Awe!!

 Awe!!
ah, shucks
slapping slippery hockey pucks
for the winning points
getting free smokes in all the best hippie joints
while lounging under American skies
eating warm grandma apple pies

 just about everywhere in the great prairie spaces
playing high stakes poker holding all four aces
watching forest trees dance
in an imaginative hallucinogenic trance

 well, don't you know
from tip of head to toe
everything tingles
listening on the am radio to Wild Bill Hickok and his partner Jingles
getting lucky on a date
definitely has to rate
pretty high up there
where the rarefied air
is filled with exquisitely scented flowers
counting the seconds, minutes, and the elusive hours

 sipping rich wine with a mouth full of poetry
anywhere from sea to shining sea
and much more such,
like a lovely skin to skin sensual touch
on a soft pillow made of comforting breast
give me this and i'll be tempted to give you the rest!

 on the point of a needle our brief life pauses
immersing in irony and meaningful causes:
hundreds of millions of years gone by
and still we stand and wonder why.

 well, something never to miss:
a soft, warm, lingering kiss;
an exhale and an inhale and an exposure to bliss.
and then this:
deep in the dark woods getting lost,
one toe stepping timidly and touching frost.

 a deep breath yearning to be free
of the pressing weight of modernity.
Whitman’s wild children fully awake,
singing in the open air by a deep-water mountain lake.

 Awe!!

Idyllic summer at Juan-les-Pins, France, 1920

the Two Nudes were magnificently
conceived as life-sized torsos
with astonishingly perfect breasts
schoolgirl toes
volumetric classicism
imagined at a school in Holland
in 1905
with a corpulent rear end
on both
arm in arm
a full painting
not made for alarm
but to hint at Sapphic sex
to polish a classic subject
in a modern shine
and yet
one wonders
who was inside the glass?
was this a picture of Gertrude Stein
and Alice Toklas?

or random beach-goers who attracted his special eye?

beneath a Copper moon

i slept in the Victoria Hotel
down in old Mexico
and walked on handmade tiles
colored in deep indigo.

Eliot wasn't on my floor
nor was he at the bar
listening to the young gringo
strumming on an old guitar.

i heard he was swimming
in a pool without a sound
with a handful of wasteland dust
i remembered he once found.

he was wearing a huge sombrero
pulled tightly against his cheek
with a slip knot fully made
still showing the receipt.

my margarita had no salt
but i drank it all the same
to not offend the bartender
who asked me for my name.

a Spanish lady with the melons
she was proposing to sell
approached the nervous tourist
ringing the front desk bell.

i came to walk Copper canyon
so deep it smelled of death
where spirits wore historic masks

to take away your breath.

a train would leave the station
soon maybe the next day
and though tempted by those melons
i knew i shouldn't stay.

my coach was full of writers
down on their luck & drunk
on mescal which they all consumed
until their voices shrunk.

we stopped above the canyon walls
& began the long decent
into darkness at highest noon:
i wondered what it meant!

i heard the hidden waterfall
a primitive, lovely tune
and supped on poetry endless
beneath a Copper moon.

the White Witch in the White House

i saw little Red Riding Hood
sitting on a mushroom cap
looking like a caterpillar
simply taking her final nap.

The Tin Men surrounded her
each holding an Atomic bomb
while Captain Kirk went boasting
that he discovered Major Tom
who was lying flat on a city street
where a Mother would hear him cry:

fake news reporters flew into a rage
but no one asked them why.

And behind the door to nowhere
the White Witch drove his train;
he held the throttle open wide
to see what he might gain.

on her bouncing floor Miss Dorothy
kept piling yellow bricks,
so Alice called the Queen outside
and blinded her with tricks.

a space ship called Apollo
on a mission to the moon
found David Bowie singing
with his Ziggy Stardust spoon:

he pleaded for a bathroom break
as two riders came his way,
but Neil Armstrong told him "Negative":
we ALL were here to stay.

then a ghostly sound like sirens
came echoing down the hall
but Vonnegut in Cat's Cradle
used Ice-Nine to end the call.

the operator was intrepid,
ran outside and threw a fist:
he thought he'd remain anonymous,
but she found him on her list.

meanwhile, the White Witch in the White House

proved he didn't know the score,

but even when he was winning, he always wanted MORE!