Writing

Pound Pound Pound

Pound, pound, pound the gavel

Call to order this raucous rabble

In elevator shafts we travel

Radical rebels left to grovel

Through iron gate they duly filter

Real or imagined

Tangible or specter

A poet, a painter, a whore not least

A janitor, a sloth, a defrocked priest

Now the famine that was a feast

Bears down upon us like a beast

Ere dallying doomed

Defiant in dungeons

Gruff groaning grouches

And crusty curmudgeons

A meeting is called

We all concede

Times are dire

Dire indeed

We need, we need

To plot, to plan

To bond, to band

Together, together

But hush, hush

Clandestine are we

Walls are ears

And eyes can see

Our hold yet remains a tenuous grip

Who will abandon the sinking ship?

For what has transpired of late

Puts at risk our very fate

The streets do run

With murderous hate

While here we sit

In urgent debate

And speak of justice

And of truth

Forgotten ideals of our youth

Vexed these vocal cords do quiver

Query and question every quaver

Every quarter note of drum

Bullets from an enemy gun

For is it armed that we must face

The foe, incite the populace?

There’s strength in numbers

Safety too

A brotherhood to fight the coup

Who’s at fault

Our loss their gain

For years it’s been

A gravy train

Our conscience now upon us weighs

Through dismal, dark and dangerous days

Blind, blind,

Were we to greed

Individualism

Our selfish creed

A free fall slide

Into our grief

To blame, to blame

To blame the thief

Squandered loot among us blown

Amid the blood and viscera strewn

And curfew streets left to brood

In deathly painted pallor, lewd

Fascist felons flout and flaunt

The rapéd city’s countenance, gaunt

Terror night, the guns persist

As snipers fell those who resist

And we who cower in cloistered cell

With naught but will that wishes well

And well it wishes Will could assert

Itself upon this crude assault

It matters not who is at fault

Of what’s now past and what was felt

Bears little imprint upon the hour

That turned the sweetest hopes so sour

Shall we climb from ivory tower

To meet this monster depraved and dour

But meeting like this is dangerous, deadly

And what of our plot, our plan, our strategy

We paint, we protest, preach and pray

Think of Goya

The Third of May

But what good is art anyway

Art alone won’t save the day

O looking back

It really was we

With avarice and gluttony

No collective, no beliefs

No shared ideology

Apostles, apologists, loners, cranks

Remember solemnly to give thanks

That we are here and still alive

We must act if we’re to survive.

Painting The Passion

Good evening Sir

Your paint encrusted atelier awaits

Replete with Pthalo stain dread

Where Raw Umber downers

Cajole long abandoned

Quagmire tubes

Here, in deepest shadow remorse

Ultramarine sympathy

Quells tumult mourners

Grieving

Their throng mentality

Seething on streets

Of Calvary suburb

Let only passions reign

Across the white void

Whose lamentation torso

Receives the brutal blows of

Unrestrained spectrum riot

And hog hair bristle

Manganese bruised

Alizarin scourged

Do not for one moment

Let Chromium hipsters

Distract you from

Mindless scumbling

Or futile

Pursuit of Cadmium’s pale sublime

Most opulent Cobalts

Do not contain

Your flagrant fulminations

Scour the highest heavens

Chase Cirrus and Cumulus

And ostentatious Vermilions

Be reckless in your impasto

Pummel the pallid strains

Of olive half lights

And delicate sheepish glaze

Between the speared

Serratus Saviour’s rib cage

O epic stations

Tearful tale of the condemned

Stigmata blemished

Muller ground boles

Of somber Caput Mortuum

Let me paint this cradled night

Alfred Swan

Alfred’s curriculum vitae

A tale of a life in decay

Embroiled in the boil

And the kettle spoiled

Ink on the paper

Trickling down

Where his dirty sheet head

Greets a dull, somber morning

Sleepwalker door chimes

And valium escutcheons

Caught in jamb

Between mezuzah and buzzer

Internal hallways

Ooze self-infliction

Security cameras

Record the history

Of the domiciled

The defiled

The never to be reconciled

Alfred Swan

Puts his hat and coat on

Walks for miles

Around the kitchen tiles

A porter floats suitcase

And someone just sits there

Unhinged hysteria

Strokes its dementia

Endemic panic

Grips portals of egress

Smelling of ordure

And stale human congress

Oh a history

Of the domiciled

The exiled

The defiled

The never to be reconciled

Alfred Swan

Puts his hat and coat on

Walks for miles

Around the kitchen tiles

Born

Mother torn

Father’s scorn

His to bear

Wrapped, ensnared

In a world

Of his own

Alfred Swan

Soldiering on

Writing his crazy swan song

Alfred keeps a secret file

Of scrapbook clippings

He’s compiled

A memoir of the life and times

Of Alfred Swan

Study  For A Pope

Dark scowl of faith

Grin of a cat

Clenched white

Titanium teeth

Perched on a throne

Il Papa thrown

Into the limelight

Glass room

His hands are merely claws

That grip his armchair guilt

Rancorous Sahara jaw

Pince-nez crushed scream

Skullcap grimace

The blind cord pendulum swings

Sealed gothic growl

Hermetic prowl

Velasquez haunted

Glass Room

His time-lapse conscience fails

With piety exhaled

Chaos and mindlessness prevail

Potemkin shriek

Odessa nurse

A face that contemplates the worst

Existence smeared

Dais besmirched

Infallible

Glass room church

The Janitor

The Janitor

Sits in a bunker

Of wrenching heartbeats

Demented concrete

A scatalogic

Waste product prison

Spasmodic drainpipe

Conduit visions

Inside his anthropomorphic mop head

Galactic distance

Between the buckets

Of toxic vapors

Exploding tear gas incinerators

Burn the youth of

The janitor

Circuit breaker flashbacks

Trip his

Trash compactor mind excursions

A desiccated dandelion

Marks his anti ’Nam and Nixon

Entry in his fabled journal

Of some counter-culture

Memorabilia

Under a pile of

Pornographic magazines

Lies an extruded

Plastic virgin

A thrift store statue

Discarded virtue

Magdalene mortal

Appears on Fridays

Pinned to the stucco

Of his stinking grotto

His sordid salvos

Her jaded moaning echoes

A one-time cause célèbre

With his radical dustpan

Full of draft card ashes

And rubber bullet shrapnel

Obsessive

Compulsive protest

Etched on membranes

Of fragile footage