Encounter

image borrowed from bing

Encounter

I, who have driven bone lonesome

across the dark desert spine

along the two lanes of California 395,

speeding flat out into the clamped maw,

across the dark desert spine

of another mysterious pre-dawn,

speeding flat out into the clamped maw,

my yellow Pinto charging bravely forward

of another mysterious pre-dawn,

breakneck and fearless as my eyes cleared,

my yellow Pinto charging bravely forward

between Edwards AFB and Area 51;

I, who have driven bone lonesome

between Edwards AFB and Area 51

racing toward the light like a man moth

along the two lanes of California 395.

Glenn Buttkus

August 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets-FFA

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We

image borrowed from bing

We

“And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks,

sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

--William Shakespeare

We 

are the wage-slave mortals who toil

with non-objective blinders 

strapped to our temples,

scurrying like reeling rabbits, 

as dismal as weed-worms, degenerating 

into pox-ridden weather-bitten ill-nurtured

creatures riddled with kidney stones, 

exerting our precious life’s blood 

for those dastardly dewberries, 

those abhorrent corporate coxcombs, 

those maltish monkeys in the corner offices,

finding ourselves sadly dependent 

on the humble wages they pay us, 

less than a turd’s third of our actual worth,

a pauper’s portion of the big pie, 

just 

a monthly fustilarian posterior penetration

with us on all fours howling like dogs,

forced to wear their varlot-bitch name tags,

our battered senses dulled by their chronic

sodomite insensitivity, bending low,

eyes cast down, back’s arched, 

genuflecting to the beasts,

kept in cubicles like cattle,

forced to submit to their ruttish behaviors;

we, 

the people, 

we, 

the work force,

we, 

of the 99%,

we 

who serve,

laboring sans sympathy

from the craven overseers, 

as if under-employment and out-sourcing 

was our manifest destiny,

we 

have been talking amongst ourselves,

preparing to build battlements,

if democracy continues to be folly,

if Presidents continue to be powerless,

if the future contains more failure,

more destruction of our dreams,

we

have made the plans,

and the word “revolution” will not fully describe

the day the sled dogs turn in their traces,

first eating the harnesses, then the whips,

then the masters.

Glenn Buttkus

July 2012

Posted over on Flipside Records
Posted also over on dVerse Poets-OLN55

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Meraki Mumbling

painting by maria zampedroni

Meraki Mumbling


"What can be explained is not poetry."
--W.B. Yeats

There I was lying holy

in a halcyon hotole, admiring

the cairn I had constructed while

in the natiful throes of chiplick bliss,

searching for the elusive astoe balance,

sketching the stersha stipes midst mastication

of their musky caps, fixated on the bristlecone

eyespot that contained whorls and tendums

a thousand bilanos deep, before rising

indantly to capture a red latostyr that

had fluttered innocently into the

cluster of bilino blossoms all

about me, for I would ever

be just a husky honist

laden with skytio

daydreams,

a perspou poet

infatuated with ireatio words,

that language that embraces softly

like Harlow’s silken robes, begging ever

so sweetly to become pupticious poetics

and I, of course, cannot deny

such genthic entreatments.

Glenn Buttkus

July 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets

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Styx & Stones

image borrowed from bing

Styx & Stones

The old man grimaced from lower back pains

that stabbed like a squad of stilettos 

as he skipped a flat rock across the river

eight times, once for every decade

of his life;

eight rippled rings spreading out

from each other, wider and thinner

until they blended once more

with the moving surface of the water

and then quietly disappeared,

first the loud splash, impact, vibrance,

focus, identity, notoriety, and then

invisibility, down into the deep green

again.

He squatted by the riverbank

for a long time, hunting, until

his strong big-knuckled hands

found another perfectly flat stone.

Rising up too quickly, excitedly,

it took a moment for his eyes to clear,

his nostrils to stop flaring,

his breath to slow down so that

he could hump the harmony,

harvest the heart of the moment.

He tilted slightly to the right

and then snapped the stone

from his thick shoulder

low to the ground and out 

across the rushing water.

It hummed as it left his hand,

slicing the air effortlessly

before hitting the water and then 

hopped like a sandstone bug, 

skipping ten times in magnificent motion,

softly splashing yet barely touching

as it leaped across the rapids,

clear and precise, shining in the sun

for a moment before bouncing hard 

onto the startled bank on the other side.

The old man’s heart was skipping too,

ten times lightly, and his smile smothered

his grizzled chin as he stepped boldly

into his next decade.

Glenn Buttkus

July 2012

Posted over at dVerse Poets MTB

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The Shroom Deity

image borrowed from bing

The Shroom Deity

"Timothy Leary's dead.
He's outside looking in,
he'll fly his astral plane,

takes you tripping around the bay,
and brings you back the same day."

--Moody Blues.

