of words flicker,
Shot scum from a slag incineration
Evaporating mid-air.

Catacombs crumbling like abandoned mines
Furred, felled by negligence.
Labyrinthine whispers. Air-choked bats
Affix on caked one-by-eights.

A family album asunder
Stolen copper fixtures
With unknown faces smiling
Around the serpentine pipe-bars.

Blinkered by church fears,
I wander through cyber-bogs
Endlessly reworking
My one piteous scroll.

Stifling sick rooms applaud
My every poem, I standing
On my cot, nose effluent
Caught on my flapping sleeves.

Melodramatic balloon
Of hope, float out
Of my scoped incomprehension.
Sever this day.

Down long wasted years
The song became stillborn,
Became a parody of a parody
Thin with diseased keening.

I, a farcical satyr,
Fulminating in distemper,
Outlets like sensuous trap-doors,
Grieve the short road.

Songs I try to remember
When the voices are absent --
Innocent upgiving hymns of peasants
And homesteaders in groups.

Vocal oceans spilling
From my mouth?, …. their mouths
A sanctuary of acceptance
Turtling now under bramble thatches.

“Howsoever they may fall”.
Bloodless tankers afloat on pegs,
Drydocked my heart
Along the long and gullible corridors.

Ethereal Beauty #18

I'm back from a brutal triple-celestial attack
With my insanity, dentures, left testicle intact.
Wobbly winos backpedal 'round my kitchen utensils
Shining a doctor's 'scope in my mouth, awww, at my tonsils.

I ply myself with hooch from the floorboards of a Chevy
While June Taylor dancers synchronize kicks, they're a bevy
Of sliver-inducers. I’d sprint for my institution tray,
But I'm still in the barnyard needing a lay, O-de-lay!

Shave my pits; sell the clotted hairs on E-Bay; smoke my stick.
I know a floozy tart, woozy with grief, who'll turn a trick.
Please turn to Genesis chapter one hundred fourteen
While I lower my trousers, pour a pitcher of Jim Beam.

I've cavity-searched the flock for my missing Love, by Jove!
She's with another, mouldering words moistening her cove.
Harem in my mind, pressed weeds in my crib, quaaludes.
Fish I mail just block my penis and pretend to act rude.

Ethereal Beauty #17

The stippled ceiling tiles keep out God’s stare,
Rectangular, machine-cloned white, soft, cracked.
Insomnious with God, I spot a hair
In the bedside bedpan. Sobs are racked.

Cryptogenic cells, fast spillage of groans,
Fractal headlights’ lasers hours later
Whose ECG wall flares a Zorro slash. Coned
In creeping moonlight, hands clutch …. shadows quaver.

Morning’s the same, same the condescending
Brusqueness of revolving nurses, angry, spent.
One escorts a postcard, blank, and sending
It back with an inky X, I relent

And work those unobtrusive tablets in.
The orderly, like clockwork, tucks me in.

Ethereal Beauty #16

Funiculus of a noose, my hold on reality
Frayed to the last faded crusty sisal, I'm a ceramic pig

On a track of greyhounds looking under every divot
For my Love who barbeques my banns in lighter fluid.

I wrote her "To Beauty" while my mushrooming head, grey
Hollow, dry, spewed dust as in a tracheotomy patient’s sneeze.

My dentures are quite the hit among gumming koalas
Who pepper my pecker with peptic puckers as they play.

Four score and etcetera my granddaddy recoiled in horror
As his unborn scion appeared to him in a fleecy nightmare.

Grocery shopping in a print dress as the canteloupes I fondle,
It dismays me the Scripture does not anticipate my coming.

Second time I came, I shouted "Eustace!" into the Buy & Sell
While the twenty-watt flickered over my uncaptioned head.

Once a century a sad-sack verser with gnome's disease ingratiates
Upon a startled readership his hubris overflowing with bat plaque.

Love, though you've fallen asleep or clicked on another profile,
Give back, in a Mason or denture jar, my weakly flicking heart.

Your love was like a red, red nose on Rudolph, shining on me
Like an angry stop light at the end of a pitch-black wharf.

