Good Intentions

This is what it's like to be deaf:
Cancer sounds a lot like life
and everything smells the way of childhood
God frowns on the the ocean tides
because repetition just doesn't feel right
We are here, Spirit Love Us
We feel like cannon balls free-flying
a cognizant lump of life, whatever that means
We can dream, but only because we carry
thoughts of the generations before us
we see the world as it was,
and create it only in past lives
We are all the wives of a better man
the sons of a lesser love
the pretense of that race we strive to become.
Here, let us stand, because we cannot hear
the cries of those great creators in our veins
And the only way we have learned to exist
Is to fall constantly through the depth of space
leaning ever slightly to the right, then the future,
then the left
And when we are gone, sound will come heavy
like the cleansing wash of fallout
drenching the earth, the sky and everything we knew
Truth will burn brighter without us because
we inhibit with good intentions.

Here We Are

We have come with cash in hand and palms upturned
The Twenty-Nothings, Fear-Godders,
Progenitors-Turned-Inventors, Goddamn
Omnipotent Creators of this OverTheCounterCulture.

We are stone deaf to silver-tongued devils
and cynical beyond reason of realism
and all that was implied about the good life,
all the high-gloss card stock that built
our parents houses can be found in our junk drawer.
(Good luck getting that one open).

Own Self

Even pressed poetry
left lifeless in a diary decades shut
bound by leather and trust is true

Policy and polite aside, men of task
live still in the lines of long dead lovers
details of the especially plain
peek bulge-eyed out from the past
the difficulty of the day gone
only truth remains

Obit

Tiger Steffie Mo, the corn-fed poet laureate raised on whiskey and fifteen acres, died today after a long battle with writer's block.  

Tiger Steffie Mo, the silent virtuoso. Tiger Steffie Mo, the igniter of a generation of poets not yet born, first displayed symptoms of her chronic ailment at age seven, when, after completing a cycle series about cats and their colors, began a blank page with the words "the black cat..." and then erupted in tears. It heralded the end of her Cat period.

Tiger Steffie Mo, blessed with a gift of words.  Tiger Steffie Mo

Tiger Steffie Mo, whose mother committed cancer after a lifetime of cataloguing her own writings called The Prose of Suicide, was a fierce enemy of grief.  

Tiger Steffie Mo, who never once referred to herself as a Poet, usually opting for Waitress, was found dead this morning.

Tiger Steffie Mo, Tiger Steffie Mo, Tiger Steffie Mo who broke bottles across the earth, left a trail of glass leading to her frail former frame, merlot dripping from the smiles on her arms. Tiger Steffie Mo, whose first and last words were the same, who had no interest in Jesus and viewed life as evidence the feeling was mutual, Tiger Steffie Mo, died twenty two years after her last known writings, and exactly eighteen months before she could write the poetry that would earn her acclaim, died a waitress with mute hands, lips whispered momma.

Black and White

And in that time, newsprint was the preacher;
the history we would drape over our bent lovers
and down the street they would tumble
taking to wind like dizzy pigeons
until they all disappeared.
Headlines screaming you shot grins
and girls and your salvation was a shithole.
A flurry of quiet ripped calloused space and ten heard.
Ten pried through sidewalk cracks and emerged to find the all the time in the world.
Maybe, you know maybe, we got the grumpy end of the universe stick.