Buddy knows first
July 5, 2017
He leaps
from the couch
and growls at the sky.
Then looks back at me
to say goodbye.
Soon come the winds
straight from hell
all we can do
is bark and yell.
The Earth is an ember
our spirits release,
another failed planet
another failed peace.
In Tribute to a Jersey City Boy
May 28, 2012
My father was born in 1920. His dad left one year later.
He was raised by his mother and his aunt. He was ten when the great depression hit his world. Dad eventually left school to find work. He joined the CCC, and later enlisted in the U.S. Army – a truck driver in the 262 Infantry.
His battle and campaign credentials include: Normandy, Ardennes (the Bulge), Northern France, and the Rhineland. He brought home some intense memorabilia. We seven kids destroyed it, as the war could not.
Dad did not talk about the war, except for the cases of wine diverted from the headquarters’s staff, or the time he chauffeured Omar Bradley. He said the captured Germans seemed just like them. Only they were on the losing side.
He died at sixty.
Each Memorial Day my parents had a picnic . It was an open house and lasted late into the night.
The following poem is about my father and makes reference to such an occasion:
Dad Wore Hats
Not when he should have.
On a cold bright day
he would call out
where is your hat?
while the wind played
in his hair.
Nor the way he should have.
It was always
crunched atop his head
by a nephew or daughter
running around our backyard
at a picnic.
Nor what he should have.
Into the dewy night
the adults would sing,
heads touching in harmony –
dad smoking a Chesterfield
wearing a bonnet.
consider this:
December 25, 2009
the killing brine
March 2, 2009
The rising sun falls from the sky in flames
as bodies float atop the killing brine.
We scan for light that moves into frame,
no grave as lonely as this chilling brine.
They fly unseen, their minds abandoned,
fast and low along the churning brine.
They rise to dive, and attack at random.
We jump into the burning brine.
How many prayers were said this day?
How many fell silent to the brine?
Why must we die such a pointless way –
in this black and boney killing brine?
2006
be the embracer
December 5, 2008
peace is a choice
do not wait for one’s embrace
be the embracer
QUESTION AUTHORITY??!! (1972)
November 15, 2008
what the HELL does that mean!!??
QUESTION AUTHORITY!!??
YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT!
But Dad…
WHAT IF THE MEN ON D-DAY
QUESTIONED AUTHORITY!!??
OR THE SOLDIERS FIGHTING INDIANS
QUESTIONED AUTHORITY!!??
or the Conquistadors,
or the Crusaders,
or the Hitler Youth,
or the…
“SMACK” (the big open hand hit his young face with a single head turning blow).
GO TO YOUR ROOM – MISTER QUESTION AUTHORITY!!!
AND THROW THAT FUCKING BUTTON IN THE GARBAGE NOW!!!
soldier
November 11, 2008
until there are no soldiers
we have all died in vain
This and That – More Shit than Anticipated
October 28, 2008
Why is the far right the keepers of who is “American” and who is
not? I would leave that to the Native Americans.
To my Roman Catholic brothers and sisters: Go ahead and vote on one
issue. But remember, your votes put George W. Bush in office. Therefore, you share in the responsibility for making this world a geometrically nastier and more impoverished place in which to birth a child. (Thereby, ironically, increasing the probability of an already overwhelmed pregnant mother choosing abortion) You are so preoccupied with the unborn that you have allowed the born to be doomed to the cesspools of the ever expanding slums of this earth.
Always remember, it was the Bush administration who dismissed the warnings about bin Laden from the Clinton people. Bush was such a myopic fool.
I believe the neo-cons half wanted something to happen. They wanted an excuse to invade Iraq; a Gulf of Tonkin, a “remember the Maine”. They got more shit than they ever anticipated on September 11. Just as they got more shit than anticipated when they invaded Iraq. Did they suppose their “enemies” were like those in a Bond movie: diabolical but relatively impotent and easily defeated? I can see Bush, Chaney and Rove consulting the library (a bible and 3,000 DVDs) to review how James Bond escaped the bad guys by sledding down a ski slope in a cello case. They surely drooled on their ties.
Is the bloody saga of the white man’s displacement, erasure, and
marginalization of Native Americans a model for Christian relations with Muslims? Or Muslim’s with Christians? Convert or hurt! Only madmen would think that, you say.
Is Your Candidate an Armageddonist?
September 27, 2008
Belief in the The Apocalypse of John posits peace as unattainable
until the second coming of Christ.
Until there is a worldwide conflagration and a Christ based theocracy –
peace is considered impossible.
How can Armageddonists conduct sane foreign policy when they believe in such inevitabilities?
qazse 