Fold me up, spindle me, turn my wine into water, and give
Me back my stale loaves so's I can cover them in sheepdip.

Ethereal Beauty #15

Demerol!
What a ball!
They let me go at three.
Muscatel
In the dell;
I’m on a barnyard spree.

I snagged a nurse
And read her verse
From my soiled and spineless book.
She fainted;
It's tainted,
The smell from my diapers, ook!

I'm a poet
So please stow it
You harbingers of fury.
I'd lick my balls
In Eros' halls
If I could reach. Jury!

Sentence me
To ninety-three
Years with Rod McKuen.
We'd bugger
Each other
With love odes. Here's to screwin'.

I'm the best
I must confess
At this odd game of verse.
I bite fleas;
My girlish sneeze
Makes brains leak out worse

Than cooking oil
From pots I've spoiled
By papering the copper
With poems
So ho-hum
A five-year-old could top 'er.

Viagra
Could gag ya,
But I give it to my sheep.
They wink at me
From the sea
Of grass. And they never peep.

Ethereal Beauty #14

How in the long cascading days should I, Love, call you?
On a drunken spree
On bended knee?
I've pined so long, foreigners put mistletoe on my nose,
Forgiving when, at crashed parties, I bend in panty hose.

Stroke my warty pores through fragile fabric of maroon.
On roller blades
I pinch bums, shades,
Pen pathetic dirges to molls in the state pen
With pent-up emotion, French kissing stamps in the glen.

Stirrings in loins occlude the visionary preamble.
My Love, lick me
And never stick me
In max security where thugs pick teeth with razors.
They'd pick my ass when seeing pics of me in blue blazers.

So onward, Sweet, rain is singing in gutters of limp verse.
I'm appalled at once
And always the dunce
When tourists ask directions and I shoot a paged beaut instead.
I'll read to the crossing-guard cutie, lie in my fireproof bed.

Help! The druggists have finally arrived in teams of ten.
I'm signing off.
My clothes I doff.
Go to the cemetery, I'll dress like Daffy Duck.
I'll belch out a weeper. Then flatten me in a Mac truck.

Ethereal Beauty #13

I wander nude over hill and dale, rub calomel on my shanks.
To sixteen bleaters in bashful clusters I salute, give thanks.

Barn gate open, dilapidated shed, top-heavy cloud of grey;
Upright biped trailing glory with pitchfork on display.

Circling fence lines , impatient midday, I wonder on the silence
That chafes my mind with stifled guilt. Love, you’re my reliance

When urges thick as gathered odes to anonymous chicks in fur
Plow my fallowed charms in code, in roses brown, bestirred.

Ethereal Beauty #12

Death walks around me on ridiculous little feet,
Invisible, loping foul, tamping my friar's cowl,
Groaning with an ocean’s gathered weight of amour-vomit.

Confused Love, arrested development fed my arrest.
Prattling an anthem in a choir of henroost and crickets,
I, flustered, unloaded my pencil and plunged my bare sword

In curly confines of matted domestic doll, Baaah!
Strange moons of blue edam fester in the eve's slough
Where nuts of frustrated monks the size of pumpkins suspire.

In languished language, my unread autobiography
Gathers wood ticks and fridge culture in its jaunty transport
From shed to den to cow pasture where prominent patties

Describe my verse in enthralling finale. Nurse!
Rob my cradle of fuzzy memories. Parachute
The parson on top of my sunburnt head, scowling

Like admonitions at a competitive bake-off
Fixed for the organist’s upside-down cake where palsied
Televangelists enlist my verse for sing-a-longs

At a camp for hosannah-testers. On the back deck
I circle my grief and prong those whose bicuspids
Crunch the shattered shells on a set of Lord Of The Flies.

Free me, Father! I stare and glare and say I care,
But it's only to snag that overseas wench from
Jawings of Fabio poet-puffers with AirCared hair.

I'll find my soggy loinflap buffeted by a sour wind.

