.........Max and the Life of Big Machines

Another "work" from the ongoing manuscript Max and the Life of Big Machines. A character-list of sorts (there's a Latin, wait, Dramatis Personae, is that it?, word for that) type of poem.

Landscape

Max tows around his rusted-out, misadventure life.

Leslie Ann is the girl with the megahertz heart

or The Girl with Xs for Eyes
when her loves
uncoil under the moon.

Moon preaches with a fast flash, sunburst Les Paul and Tomcat's yowl.

The Green Night feeds on many things: headlights, hunger and paranoia.

Satellites cluck their tongues in omniscient orbital awe.

The Sun should keep its loathsome thoughts to itself.

The Moon judges from behind a big, dark desk.


(and more......)


Max on Tuesday

The Sun once said "Max, commit suicide."
It spun once on its thin silver tether,
stood up and winked then died.
Max slunk to the gas station for a newspaper.
Max slunk across the college campus.
Max moved until he felt anonymous,
then headed to the bar. Max made good time.
The Girl with Xs for Eyes soon followed behind,
muttered "Moon, you whore" and cooed for love.
Max kept his cool: He knew The Moon's bones.
He looked up, unsheathed his eyes,
counted the flakes of snow as they fell,
turned to The Girl with Xs for Eyes and said,
"Let me do the worst thing I can think of."

PS....I also somehow run a small carpentry company (I used that term real loosely.....). Here's a couple of pics of a project I'm mostly doing solo. A century-home porch restoration. Kind of cool--if your into those things.

Notice: The haphazard caution tape. Dangerous Bushes, them bushes.


Um, yeah, somebody is paying me to structurally fiddle with this house:


POS:

Is Everybody In?.....The Movie is About to Begin....

Below is a poem that almost got me anthologized here: www.bestnewpoets.org. Part of the Max Poems.

Where the Gray Waters and Lake Sky Meet, Max, Lodge Your Heart There Before Leslie Ann Turns From the Window

Leslie Ann says, "you can't just treat people like that, like
everyone is nothing but flesh with a slimy wishbone in their chests."

She's standing over the kitchen sink, Max, with little window
and white begonia, working--as if a trail of clean dishes could lead her out of there.

When the woman in the window becomes a window, well, you see, Max.
Walk your hallways patiently next time you feel like listening

to walls. You will dream of dark gray sharks and bags of ears. Do not go
into the basement, Max.
Because really. Who could ever need to go back through all of that?

Don't worry. They'll stash the Class I, II, and III pharmaceuticals
wherever you go. You will move through the world like a teenager back from rehab.

The blue snow: your young wife, soft-eyed and languid
as a memory of the moon. A cracking branch in the dark.

They will handle you like a 13th century manuscript: all that glossing
down the page. There are switchblades in your future, Max,

and, of course, tequila injuries, and perversely, Hemingway, and what is left
of his head, raising a rainbow trout from a picture book lake.

(first appeared in The Cream City Review, Spring 2006, Vol.30, No. 1)




More to come..............

Fire for Effect....

Testing...testing.....testing....