Love at a Reasonable Price

Not even trying
nothing to say
nowhere to go
so full of shit
wasting time

who even cares
another man
flushes another night
down the drain
watching its thin
legs flail
hopeless
as a cockroach
bouncing underfoot.

Who can hear it
Who can accept it
Who can love me.

Sure, sure, sure.
But everybody knows about you
You like hot girls
resting comfy in their
blessed twenties
and you
ignore the rest.

So who’re you trying to fool?

Now see here!
It’s more complicated than you
make it out to be!
I have some needs
that aren’t quite
greeting cards,
but that doesn’t mean
I don’t have some
that are.
Why not just be sweet
to me while you slip
off your things
and put your big breasts
into my
admittedly
too greedy hands.

If you match my strengths
and my weaker points
and I do yours
then
together–so they say–
we can rise,
becoming something
better than we were
when we lived apart
and begged God
for all this
bullshit.

Right?

Or is that just some more
bullshit?

Where are you?
I’m not bragging.
Why must I brag
every time I breathe?
It’s so gross.
Where are you.
I’m not mean.
Why do I always feel
a little up-nosed,
a little, let-them-die?
Why am I mean
every time I breathe?
It’s so gross.
Where are you?

OK, OK, never mind.

Anybody out there?
Anybody want to listen
to the things I say
when I’m uneven steven
looking for a love
I can’t even desire?

Anybody looking for me
out there in the busy minds
and pestered hearts
waiting in line to buy
their fair share
or hustling the wharves
to follow the slosh
of long distance waves
on corrugated iron rust?

No?

OK, OK, that’s cool.
Whatever, you know?
Whatever.
Because, like, in the end,
what I’m asking for
you cannot give me,
you seven billion strong
buzzing in the myriad ways
hands and feet can throng
hoot holler jivedive play.

Read me on your cell phone
as you blow your nose.
Read me on your tablet
in your dress-up clothes.
Read me on a screen
in a book
on a podcast
with the night air
circling round
like a pack
of yellow eyed
wolves,
flashing its wet
white teeth,
howling its long
lost promise.

I saw you there,
on the other bank,
across the water
where the pebbles splop
so that we can know
what is what.

I saw you there,
on the frozen pond
where the girls spin
reach and dance when
the sweatered boys race
push fly and chase
as the powder snow
dunes the edges,
spilling white spray
in drifting swirls.

I saw you, or wished I had
and began to walk away,
strong enough to feel sunlight
flip soft green summer leaves
and the creek sing glass clear
over the jutting dimple beaks,
but not so strong as to hear
you laugh rose-fired cheeks
and tell me you’re glad I’m near.

A man accidentally walks alone
along a bank he’s long known.
A man in jeans, his hands shoved
into windbreaker; his feet above
the in-town, under bridges, beside
shale banks loamy banks fallen trees
self-tossing, frolic-lite creek.

You know who I am.
I know who you are.
We know where to find each other.
I’m sick of talking to myself,
peeling oranges for only me,
sick of sucking sticky nails
after a quick early morn
soliloquoy.

Oh, listen to him,
he’s bored!
Oh, hear him out,
he’s terrified!
Oh, give him a chance,
he doesn’t know
what to do
with himself.

I’d settle for you
said the spider to the fly
on the web sticky
and dotted morning dew.

You’re sturdy in mind
body, heart, and stuff.
Your eggs so clear
and begging for it.
I’d settle on you
and make you my home
a colony of sorts
some kind of love.

I’m getting older now
and I’m sick of pretending
so I’ll hand it all to you
if you want to hold it all,
about which you may
or may not now know.

I accept your court
said the fly to the approaching fangs.
I’ve asked for this ever since
I was seven and now you’re here.
I’ll lay real still until you
take over my body, blooming me
like I’ve waited for ever since
I was young and began to feel
the knots wiggle and wrangle inside,
asking to untie and become
some kind of a woman,
the kind I need to be.

I’m looking for you
said the tiger to the ewe,
the gorgon to the virgin,
the weed to the lawn.

I’ve been waiting for you
she said.

The longings
and the things not there
The children
and the magic undiscovered
The friendship
and distortions from way back.

Sorry to the wind
over a winding nothing moment
come across the desert
where ‘roos bound
and white men crack peel
melanoma on cable TV.

A nice young lady
living for dreams
not unreasonable
A boring older man
unable to get past
a twenty five
he should’ve
quit long ago.

Sorry to unwashed armpits
thinking of a hot maybe British babe
once glimpsed talking pleasant and even
with a twiggy-thin mottled blond British dame
on the subway to the airport.
As if full, down-diving torpedo tits
were all a man could ever see
could ever care for
could ever sacrifice to.

A man on the train,
wishing the jangled jumble
would add up to a kind joy
where he was a man
and someone she
was a woman
somewhere here
in time
before
he has to step aside.

AMW/BW/To A Young Australien and then sauntering off and then wandering back

All you people, walking along all your streetsides,
listening to the air rustle the leaves,
misinformed dogs stand their delusional ground,
cars purr zip and whirr,
children shout high and scamper everywhere,
water-like seeping into all nooks and crannies
of the organized world.

