Thursday, May 31, 2012

Gioia Libre



image borrowed from bing


"I can tell whether a person can play just
by the way he stands."--Miles Davis

Gioia Libre
jazz
is the ear
spice, the todDy,
the perFect pal,
pierCing
the glazed
gloom.
napPing riPariAn
beFore
conStrucTing a cairn
witHin
my own husk.
most jazz goes down hot,
scalDing
as it transForms
our aura,
our sphere.
free
floaTing
muSic, 
seeMingLy just
ranDom
notes, lanDing
midShips
and
cenTer
         chest
                 beTween
                             naVel 
                                     and
                                          nose
stirRing
         soul,
               sparKing
                            love
                                 pelLets,
shatTering maLaise
as
dadDy jazz
forms
the dart
striKing heaVy 
hearts,
pouRing_viBrant
hues, steaMing stanZas
inTo
the warp and weave
of life.
Glenn Buttkus
May 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets-FFA

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Monday, May 28, 2012

Victorian Spelunking



image borrowed from bing


Victorian Spelunking 
Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can
be planted.”--Wu Cheng-En
Mother, mother, dearest Aurelia,
why in hell did we take you with us
on our honeymoon to Benidorm?
The Spanish coast lost its luster
with us fearing nightly that you had
given in to your mixoscopic tendencies;
somewhere, perhaps in another flat,
she heard a piano, someone playing Bach
here at 23 Fitzroy Road, then heard Nicholas’ 
chronic coughing, cousin to pneumonia, 
her thin sweater not sufficient to ward off 
the bone-chill during that coldest February 
in London’s collective memory,
sheets of silver foil clinging to her peripherary,
her chin resting on a soft flower-designed doilie,
her lungs beginning to ache with the gas,
her stamina collapsing like chaff aflame,
her nerves raw as a fresh wound, yet
her resolve relentless as her spirit seemed
to hover above the scene, seeing her there
on her knees with her head and shoulders
thrust deeply into her narrow refuge from
Ted’s lacerating lectures, his probing quizzes,
her mind scurrying about bathed in abstraction,
consumed by black pools of energy that pulled
her down hard and fast, down to some dark domicile
beyond God’s latchstring, feeling the deaf thunder
alive with bold bolts of black lightning,
dropping straight down breasts-first toward
a faint pin-prick of light that was busy expanding
expeditiously until the light filled the dark sky
completely, and she was hurtling into it like
a hungry comet, and as she grew closer to
the inner sun she suddenly shed her sins,
cleaved off her doubts, abandoned her
mental instabilities as she became encased
in the solar eye, and embraced the cosmic tongue
in His mouth--as He presented her 
with a hot kiss
that brought orgasms 
clothed in omniscience. 
Glenn Buttkus
May 2012
Posted over at Monday Melting 19

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Sunday, May 27, 2012

Carnivale



image borrowed from bing


Carnivale
Those seedy brilliantly lit carnivals
that caravanned in late at night, 
shouting down the freeway, 
as the rides were bolted together 
one more time in some vacant lot 
near the train yards, always had
an air of naughtiness about them,
like maybe squads of street walkers
had slid in with an army of pimps,
and the tired purple feathers, slit skirts,
and push up bras were pulled on over
perfumed bruises, broken knuckles
and jagged fingernails; all painted up
and ready for the suckers;
but never really having the majesty
of the Big Top, no parades, 
no ringmaster, although I once saw
an old elephant at a county fair
in Montana, and there were
camel rides in Kent one spring,
shit,
Ringling Brothers never had camel rides,
nor did they have those Carnie harem girls
who shook their asses after you paid 
your dough, and sometimes flashed
their breasts, and the freaks, man,
old Barnum never let the freaks loose,
those bearded lady weight lifters,
those hilarious midgets dashing through
the legs of stilted giants, the dwarf tossing,
the houses of horror, the houses of fun,
those damnable mirrors that twisted your
body into grotesque positions--bizarre
mirrors everywhere, infinite reflections
of mirrors inside of mirrors;
a real sordid affair that assaulted 
you with wafts of steaming animal dung,
sweaty canvas, sticky sweet cotton candy,
wet ropes, dozens of engines churning
providing the energy to power the rides,
a calliope around every corner chugging
out a carnival beat, pounding your senses,
always with the carousel in the center,
the hub, the gentle heartbeat of the place,
offering those beautifully garishly painted
whirling horses, hippos, lions, tigers, zebras
and ninja turtles, pumping up and down
like bored prostitutes--anybody could ride
them for the right price,
punctuated by ten kinds of screaming,
pretty girls and frightened men
who screamed like little girls,
dropping through chutes,
spinning in tea cups, clanking up
the roller-coaster rails and diving
headlong into valleys of calculated
chaos, swinging wildly in a ferris wheel
chair, the lock bar drenched with sweat,
rotating with loud gear clunks higher
and higher until that magnificent moment
when the car stops at the very top, 
the pinnacle of the evening,
and within that tiny mechanical window
all the music stops, you notice the stars
and the lights on the refinery miles away
as your date kisses you and uses her tongue
for the first time, and your right hand fumbles
for a breast just as the car lurches back
toward earth, and you become aware
of lunatic empty laughter
and the screaming starts again. 
Glenn Buttkus
May 2012
Posted over on dVerse Poets-poetics

