come in, mockingbird.
Old saw, old gong, old giant:
come in like a lion.
Old tree, old ship, old song:
go along to get along.
Old blues, blue blood, blood orange:
how much is the damage.
New house, free range, thin herd:
hear a discouraging word.
New moon, full dark, seaweed:
at first you don’t succeed.
Slow god, Gilead, old gate:
come to those who wait.
Old snow, old street, old fence:
rooms to let fifty cents.
Late night, last chance, light load:
get on down the road.
Sunday Morning
Must you flush the toilet
while I’m in the shower?
That’s a metaphor. It means:
one system, contrary aims.
Let us say that I have come
from beyond the Lyme fields
and ironworks of mortal men.
Would you flush the toilet then?
It’s a yes or no question.
Sometimes I think you’re in a coma
for there is no pupillary response
when I shine a penlight in your eyes.
Still speaking metaphorically.
We’re all adults here,
except for the children.
We all have someplace we’d rather be.
Once, not many winters ago,
a man could record his favorite show
on magnetic tape in plastic casing
and enjoy it at his leisure.
Or so I imagine it,
living alone with the cat,
my amanuensis and all that.
Visitors tell her that she’s fat.
Anthony comes around to play
“Burning Airlines Give You So Much More”
on my brand-new Yamaha.
I read him what I wrote that day.
I step from the capsule
out onto the surface of my apartment.
From here the earth looks like the set
of the Verizon Halftime Report.
I make the beast with no backs.
Someday a real rain will come
and wash all the scum
off my sheets.
I support the unborn child’s right
to be spared the ghastly sight
of this brightly burning world,
this swiftly tilting dumpster.
All new speedways boogie
and misty mountains hop.
The telephone’s been cut off,
I’m waiting for the clocks to stop.
If you love something, set it free—
that’s stupid. Keep it close.
If I’ve killed one man,
I’ve killed most.
I’m having a feelings attack
out of the blue. Into the black
site, the multisided mudslide.
I’m just trying to find the bridge.
I Skype with Rose.
The heart knows what it knows.
Rose says, “Go put a shirt on.”
All my friends are Scorpios.
I live alone with the cat.
It’s been a long time.
Been a long lonely
lonely lonely lonely lonely time.
40th Anniversary Edition
It’s the Chinese Year of the Fire Drill.
I walk the fields—alfalfa, falafel, falderal.
Nothing out here but syllables, high as
Aegean okra, and a few post-agrarian silos,
dotless i’s that dormice catch some z’s in.
They’re rich like me, this time of the season.
Convair CV-300, play that dead band’s
last black-box seconds. I can’t imagine that Can’s
records were favorites of Ronnie Van Zant’s.
Gary Rossington (later he married Dale Krantz)
broke both arms and legs and, yep, his pelvis,
two months after, yup, the death of Elvis.
Star Wars had opened in Wichita, Kansas.
I don’t think anyone knew who Can was.
I listened to Kiss and Shaun Cassidy.
But when Skynyrd’s bird dropped out of the sky
(I’ll spare you the pun I’ve prepared on “free”)
we sang Watergate does not bother me.
Turn those speakers up full blast, and all that.
Nel mezzo nevermind—pace Foghat—
what a loose ride, what a fast ride too.
Remaster Tago Mago, add bonus tracks, reissue.
Overnight
The FedEx logo, feral,
felling deer with its arrow,
likes shooting monkeys
in a barrel. It gets Lyme disease.
The ironies! Arrows and
the telltale Target logo rash
I sing. The love of evil.
The root of cash.
My bluish and my human foot
around the child soldier’s neck
absolutely has to be there.
We demur to dissect.
I shall be telling this far hence
in a speeding Mystery Van
traveling furiously toward you.
Get out as early as you can.
Within a Budding Grove
The rabies virus is half my age.
Its engine’s any bartender.
It’s part meerkats at the zoo at prayer,
part Nobodaddy Tabernacle Choir.
All boners are my brothers.
Alps on Alps arise.
The waitress serves the fatal virus.
She’s never seen The Rockford Files.
O huntress, suitably attired,
you’re going to need a tetanus shot.
You’ve got a suitable vagina.
