Dead Father's Daughters

Rounded old cars
of dead father’s daughters.
Ancestors drive you
through the dotted lines of time.
Heat-cracked stone road,
lazily chasing the horizon as
roadside tree,
unanxious witness
waves goodbye.

Remember You

And then you have run ins
And then you have sleep-overs
And then you have breakfast in your rumpled clothes
You take the knife from their hand before it slits the lifeline
Before you have to clean up
Before you have to not be able to say goodbye

You walk that rope as it bounces, not looking down
You hold your breath for them
You pull them from the street
Before the car coming on fast, ends them
Before the words you said open doors with a crash
And all the wind comes in, that storm of awesome power unleashed
From behind eyes sometimes kind

At some point, you hide away from them
Hold your heart like a frightened child in your arms
Close the windows to the wind and watch your own reflection
There in the glass
And then you remember
You

Ceramic Smile (song)

'Tree Woman' by Wayne R. Flower

Trees are swaying
Ancient pantomime
You are missing
But right here all the time
Roots are are fixed
And cannot tell a lie
But roots are buried
And bark hides scars and lines

(Chorus)
You look at me
Ceramic smile
Waiting to be
Broken

You don’t like me
But cannot help but stare
I am broken
But always in repair
Searching for pieces
Scattered everywhere
The leaves of me
Are floating through the air

(Chorus)

Dogs are smiling
For secrets they all share
Cats are sleeping
Cuz they don’t really care
Spiders spin webs
To capture bugs and thoughts
My head’s full of bugs
The web’s full of not a lot

(Chorus)

Chicago, IL

They were like corpses, slightly bobbing
Mouths open, eyes closed
The fat of their cheeks
Jostling to the
Rhythm of the train
As it sped us like
A metal neuron
To the appendage of O’hare

Sometimes

Sometimes, the world
forces itself upon your eyes,
makes you know it.
A violent rainbow
spewed from the earth and
clouds, stained
with the rosy blood of stars,
boiled to steam by the sun.
I am so small here,
on this round, living thing
that waits to swallow me
and my history.

Bird Memory

Mother where you go, up there? down there? father lost in hospital halls forever.
I remember little.
I made a death star out of a hand operated lawn trimmer blade and threw it into the neighbor's
big old dead tree.
If you were a bird, you would have seen me from up there,
flying through my whole life.

Untitled

Old people whisper trapped air,
dry, spirit voices.
Still youths inside,
lost and dismayed with physical decay.
Death’s a friend so close.

Words words, like dead birds
feathers falling from sky.
Throw me into dark floating night under god and street light,
sitting in the corner waiting for the sun.
There really is such a thing as time. I ain't laughing.
I can’t sleep,
am sentenced to endless electricity,
flitting cells zipping,
memories on skull walls,
dried glue wet with sweat.

Slow Dimension Soldiers (song)

'Man and Tree' by Wayne R. Flower

City eyes are one,
in blood behind bone.
One rhythm beats,
spurting out that fuel.
Trees, fighting us with oxygen,
slow dimension soldiers.
Our death love a fire
called electricity, called emotion.
Photographs steal the soul,
so they say,
but last longer than blinks of our eyes.
City sighs at once,
shits in rivers,
rolls over to sleep.

History of You Til Now

Root beer and wine at the store
Movies and ice-creams
At home we turn the heat to
“The Comfort Zone”
Play Scrabble in bed, with cats under covers
Who lay sleeping, twisted,
Clawing, dreaming
Silly arguments are shattered by
knowing looks, laughs
You sing to the radio when I drive you home
And tell me of your day
To put it to sleep
Later, we try to reclaim hours stolen
by corporations, driving, buses
And wake up still in love

For NEM

Invitation From the End

A lot has happened here, I can tell you,
tell you if I’m allowed.
It’s cold inside,
the end is inviting me in again.

There are people dancing on my roof
and I cannot sleep.

If I do sleep, please wake me,
so I can see you there, floor-chin forming a smile.
In the dream, a chair was against the wall, a shirt
at its feet, deposited there by a clumsy,
house-wandering cat.

