ALPHA'S ALPHA*

Roosters can fly in spirit.

I always knew you had a soul.

Your speckled wings

are spreading now,

your red and gold

filaments trailing

over country roads

and ignoring highways.

Who's that ghost raccoon

following you?  The eye

you took from him

is filled with liquid moonlight,

I can see he is your brother now.

He collapsed in the forest

with a missing testicle.

You roam these astral lands

together toward your own

unknown Valhalla.

Then I wake from lucid dream

and release you to rejoin you

sometime later

in another unsought vision.

* The title was inspired in part by Rafael Alberti's 'The Angel Angel' from his great collection, Concerning the Angels.  That book and The Owl's Insomnia are favorites of mine.  Alberti was one of the greatest poets who ever lived, and his work should be confronted by anyone with a serious interest in poetry.

A glade beside a cliff-drop

a pool of bejeweled women

a burlap umbrella,

corolla'd skull and bones

sweet rain soaking fibers

and the laughter shaking

delicious rows of breasts

bright triangles of sentient pubis.

Faces staring tendrils

through the bleakness

of my former soul

searching me for

milks of ancient dawn

no king's hand

on no willing pawn

free people in a ring

of stone and water

we frolicked making sons and daughters.

ESTUARY OF ASH

Estuary of ash

the hissing kiss of fallen particles

flowing together from formerly

living bodies, wet with blood again

from heaped neglected generations,

filling my ash-stained hands,

mouth crying from my forehead

for my long lost people,

teeth and spine adjoined

in a crawling thing

that can no longer sing.

The flow of deaths

around strong rooted trunks

and trunk-thick roots,

leaves of scalp and hair

landing on reconstituted skull,

making me climb out and

reclaim my throat of throats,

building up the scream of life

lost to so many.

I see my mixed ancestors

pressing a wall of glass that

presents like a bulldozer's blade,

and I want life from shade

beneath disintegration,

let it divide my cells

into teeming darkness,

darkness which has kept the life

unseen in gemlike rectitude

the pale blind sand flows past

the clinging sash of inheritance

to catacombs of damned

whose singing no door has slammed

an unstuck tongue has wrapped

my heart and taken its errant seed

to deeper wombs of home

whose rowers never row alone.

ATTACK OF THE SWAMPMAIDS

Part Two

Swampmaids invade offices

through water and waste,

protected by their amphibious bodies,

shaking off the human sewage with a snarl

as they embark into the cubicles,

injecting psychedelic slime

into corporate computers,

erasing all government files,

poisoning the hearts of heads of state

and sealing their genitals.

Black swampmaids shake fin-clad booty

in ranks atop long conference tables,

dripping radical literature into broken brains,

hypnotizing bosses to walk through

broken windows and smash their skulls

between the painted lines of parking lots.

A few awaken to their torment

and begin to dance along.  They kiss

the foot-fins of the swampmaids

and their veins light up

with swamp psilocybin.

How they long to dissolve

their false identities

in living water.

Now we march together to the swamps

to be fully baptized.  The converts

see the smile on my face: my gills

are beginning to open.

Each opening presents a purple pussy

on my skin.  This is the realm

that dwells in me, not just

the realm that I am dwelling in.

SWAMPMAID ATTACK

The swampmaids slither up

the rainy hills.  They bathe me

in the slime that heals and kills.

It kills the old self that I left behind.

It scuttles that self's last

remaining grime.

They bathe me in the wetness

of their cunts.  We eat the fish

they saved me from their lunch.

We serve the sky's green tendrils

as they climb.  The swampmaids

love it when I dance and rhyme.

They're lighting me on fire

with their talk.  Their anarchy

does not balk where mine balks.

I let them take me further in the dark.

I let them sodomize me in the park.

Their liquid phalluses retract and melt.

They let me melt mine

deep inside themselves.

They open every hole and scream

and scream.  They feel the tadpoles

in my mammal cream.

Our mutant babies soon

will crawl the world.

United states of anarchy

adorn these boys and girls.

The rooted clouds unfurl above

the veins of swampmaid world.

A sheet of water spouts

from a rift in the ground

a living mirror refracts

my inherited cultural self

and scrapes loose the mysterious soul.

I'm drinking through my asshole.

I'm drinking through these

sallow pockmark eyes

from a God-touched Earth

my kind has savaged

with increasingly elaborate error.

Where is the real path to the sky?

It's not through any of their rockets.

The ethereal empties my pockets.

REVOLUTION

Overturn the throne of Christ

in America.  Drive the corporate

capitalists into Hades, leave only

mom and pop shops up and down

each coast, scattered freely

among our humanity.  Tear up

these cruel highways for light rail,

joyous children and bicycles,

communal food-pits and huge

picnic congregations: let us begin

to see one another again.

Bring in the holy heretics

who sacrificed to give us some light,

welcome in our radical elders

without worship to give thanks

for what they sowed, while so

many of us were asleep.

The church we grow together

from this ground

is the church we keep.

No more high elevated priests.