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Thursday, May 24, 2012

Crazie



image borrowed from bing


Crazie
I find crazy
in the damnedest places,
in my yogurt,
in my jeans pocket
after it has gone through the wash,
in the middle of my quilt
while investigating an odd lump,
as a mystery ingredient
in my breakfast cereal,
borrowed from bing,
stumbling onto some perverse website,
behind my dusty hiking boots,
in the thumb of my gardening gloves,
in a mouse nest
within my old paint cabinet,
on the shelf right between
NIGHT AT THE OPERA
and
PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT, 
in my socks drawer,
while reading William Burroughs
or Hunter S. Thompson,
or Philip K. Dick,
in the medicine cabinet
at my best friend’s house,
in the cat box,
in my treasured Roy Rogers
lunch pail under the Buck Rogers
decoding ring, on the seventh page
of the first issue of Conan the Barbarian,
in Frank Frazetta’s biography,
in Woody Allen’s mind,
while listening to John Belushi,
reading a Jim Carrey tweet,
within the wound in my right leg
five inches into the hematoma
after crashing through my deck,
in Taffy’s dog house
four years after she left us weeping,
holding her while she reluctantly
received the prick of death,
in the desk drawer of a Motel Six,
under my spare tire,
in the backyard where we buried
the cat from ten years ago,
in every production shot
from every theatrical play
or film I ever appeared in,
in an old cigarette ad
John Wayne did for Chesterfield,
in the bottom of my golf bag,
wedged into the thumb webbing
on my high school mitt,
under the Hudson hub cap in my garage,
in the plain brown envelope holding
the last hand-written note
my mother left me before she made
her last trip to the hospital,
and the translucent mystery man
who held my hands tightly
just before the hour of the wolf. 
Glenn Buttkus
May 2012


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Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Loyalty


image borrowed from bing





Loyalty


after
your death
a cat
will wait
one day
before eating 
you,
but
in the
case of 
your dog,
it will mourn
your death
until it
joins you. 
Glenn Buttkus
May 2012

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Cristofleoge



image borrowed from bing


Cristofleoge
imagine baxter’s bafflement after losing
his long battle with cancer, emerging
from the tunnel of photonic rings
not into the cloistered halls of bardo,
but rather encased in some translucent egg
attached to a broad leaf, suddenly returned
to life, morphed magnanimously into a
gelatinous fertilized vulnerable globule
of white homogametic (ZZ) dna,
still sentient, nothing forgotten, intelligence intact
with transcription tapes of past lives on board
before burgeoning into a bug;
another new beginning, this time 
without
any pause for pre-planning,
without
gentle counseling,
without 
a life review,
just some kind of kafka-like mandatory 
unsolicited spiritual surgery, being injected 
whole into a gob of butterfly spermatophore,
before marveling at the speedy week
of gestation as the egg proteins split open
and his furry new form unfolded into
a yellow and black knobbed larva,
with 12 husky hirsute caterpillar shoulders,
and a demon hunger providing vital volition
for the fuzzy segments to bristle with purpose,
funneling herbivoric sustenance non-stop
via the voracious maw, burning with the need
to feed, to serve, to worship the glowing
insect helix, while simultaneously excreting
pungent turd sap trails that spiraled sticky
around branches,
busily sending pheromone telegrams to his
ant cousins, vibrating vociferously delta blue
work songs, prompting the tiny red soldiers
to set up protection from predators--
in return for access to reciprocal piles 
of honeydew secretions,
driven manically, never at rest, until
the end of the third larval instar,
when the horrid hunger dried up,
when the passion for consumption ebbed,
when tiny incipient wing disks blossomed
as infantile mimics and the caterpillar
persona was penciled into lethargy, 
into porous pupa, weaving his personal
chrysalis into a magnificent mud crochet,
a buff bastion this caterpillar keep,
soon lured into a trance of tortoise-shelled
dreams of flight, of sensual delight,
of sun-dog days and fructose nights--
dropping even deeper into the cosmic
mystery of metamorphosis, clearly hearing
the crystalline click of completion before
swimming back to the surface light with
great lunges, gathering blinding speed
before cracking open the chrysalic chamber
with incredible strength and inexorable vigor,
to emerge imago, triumphant, his powerful
wet wings dappled deliciously with black,
yellow, and golden eyespots, furiously flexing
his twin antennae, his proud proboscis swelling
with the sumptuous scents of sap, dung, rotting
fruit and decaying flesh,
launching himself into mountain meadows
that he would become endemic toward,
the first of his kind, double large,
three sets of wings, more than a monarch,
approaching messianic, a king of kings,
announcing himself as papilio jaguaris,
a papal prince of love set loose
among the fluttering multitudes.
Glenn Buttkus
May 2012
Posted over on Monday Melting 18