All you people who hear the clank and smell the stench
of stopping, situating, pistoning garbage trunks,
on a new, worn, and/or gum-blackened cement sidewalk,
next to a street fresh paved and punging tar
or old and regular, silently bearing all while sinking low.
All you good people in the cityscapes, bayous, forest hills
who listen to civilized beeps, clanks, cackles, rattles
through the rock the rap the jazz the symphony
pumped ‘cross plastic knobs into your ears.

All you people waving candles and holding hope
for a different tomorrow.

I am here!
You heard that right:
I am here!

You didn’t know I had it in me
to roll up out of that tiny ball, shattering the egg
that sat still since the time of the monsters.
Look at my laughing yellow stalagging teeth.
Understand my smooth dagger claws
and the impenetrable scales shingling my bulk.

For to be, I tell you, a sport,
I gave a sixty thousand year head start.
You built your weapons, powerful enough to destroy the earth–
as if I needed the earth!
You put your systems in place, organized your thoughts,
studied and optimized strategies psychological and physical.
Pardon me, forgive me, excuse me,
I just have to laugh!

A rich, righteous, eloquently strong, booming laugh,
flattening whatever city I’m nearby.
Oh, gosh, my breath’s so inferno, isn’t it?
I quite evaporated your puny fleshy form, didn’t I?
Sorry, sorry–I really need to watch myself!
Don’t know my own strength!
Except I do.
And I’m very ready to show it to you.

That’s right–
good night,
cause you’re going down,
down to the ground
like bugs underfoot.

You have no chance.
You imagine you do,
and that gives you
a certain luster,
a definite cuteness,
a real, if pathetic,
charm.

Oh, oh, OK, sure!
Try that angle,
huddle up in your churchy dens,
cuddling together beneath
fraying, decaying,yellowed, brittle pages
that’ve coddled you on down the ages.
“The demon thing with the dragon wings
and the howling, mean-eyed sing-song-sing
can destroy our bodies but never our souls,
never our heart and the light who keeps us whole!”
So cute,
so lovable,
so very wrong.

Friends, people, don’t you get it?
tearing your puny bodies into jag-edged
bloody rags strewn across telephone wires
and on pavements so sturdy and rough
is not my main game.
I just do that so you get to watch
with your gooshy eyballs
as I sink your heavens,
dungeon your souls,
laugh away your pride,
hiccup off your virtues,
shit upon your wisdoms,
expose as sordid fraud
all your heroics,
your hard-fought insights,
your courageous self-overcomings.

I’m here to tell you that jupiter
must swallow the universes,
and jupiter is cold as spiritual death.
Jupiter is the final answer.
All your wise ones, your fools,
your sturdy practical folks
were all always wrong.
All your human ideas
just so many pebbles
tossed feebly into the gurgle-quick creek.

The joke is on you,
because I’m not even evil.
I’m just the brute facts,
the natural meanness,
the cruel happenstance
of the real.

Sorry!
‘Cept ’cause I’m not.
I don’t care
if I hurt you
now and forever.

Signed,

Your Dragon

AMW/BW

The Hero:
She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d,
And I loved her that she did pity them.
This only is the witchcraft I have used:
Here comes the lady; let her witness it.

His Lady:
In dark times wild minds race vainly fore
while gentle heads expand and plop inside
the gooey gel of milk n honey’s mix.
Mistaken both the over and the under strong–
So hold then each Medusa’s writhing locks,
and look away as you hack them aside.

This man, though not so schooled in sciences
entombed in books, is still surpassing skilled
in keeping to the center, where men best
find the happiest course. That’s

The King her father:
I’ve loved you all your life, my child bold
and bright who sparkles ‘gainst this world as stars
against the night.
Your counsels recommend I to those who
counsel me.
So long I’ve trusted in your mind, I must
now trust your heart–for mind and heart do share
quite equal parts in wisdom’s secret art
to know the good and find the path that leads
us flesh and bone spirit casements where
the good would tell us go.

Her father loved me; oft invited me;
Still question’d me the story of my life,
From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes,
That I have passed.
I ran it through, even from my boyish days,
To the very moment that he bade me tell it;
Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field
Of hair-breadth scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my travels’ history:
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven
It was my hint to speak,–such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline:
But still the house-affairs would draw her thence:
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch,
She’ld come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse: which I observing,
Took once a pliant hour, and found good means
To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart
That I would all my pilgrimage dilate,
Whereof by parcels she had something heard,
But not intentively: I did consent,
And often did beguile her of her tears,
When I did speak of some distressful stroke
That my youth suffer’d. My story being done,
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs:
She swore, in faith, twas strange, ’twas passing strange,
‘Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful:
She wish’d she had not heard it, yet she wish’d
That heaven had made her such a man: she thank’d me,
And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story.
And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake:
She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d,
And I loved her that she did pity them.
This only is the witchcraft I have used:
Here comes the lady; let her witness it.

Children of the future,
looking to see further
than we did when we took
our whirl as cute hope.

Give up blank space:

Discarded Verses:

What becomes of a soul
when it’s no longer fresh faced,
a part of the future?

What becomes of a heart
when it’s time to grow up
but it cannot?

What becomes of a mind
that never learned to play
the way it is on the inside?

Where to go now that it’s over
a