This is not a real place that I am.

I do own cats, and cats do own me,
and I do own a chair that owns my ass...
But I must decline the kind invitation from the end to go inside.
It’s much too early for me to say goodbye.
I can learn to sleep with people dancing on my roof.

The world, my lover, unkind

It sticks with me, I don’t know why;
The sight of him hunched,
getting out of his car.
I rose from inside mine, shook the extended claw,
old man hand.
We walked to the apartment, inside.
It smelled like monkey piss,
as if in territorial marking, one had
covered floors and walls...
He was allright, the old guy,
sweet, softspoken, nice to a flaw,
desperate to rent it, to finish life.
I kept my poker face and walked
every room with him, looked left and right.
His face, his caving face, so soft...
I left the monkey piss apartment behind me
that no one would rent, no one at all.
The world, my lover, unkind,
slid its arms back around me
as I drove away.

Untitled

Trees against pale blue of new night.
Sun dead and still burning,
somewhere beneath my back yard.
That shape,
those jagged trees in silhouette,
is the face of darkness,
smiling slightly at my electricity,
my gas combustion.

East

I was looking at her clock.
She said,
“I think we are in Mercury Retrograde.”
I said, “That explains the failed devices
that are littering my life.”
She looked at me, said,
“Don’t forget that fading graves go east.”

Note: this poem is based on a 'mishear' in that I thought a friend had said 'fading graves go east' in a conversation. I don't even remember what she actually said...and does it really matter?

Theatre

Walking the movie
Too much time for a hungry dog, even.
Trotting lost in ashcan alleyways,
sniffin' for a scrap.

Your heart is a hunk of
bubbly flesh.
A piece of meat for the hungry hounds.

I took my dog for a walk.
He took me latterally through time.
All the while, my legs were jelly,
cement receding into wild trails.

At the end of the movie,
I'm the heartless boy in the ashcan.

Neighbors of Wayne

At least you were quiet,
not playing ‘Brown Sugar’ badly on electric guitar
at all hours,
not smashing things, kicking down the door
because you forgot your keys or
pouring bleach out of spite
onto my girlfriend’s clothes in the washer
You certainly don’t
move all your furniture
at 2 am
or stumble noise into my RapidEyeMovement sleep.
But now, I see one of you ladies
has a new Man...
Suddenly, stairs are stomped,
music played louder...
I can hear you strut your body walking by him,
floorboards rattling with your intentions, your
purpose.

The Train

There the metal cars are whizzing over the river on rusty scars
coins balancing boxes that roll across the land
inside them the lovers meet with rushed movements
over a rough jiggling train cabin bed and
through those panes of glass
are cottonwood trees, just seen on the bank,
bleeding, hugging hills and earth.
They are losing their white manes to the water
again.
All around them the land is flat and yellow and patient.
Those scars on which they roll stretch all the way to apple fields held by cousin creeks
where you can see
horses run
under and within dying purple moonlight while
snakes sleep within warm stone hearts inside the hill
(they are curled and they are dreaming).
By the gash of the road,
telephone poles stand there like
lonely soldiers thin with hunger for word from home,
bound in their silent electric war, their
crowns forever pierced and laced together as they mourn while marching.
This trestle once held some young men as they jumped from her strong,
frail-looking iron bones for fun
barely missing the rocks as their erect bodies hit the water,
feet found the sand, hitting hard. “Just bend your knees as you hit!” they yelled from the top.
It is mid-day when he drowns
and soon the newsmen steal his brother’s image; fractured,
arms up, in the water to his knees, crying in the river.
A train, indifferent, frenzied and insistent rushes through the belly of the trestle above him
rattling its old bones that groan with the weight of cousins and
countrymen.
The lovers are entangled and sleeping to
the jostling of the train
as it carries them away.

Seattle's Lament

'Seattle Street Scene' by Wayne R. Flower

Asleep like that
They look so harmless,
Square, dark,
Save electric eyes
That float like downed stars.
Caught in dark spaces beneath purple sheet skies.
I know better, know what lives in them.
Bone and gas and muscle.
My cousins, my killers, my lovers.

