Cesar Vallejo

A whole civilization walks
by Cesar Vallejo sleeping
in a Parisian gutter.
His stomach resonates,
the canyon of his word,
speaking something
he can't transcribe.

His mouth has forgotten
the taste of words..
His tongue hunts
the craters of his
teeth, the squelched
ribs of the roof,
dehydrated apple skin
of gums, which
have given all
of their blood.

"That's Vallejo,
the great poet.
He subsists on
words. He must be
given pain
so he can make it
into poems."

His pen is out
of ink. His mind
aches for something
that cannot be
given through words.

The flying wings
of Spanish grasshoppers
are singing their
ride towards
this moment.

"Cesar, just one
more poem!"

The throne of the gutter,
he renounces it.

Indian Summer Layover in Grandview Heights

Birds by the thousands,
their cries arguing with the air
like a storm
Where do they come off
being so confrontational?
the great trees lift them
into their sky
which only knows it could easily tumble them,
unfamiliar with their ally, the ground

The Woodhill swings down
Mulford, a road you climbed
all your childhood
to school, to friend's houses,
it's slope feels to have slumped,
it's grade lessened, though
the trees you now are awed by how tall they've grown,
they've always been mostly that tall
Your hometown becomes a demonstration
of the pliability of how things are seen
You've begun to experience the difficulty
of any thing's survival
into all that air pressing down,
the miracle of a thing learning
to turn the violence of a storm
into drinking water

The birds that you remember never hearing,
you now glory in their storm,
and the branches too,
stretched into the gray
over the houses and sidewalks
you know by heart

A blonder man sees the sky
and his ambition says
it belongs to him
If he gets there
he is a hero
if he falls
he is a tragedy
if he remains still
he is sodden and trampled
like a piece of grass
stuck to the mud

You are not an ambitious man

Two Little Girls in Yellow Raincoats and the Empty Stone Battlefield of a Chessboard

There's life running all around me,
The peaceable caretakers of genetic code,
God's true scripture, speaking the universe.
I understand none of it.
Above the blue shelter of our sky
All is black, All is rock, All is fire
And here on earth, our soft-bodied earth,
the fire burns off into light:
only lost galaxies held within eyes.

Andy

I read some of "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol" the other day and I think

Andy(I feel like we all have the right to call him that)'s right.

Andy says he doesn't know why people don't like being alone.

Andy says all the James Deans are incapable of inspiring romance (On behalf of failed James Deans everywhere, I agree).

Andy says it's movies are real and real life's the fake.

Andy says that no one even knows what they're feeling till it's over and movies give us a way to feel everything without having to live through it.

Andy says be what you love.

Andy loved plastic dolls.

Andy says things beneath what he says, around and above what he says.

Andy is smart enough to say less and mean more.

Andy Warhol may be Frankenstein.

Andy Warhol may be Dracula, but most likely

Andy Warhol is just one of his mother's broken little dolls.

Johnny Meyers

My friend
John Ryan Dobbs,
an air traffic
controller,
says pilots are
the only truly
happy people.
If they get
some time
in the air
then that is
all they need.
They don’t make
mistakes
he says.

I knew a kid
in high school,
Johnny Meyers,
who, though he
was small, had
bigger, more precise
dreams than anybody.

He loved planes.
He always had.
There was never
any doubt.
He wore a
newsboy cap and
an olive green
jacket with
golden wings
pinned to
the pocket.
When a plane
passed over
he’d stop the
conversation,
stare up
and name it.

Johnny had a
high voice and
it seemed like
puberty would
never happen
to him.

Presumably
puberty could
and did happen
to Johnny
but I like to
think he escaped
the pickling
and souring
of growing up.
Sure, Johnny could be
drinking Milwaukee’s
Best in a Ramada Inn
in Amarillo, Texas
alone right now
but I like
to think that
today Johnny Meyers
is up in some sky
somewhere

happy.