Four Poems

Ode To Woody Strode

Veteran Actor Woody Strode will appear at the 8 p.m. Saturday screening of John Ford’s “Sergeant Rutledge” at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum’s Wells Fargo Theater.

—Los Angeles Times

Brother Ebon Noggin, Survival Bubba, persona non grata In the peckerwood’s head, a midden of bushwah shoe-tree’d Into a montage mob of Queeg fits. Can’t beat it For sheer eidetic distress of 30 shitkickers with 10 toothpicks recidivism A runaway braille trimming tremors to the quick Gimme some skulls, man! not these Chiropodists down with the croup, Jack, in Drumstick Gigging like locust on the corn, humming memory loves company Per Idaho beanfire with chili obligations as Bronco Nagurski makes the conversion with broken horns

As at a theatre corpses calling curtain calls With their entire cast of improprieties, Errol Flynn Pinned if only for a second between a crumpet and a scone The peak of his powers at the end of his rope The one-eyed King Radio with a mumbling jag on - This is the chorus of the Caresser’s song Canoeer than Velveeta were her thighs I thought I was standing in a movie with a leg wound An open book of alluvial text approximating flesh A ceiling dispensary pulled down to reveal Halfmoons claire de luneing at the world

No one has a straight job, wheat snobs rule the waves Waterbury sidles to his cardspout Tuberculosis got the camellias. Family trees May insert any name one chooses for the pedigree of love Let the foreign woman come ashore, what as the talkers say You’ll never see at home lost in the delicate rays of folklore Its minutes recorded with his feet by the Armless Wonder Thuggees with allergies film greenhouses, hold shining steam To treebuds, prehensile eyes out stalking vim as if vision Were a concubine, a rinse cycle lashed to the belly of a Raj With buckle of swash, Flora Danica waiting in the wings

Professor Pretzel Wolf buttons the suit on his portrait Of trees, an ornamental hombre in a speculum of preen Asks, “Who’s the forest of them all?” Why - Woody Strode! spiked with summer drone His dome chapeau made of breeze, accent grave Over the trees tight as a coat of Gliddens Not without ribands or the great socko of Kilimanjaro

All these yahoos headed West, have they got names to be blessed? Bring me the ho-hum, fly it up here verbatim An eggshell carbon 12 writ in a foreign tongue As though Johnny Vast had no idea where his howl came from And fetch us the cretin who et my heart That’s what makes it green, does it not? We live in a factory of the future on the edge of a lip With miniature cowboys banished forever The precision of faraway herbalists spilling the beans ”Our desires expectorate dutifully” slobbers Crow Bob

An ol’ Yakima stuntjockey son of Cannut uproots the tree Of reason roost, wraith of the treeshirt twinges Until and when courage is inflated to pressure sufficiently Pigeon balloon per square inch chest looking comical enough To glance, getting by the smoketrees you reckon it’s only Gene Our ofay Autry slit-eyed slimewinder triggering his getaway Lately ghosted into Christmas while all the leaves go blind

Only the shine inside perception lights the street Yours the campfire that mocks the sun Never met anyone outside your head who didn’t shimmer fragile timber What I mean Woody is you look swell Like them Indian lakes in summer Air kisses on a nudist clipboard, offbeat green tops o’ trees Everything Ritz crackers in the polluted lake wrappers Blue Moon mobile homes for the executive cornhuskers shimmering a song Cigarette snorkel on fishlip puffing dawn

Removing The Obelisk

From immediate dictation and against my will

“I”s the most embarrassing character in the world a deflector from antiquity pretending to be italic

Just another mook on Hungry Hill

“I wanna got to collage I want sun on the phone to talk me down from here Nice embalmer. Easy Boy!”

Fucks it have to do with me? This crown ain’t...