I do not want what you haven’t got.
I come from a land of ice and snow.
I’ll reboot your Southern charms
with the brute brute boot of a brute like me.
All boners are my brothers in arms.
Poem Beginning with a Line from Samuel Johnson
Clear your mind of cunt.
I can’t.
I put on my pants
one day at a time.
I have an eight-track mind.
It shoots ink to confuse.
I support
its right to choose.
When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
of two balloons.
Just a little pinprick.
I’m a certain snatch of light
passing through
a double slit.
If observed, I behave
like a prodigal,
not a wave.
I’m neither both
nor and.
You’ll never understand.
You’ll never undersea.
I feel like a natural woman
is just too real for me.
In the Air Tonight
All my love come tumbling down
and I get wild pregnant with Jesus.
I feel a wild harbor in my pants
and the boats with all their lights.
I have some oats in a thing of leather.
My toast always lands Christ-side up.
Kid! It’s coming out my ears.
Don’t you want to be there when we all get born?
Let’s carry rope together in a glade.
Boom
Boom Mancini survived on ferns
and roots for a month on Fire Island.
I led the search party. It’s what I do.
I too dislike you. I rock down to
Electric Avenue. Let’s reinvent then die
behind the wheel. I’ve been waiting
for this moment for all my life.
Oh Lord.
Friend of the Devil
See here on the ultrasound,
that thing that looks like a comma?
It will separate the elements
in a series. I can’t believe we’re even
having this conversation to begin with.
The womb’s a fine and private place,
or am I thinking of a doughnut?
You ask me, the hippies still have
a lot to answer for. But no one
ever asks me. I smell pasta.
I was a nurse during the war.
The soldiers in their dying pleaded,
“Can you get one of the other nurses?”
I know what no duck knows.
Tomorrow is Thursday.
Come, Lord Jesus,
let us not bandy words.
I too have followed the Dead.
I saw you and the devil talking.
Tell me, bluntly, what he said.
Weren’t you just a little tempted?
Rhymes
I went down to Nag Hammadi.
What’s your name and who’s your daddy.
Hamper’s full, the laundry’s dry.
These pots might have some jinn inside.
That whale must answer for his crimes.
He ate four trainers and some lions.
Devil horns and nothing else on.
Matthew Murdock, Foggy Nelson.
Foggy notion just crossed my mind.
Trouble ahead, lotion behind.
Get with the program, mandrake root.
Let raven croak and howlet hoot.
A liver, observe, is eating an eagle.
The liver is me, we learn in the sequel.
Sometimes an eagle is just a cigar.
Mock on, mock on, Truffaut, Godard.
A bout of sniffles, something’s off.
Turn your head to the side and cough.
Daughters and sons, dollars and cents.
Cat’s in the cradle, dog far hence.
About that soufflé, a word if I may.
Roadside abortion, curds and whey.
If it’s romance you’re after in Phoenix,
just ask a teen girl for a kleenex.
Could you finish up a little faster?
You’re old enough to be my sister.
My battle cry is Nevermore.
I give these suckerfish what for.
I ruin them. I’m through with men.
I build the new Jerusalem.
This earth, my sole inheritance,
spits up its precious lubricants.
I kick an empty gas can.
Behold: the next-to-last man.
The Song Remains the Same
Comfortably platinum,
they bang a gong, the old masters.
Jägermeister underwrites
their Stratocasters.
My childhood’s reunited
and it feels so good. It feels
like making love for money should.
Money changes chicks for free.
It changes Freddie Mercury.
Ave Regina!
How high that highest Bic
lights the arena.
What is the use of rocking,
and there is no end of rocking.
AOR’s blocked aortas clog
Friday Night Rock Block,
but Zoso what, black dog?
It’s half-past past is prologue.
Sweat, Piss, Jizz & Blood
The great nation of California
shuts out the lights, one by one.
I’m next door in the saguaro.
I must expel the Mexican.
Warren Zevon, Levon Helm
slip into a slippery elm—
fall, gash, crash that gold-
vermillion dollar bash.
Mississippi trinity:
fetus, flag, and F-150.
The bee, a tiny mason, is
expert in fruition.
