I like that you are living in a house I know intimately. It lets me imagine your life which I envision as puttering around the farm in a terrycloth bathrobe, cigarette in mouth, maybe with pink foam hair rollers, calling to one or more skittish, injured, or derelict animals for feeding time.

AV is in the living room frantically adjusting the EQ on a song he hasn’t heard since high school while yelling to you to hurry up with red beers, you gotta hear this, and leave those damn cats alone!  Your answer being, Helluva time, kid, helluva time! But it’s cheerio my deario that pulls a lady through! as you reach for your gadget to Instagram the water gauge and ask yourself what to do with all these damn kittens.

I secretly hope you will become one of those types at the bar on Saturday night regaling my former classmates and frenemies with tales of my adventures on the old continent after a plethora of Captain and Cokes. Make sure you include images of red light districts, poetry readings in leather, dancing in WWII bunkers at 6am on a Tuesday, my brilliant and brooding resistance hero on a scooter dressed in black, and my comrades making art and history on designer drugs.  That will keep ’em busy until my obit from the New York Times is reprinted in the Hebron Journal-Register.

Love and all that Jungian nonsense,

The Accidental Immigrant

The passing of the last patriarch deserves a Williams one act

The  secrets there seep like Texas Gold and sprawl across the collective Western landscape 

Mimicking the scars of wandering saints lost in my memory 

A rogue poppy for remembrance in a shade of sinister scarlet

(not the outlaw orange picked from a ditch for archy’s transmutation) 

blossoms under a bloody eclipse; a primal scream echoing through decades of disappointments

The birds return in colors too rare for Cardinal Haarlem

Echoes of pirate poems spiced with saffron chattering phrases of the forefathers and bringing closure to New World catastrophe 

Please don’t forget to give my love to your sons and ancestors in Valhalla 

One day I will join you, but not just yet

There’s a poet on acid in the garden battling demigods, Ferlinghetti unfurled at her feet 

In the distance glows the guiding light of a television as a christed candyman stands on a table littered with remnants of a relapse and shouts, 

Look at all this fucking bliss!

A man with a handlebar mustache asks if we met in the past and suddenly 

I’m Coco Chanel’s assistant searching for signs of a Dutch Resistance Hero in the midst of a midnight raid

Trading secrets to swamis for deliverance of a forgotten word

The tiny Mao in her mother’s military hat smiles across the table as a fascist gets punched in the face by the facsimile of a friend who took my load off while Nero fiddles on a stairway to nowhere 

The prodigal daughter caught in a loop of psychedelic 

return to sender:address unknown 

Hermetically poetic in a free fall through the cosmos and giving the middle finger 

As I dance with Dr. Thompson’s ghost

For Hans

The patron saint of Lost Poets laughs

Smoke surreal in the sacred sun

Unmasking kindred madness 

Recognizable from a subversive plane of my existence 

(The soldiers are there for me, too)

Mystic grandfather of the underground prophets 

I lay bouquets of phrases at your feet in gratitude and veneration 

As we weave destinies and laugh into the void 

i am lovingly fascinated with this storm as we try to tear Babylon down with battlefield remedies

The night belongs to poets, madmen, and my revolutionary pornstar Jesus who is crucifying himself on electronic versions of yesterday’s news

It’s been so long since i’ve been home that i’ve forgotten Mother’s laugh but

there lies a truck stop philosopher who once pointed to the psychedelic stars saying you can never go home again and

i can’t recall his laugh, either

The red dress i wore that day turned black becoming a Midwestern Classic loaded with

pomp & circumstance, stars & stripes, death & taxes

i’m on my eighty-seventh transformation cutting atonal chords and severing velvet ribbon ties

The gods return with different names; ancestral Valkyries reminding me of a warrior’s birth and a bargain struck for a drop of mead

Soldiers of Debauchery, we rebel on

As icons fall from grace in another nocha oscura