If someone offers you. Some sugar. You should eat it.

Arthur Russell "A Little Lost"

To Roanoke with Johnny Cash
~Bob Hicok

Mist became rain became fog was mist
reborn every few miles on a road
made of s and z, of switchback

and falling into mountains of night
would have been easy and who
would have known until flames

and nobody, even then. I played his life
over and over, not so much song
as moan of a needle and the bite,

the hole it eats through the arm
and drove faster to the murmur
of this dead and crow-dressed man,

voice of prison and heroin and the bible
as turned by murdering hands.
And the road was the color of him

and the night was blind but the mist
turned blaze in headlights as I haunted
myself with one of the last songs

he sang, about what else, about pain
and death and regret and the fall
that was the soul of the man.

Johnny Cash "Hurt"

you gonna need a space shuttle or a ladder that's forever

Rainbow Warrior and Frog, Sylvatus, Virginia

Better get inside the kingdom, and close the door

Lines on His 30th Birthday
~Everette Maddox

On a hill high above
the mild October day
I stand, heroic, hands
clasped behind my back,
as the last musket's
crack fades
and the smoke drifts away
from the place where the famous
Battle of my Youth was fought.

Who won? Who lost?
Who knows? My speech,
which I seem to have misplaced,
tells. Oh well:
myself and loves and grey
uniform were not among
the casualties, quite; though
a gold button dangles.

Now we'll bind the wounds,
free the slaves, and set up
(oh shrewdly!) a shrine
in the decaying mansion
of my body: post cards,
stuffed possums, and, out back,
whisky to be sold
such emissaries
from the glacial future
as have coin to spend.

One Day Out West
~Ralph Adamo

One day Jeremy woke up from a dream
in which James Dickey, Johnny Cash and Andrew Warhol
had spoken to him in the form of a siren chorus,
gowned and balanced on a ballbearing rock off the coast
of stormy San Francisco where he had been asleep
not more than a few minutes before Harmony
had gripped onto his legs and was about to drag him
down to the center of the earth when

Johnny sang "The earth is two foot deep"
and andy sang "and flat"
and James sang "But love
might put an end to that."

Wow, Jeremy said and he woke up in time to see
Marsha, in her pink robe,
looking out of the window.

It Was the Fifth Circumnavigation
~Ralph Adamo

I try to be a human being.
I've been taught plenty.
A kid with crooked teeth
learns to listen.
I've tried to be a human being.
I've made assignations at wakes.
I've borne the ticks gorged on mere possibility.
I've thought it was later than it was.
If I miss the point
a note is left
explaining it. I fly
higher than it
and through it.
I've seen murders fail to happen
tapping my fingers.
Whatever of mine gets stole gets
brought right back.
In my whole life
I never saw a thief.
Don't ask me about the storms I've slept under.
When I sleep
I need it.
Me and the things that have tried to kill me
we were joking perhaps?
There are women who bring us ancient dreams.
We're fooled.
We think the dreams are ours and begin.

Sweet Mary and Joseph, in a rocket machine, travelling the void, not a star to be seen

~more wrecked cars...and more Everette Maddox

What I Said To The Sky

I reeled out of a 6-martini
candlelit dinner
& stood in the usual gutter
clutching what was left
of the 20th century
& looked up into a sky
the color of a bruise
It looked like Mr. Hyde
in Classics Illustrated
& I shook my fist
at the God that had vacated years ago
overdue on the moral rent
& said "I came up a romantic idealist
& life has made me a mean
cynical pessimistic piss-ant
fuck you & the clouds you rolled in on"
& some wise-ass passer-by said
"But what about Suzy"
& I said "Suzy
blew the last blast
on my toy trumpet
that's all"

Composed On the Back Of A Dark Green
Muddy Waters Poster

When I woke up on the batture
& you were not only gone
but had never been there
& I heard the aluminum
silence of the river
I was scared--
it wasn't metaphysical
exactly
I just thought they were firing
cannons over the water
to make Huck's carcass rise