The honey-drip, the bee-loud buzz
of Jimmy Page’s Gibson.
You say that this is all there is:
sweat and piss and blood and jizz.
But I’m from wheat and dust and flat,
and I was born to marvel at
the Jayhawks in 2008.
I don’t believe you: God is great.
Country Music
God bless the midnight bus depot,
the busted guitar case.
God bless diazepam,
its dilatory grace.
God keep Carl Perkins warm
and Jesus Christ erase
my name from all the files in
the county’s database.
The dog that bit my leg
the night I left the state,
Lord won’t you let
his vaccines be up to date.
West Point to the south of me,
Memphis to the north.
In between is planted with
pinwheels for the Fourth.
Smokestack Lightning, Jesus Christ—
whatever your name is—
bless my fingers on these strings,
I’ll make us both famous.
How about that, the new moon,
same as it ever was.
You must’ve been high as a kite
when you created us.
So hurry, hurry, step right up,
there’s something you should see.
The sun shines on the bus depot
like a coat of Creole pink.
God keep the world this clean and bright
and easy to believe in
and let me catch my bus all right,
and then we’ll call it even.
Oh Wow
The only reason you’re not going to hell is you’re already in it.
The Fear Factor contestant says he’s in it to win it.
Science, the opiate of the elite, asks too many questions.
I become tired and sick, till I wander off by myself and listen in perfect silence to The Sun Sessions.
Why is there something rather than something else is a question only Southern rock can answer.
The cattle all have brucellosis. Grandma’s dead of cancer.
The astronauts of my youth plant the flashing MTV logo on the moon.
I thought of that historic moment on the day Steve Jobs was taken from us too soon.
The artist formerly known as Sting gives back rubs to the war orphans;
Swami Svatmarama distributes copies of the Hatha Yoga to boost the orphans’ endorphins.
Would you care to make a small donation?
The orphans with remaining limbs give the dharma a standing ovation.
Oh wow, a guy came on your face and you wrote about it? That’s so daring.
Let me be among the very first to say thanks for sharing.
If you need a writing tutor, I am programmed to oblige.
Lesson one: metaphor, a kind of bridge.
A blackbird can be looked at in a number of ways, including two.
A man and a woman are the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.
On Making Mixes for Girls Who Won’t Give Death Metal a Chance
My reptile brain sheds its skin.
On its belly it goes supernova.
It got over getting over
that assimilated Jew, Jehovah.
My reptile brain chops off its tail
to watch it grow right back.
The family requests an autopsy.
My brain drops horribly in a pail.
Like a bulwark
breached for the very first time,
dear brain, once more unto!
There’s someone bleeding all over you.
Down on all fours, brain.
Brain take a face full of quills.
You’re still in love with dark
Satanic Hayley Mills.
In olden days a glimpse of stocking
would give me a lobotomy.
The very thought of me!
Out of the car, long hair, endlessly rocking.
Reptile brains are wasted on the young.
Butcher Holler
Got an empty shoe box for Xmas.
Every Xmas, same shoe box.
The theater of my dreams
I called it, for I dreamed of shoes.
Its realistic cardboard walls
enclosed a horseless expanse—
no lariat, no corral, no okay. So I
stole six U.S. Army mules,
named ’em Cattle Drive,
Train Job, Bank Job, Blow,
Adios Muchachos, and All
Deserts Have Cacti.
In fact, I also stole
their sires and dams.
A man should have a best-laid plan,
or what’s a town dump for?
So mothers, tell your children
I’ll need to see some ID.
Work on your looks, ye mighty.
Someday I’ll have more shoes
than I know what to do.
Barefoot servants too.
Lose Myself
Yeah, I got the bug. Got razzle dazzle,
dazed and refused. I’m with stupid.
Step up, chump. I’m OK, cupid.
Main man on the data dump.
I’m erotic baggage and cholo spit.
I’m the motherfucking the.
I invented it. I’m a bucket
of Colonel Sanders,
Kentucky Fried Panzer man.
I’m a bare midriff in a sharkskin suit.
I got twenty-seven dollars!
I’m homing in on your boo.
It’s all over now, Bobbie Sue.
The Second Sex Page 2