Pink rectangle in my

Rear view mirror proclaims me

One of the saved

Or damned as painted

Zombies throng the town with possible real

Plague as children swarm crowding frozen

Floats for candy

The radio pops 80's mad world as

Garlanded skeletons toast from

Ironic Adirondack chairs as if

Death is a punch line to the old and

On vacation as if

We always knew the road that they travelled was paved in gold

They will never go hungry

Never get old and gray or they already are and

The joke in fact is on the living no global warming

Where that happy couple goes

The zombies will pack their brats into crowded restaurants

Shell out against retirement funds to

Sate the next generation

October remains weirdly green

Jack Frost just a runny streak on my windshield

A photograph of olden days

The Internet diagnosis

Inattentive to spacial geometry cannot

Think outside the

Box

What box

There is no box to contain the dimensions of

My Cyclopean brain my verbal grandiosity like

Those addict racist depressive paranoids Lovecraft and

Poe

Those bipolar poets afflicted with

Verse

They call clang

Hip hop freight train in the head that

Voice that lives on the page that

Inchoate lust not the devil not delusion but

Something bigger than me

You say I'm a narcissist

No algorithm can compute this

Non Euclidean brain

This dance between contradictory hemispheres

I can't count triangles

But do you know what extra dimensions live inside me do you know what multiple perspectives I navigate every day

Am I a Narcissist because I had to wrestle a

Self from doctors and preachers and exes and hexes and witches and feminists and sexists and

If you call me a Narcissist I could tell you

I'm actually Echo a dissolved girl lost in longing pined to atoms

I could tell you I'm the aftermath

Washed up on the beach in a Fellini film

I could tell you I have been shattered into a thousand and one nights told by Anais Nin

I could tell you

But you would never understand

Little egg machine

outside my body like a

witch in a storybook will you

read me will you feed me it is lonely so

compressed like a cat in a cage in

that makes me

cry despite its predictable ending abandoned by a couple in an indie film

The banal tragedy outside my

body promise of romance immortality sentimental ones and zeroes cute pixels a

novel gadget of responsibility I couldn't save the egg baby in high school her painted eyes

condemning me cold on the tiles in the corridor I never played with Tamagotchi I was too old never had children talked to strangers in a box ones and zeroes said feed me my heart is in an egg in a box ones and zeroes

feed me I'm trapped inside here and

It was never immortality I was looking for after all

The earth turns and rings the sun a witches dance bird song and flower squabble and the people come on pilgrimage drawn to the spiraling of interior visions and ribbons spin around a sacred axis of man and maid and more and god and godlessness and pagan babies display inked skins and don the costumes of true identity manifest self manifest destiny and dance with fate free will free choice free love art and anarchy and the wild magic of seeking the boundary and testing the limits and loving the forgotten and strange and longing for a lost cross lover of stars inked with green magic a wolf who walks beside me teaches me silence to trust the moon to know my own footing to dare to see in the dark

I was too fragile and bourgeoisie for occupy never got arrested thought

the pussy hat would be the new

peace sign thought black lives

would bring the dead panthers back but I can groove on

Acid communism feel like you knew me as a kid in Worcester watching Abbie Hoffman's funeral from my college window

asking my English Lit professor who's the bigwig with all the limos

Just another suicidal

revolutionary burned out before

they could pass the torch

I know we've tripped Phildickian in drug free future memory you died

In 2017 the year this hippie heart put down the love beads and got radical this banker poet went to grad school knew they could never punch a nazi but they might fight the power with harm reduction fight the system within the system

Knew they had to do something for all the lost boys and crazy girls of all colors for all the poets and addicts for all the galvanization of madness into action because doing nothing was anything but sane and now they keep the keys but want to unlock all the artists hold a rave in the asylum a drug free dream trip of what we need to call your ghost back to dance with the 13 indigenous grandmothers to bring back what we need to

imagine to have hope to be healed

Whatever happened to the

Girl with the name of a mermaid and the

Kids from the crazy club in Worcester

The brown boy with ancient eyes who gave me my best line

I stole it from cast-off snakeskins slumming one July

Running away from a monster with

Blue eyes blue jean soul beat

Down and faded we were all

Running from something

Running or standing reading Stephen King

And making weapons in the

Basement Red-haired momma raised us on Abbie Hoffman Revolution

You were the casualty in the undeclared war on

Drugs

You were the one who dared to beat the monster

Back you were the one drunk and

Frightening in the dark you were the one I ran to and away

From to hide me too

scared to be poor or queer to soft and strange for revolution in anything more than