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Monday, May 21, 2012

Pagliacci



painting by john wayne gacy


Pagliacci
regardless of regality, the royals,
the philosopher kings must have their fools,
so woody became emmett causing
coulrophobia to rage rampant as everyone’s
children tasted terror when confronted
with those big floppy shoes,
that pinkish-green brillo hair,
capped by the bulbous rouge proboscis,
like bart simpson who feared Krusty so much
he suffered from insomnia, chanting, 
“can’t sleep, can’t sleep, for the clown will eat me”;
like slim pickens as clete the rodeo clown, in
the honkers, gored by the brahma 
inches short of the barrel;
like richard basehart as il matto taunting zampano
dangerously in la strada;
like jimmy stewart as buttons in de mille’s epic,
never seen without his make up on;
like lon chaney, sr, the killer clown, whose silent
placard read, laugh, clown, laugh;
like red skelton as dodo delwyn, his character
a hiding place from his own fears, letting
clowns become his personal obsession, 
peopling his paintings garishly; 
like stephen king’s demon clown in it,
the child slayer, the muse for 
the rock group fear the clown, 
boldly clogging our ear buds,
a reflection of the real terror, portrayed
fearlessly by brian dennehy as
john wayne gacy, cataloging the images 
of gacy’s prison clown paintings,
and trying to stifle the stench 
of the all those young boys 
strangled and buried
under his innocent-looking house,
so even though the famous federico
loved his clowns from an early age,
there is nothing remotely dulcet
about a child’s dark nightmares--
do us all a large and pack away
the commedia masks, recycle
the halloween rubber smiles,
wipe off that pound of pancake,
tear off and feed the noses
to the rottweilers,
and as for the clowns,
just don’t send them in.
Glenn Buttkus
May 2012.
Posted over on Magpie Tales 118

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Thursday, May 17, 2012

Projectile



image borrowed from bing

Projectile
My flight as a sentient projectile began in
1944. My mother was 17 years old,
pregnant first at 15, veteran of
a back room abortion, a real horror story
in 1942; pregnant again at 16 with me;
7 months pregnant when she
saw Snoqualamie Pass for
the first time, from the front seat
of a Model A Ford 
watching my grandfather fix
the sixth flat since
leaving Spokane the day
before; her mother already in
Seattle, gone on ahead to work at
Boeings, doing her part for the war
effort, spending a lonely Mother’s Day
cooking for herself and going to
a Deanna Durbin musical film;
whom they said my mother looked like. 
As a child, then adolescent, Mother’s Day
didn’t mean a hell of a lot to me,
another Hallmark designated moment, just
another day where gifts could be
purchased; candy, ribbons, roses and cards.
But in 1966, when my mother was
barely 39 years old, she died
of uterine cancer, looking like
an Aushwitz resident, a ten pound
tumor swelling her uterus, so that
she looked pregnant again as she
bravely waited to give birth to death.
For Christ’s sake that was 
46 years ago, and every 
Mother’s Day since has grown more 
bittersweet. Mother, if I was the
arrow you projected out into this world
with all the strength and verve
you could muster, then you
became the stringless bow
of my misty memories and my
dreams, merely a maternal face
from a few photographs, always with
that flower in your hair.
Tomorrow your day rolls around again, and
that knot of churlish pain in my chest
will arrive, swell and ebb, as it
has always done, as it shall
continue to do until our
rendezvous, our rejoining, as
I shed the old man husk
and again become your boy.
Yes, with regret, I have let your day
come and go in silence, wearing a sad
smile, emotionally mute--but Jesus, not
this one, no. I will joyfully celebrate the
46 Mother’s Days that I had repressed in
my ignorance and arrogance, and
so, mother, whom I now know can
hear my every thought, be reminded that
I love your matronly spirit, and
I thank you so much for
bravely being my bow.
Glenn Buttkus
May 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets-FFA

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Alone On a Sidetrack


image by glenn buttkus

Alone on a sidetrack,
the locomotive was happy
to pose for me.

Ma and Pa Kettle


image by Glenn Buttkus

Ma and Pa Kettle
have been seen
on the premises.