AD.

WALKING ON THIN ICE

yesterday’s poems

I’m stealing my soul
back from the Devil
one selfie at a time

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Rebuilding my soul
In spite of Satan
haiku by haiku

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free will on the installment plan

Recent Facebook statuses:

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I am what I is… not much mainstream involved.

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Been thinking about joining the power structure. I am white. I am male. I am old. Of course I’m poorer than Trump’s chance of telling the truth, and I’m not a lizard-person, so there is that. Can one become a lizard-person? Are there apprenticeship programs? I do lie well, so I have the basic skill set.

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I wanna be a kleptocrat.

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Walking from kitchen to living room swinging my arms, my forefinger thumps against something… I look down to see a 3 inch black & pale wasp of 3-segments circle me slowly then move on, and my fingertip tingles with the might-have-been.

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We’re back home from her eye operation, she’s sleeping… they lasered away 2,500 portions of her eye, reducing the edges of her retina in hopes of increasing blood flow so her retina doesn’t swell.

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Watching roadkill before it becomes roadkill –
what do you want for Brexit?

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The better root of the bitter truth
is the bitter route to the better truth

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They always talk of darma,
but what of darpa… and their darkids?
People say the darmist things.

And when darma goes shopping,
does she drive her karma?

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“We die. That may be the meaning of life.
But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

– Toni Morrison

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Folk call me a cradle robber for marrying 27 years younger,
but she chose me, so it’s more like she’s a grave robber.

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The 1950’s kids TV show was originally to be called The Howdy Dawdler Show, but the puppet star-to-be dawdled so long they found a puppet that would do his duty and changed it to the Howdy Doody Show.

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We need to change the rules —
you can only shoot someone who has a gun.

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I live in the addict.

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Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?” – Genesis 3:1, New King James Version

If God made everything, how can the Snake of Eden be craftier than anything God made?

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Spirit caged by skeleton
bone cased in flesh
free will on the installment plan

Yes, erumpent fireflies warmed hands

Yes, erumpent fireflies warmed hands
on xanthous flames fireplaced in a
viperiform damascene hagioscope
gripping the reredos

Girandoled discoball constellations
yogiboogeyboarded swimming pool lights,
dog and ponied interstices of the ceiling joists
zoopraxiscoped herds of variegated animals,
the alopecoid and hares, all manners
of dazzling English animals

The nickle nutlets of teeth in
jellygraph gloss of a dead lamb’s grin,
closed eyelids, japan painted blunt nose
nuque broke, visceral ladled nup of bent innocent colliform
draped on a chair, the Inuit their kamiks

Corpulant agriculture was fecund
on plates we left for morning after Christmas,
wastive abundance, frapped humanity
in ruddy hardihood consecrated by
the rabbi we called in;
the comrade donned a biretta
the webster sat under the vesper
it was a mixed bag, fingers bewildered in
nodated whatevers, que sera sera-ing,
the cows munched their kerf
it was ok it was the weather

The validity of vermiculture,
of worksome insects typing logopedics,
rosining translucent violins withily weaving
wirewove niello of the organized whole

~ Lady

Sparkling Fruit

Sparkling Fruit

Water’s burn
quenches mineral thirst
frees yearn

Fluid husbands
two embraces

Fire leaves gas, ash
sickle’s attainment

Water
adds to the wetted mass of
suckling tree roots

Nurtured in mud,
woody lotus
tall seed dapples taut
sparkling fruit

~ Lady

Good Friday Lady Poem

Discrete blades of crocus
gleam older lizard slivers against
Easter egg grass

Tree bird
coaxes sweet revolution
from the branches of marbled clouds
pearl in its warble telling of the oyster
at the garden gate
open maw honey tide
mellow rosin sun

Far away from lead and stained glass
Mulatu Astatke pops up on the radio
i faram i faram
permutations of rainbow cloth
carrying cross in coptic lands
warm feet on cold plateau
to the temple of the living rock

Sun Ra

Sun Ra

1

My brother, a man of few words
goes across the street to pick up
a Mexican lunch and after he’s full
he gives me his bag of
leftover fresh tortilla chips
a kind of intimacy

2

Tetras – their movement’s squared off into binary digits
flicking 90 degrees like an object suddenly stimulated in a child’s mobile
half of them draw straight lines one tetra length long
various vectors and tangled orthogonalities

They cloud in their favorite spot, the hollow on the right side of the tank
between the lake rocks and the bookcase
The ones on the edge more quick, shooting long tangents,
unsure what they define
and when they thin they scatter
the cloud loses its mind

When a tetra’s alone, it’s adrift
without the ballast and balance
of its companions

The reflection
from the fishtank’s bubbler
goes up at the same rate
looping like contained
stars on a strip
of quicksilver

3

Lyle Lovette says
stars shine on water
sun burns on sand

4

Jupiter is rising
in the ring of Saturn
to celebrate the equivalence
of the days forthcoming

Polly want a polysaccharide?

5

Staircase at night
Low piano note
Comfortable noir

6

I’m going to get a beer
husband goes off to urinate
we’re a pair

The romance of
cyborg man and
atomic eye woman–
the title of our
next book

“When the rising sun
hits the army tents it’s a tent, son,”
he says, then, “s’n will be gone
before eight”

I say, “Astute observations for hire”
He says, “Call me Am….. Astute Man”

then “I was born on the border of
Tolerance and Intolerance,
Texas.”

7

Were my face an owl
thought not thought but
regard for thock of my
feeling, a mirror bent
down from a tree
undersea
being

8

I’d be a
calm caravan
plodding crucible of mothered feet,
shadow liquid in its shifting
under witnessing stars

Retiform filter
gold sifting loaded loam
easy, like a cold ripening apple
thinking about the sun
in the night

~ Lady

Lady Poem 7-29-2016

A shearwater nests on the edge of a cliff
to fall in dream to flight in space
its cruciform wings skim tips of waves
and it follows the whales to feed on their wakes

~ Lady

Lady Poem July 28, 2016

Moment courts that I be not afraid but
trust the line I walk to time earned in
expanses of allowed whistles to a song
of self esteem, a bounce in my step, fealty
to sights noticed and ambient sounds heard
generous wallet and spontaneous talk
face slack, relaxed without frantic smile
except one come naturally like
sating rain

~ Lady

Lady poem 7-17-2016

The colophon of a book
of the paradise of my life – would
I let myself enjoy it – includes block print bees,
fruit trees, pineapples, haystacks and
wheat wreathes, mint juleps and distillations
cultural and otherwise, figures in almanacs
rendered into prizes for specimens shown
at a county fair

We could walk into this streaming sunshine logo, me and thee,
holding hands up to the curlicue of a wooden arch drizzled
in vine, ducking under leaf and grapes and other emblems
of harvest and civilization

Or we can walk into someplace wild named only
by calligraphic monks and keepers of words
glossy books of birds come to life

Summer morning before it gets hot
swallows divebombing us in plucky cheer
us alien in overgrown grasses of a nature
preserve, new eyes of animated stick figures
a children’s drawing taped
on my office cabinet