Futureback Rider

Can steel reveal? Go online for real jottings -
musings - information about how to improve your
station, trading learning from face-to-face for
philosophy written by this dead man, at X
place. Why not live in now from your ideas and be clear,
unmuddled by what your mom learned from hers or your dad's
escapism embodied by Bud longnecks, two dreck
ideas dead long ago; go remove the snow and hoe your
own row of muses and abuses and spare me
the accuses - just tell me how your garden grow.
Plow now ex-cow your own relief from past-timed
elves who whisper histories as extensions
of our past selves.

なる

Closing our eyes to

dream diminishes breathing

life into right now.

break - the chair

A bowlegged chair -
all redwood pressboard, green cushions plumped -
rests next to the cling-clang washer,
waiting for its owner to return.

The owner, my grandfather, once needed no chair,
once threw baseballs like the bullets he carried,
sweet shrapneled souvenirs from a Pacific campaign,
mementos for a life passed away,
wiled away on an auto assembly line
eight hours at a time.

The chair was the latest in a long line of evolution
dated from before the war,
before thirty-eight years of Lucky Strikes:
the child of when he met my grandmother
which was birthed as he returned from the war
that gave him, in order:
malaria
shrapnel
and a good left eye exchanged for one of glass,
sealing a childhood shut
the day that Fate
(in the form of a draft number)
tapped him on his shoulder.

November 23, 2006

Meat dark and white, eyes

bright and wise round two tables

on this Turkey Day.



Six years since our last

one has erased stigmas

(natives versus whites)



and left us with true

fellowship, laughter, and

a renewed thanks


for companions, new

and old, amity heating

every corner


as we sipped wine,

reflecting, peering out at

a winter night dusted white.

Malacampa: After the Funeral

Did Spaniards foresee fate when they named this place?
Flat land with heat that hung like death.
Did they know? Could they have known?
Did silver shorn horseman sense that blood would sow the fields?
Could that be why they left?
Did they know that relics from their days - pesos -
could not bring back pride,
and that this bad swirled from nowhere.

My Filipina Grandma had been gone three days,
and the squatters have come forth and feasted
after holding back on their tributes of rice,
and the cousins have gossiped the open casket,
swearing only bad would stem from space
between dead head and wood,
and now no more fires are lit under the morn mango trees -
as the fire ants know enough to flee the scene.

A priestly donation turned into a Range Rover.
Parcels of land re-divided in secret.
Jeepney drivers give no quarter as they sport fresh new tires
leaving an empty house sucked to the marrow.

Now we husband our coins,
give the maid just what she needs and no more,
sit in the house, play cards, and refuse to be bewitched
by five-ace hands,
listening to how a carabao brained Uncle good as we
put out the call to Manila.

Now we hear the baranguay cock its ear,
hear the New People's Army stalk and wait,
even hear the heifers moan at the moon -
knowing that she's gone, and why.

Even the mosquitos cease their buzz -
not wanting to labeled a bloodsucker,
not on this night
- under a bad camp moon,
with a Luzon barrio scarce of breath
under the lunacy of the thick blood moon.