Hysteria

image borrowed from bing

Hysteria

Abused and scorned by her husband,

Ruth, laden with needs unfulfilled,

sought out the randy imp, dropping

four golden shekels into his cedar box,

and stretched out on his velvet divan,

taking only two bites of the root candy 

before becoming overwhelmed

with blissful heat and satyric need,

captive of the deliriant hallucinogenic, 

happily allowing the mandragora to climb up

onto her hips, stroking her 

with his hands and tongue

past the chrysolite gem in her navel,

sliding beyond her thin waist

to stop teasingly at the pocket of her sweetness,

beneath the silken cluster of her dewey fur,

golden as sunlit wheat chaff,

dousing the pink pliable labia with scented oils,

washing away the veneer of fear and doubt;

soon arousing her carnal appetites,

he rode the shivering undulations

that emerged as he began to massage

her clitoris, frantic-heaving lustful-arching

as her womanhood craved contentment

and just as the orgasmic fury peaked

she was envisioning the humungous creature

of living energy, the Mandragora Helix,

that could snare electromagnetic fields

and jerk the earth slightly off its axis

and then let it snap back into balance

just to demonstrate its cosmic prowess;

she rose majestically from the perfumed pillows,

shook out the tangles from her tresses,

smoothed out her skirts, and then

bowed low with both hands brushing

the beautiful carpet before making

her sweeping exit, pausing only to scoop

up a handful of chocolate raisins

from a crystal goblet by the door,

leaving unescorted and smiling. 

Glenn Buttkus

August 2012

Posted over on Shawna's Flipside Records

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Yang Without Yin

painting by Borg de Nobel

Yang Without Yin

“Every living creature on earth dies alone.”

--Roberta Sparrow

hey, big guy, yeah you

with those ridiculous long white ears,

Jesus, you must be over six feet tall,

and you have fresh blood on your neck fur

and dried blood on your little pink mouth,

twitching your whiskers and staring kindly

at me here in the dVerse Poet’s Pub, but

behind you in the huge bar mirror,

your actual visage resides,

ghoulish, monstrous, demonic, evil,

like that friend of Donnie Darko’s, Frank;

Donnie: Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit?

Frank: Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?

Christ on a crutch, this is not the gentle Harvey

having a couple of beers with Elwood, hell no,

this is Frank, the lepus leper, the mirage,

the grand manipulator, Time’s muckraker,

Beezelbub’s berserker, saying 

between jagged broken teeth

with his red eyes shining:

“28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, 12 seconds--that is

when the world ends.”

As they drove around in that aimless convertible,

they began to ask:

Is time travel simply an act of God?

Are extraterrestrials the real angels?

Do we really want to have the answers

to the big gnawing question, why are we here?

Q: Does anyone know who Graham Greene is?

A1: Come on, we have all seen Pa Cartwright on TV.

A2: Yeah, the Indian dude who played Kicking Bird in 

DANCES WITH WOLVES.

A3: Some British jerk who wrote the screenplay for a movie

Richard Burton was in. 

If we never had accepted the veil of forgetfulness,

if we knew our actual destiny, could see it clearly,

might we choose to betray it?

Frank: I tell you a storm is coming, and it will swallow

all the children.

But young Donnie tuned out the rabbit prophesies

and listened only to his father:

“Don’t listen to them, son. They are all part of this great

big conspiracy of bullshit.”

So Donnie Darko disregarded the prattling 

of long-eared soothe-sayers and just went home

completely exhausted, pockets empty of answers,

and flopped onto his kid-sized bed 

with its Hopalong Cassidy bedspread, 

and immediately

began to dream about that broken off jet engine

hovering at 30,000 feet above his room, watching

it fall, fall, falling like a radio-controlled drone

directly toward his pillow,

as he finally saw the great serpent

preparing to eat its own tail.

Glenn Buttkus

August 2012

Posted over at dVerse Poets-Poetics

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The Greatest Country in the World

image borrowed from bing

The Greatest Country in the World

There is absolutely no evidence

to support the statement the we’re

“the greatest country in the world.”

