Flowing fingers and cloudy vision out of vermiculite bound magic.

I'm not jealous, I
can keep my moustache.
Corncob pipes burn
away the midnights
and ease our ache
while awake the bats
and Mr. Toad.

Kerosene and
mildew stink
dirty books
swollen with water

A Nation of
tobacco spit and corn husk
red dirt in walls
faceless cornerstores
the arsenal's
poisoned the fish.

Bear scat
and fungal forests
crunching leaves
and sloughing
needles.

21st century bukowski
hunched over
bleary-eyed
an overheating laptop
holds a tree frog
aloft, to free it
from its cistern pit prison.

Short lived
is how all freedom
is and will be
All is temporal
and even the
truncheons and
walls of cinder blocks
fall to its
perpetual cadence foot falls
as time
keeps
marching
on.

So if you find
me
haggard and smelling
of fish guts, camped some
tuck-away-somewhere on the
tennessee
(the everlasting life-blood)
You'll know I'm there
only cause I wanna be.

Diddley-bows thump through
the tupelo and sassafrass
songs of the south
slip slowly gospel
ploughs on yankee ears

of The Wind and Rains
only the Wind ceased
The Rains screamed unpredictably and
Sol
spoke at noon
but the aboretum of
mountain hard woods
silenced his chant.

Blackberry and
red-clay tattoos
those are the
only flags I'll carry,
those of Maiden
Earth.

Soil from whence we come.

Dirty hands
muddy feet
busted boots
copperhead strikes
devil's bushes
spice tree
wonderin'
whether is was haint
or
turkey.

Deer in the mornin
bear in the evenin
beer for suppertime
baby cricket lullaby for bed.

For once in my life I
felt like I
didn't need a pistol,
and probably
one of the times when
I may have needed one.

Bears and small rivers, my god.
People without air conditioning in
southern swelter
feet of yankee
snow
into march
Barbarism.
Lovely country.

Sweat bees
linger and like
rotten heartbreak memories,
they sting you
when you try to shoo them away.

Poems about the Aztecs
and trains.
Songs we
can't remember
and wonder why
we even
know so much.

I casted poems out into
the wilderness,
to be consumed
and destroyed,
only because
I could.

And now you'll have another
one to read.

Woods

In trickle-down moonlight
Silver dollar beetles
in a high-speed thump
burn through the obscured
night trees.

Pollution makes
otherwise delicious
bass nothing more than
a good fight
and a mild sunburn,
knee deep in warm
and ancient
waters.

Had some yellow poplar leaves
and rationed toiletpaper
for hygiene and smoke baths.

Weak wrists after days
of dirt daubing a
human hovel.
10 foot walls weighing
at tons of clay.

Remembered songs and
stagnant stinking memories
flurry down and melt on my mind's
ground.

And to think
that I can do even
better.