Standing at the bus stop
On a rainy Portland day
Chatting with my bus mates
Just to pass the time away
When some a-hole drives by
Easy as you please
Now I’m soaking in my work clothes
And freezing in the breeze
Everybody!
Breeze, breeze, breeze, breeze
Freezing in the breeze…
Damn I feel happy
Walt Disney can eat my shorts
Craig Virgin can take people to the moon in his aero rocket for all I care
I’m going to grab the corners of my mouth and shove them up over my ears
gonna lay around the shack ’till the mail train comes back
gonna hop like a one legged crow on a day old happy meal
I’m going to bloom like a rhododendron looking to get his pistil wet
Oh. My. God.
It’s working.
It’s just words on a page
don’t simper or whimper
nasty is tasty
and wetter is better
than dinner details
or fan boy wails
the smell of rain
on hot cement
compels more
than impudence
Crouching Tiger
Proud Tiger’s lie in the hoary rough
Beneath Augusta’s august boughs
To the mortal eye would bring a tear
Yet the golfing god would acres tear
Until the lie became a slough
And if the slough be not enough
A lake would he plow up and swear
And toss his club, his face a rouge!
His reputation back to steer
To the lie where it lay
Not half so deep,
So beyond repair.
–Burl Whitman
The man with the steel pierced lips leaned against the utility pole by the bus stop smoking. Blowing smoke from the corner of his mouth, he watched the cars on Broadway dart by like tropical fish returning from the feeding grounds. A heavy young woman with Downs Syndrome ate an apple and stared up at the man from her cross-legged perch on the sidewalk. Four number eight buses went by before theirs came. The man patiently waited as the woman got up off the pavement, counted her change and bought a ticket from the driver. “Things could be better, but they could be a whole lot worse,” he said to me, smiling, as he flipped his cigarette into the gutter as he got on the bus behind her.
the wind through the blue pine needles
kept thinking at bay
long enough
to enjoy your company
A fruit bat will hang upside down
all day at the zoo
waiting for a banana
so why won’t you wait
six seconds
for me to walk
across the crosswalk.
Asshole.
How detestable, how absurd
to be upstaged by an insipid Bird
thought Elmo with glum eyes gazing
as the puppeteer smacked him
with a six foot bird wing.
Masons laid up the basalt for the cottage walls between smoke breaks and beer the skeleton grew sideways first then a chimney spine and vertebrae
the breathing started later
rasping at first
then smooth sighs
finally growling at the end when the whole thing came down in an earthquake a hundred years later
Earth eyes looked up from below through the masons beer bottle glasses as they scraped the rubble away looking for anything salvageable amid the moldy fever dreams of a hundred years of nighttime wanderings.