We are seventh in literacy,

27th in Math,

22nd in Science, 

49th in life expectancy,

178th in infant mortality,

third in median household income,

fourth in labor force,

and number four in exports.

We lead the world in only three categories:

Number of incarcerated citizens per capita,

number of adults who believe angels are real,

and defense spending where we spend

more than the next 26 countries combined.

So,

when you ask me what makes us

the greatest country in the world,

I don’t know what the fuck

you’re talking about.

Aaron Sorkin

Speech delivered by Jeff Daniels

from the premiere of HBO series

THE NEWSROOM. 

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After Babel

image borrowed from bing

After Babel 

Words

decorate our lives

like ever-blooming flowers;

some bursting with sunlight,

others poking their oil-soaked petals

out of bayous;

some so holy they are only uttered

by anointed practitioners,

others smeared in blood

on middle eastern walls;

some that stimulate eros,

others that damn us to perdition--

but they all serve us well.

Glenn Buttkus

August 2012

Posted over on G-Man's Friday Flash 55

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Pugilist

image borrowed from bing

Pugilist

Bruno started boxing

when he was eight years old,

the red leather gloves huge on his small fists,

and he loved it.

His

   father

        hung

             up

               the

                 heavy

                       bag

                            in

                              the

                                  garage,

with the speed bag by the door.

                                              He

                                    punched

                                        deep

                                       into

                                     the

                             sinews

                                  of

                              that

                    massive

                  canvas

                bag,

his head barely touching its midriff.

He had to stand on an apple box

to swat the speedo,

slapping it into a blur,

fast and hard, nearly

tearing it off its springs.

He and the big bag became intimate,

his jabs snapping sharp into the sweaty folds

of the faceless porous partner,

his uppercuts pummeling every stitch,

smacking the stuffing loudly, thudding

as his terrible right and left hooks

tore at the texture of bag and glove,

training like his life depended on it,

night and day the grunting

and pounding rang out clarion

from the rough hewn garage gym.

Then his father bought him 

some free weights,

a sit up board and press bench.

The young man’s muscles rippled with joy,

growing, thickening, pumping up.

First featherweight

then lightweight,

then middleweight

becoming a strong light heavy,

battling his way up through the rings at

the Boys Club, YMCA, high school, then college. 

He fought like a physicist,

never with blood lust,

mostly knocking his opponents down

and winning by points,

but several times the adversaries

stayed down for the knockout call

rather than face his fists again;

but he was proud to be a boxer,

not a mauler,

not a braggart,

never arrogant or mean;

he did not hate the men he faced,

he just loved to box;

there were a few times he fought to a draw

hardly recognizing his own swollen features

in the mirror the next morning.

He really only lost once,

to a Hispanic

who failed to acknowledge pain,

who fought in the streets daily

without gloves;

somehow this had enraged Bruno

and he had unleashed punches

that broke ribs and bruised bone,

leaving the other man covered in blood,

yet the fighter battled like a bull dog

and refused to go down,

winning by points.

Bruno never was the same after that,

as the youthful joy was replaced

with sadness, and the mindless behemoths

he faced began to break apart his dreams,

punching beyond his body, injuring his soul,

until he rose one hot August morning

and he embraced his epiphany,

listening at last to his higher self:

“Fight no more forever, for you are worthy of something finer.”

Somehow he found the strength to walk away,

setting aside who he had been,

putting away his gloves, trophies, headgear,

allowing the rope burns to heal,

saying adieu to the ring, to the crowds, 

letting the heavy bag hang dry, kissed by dust,

forcing the speed bag into silence,

as he unclenched his fists

and became a scholar, a lover, a poet

and a father himself, who only pulled

out his scrapbook of press clippings

when begged to do so by his three sons.

Glenn Buttkus

August 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets MTB

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In Vagrantus Veritas

image borrowed from bing

In Vagrantus Veritas 

He awakened at first light

as a commuter train rumbled by

on a parallel bridge, and found himself

distracted by the strong fresh oder of feces--

Christ, Billy had taken a shit near his head this morning,

then packed up and boogied, heading for the Mission.