In 1954 Aldous Huxley had himself

a mescaline experience, letting peyote buttons

swing open those doors of perception,

and hark the dandelions sang,

blood turned to apple jelly,

a straw dog jumped up and ran out of the room

barking in German, as the amateur drug culture

dawned like coral sun triplets.

In 1960 Timothy Leary traveled to Mexico

into the plexus of the sub-tropics in search

of psilocybin, soon finding those magic mushrooms

drenched in humidity, hiding midst interlocking

fairy rings as he crouched nose-deep in leaf litter

and dying tree roots, chewing the very palatable

caps off thick sticky stipes, watching squads of

earthstars splitting into majestic puffball star-shapes,

surmising that the oyster gods of fungus were guileless 

and gilled with black shoelace Asian beards

as he returned to Harvard to be fired

so that he could freely accept the throne

of Love Guru for the teeming hippie hordes.

Whereas I had suffered with monstrous migraine

cluster headaches forever, beyond recall, retreating

to shuttered dark rooms, crumpling into a limp lobster

pose with pillows over my head, until 2006,

when the United States government funded

a double-blind study for Johns Hopkins University,

looking at the spiritual aspects and effects of psilocybin,

and I was invited to participate.

38 minutes post-ingestion my perceptual accesses

swung wide open while listening to Miles Davis,

as the room filled with a thick rope of rainbows,

pulsating with brilliant colors that flashed perfectly

with the clarity of jazz notes, as the angelic halos

around our prayer candles hissed and popped

like sparklers, as the table tops and furniture

came alive and I could see them breathing,

rising and falling to the beat, as I floated

for a lifetime on blissful bosons until

the Higgs Messiah arrived stirring the calmness

with breezy beckoning with me joining

with the gregarious clusters of particles

that flocked frantically to it, creating

mass again, working our way leisurely 

back into the room.

My headaches are strangers now,

anxiety just a quaint memory,

God chants behind my pancreas,

death is but a transitory portal,

loving spirits dance in my hallways,

and incredible spiritual well being

rises in me daily as my inner sun. 

Glenn Buttkus

July 2012

Posted over on Shawna's site Flipside Records

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Etat Francais

image borrowed from bing

Etat Francais

Despite the ongoing love affair

most Americans have had

with France since the 1950’s, 

with Gene Kelly pirouetting across the Seine, 

with Jackie Gleason miming Gigot,

with Jacques Tati re-inventing physical comedy,

with Jerry Lewis becoming an icon, 

I have always been fascinated with the bloody blot

that the French carry on their twentieth century souls,

after the crack Nazi war machine had defeated

their ill-equipped provincial Army, during

that dark period from July 1940-August 1944,

when the Vichy Regime,

led by the 84 year old WWI hero,

Marshall Philippe Petain, created

a semi-fascist state patterned after

Franco’s fascista in Spain,

began to collaborate with the Bosche,

helping to round up Jews and other “undesirables”--

like teachers, poets, intellectuals, and homosexuals,

and sometimes used their puppet military forces

to fight and sabotage the Allies.

Sadly, ironically, the majority of the French people

supported, or tolerated Vichy rule in order

to maintain a degree of national autonomy. 

Historians favored Charles de Gaulle,

the highest ranking officer in the French Army

who officially resisted the surrender of his country,

who fled to England to create

“the French government in exile”;

but my poetic blood has always been stirred

by the guerrilla bands of resistance fighters,

the Free French movement, who fled

to the mountainous areas of Brittany and southern France,

to those dashing brave Basque-beret wearing warriors--

the Maquis,

who helped and hid downed Allied flyers

and runaway fleeing Jews,

who attacked the Germans within

every corner of their occupied country,

who were labeled “terrorists”

by the cowardly corp of Vichy authorities--

thankfully many of which were executed

for war crimes, collaboration, treason

and complicity during the Holocaust;

yet, as with the post-war Nazis on trial,

the majority of the Vichy treacheries,

injustices, cruelties, inhumanities,

and treasons were never fully paid for--

the Fascists became mist, just ghosts

hidden in plain sight, blending masterfully

back into the work pants of the proletariat,

just a shameful vermillion stain on 

the war-torn pages of French history;

but for some reason a throbbing part of me

cannot forget or forgive that cruel capitulation,

that terrible time of evil deeds

when most of France gave in

to their basest of natures.

Glenn Buttkus

July 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets-Poetics

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Higgs

image borrowed from bing

Higgs

The Higgs mechanism is the Messiah

and particles are attracted

to its presence.

As it gathers mass,

it gains momentum.

Soon it is affected

by phonon and boson waves,

which spawn a solid,

or a lattice of crystalline structure

of positively charged atoms.

The more you read, 

it seems that

every answer creates

twenty questions.

Glenn Buttkus

July 2012

Posted over on G-Man Flash 55  

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