Moldy magazines and coffee shops

I threw away the mermaid girls art

Barbie with big hair and black-and-blues

"Typical Girl"

She called it

I wore it pinned to a thrift store vest until I moved to rich town where

Nobody flaunted survival only crazy that was fashionable

When my boyfriend too-scared-to-be-my- girlfriend-but-was-anyway sniffed at the pretense of punk rock

My boy girlfriend who never drank but I left behind

Like a moldering copy of feminist poetry

And the mad children who made me whole

I am addicted to sweet things and sad stories

blurry pages and lemon cookies

artificially flavored

tasting like conspiracy

and summer conversation in her tangled upstairs

garden

tendrils of plants and dark

luminous oil paintings

She turned them all against the wall --Eve strangled by the tree of knowledge

Faery queens with porcelain faces

and alien grabbing fingers

I remember the taste of lemon meringue pie ice cream in her humid kitchen artificially flavored

as these cookies that so sensually flake and

melt on my tongue

reading Alice Hoffman and thinking of a boy

and the woods

and a green place where I am dreaming the taste of spring candy

on my lips

lust and rain and innocence

I should be the painter --turn their faces to the walls

so they can't stare at me hungry and unfinished

I remember the last night I saw her wearing a long bright blazer

magenta roses smiling

praising her new medication

I wanted to be happy for her but I missed the livid colors of her rage

those dark confessional

claustrophobic moments listening to her voice as she read me the novel she wrote for her children

so they would know who she had been before they were born

Our heads bent over teacups and ice cream

one dark and one white

though she would mock me if I mentioned Taoism and balance

she would mock me and keep me honest ranting

--Mary Oliver is a millionare and not a mystic

all flavors are artificial

where is nature in this world governed by pavement and chain link fences

nature is nowhere except a metaphor to sell poetry

but the Big Dig so huge and all around her was real and and I told her only a true pantheist would see God in that monster machinery

and I want to tell her I still taste yellow in my dreams

I still smell the sun's honey on my fingers

in every woods I walk in

and someday I'll be as brave and bold as she was

till then there are these lemon cookies from the dollar store

these sad dreamy New England romance novels

these windows full of tea and conspiracy

these tepid wisdoms steeped in bitter days

Renunciate exile islands of life divided by information

Highway my squirrel scraping the ground for sustenance the feminist podcast says

The body knows the squirrel will leave a barren patch it will move on it's about survival so why do I scurry and scuttle as it is getting darker fattening on sudden images of you on old songs old lovers in a dangerous time old longings old regrets old Lang syne the end of the year the end of the world? the dawn of my fiftieth winter you would think I would know better you would think have learned something by now .....

She's craving pills and I'm just wanting to know were you living for humanity or just looking for permission to die

I don't know what I desire I stand on his shore empty is it just autumn ennui is it too muchness school this urge to succeed I thought to fulfill the edict of a better angel but what if dust is all and we must sweep it all aside the urge to hurt the urge to purge the craving for chocolate to touch a strangers hair the urge for skin when I've forgotten what libido looks like when Sex is summer morning and unbroken time when we occupy bodies in space when we press skin to skin the impression of a leaf in wax what was it we were drawing again it comes out so faint so timid so lost on the white page

Drum hat dialectic

We've seen this all before on the national mall white boy red hat all up in native man's drums and aggression red man white hat Vietnam vet or conscientious objector forgives red hat boy on national television speaks of anger and prayer and the need to forgive him the boy's parents hold him home from school death threats and you can't be to careful hire a PR firm professional confession you can't be to careful the arrow flies both ways this Rorschach test this tale of two prayers and two who pray one to save babies in the womb one to save babies in border cages one to build a wall one to deconstruct his own reaction one to drum and one to march one to sing and one to chant one to build a wall and one to break one down he never built there were no walls no country just lands and songs forget just fire water and white mans sin and salvation just recovery just infantry just AIM just this foment of nations just this burning consciousness this surrender like stolen sage smoke this music of prayer this burning for justice and plead for resolution because somebody had to step up and somebody had to walk away ......