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Sweet beats of jazz impaled on slivers of wind Kansas Black Morning/ First Horn Eyes/ Historical sound pictures on New Bird wings People shouts/ boy alto dreams/ Tomorrow’s Gold belled pipe of stops and future Blues Times Lurking Hawkins/ shadows of Lester/ realization Bronze fingers—brain extensions seeking trapped sounds Ghetto thoughts/ bandstand courage/ solo flight Nerve-wracked suspicions of newer songs and doubts New York alter city/ black tears/ secret disciples Hammer horn pounding soul marks on unswinging gates Culture gods/ mob sounds/ visions of spikes Panic excursions to tribal Jazz wombs and transfusions Heroin nights of birth/ and soaring/ over boppy new ground. Smothered rage covering pyramids of notes spontaneously exploding Cool revelations/ shrill hopes/ beauty speared into greedy ears Birdland nights on bop mountains, windy saxophone revolutions. Dayrooms of junk/ and melting walls and circling vultures/ Money cancer/ remembered pain/ terror flights/ Death and indestructible existence In that Jazz corner of life Wrapped in a mist of sound His legacy, our Jazz-tinted dawn Wailing his triumphs of oddly begotten dreams Inviting the nerveless to feel once more That fierce dying of humans consumed In raging fires of Love.

Someone has opened a giant map and with the tips of our fingers, each of us suddenly blind, we track the black cold of this monument for names we know like finding a route home. Lost here this damp spring morning, the cherries exploding like the fourth of July, we wonder how many maps of Viet Nam sold those years, so many strange sounding places. One of us holds a magnifying glass to McCarroll, McMorris, McNabb, small print in the polished stone, the way a neighbor, say, in Neoga, Illinois might have done, late at night searching that faraway land on his kitchen table, hearing again the morning paper thump against the front door, that boy on his bike in the dark grown and gone—what was his name, that kid from down the block?— Khe Sanh, Da Nang, Hanoi. --for PFC William "Willie" Searle

The sun time of the year died out and never might return. We made fires big as coffee tables to approximate the sun. I wanted to be a mountain. I wanted us all countless mountains in a detailed painting. Blood is everywhere as always. But now it is blown further and oxygenated for longer. Yet more sad word has come digitally. We contain no blood with which to soften and warm the sad word. Cold wind placed and places the house in its mouth. We met the end numb and almost still. Number meant less motion meant even number meant totally still. The buildings stand still. The buildings still stand. The buildings like the builders take each other by the hand.

Poets' Anti-War Rally, 12 Feb. 2003 The massed and pillared wings of the White House never fly— whitewashed yearly, they stand impervious to metaphor, to hawk and dove, and red armies of ants. Only the halting squirrels investigate, creeping past the arrowhead gates to scratch the Midas lawns for treasure—On the street, commentators wander like boys in a story too simple to explain. The political message, a hat punched inside out: once, the Nazis got word that Churchill would visit Roosevelt "in Casa Blanca": U-Boats bobbed near the Potomac, waiting for him... but Churchill, as he said, was sailing to Morocco. Reagan protesters splashed the Pentagon walls daily with cow blood— soldiers waxed the plaster, and triremes of rats licked the bloody grass; the EPA sent health goons to stomp them, and the pacifists, away— Then rats stormed the National Zoo: urbane, patient inheritors of the earth, they snapped prairie dogs like wishbones; vigilante zookeepers laced the ground with poison, Carthage delenda est, and killed the hippo. (Here, in the New World Order, penguin and polar bear soak up ozone, and Nation shall beat them both into ploughshares....) Hawks and fat cats disdained the White House squirrels, their proconsul Chevy Suburban nosed us aside: we spoke against the war, and for the cameras, spelled our names on Chinese Radio—Elder poets shrewdly loitered at the lobbiest bar, read first, then left us to the falange of Secret Servicemen, chatting like critics into their black lapels at every bungled line: this was no singing school, no falcon heard our crows and warbles... Emily, our modest leader, rapped the gate: "Mrs. Bush wanted American poems— I brought 3,000, all against the war. Can you take them?" Gulping, the pimply guard asked his shirt for help; older hands hustled up, "The Great Oz cannot see you..." etc. Will four and twenty blackbirds fill a cowboy hat? Bunkered belowdecks, the President goes for the burn, racing the cut tongue of his treadmill to a dead heat. Even Nixon met the enemy once, strode with his staff into a red sea of hippies— they didn't part, and he burbled about baseball... from his desk, he liked to watch the sightseers through a gap in the hedges; peaceniks learned this and blocked his view, stood there day and night for years: Nixon, nightmare reality shanking through his eyes, knelt with Kissinger: Henry, he moaned,what do they want?.... Days from now, how many days, the Valentine "Woo at the Zoo" begins. A hand-raised falcon bows, and shares meat with its master.... He bows in turn, and eats; both softly whisper ee-chu, ee-chu,

who somehow have found a sip of water, on this day in the past four syndicated series involving communication with the dead were televised and in this way we resembled our own ghosts in a world made brief with flowers. To you, our agonies and tizzies must appear quaint as the stiff shoulders of someone carrying buckets from a well or the stung beekeeper

Green mwold on zummer bars do show That they’ve a-dripp’d in winter wet; The hoof-worn ring o’ groun’ below The tree, do tell o’ storms or het; The trees in rank along a ledge Do show where woonce did bloom a hedge; An’ where the vurrow-marks do stripe The down, the wheat woonce rustled ripe. Each mark ov things a-gone vrom view— To eyezight’s woone, to soulzight two. The grass ageän the mwoldrèn door ’S a tóken sad o’ vo’k a-gone, An’ where the house, bwoth wall an’ vloor, ’S a-lost, the well mid linger on. What tokens, then, could Meäry gi’e That she’d a-liv’d, an’ liv’d vor me, But things a-done vor thought an’ view? Good things that nwone ageän can do, An’ every work her love ha’ wrought To eyezight’s woone, but two to thought.

Tom Tigercat is noted for his manners and his wit. He wouldn't think of lion, No, he doesn't cheetah bit. Tom never pretended to be something that he's not. I guess that's why we like him and why he likes ocelot.

As it would for a prow, the basin parts with your foot. Never a marsh, of heron blue but the single red feather from the wing of some black bird, somewhere a planked path winds above water, the line of sky above this aching space. Movement against the surface is the page that accepts no ink. A line running even over the alternating depths, organisms, algae, a rotting leaf. Walk naked before me carrying a sheaf of sticks. It’s the most honest thing a man can do. As water would to accept you, I part a mouth, a marsh, or margin is of containment, the inside circuitous edge. No line to follow out to ocean, no river against an envelope of trembling white ships. Here I am landlock. Give me your hand.

Too many needles spoil the cloth. Too many parrots spoil the talk. Too many chapped lips spoil the gloss. Too many teasel burs spoil the paw. Too many bubbles spoil the froth. Too many doorbells spoil the knock. Too many seeds spoil the floss. Too many feathers spoil the claw. Too many lightbulbs spoil the moth. Too many holes spoil the sock. Too many sunbeams spoil the moss. Too many kisses spoil the jaw. Too many wolves spoil the flock. Too many necks spoil the block.

IF the butterfly courted the bee, And the owl the porcupine; If churches were built in the sea, And three times one was nine; If the pony rode his master, If the buttercups ate the cows, If the cats had the dire disaster To be worried, sir, by the mouse; If mamma, sir, sold the baby To a gypsy for half a crown; If a gentleman, sir, was a lady,— The world would be Upside-down! If any or all of these wonders Should ever come about, I should not consider them blunders, For I should be Inside-out! Chorus