Bottom Shelf

Several ways and
several times
sweet yellow corn
has
transfigured and burned
down, thrown into
my throat with
a friction and
a speed.

A unique bitter
slime
back in the
back of my
mouth flushes, flushes
with fresh liquid.

You have to swallow again
and then you completely and
totally
taste it.

"Ah, bottom shelf as usual I see."

"Indeed sir, only the least fine."

And so you pour a little more
and let all the candles burn down
and soon
in cricket song
we'll sing
for the dawn.

Finally Run Aground

She sailed out
pretty as a peach
the decks shone in
a white April sun and
the port on the river, the
piers shifting up and down on
glassy
green water,
she waited every night
for the sleek, painted
barque to sail home.

The storms of time will
scupper steel
and rot the osage orange.

We loved her and she would still
haul in fish, a sight every morning leaving the
harbor.

And it broke me,
it broke me when
we saw her
leak and groan
and we swore at her, cursed her
and at night winced, remembering.

We crashed a beer bottle on her hull.

She'll sail now only in my memories.

They ask me 'Why do you look like that?
Are you okay?"

And I say "Y'all, I'm just thinkin'. I'm sorry"

And she'll be carrying me over whitecaps,
soaring under granite bluffs and
making me feel free.

Now, the anchor chain is
cold
on my foot.

Dawn

The sunrises
Are my favorite part
Of an otherwise
Soul-deadening and nerve-numbing
Job.

The stars are so clear
In their selenium black-blue when
The young horizon
Begins to burnish and braze to
Brass, copper, orange.

Hours before the sun ever
Peeks above and
Blazes furiously, avenging
The cold and blindness of
Night, the sky melts and
Oozes into color, still full of stars,
Still overseen by the Moon,
And my favorite is the hour
When the bright faces of
Luna and Sol share the sky
Like good siblings born of the same
Light.

Hoarfrost shimmers in winter
And dances in our headlights
Pulling over the crunching
White gravel.
I shiver leaving the truck
For the cold factory
And I breathe deep the morning air
Before I plunge into
Work.

ACAB and Mawma sez

Someone hollered "whoo!" Across the river

I had driven myself here
To kill myself.

Fortunately The Dam was closed.

Because i had intended to walk along the low side.
The high side was the favorite, because of the depth. But i knew
There was so little
One could drown in.
So i walked
Along the lefthand
Low side
Because i also knew
That splatting oneself against the
Spillway
Slope
Was much more humane than
Drowning in the
Deep
Catfish
Dark,
And i had in mind my people,

Maybe they'd run their imaginations
Through.

Maybe there'd be horror but *gasp*
Also sympathy

Let's not go that far.
So I chugged down a bottle
And i drove as close
As i could
To where i could jump
Into that wide
Pure
Clean
Tennessee

i chugged that bottle down
And the wind cut cold
Shivering
Through me

And way,
Way across the slough
I heard a faint:
"Whoooh!
With a certain
Southron enthusiasm. And it said:

Don't give up!
But drink 'at likker,
Does 'at make sense?

And as I
Screwed the top
Back on the bottle

I thought:
Maybe so.

I elbowed the door on
My truck that
The cops broke
All the way home

And lived another day

What More There Is #2

This life  and
This love, they are so much more than
Dying, listless
asleep in wine, in malbec
and cabernet, in
whiskey smoke and beer,
Dying for a loving touch that feels
like white sand in between
your toes or a cool
blanket in summer.
It's more than fighting
to stay awake or
to sleep or
to get enough fiber.

It's more than you hearing words
in crowded spaces
those words that call for
great expanses, fields and
copses of birch and pine, you
who can barely listen above the din
and miasma, whose eyes are
dimly lit by neon and cathode-ray
and LCD,  deserve only the auditorium
of a grand wilderness, an endless jungle.

I too, cannot fully watch the flickers in your smile or the nuances of your laugh when all the diesel traffic
roaring by and every chainlink
fence stands between us,

~~~~~

A boat roars by, the brown water gets murky and
churns on our feet
river-glass sparkles in the waves
and white pelicans
soar far from home over the river.
We stand laughing, eyes
squinting in bright laughter, in the
burning sun.

There's more to life
in this, in this
shining cloudless day,
in mirthful folly and joy,
there's more to love in our
little rounded toenails
crinkling in the mud.

And I'll hear
your voice as if in a dream, vivid
and clear, hearing it as if for the first time
but with an added sense of deja vu.
And I can speak to you with no hoarse
choking throat, no smoke or
nebulae to cloud it, and
we can find what more there
is, and what sun
feels like on our skin.

Wherefore Is the Dawn So Bright?

Bow
To the whisky bottle,
And put your finger
Here
Between these frets.
Hit these keys
All at the
Same
Time.

Dip cigarettes in crawfish juice,
Get stymied by a gas station
Condom wrapper.

Know this,
These,
People and faces and professions
Neuroses
Dogs' names
Relatives
Those others
So significant.

Lose elastin, use lotion.
Snooze buttons, schmooze cliques
And
Play
Your part
Running
For local bar regional review assessment commissioner.

Repair things.

Learn how. It ain't hard.

Hit it with a hammer, weld it.

Learn the back roads in Tuscumbia,
Drive a stick shift, order the cheapest beer,
take cold showers, go camping unprepared. Eat the guts of
Crawfish, make terrible
Homemade pizza, burn bad poetry,
Burn good prose, burn letters, burn photos. Keep photos, get in touch with old friends, then never speak to them.

In a daydream, we dance to
Skynyrd in firelight,
Mosquito bitten and barefoot,
And the pebbles rattle under our feet.

Now look at the whiskey bottle,
see how much you've drank. Acknowledge this as a dose,
how much you need
now, versus
every other time.

Don't freak out. Don't eat too much.
Don't act wild at work, it looks weird.
Don't play with
fishing poles in a parking lot,
don't talk to yourself at wal-mart.

Be a human,
Love, remember,
Be a reptile,
Hate, forget

Red Autumn

The cypresses shed blood
Red on the asphalt, driven like
Snow at the marina, and
I deathlessly sneeze and
Cough, sniffling in
Leaf mold and the changing weather,
Watching yet another
Youthful season grow old
And senile. The summer
Waned helplessly before me
And could I have seized
It, and shook it by the shoulders
I would have, saying,
"Wait for me,
Just a little longer now."

My father says one more frost and
His lawn will lose its green.
He said this morning,
"Do I hear someone mowing?"
And, sure enough, the black
Neighbor who married that nice
Filipino woman was mowing the dust,
brown clouds soaring up
Into a clear and bright Alabama
Sky, little bits of dead grass
Slung out sideways from the blade and
His skin shining, hat too, bright white,
And my father says,
"I need to mow too."

The fiddle sings like a
Well-tuned train whistle, it screaming
In my ears out of the stock
Ford speakers and it drowning out
The lack of muffler, it giving me chills.
I headed to the end of the parkway
Where it hits the highway and
Stops, the highway running
North to South.
South led to the same, the familiar,
the dark and dirty foundry
And swollen hands, busted knuckles and
More sinus infections. It led
To the same too-soft beds and
Staticy televisions.
North went straight to my brave
And beautiful wilderness, dead
On into smooth pebbles worn
By water so clean you can drink it,
To tupelos reaching into creeks
Drying up in the winter's thirst,
To birches' silver knives waving in a
Stinging wind, to the year's last
Topwater bass that leap into my lap
And there,
There I made the
Tough choice.

"Another year," I said,
"Another season."