Ethereal Beauty #11

Self-impresario, scary, O!, lips of ruby,
Flush with loving the cornflowers on the back forty
(Puckered and provincial), I'm full of ardour
For my one true Love on Earth as it lurches
Away from Heaven. Our Father who art
Antagonistic to mine art, I fecundate the valleys
With volleys, with antipodal wellsprings of guano.

I was in a church the other day fondling a basket
Of pansies overhanging the pulpit under the nave;
In the narthex I was oversexed, and thought the hymns
Were streaming out of chapbooks intoning hidden
Eerie chromatics of my personal Revelations.
Hymn number seventeen-seventeen was particularly
Disturbing, even unto me. Cold shivers,

My absent audience, pass through my diaphanous brain
On a one-way furlough to Eurydice’s halo cleaner.
Should we elope, my Love, in a guffaw of graffiti?
Throw pineapple rings 'round our naked protruding parts?
Quote geographical Wikipedia cut-outs to impress?
Sheathe our unsapid grout-beset haunches,
Setting them in wine casks for visiting Burma cats to lick?

Anniversaries of doom, grotesqueries abounding,
I look in my one remaining good mirror
And crack up as it cracks up when, exposed, my crack
Cracks the front cover of "Lugubrious Poets Monthly".
Now I'm on crack, and my crack-brained drivel
Needs a crack shot to ease my pain, floating
High in the tenacious weeds of my history. (Medic!)

Ethereal Beauty #10

My transverse colon is acting up again,
Wiggling like a punch-drunk eel cornered by rats
In a parade of ice on New Year's Eve.
I, a poet who fares well within boundaries

Of the obtuse, need a frayed lamp cord to play with.
Traversing Fodor’s sun-page, I read the tran verse,
But s/he stole my mottled headrug at the diner
Or pantry, it doesn't matter. What matters
Are corns on jammed toes I've shorn with a hacksaw.

Can anyone, someone, find my medication?
Someone told me I was a poet, and though
Unappreciated I toil in sewage
For grace I can rebestow on myself,

I'll quote Auden: "On a high chair alone" sums up
My childhood, Christ, my adulthood, too. Denture plates
Like rat traps snap shut when my Love refuses
To answer my mail, I emoticonning
Her wild, she may, forsooth, ignore, nulliparous
Vessel, verse translated into perfect hand wrings

In lieu of beauty. Millions of minions
Of my mirrored selves shelve green passions in my cell.
Come to me in squalid squat quarters, Love, and brook
No oblong egghead quarantining my maze-swept
Excitations in six thousand reports (full of
Noise, yes, yes).

Ethereal Beauty #9

I'm the parrot who glares. I headline with "respect".
Even though I don't show any, who cares? Worms will swim
Through your body just like mine. I of a sudden
Feel queasy. Aah ....! Grease my poems and resurrect
My reputation, moribund in gym stench. Dim
With circumlocution, I inhale (fine friend!) mutton

And throw the skanky shanks athwart my fervent ghosts
Populating the vacant hemispheres of my brain.
I moon the moon and make moon eyes at my Love’s pic. Heave
A bucket or three, I don’t care. I’ll cull a roast,
Regurgitated slop, and recycle a refrain.
Cryptic moans through pockets in my head I believe.

Kumquats? Forbidden Loves! Mesopotamian nights!
Strike my haberdasher with flinty sheaves of paraffin.
I think I espied white-coats making off with my missives
In moon-flooded white-floored midnight. I'd put up a fight
But a man of God with a bad reputation can't win
So I'll back up my book of lies and call out for kisses

Sweet while forensic specialists in halls of basements curl
In cues of cadaverous stanzaic watch in leagues
Of ennui mightier than my ego pilled
On pillorying poets sublime. What Shirl
Can resist a meadow interloper? Cheryl Tiegs?
Bind me in horsehair and hemp; my meds do make me ill.

Ethereal Beauty #8

Fortuitous circumstances have set me here
On this mossy outcrop of granite, fist around beer,
While the ass-flap of my pink pyjamas flutters
In sheepish wind as the prize in my eyes gutters.