A Proposal

The sort of sigh
of light
around the white
nearly full moon
between the telephone
wires
Above the blasted site
of the proposed discount
drugstore
pre-minds me
of the sigh
I expect to expel
if I ever get
to kiss your lovely
mouth

"Several Million Of The
Most Amazing Things I
Ever Saw"

were several million stars
hanging over Highway 43
between Tuscaloosa & Mobile
one winter night
when I was out there
taking a piss

The other 2 most amazing things
were the way your tits
stood up to that flowered dress

Flowing on the Bench

As I was going to sleep
on the iron bench
in the back of the bar
I felt all right
I felt I was joining something
Not the Kiwanis Club
No
I felt like one river joining another
I felt like the Mississippi
flowing into the Ohio
Right where Jim & I
passed Cairo in the fog
Right where the book got good

The moon rose high in the midnight sky, on the road to the bottom land

~3 by Everette Maddox

Breakfast

Oh hush up
about the
Future: one

morning it
will appear,
right there on

your breakfast
plate, and you’ll
yell “Take it

back,” pounding
the table.
But there won’t

be any
waiters.

Gift

life death eternal significance
bullshit
from now on i’m just
going to make whimsical little gifts
this one is for you
it starts off with bullshit
which is mostly just to get your attention
then trudges along
through some fairly dull
explanatory stuff
and finally comes out (if i’m lucky)
at this point which
is where a little silver cowboy
blows the head off a stuffed tiger
with a pop gun
nobody is really hurt
just me because i know
you won’t accept it

The Sense of Decorum in Poverty

I put on a shirt
with a couple of
gone buttons and a
pair of pants my wife
hates and walk into
the living room and
sit down in a dull
chair. In this way I
acknowledge nothing’s
going on. If I
wanted to really
suffer I could go
lie down in some shit,
but that transgresses
the fine line between
propriety and
masochism. If
I were any kind
of poet I’d go
stick up a Jiffy
Mart or, Say, the First
Bank of the Cosmic
Imagination.
Then I could buy a
red plaid jacket with
a rooster tie and
stumble out into
the clear autumn air
crowing “Guilty! Life,
I’m your beautiful
man.”

I think I know the bloody way by now, Frankie, turn the god-damn radio down, thank you

current listening (mostly lil wayne, but also this)

I try to act amazed, but it's an act. The movie may be new, but it's the same soundtrack

Hillsville, Virginia

graham parker "local girls"

There may be mermaids under the wharf, there may even be a man in the moon, ah but Vincent time is running out, I hope you get yourself together soon

Yoko Ono, Austinsville, VA

a few lines from Charles Simic's notebooks (The Monster Loves His Labyrinth)~

Once again, I find myself on the North Pole. I have no sled, no dogs and I'm dressed for bed. You ask me if I'm cold? Of course I'm cold, you idiots.

I traveled over some bad roads in my childhood. It's no wonder I have a few loose screws.

I remember a small boy saying in the lull between two waves of planes during a bombing raid: "I want to go pipi, Mama."

Riding on a sow, holding on to its ears and shouting, "Out of my way chickens!" Did I really do that?

I like to hear a happy tune played sadly.

The new American Dream is to get to be very rich and still be regarded as a victim.

Did solitary strollers whistle past graveyards in Cotton Mather's time, or were they as silent as the graves?

Old woman stammering excuses to the pigeons for frightening them.

"God has a plan for America," the preacher on TV said just as you came to bed carrying a bowl of cherries against your naked breasts.

At the tanning salon on Route 9, Regina, the Pizza Hut girl, lies naked with shades on.

The magician folded the sheet of paper with my question over and over until no trace of it was left in his hand.

I remember my father saying, "Let's have another bottle of wine so that when we rise from the table we can feel the earth turning under our feet."

It happens that a cricket enters an abandoned house at the end of a road rarely traveled to sing as the night is falling.

A sign in Alabama. Love Power Church. Music and Miracles.

M Ward "Vincent O'Brien"