Lindísima: Voice of Linda

Southwestern Dis-United States of Memory

Piñon smoke and sagebrush, voice of New Mexico night driving into an Arizona dawn rising over dreaming pueblos, low-ridden plazas, kivas and ruined cities’ rubble traced and highlighted by sunlight, Anglo angling into Aztec toward Zuni over arid zones… A to Z to El Dorado; a voice covers the high hills with a dusting of snow – every word hangs in the notes of the song: music to fall apart to, breakdown to, hurling the soul into the bottomless well of psychotic nostalgia: música de cavanga, falling into the depths. Melody pushing to the threshold of a bar and leaving you there with cash in your pocket and no ride home. The warmth inside beckons—you step across as the song fills, swells, intoxicates, then excavates the wall of the dam until it collapses. The fatal mistake: you read too much into the lyrics of shallow love songs. The deathwish beast of despair arises, the flooded plains dazzle your eyes, the Indian girl smiles on the rim of the grand canyon, the tattooed cholo pulls a knife in the trailer park, the dark waters under the bridge murmur and surge with regret; el río de Las Animas, Durango CO, Aztec calligraphy on the wall: Las Cruces, NM; Clifton, Morenci, Globe, AZ: stepped pyramids of copper tailings, gang-warred walls in fallen barrios covered in Chicano hieroglyphics, the ruined huts of shepherds and cowboys, pit-house dwellings’ flaked arrowheads and pottery fragments scattered forever in the coyote laugh of desert dusk. Crepuscular colors on the names of mountain ranges: Santa Catalina, Sangre de Cristo, Sandia, each one a separate sunset delirium—then you ride through the night to the city of palm trees and the orange-lined boulevards of Heaven. The singer herself grew old but her YouTubes live forever.

I ♥ The Stone Poneys

(Don’t drink and listen to this stuff alone.)

Drop Pens—STOP the DRAFT !

Apr10

NaPoWriMo 2014, Day #10

I actually wrote this one today (during my Staff Improvement meeting), unlike the rest of the poems I am posting for Ntl. Poetry Writing Month, which I had sitting on my dashboard as finished drafts.

Here’s to avant-cryptic stanzas:
Nihil-angst extravaganzas,
Ghazal, Pantoum, endless Haiku . . .
such may cause the Muse to strike you.
Dada, Tanka, cinquains, Centos
existential verse mementos—
yes, they’re mildly amusing forms
but finally fail to transcend norms
of poetry-induced despair
(a common modern-day affair)
brought on by formless abstract lines
of current verse. The warning signs:
eye-rolling, growling, throwing books
yelling at websites, dirty looks
at writers with advanced degrees,
a raging sense of vague unease
with life and letters. Damn what’s new . . .
one wonders what we’re coming to.

When meaning is replaced by style
and editors extol the vile
you know that doom is on its way.
The poets don’t know what to say
but fool around, devoid of rhythm
(that’s why no one wants to hear them
let alone READ them). What a lark;
like rain-soaked matches in the dark.
Poetic dullness thus delays
to kindle light or spark a blaze.
Sad vocation: analyzing
wordy scribbles. Agonizing
over esoteric twaddle
(makes one want to hit the bottle—
or the poet). Was it ever
this way? Will the next endeavor
lift us toward the lyric splendor
or return us back to sender . . .?

napo2014button2

Biblical Babel

Apr9

Sixty-six chapters and sixty-six books
(please, Catholic brothers—no dirty looks)
were needed for God to make known His plan:
the gift of salvation and future of Man.

Yet sometimes it seems rather cryptically stated;
poor Israel must wait and will wait (as they’ve waited).

Isaiah took sixty-six chapters to tell it;
for two-thousand years has the Church tried to sell it—
must Christ and his teaching thus languish in mystery,
waiting offstage in the wings of His history?

Wings of the cherubim, angels, and vultures
now beat down upon us, uniting our cultures
while tech surges up in a dizzy parabola
micro in management, global in formula…

Sixty-six chapters to say it in Greek
Aramaic—or Latin; whatever they speak
while the somnolent audience scrolls on their screens
in apocalypse trance over zombie machines.
The scrolls are unopened, the parchment still sealed
the slot-machine handle refuses to yield;
as the sixes line up towards the threshold of seven
the virgins sleep late in the Kingdom of Heaven.