I've busted out of the straightjacket, dontcha know,
And regale the ewes with bleats and shrieks as I grow
Blackheads on my schwzinzel. Crows are aping me
From sleek gutters perched above the apple tree.

Love, terrible visions await my cloudy future
Slicing seaward inflating my nose with fake silver lures.
Caress my johnson, lonely like me in mawkish verse.
I'll startle you with lines I lament over and rehearse.

Model these crotchless overalls, figment of this pig, meant so
Piningly, this cheese setting (I hope) your mouse to flow.
I'm chewing on dandelion root, dandified
In suspendered bermudas while my nurse has cauterized

My blackheads for a secret princely fee. Look,
Wanton Want, my nose is buried in a picture book,
The pages sheared as I have my way, my cave
Anointed with lip balm and corn Fritos and after-shave.

Who will love me if not for you, I beseech.
I wring and sling, left hand and right, as I teach
Others the glories of cut-and-paste passages
From Corinthians while wanking into my massive fez.

Glory be to the Holiest, now bring me some absinthe.
Undo my suspenders and knock down all the plinths.
A panegyric for St. Paul, a tulip for my Sweet.
Now excuse me yet again while I'm off to beat my meat.

Ethereal Beauty #7

Look here, Doctor, there's nothing amiss in the snakepit
Of my mind.
I bray, I stand, I sit, I pick my nose and teeth
And behind.

Anything in the kit to calm my nerves, a cayenne shake
In some cream?
I weary of the infiltrated mug of Oral Roberts
In my wet dreams.

My verses may be as flat as Neil Young hitting a high note,
Dressed in teal.
Trouble is, I write the same thing: a needle stuck in a groove,
And quite unreal.

Can I get a private nurse in room number five-nine-six-three,
Or a coop?
Lessons? Lesions? It must needs behoove me, in solitary,
To recoup.

Ethereal Beauty #6

My Love lies over the cold prone ocean;
I ejaculate a spiralled brocade
Of tainted flies over paper hole punches.

Leprous verse crowds my colouring book.
The vagabond whisperers, with plots, cook.

One-way hopes never collide, but encrust
Misgivings into harsh filaments
That rake my impetigo in gross whorls.

Pallid rhyme infests my colouring book.
Three thousand hands-on judges call me ‘schnook’.

Clearing-house bordellos of soft-core schmaltz
Reel in millions. I thought I was ‘Prince’,
But they popped turds of every joker, fool.

I put down my bird-sprayed colouring book.
I have the poetic wiles of a crook.

Ethereal Beauty #5

I'm back in the ward, number six-two-one-three.
The nice men in starched vests took a fancy to me
And tied me in a triple-bind straightjacket.
I give up my poems, I just can't hack it

The way others get credit for "better" verse.
My time is at hand, give me an enema, nurse,
And stick that nozzle up to the tenth notch, please.
Clean my bowels of this versifying disease.

I need a pick-me-up, a defining moment,
A divine proclamation. Where my comb went,
I’ll surely follow. Yay, though I walk the valley
Of the wicked, close is my four-legged Sally.

I see, my Love, my over-the-ocean Love, my Muse
Is dictating to me of Biblical abuse.
Speaking of abuse, there’s a stirring in my loins
But arms are fastened where my armpits and hands join.

Enthusiasm; Winners and Losers

Today was one of those multiple-metaphor-on-a-theme days. Before heading out tonight, I happened to read Leon Rooke's short story "Wintering in Victoria". It was a typically wonderful Rooke story with a typically wonderful Rooke twist, like a gentle screwdriver applied to the heart, before the deep and slow turn. The protagonist at first appears to be a shit, an unconcerned ass letting his wife, job, and friends fly away because of his neglect. But then the other characters become more finely etched. And, with his hysterical (ex) girlfriend, the girlfriend's mother, his best friend, and his best friend's wife all set in silent (and not-so-silent) hostility against him, at the mother's house, Mr. "Unconcerned" goes up the stairs, waits for berating ex to come up the steps, comforts her, then continues, alone, to the bathroom where he commiserates with her truly neglected (and abused) daughter (from the ex's doing). They escape out the bathroom window and run, giggling through the woods.

