StarPoet Newsletter Vol. X, No. XX

The past is to the left,
The future to the right,
The money's all above the line,
The undone all down below.

The rules are very simple,
The logic quite complex,
Winning or losing has little to do
With the purity of your life.

The goal is direct and measurable,
The results well known and public,
The rationales for absolute victory
Are as transient as the needs.

The reasons are constantly slipping,
The fame almost always fleeting,
Congress, a pen stroke, or a president
Can erase everything you gained today.

At night my brain pulses
With neuronic comets and light shows,
Synapses burn with wordcharred lyric
That fills my thought with metaphor and allusion,
An incandescent universe where space and time
Expand and contract transluminally
Until sleep takes the pen from my hand
And I lie impatiently waiting for the sun to rise
Or unconsciousness.

I watch The Godfather
As a member of the family,
A Sicilian daughter whose job
Is to be a good woman
And remain uninvolved
With the busines of the men.
I've known the rules
Since I could talk and understand
What was being said;
I would no more betray my family
Than I would my country,
Decades after my Grandfather lived:
Blood last far longer than
The inconsistent demands
Of either culture or government.
Family is everything,
Binding our lives together,
One heart, one mind, one soul;
I remember them all,
I remember.

Drunk full with words and wasted,
I can barely keep my cup from over-flooding
With great oceans of metaphor and allusion
Like some star-crazed wandering prophet
Exploring the strategic depths of her empy street corner.

I carry no baggage but these verses,
Carting them diligently from page to screen,
Carefully counting my precious treasures
To make sure nothing has been lost
And nothing appears to be what it seems.

I am a fool in a mintrel's court,
Acting out my fancies with little hope of reward;
A jester telling the same joke over and over,
Hoping she will bring a smile to the distracted king's face
And not be cast out like so many others back onto the street.

Roils of clouds,
Wave after wave,
Soaking the horizon
Acre on acre.

A memory from childhood
In Northern California
Played out on the rolling hills
In the Old Dominion:

Sunnybrook Farm is on the TV,
My mother is walking out of the kitchen
Carrying still warm oatmeal cookies
As the rain continues to fall.

The memory of the scent
Follows me to my grave.

A century full of words left inside,
I write helter-skelter,
Fragmenting the bits and pieces of my life
Down to the barest electrons
Than now serve as my permanent record.

I do not envy the recovering paleontologist
Who must search these transient spaces
For a glimpse of Starpoet
Suitable for his next authoritative submission.

Crackle of crows, hawk in the sky,
Gray mist falling in the morning light;
The sidewalks dark with torrential memory,
I avoid the flood zones and make my way
Three dams down to the northbound bust stop,
Less eager for puddle dipping than for work.

Waiting in line to be rebadged
-- A semi-mythical process too
    Complicated for rational explanation --
With maybe a thousand other bored souls;
The expiration date is unreal:
Some future slipstream space odyssey reality
Where hunger is banished
And we travel  between the stars
As easily as flying out of Dulles
On a Friday night.

The green suits are happy
To be here, not there,
But given a chose of locations,
They would rather a third alternative,

One without traffic,
One without commuting,
A one where a full Colonel
Has some semblance of rank.

The Pentagon is hell,
It's troops, recalcitrant,
& your enemies seldom choose
To execute a frontal attack.