He was lying alone on a steep slant of the riverbank,

knuckles deep into the urine-soaked soft dirt under

the bridge, listening to the river making soft 

gurgling noises as it slipped under the

great green girders above him, while

traffic busily pounded and slapped

the bridge deck.

The sun broke through dozens of steel meshed rectangles 

creating a squadron of morning rays that lined up in 

close order like reluctant soldiers clear across the 

wide lethargic gray ripples

as he sat up and stretched, unclasping his filthy pea coat,

the last remnant of his service to his country. He had a

penchant for real wool, for it could capture the true 

essence of the person wearing it, sweetening

the sweat, breathing as he did. 

He reached deep into a shirt pocket and pulled out a yellowed

photograph, unfolding it carefully in his dirty fingers and 

stared at the image of his ex-wife, in her red bikini, 

sitting seductively on a cushioned swing 

on the deck of the house he once owned 

while inhabiting a fake utopian daydream 

that would morph into a dystopian nightmare;

becoming the person in rags he presently resided within--

dysfunctional, divorced, desperate, masterless,

jobless, homeless and hungry, a mock

menace to society, a fringe dweller.

“Good morning, Esther,” 

he hoarsely whispered into the hot wind,

habitually embracing his quaint custom

of greeting his past as if it could hear

him, as if someone, somewhere

cared.

“What’s for breakfast?” 

he inquired while rolling up his tattered tarter sleeping bag,

and tying it onto the top of his slashed up back pack, 

then walking to the edge of the thick vegetation 

growing on both sides of the bridge, he urinated 

on some blackberry vines that had been heavy 

with gray-brown dust, looking like dead 

herbarium residents, smiling

as their true green complexions appeared

in the steaming puddles of piss.

“No, honey, you just sleep some more. 

I will fix my own breakfast.”

He fished around in the bulging pack and extracted a kid-sized

red box of raisins, and stuffed it into one of his unbuttoned

shirt pockets while pounding the bridge powder off

his clothes, then swung his heavy pack onto his

broad shoulders and walked stiffly out into the

brightness, squinting into the feral face

of that day’s potential. 

Glenn Buttkus

August 2012

Posted first over at flipside records
Posted as well over at dVerse Poets OLN58

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Transcendence

image borrowed from bing

Transcendence

“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

are of imagination all compact.”

--William Shakespeare.

A dun hawk with scorching thermals

beneath its short wings 

baptized the hot air

with its sibilant cry, 

echoing off cliffs and probing

the depths of shimmering canyons

as it spiraled over us, 

its darting shadow

kissing thousands of dead white logs

cast about like Asgaardian kindling

after a pair of logger gods 

had tromped over the foothills.

Sarge and I 

were merely two tiny figures

within the vastness of the clear-cut,

moving like field mice, 

like ants on a sequoia,

scurrying along the craggy back 

of cluttered trails that wandered 

through the broken discarded timber,

both silent, 

sweating in the afternoon swelter,

both listening 

to the susurrous shaman wind

hissing in its ancient tongue.

At road’s end near timberline

we rested in the cool shade

of a red outcropping, thrusting

out from the mountain’s shoulder,
his handsome head busy lapping

up warm canteen water from my palm,

just a man and his dog staring

at the bristle-cone ancient pines

that dotted the escarpment above,

bent like crones from their thousands of years

of standing there 

beyond the axe,

beyond the folly, 

their bark mostly shed,

their bodies nearly petrified, 

their branches creating a series of spiracles,

a helix that breathes rarified air,

a holy nest for angels and eagles

to roost in during the darkness,

trees that are older than any empire,

that began their growth in 3000 BC,

when the Neolithic Period was ending,

when Caral was built in Peru

as the first city in the Americas,

when Troy was founded,

when the Sumerians began to work with various metals,

as Stonehenge was beginning to be erected,

as the potter’s wheel was invented in China

and hieroglyphics began as writing in Egypt.

At twilight we were still toiling

leeward along the green lane,

happy to spot your smoke,

happy to hear the music,

anxious to share

the gentle wisdom we had gained

from our sojourn with the ancestors.

Glenn Buttkus

August 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets

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