Of course, there's no escaping the complex deciphering of relationships, the appearance with the reality.

I then turned on the second period of the Canucks hockey game where in short order the home team popped in a goal. The crowd of 18, 000 stood and yelled in concert, and the skaters melded in a melange of head-slapping, half-hugging, and smiling swearing approval.

I then took off to catch the last half of the weekly local musical idol event where 14 remaining singers competed for the "last person standing" prizes the last week before Christmas. I caught a beery-faced dude in mid-chorus of "Bye Bye Miss American Pie", the band throbbing the chords with enthusiasm matching that of the packed restaurant/bar. Next up was a 93 year-old warbler who chose a chestnut, the tune's moniker escaping me. The post-octogenarian gave it his all, and the crowd went nuts. After the judges gave heartfelt thanks and love, he noted how his voice was a "little stiff at the beginning, but then I settled down, though after hearing your comments, I feel stiff all over." The crowd, including me, roared even louder than they and I did after his song. Before the next singer appeared on stage, I glanced over at one of those inevitable bar-TV screens, and caught the shining face of the victorious Obama, while behind him throngs of supporting fans yelled in silent back-up. gawd knows what their honest emotions were behind the outward-same group visage.

After my wrap-up duties as idol-night balloteer (as opposed to the 14 balladeers), I headed home by myself whilst Verna, as part of her organizational duties, remained. The brief rains during the hockey game had stopped, and a gorgeous network of stars pricked the sky. I say "network", but of course that's a poetic shift. To take it further, poetic, here, means "lie". Are the stars "connected"? They're dead stuff, billions of light years away, and away from each other. But our human need for enthusiastic connection, and aching dumb hope, no matter how deluded or incongruous it may be, is necessary to us. We need to urge ourselves on to harmony. However much we lie, there's not only a noble intent, but a noble metaphysic to it.

Oh .... the 93 year-old? He was the only one "voted off the island".

Ethereal Beauty #4

Let's away, Love, to the denture convention
Where we'll do things I can't even mention.
Wine is flowing, my corpus is exempt
From parsing Parson birds with evil intent.

Frost my nipples, bite my hose, roll me in flour dough
Till dentures clack forty times. On my pecker blow.
Whisk me away from this claustrophobic ward.
Nurses have seen my johnson in a binding gourd.

I'm leaking chloroform from nostrils, white coats
Keep watch. I need escape in a tiny boat
That holds my poems while I write six thousand more.
I've been called the world's champion scriptural bore.

The fridge is yawning, my sperm is defunct, birds squawk.
Where are you, Sweet, in this mist by frozen dock?
Faeries drowning in lye upon my head of pins,
Absolve me, God, of these ten thousand ghastly sins.

Striking, what?, the way the sun wheels from its gasket
Of splashed benedictions on my waiting casket.
Harpies, harridans, loose-lipped matrons abound
In my cranium, haggard garish-painted clowns.

I'd give up my weepers for one eternal kiss.
Others implode in four thousand stanzas for this.
Ravage me, O Sisters of mercy. Savage
My several parts till my face is drained cabbage.

A unicylist in a marzipan waistcoat
Played "Tutti-Frutti" on a lute while a stoat
Brushed my crossed gaiters with prickly whiskers, fat,
As budgies flew a V above a boiling vat.

It wasn't always so, Doc: I love my country
And sweetie (as described in verse five one two three).
But vaporous-dreamed filles des joie announcing cum
Have stapled their stockings on my besotted bum.

Gouty snout sheathed in spouts of green. I've found a keg
Of plonk from the dispensary. (I’ve a fake leg
Where I put remnants of verbal abuse to use
As catapulted turds in fits I never lose.)

Away, pranksters. Someone get my walking stick.
This sodium pentathol makes me sick.
I'm in a cameo on channel ten-thirteen;
Licking a cross nun's shoe while dreaming of my quean.

Ashes to ashes, busts to busts. Fill my head
With sugarplums, honey, scriptures from the dead.
Addled apple’s thick with silt, I'm seedless, sinking.
There's no better poet when I've been drinking.