The Oven

I was reading about you.
Someone wrote about you.
How could they not?
Your darkness swirled into our minds through those words,
those thin ink soldiers of doom marching in:
The garden, the sky, the father you never understood…
Hovering, the witches taunting your muse.
You were right under the porch, nobody knew…

I'm sorry, but you wrote these things that made us love you.
I think that's what you wanted, that love.
I know the nights were empty.
I know you wanted to be the best mother
and the best writer
and it was so easy for him, he sat, he wrote
and he wanted his dinner.
Then he left and someone else made his dinner.
You and the little ones and your proper voices were alone.

I lived in such a small apartment though it was nice, charming even,
U shaped and facing the large yard and garden.
A cat ramp for my beautiful Mainecoon led to the wooden stairs outside.
I had a gas oven and just enough counter space.
I lived on lentils and potatoes and curry and rice
all mixed together.

I had been up all night at the studio recording a dark album with an obscure band.
16 hour days and things went south when peaty scotch entered the picture
but we carried on like foggy soldiers.
I finally fell asleep at about 3 am as my cats curled and curled and curled into themselves.

You were always first to appear in my mind as I drifted off, that face,
so sweet, until one looked at the eyes and the arch of the eyebrows.
Innocence haunted by devilishness in those orbs, though I know that was not your intention.
The evidence is there; loot from the camera box soul thief, there on the pages of your life.

Somehow, those eyes, and your story
made me fall for you, a dead girl who stuck her head in the oven that night
in London, while a stifling winter suffocated the narrow streets, you could hardly go outside but to get food for your children.
You put towels under the door.
This was to be your punishment only.
I had a crush on a dead girl?
How sad, living girls were only my friends when I wanted their touch.

The night had fallen like it sometimes does; secretly.
And there I was, mouth agape, maybe snoring,
cats curled and curled and curled into themselves.
Your face was there, you were on the beach at Cape Cod, sun bouncing off of your porcelain skin,
or you were in the library in London as rain fell tapping the thick, gilded glass,
staring into nowhere over an open book.
You were in New York, wide-eyed in the big city at the magazine publisher's office.
And you were right under the porch, nobody knew…
What we now know is the reverse of your fears; the world was actually not ready for you, Dear.
Your Panic Bird fluttered all over us, I'll never wash my soul again.

My mind formed the words 'I have a crush on you, I'm sorry, I know you are long passed from this world but here,
here in dreams, I can admire you as if you are living..."

Then she stood in my kitchen.

I was still floating, half in this body, half...somewhere...do we ever know where, really?
Somewhere between the dead, the almost dead, the living playing dead; we call it sleep…
There she stood her eyebrows in that arch and those eyes!
Black as blood, weapons of the underworld now, the witches were now her keepers.
The roots were her bed, the gulls her warning and the crows…

Outside my apartment crows gathered in a tree like they do at times,
In those parliaments of dark, reminders to the upperworlders that we are only here for a minute.
30 crows in a tree, cawing, cawing, cawing out of themselves.
Then suddenly, as if an agreement had been reached...silence. That is when she had appeared.
Those eyes hated me.

"How dare you!!" She hissed, standing by the oven in my small kitchen, as if she were forever chained to ovens.

"You have no right...You do not know me!!! You cannot have a crush on me!!! I am not among you. You do not know what I have been through!!!"

My terror was ice. My soul skipped a beat. My testicles shriveled into their holes, like when I
was a boy.
Just as I woke, the crows flew away all at once.

Natalie Wood

She walked in that white cotton dress
summer, summer dress, loose daffodil in the wind
that dark hair, those commanding eyes, like Natalie Wood
Oh, Natalie Wood, walking that day in a white cotton dress
All eyes on you as you chose a burrito
Mexican boys beaming, Natalie Wood was smiling (but was not really Natalie Wood?)
in that white cotton dress,
summer, summer dress, smiling
they rolled her tortilla, beaming, Mexican boys, Spanish spilling from lips
around tooth picks, beaming