Two or three good lines

I dont know jack about poems
I only know that once,
when I was very young I was

Alone.

So I wrote it down and kept
it in an old Elvis record sleeve
And I kept on writing it down
and I never showed anyone
Except God.

He saw...

Even though I hid them from his gentle
burning eye and screamed, NO!
What do you know about it?!
And I sat on the top of my parents roof,
in the rain and thunder and dared
him to strike me dead.

But he knew,
Knew I loved them
And wanted him to love them too

Then I applied for that writing course,
and the woman said,
"you wrote two or three good lines here."
we both looked at the words
like they were an unusual oddity,
and I knew they were the good ones too.
But when I got the acceptance letter,
I realized that they only let me in
to get the course fee
And anyway, while I sat in the hall waiting
to be interviewed with the others, I heard
two people talking about poetry
And they sounded like they knew something
I didnt want to know anything
All I wanted was to squeeze two or three
good lines from my loneliness
And thats what I did.
Thats what Im trying to do.

Territorial Pissings

Partakers of the Sunday meal,
what we call the Sabbath,
herd their children from SUV's
into the carefully planned dining area
To shield them
from mild forms of maddness

For what does innocence
have in common with the damned?
What does hard work have to do with being drunk all the time?
What does prosperity have in common with being lost?

Nothing darling, nothing at all...
Now put on your coat and gloves,
We are going outside.

A poem is a suffocating fish

Ive learnt
from all the crushing
and squeezing and straining
by that invisible hand
that seems to push your life
through a sieve like lumpy batter
that a poem is not a statement
but some plumbing
of the souls pond
hauling suffocating
fish up onto dry land

You cook them
they get smaller
And then you eat them again
or serve them to your friends

Guatemala

Charcoal
carrion raptors
peck out the eyes
and the tounge
Leaving bloody caves
of injustice
In the murdered face
of a weeping son

Chipped nail polish
calls out the forgotten
name of innocence
a hundred times
from dead, curled,
gnarled fingers
once gentle,

Something calls
from the silence
Some shocked, absent
violence
rolls like mist
over maternity lost
while at home,
tannin faces weep
for the blood of their daughters
bleached
of its cries by the sun

One long lonely day

One long
lonely day
is not equal
to a thousand

A crushing
painful life
is not equal
to death

Go off by yourself
Enter THE silence
Bow in prayer
The weight
Will release
the aroma of love

One long
lonely day
is not equal
to a thousand

Little Bird of Peace

The little bird of peace
sits on the shoulder
of suffering
and sings softly
in a minor key
While suffering wails
and rages and squalls
at the sky that
wont
come down
though he calls,
from sun to moon,
season to season.

the little bird of peace
sings not into the ear
but with sufferings
unheld heart
like a gentle bow
across vibrating strings

4am

I hear
Ocean birds
at four am
haunting
the inland freeways
with strange,
calls of the sea

and the odd
solitary road train
coming down from
the north
its thundering
wheels
Like a ghost
in my skull
bruised by
the violence
of unspoken
dialogues