File and recite this to schoolkids to bring them glee.
Have them salute daily so they remember me.
Scuppered Love on the loose three thousand verses back.
I'd have better luck exposing my hairy crack.

Ethereal Beauty #3

Scratch my back, I'm full of fleas;
Don't forget my gonads, please.
Wind me up with consummate ease
Before I sputter, cough, and wheeze.

Come here, Love, you're mine forever.
You're my one true blue endeavour.
My umbilical cord, sever.
Call me Lucy, call me Trevor.

I'm leaking lime juice out stuffed ears.
Picking poetry as my career
Causes readers to laugh and jeer.
I‘ll never see the dais as seer.

I've written for 'Broken Hearts Daily',
For 'Daffodils And Tulips Gaily'.
If your heart droops, I'll never fail ye.
For a life perverted, they jail me.

I'm a test case, the bearded lady
Or elephant man of vast Hades.
One squirt of oyster juice, baby,
And I'm cavorting with weird Sadie

Under pier as I peer up her skirt.
In all the vast meadows, I'm Fra Flirt.
Women flock to me with their hurt.
Lick my nipples under my hairshirt.

Repair my ego, I'll write an ode,
Love, in sappy mysterious code.
Come into my squalid abode.
(Jesus into town on his ass rode

And, I hear, shook his head when
He saw the gaping idiot men
Hanging on his every word, then
Penned paeans demented, without end.)

Ethereal Beauty #2

Crossstitched, my eyelids, to a hospital pillow.
The clothes outside are faint eggshell blue. They billow
While the humid matron pumps horse-meds down my throat
With a two-by-four back-up, and a rubber goat.

Help me, dreamLove! Defrost my poems and bite my lips.
Float here; sing a lullabye while I let one rip.
Flip cartwheels. Install butter in my dressing gown.
I think one of the nurses saw my backside and frowned.

Ahoy! I'll abet the rumours with furious glee--
See the straightjacket wall strings covered with cat pee?
That's my work, I composed it for you, matchless Love,
Though your eyes cross, twitch when espying my wet glove.

Ahh! Another old fart, the minister of the ward
Has come creeping 'round my sickroom with a pen sword.
He's trying to convert me to the other side
Where poems are big and my head voices don‘t chide.

Ethereal Beauty #1

Ethereal beauty, as if an amour
Could reap and sow, like a basilisk
In God-giving banquets for the poor
Who love in beseeching tears. Tsk!

O, Love, blind me with your love,
A love that wraps and smothers
My aortae, blood unshoved.
From unrequited love, we're all brothers.

Ah! The men in snowy coats
Come for me
With butterfly nets. Who dotes
On you, Love? It's me on my knees.

Cleavage! Turnips! Westward fools!
My Love lies unrelating
In a fervent sea which cools
In epileptic flecks mating

Periwinkles with discarded twinkies. Sadness
And sameness, Dear, I follow your coattails
With tongue-lolling gladness.
Verse number six-one-two-nine. Quail

Litter the foyer while I dine
On sheepsbrains, vicious
Their remonstrance, I've had wine,
A bellyful. Are you suspicious?

Erk! Cover me in potato sperm!
Lick my dangling parts.
I know, I know. I'm but a germ
Who prays and bites and weeps and farts.

Sing me a song, ethereal beauty,
Afore I collapse in hysteria.
You're such a coy, steaming cutie
With, no doubt, not a touch of malaria.

A tepid round of tea, barmaid,
I’m juiced on skull-and-bones pills.
The orderlies left, I‘m not afraid.
In seventeen books I‘ll relate my ills.

No? You‘ve refused overtime?
God’s plan a cataract of song,
A splooge of rental dental rinse, a dime
Halo expurgated from my dong.

My ethereal beauty should be smiling
So I can sail, absolute, softly in peace,
My reputation as poet-putz piling
Up like mercury in a piston-obelisk with grease.

Ha! Ho! Where is my amour, my one true Love?
My cooing pigeon, my mustard seed,
My aching, tear-stained turtle dove?
I give up my pale abominable screeds.