Teasing Lies of the Marmota Monax

The gusting green glow

of a Spring-like mirage

lets loose a tsunami

through my tingled being,

melting the winter malaise

just a trifle.

This rush of life

wraps me in translucent

fever dreams

for a day of fire

until the beat down

frost of February

blows back into the fore,

coating me icy cream

again into hibernation,

threadbare to rigor

left to carry on the razor wind

howling at my door.

I'm bathed in the white flakes 

of supposed springtime sunshine

at temperatures frostbitten, 

wounded and bloody.

Picturing breeze blown laundry 

hanging from clothes lines drawn now darkly

long faded into the Kodachrome 

of bygone yellowing family albums.

Standing on the precipice 

of winter's ice scarred canyons, 

I reach across to the drifting tide of flowering

just out of reach.

-----

Still, it's but a March

'round the corner to

academic b-ball brackets;

to faux celtic drunk fests

by the Erin shamrock busload;

to the pineapple cactus

vampire bats striking in full swing.

It's but a shiver or three

from here to there,

but a shovel or four

of the white cold power

up my grill.

Meanwhile, chill.

Bee Stung Sensible

She's all frost blonde bee stung lips

and half frivolous shoes,

swaying, tripping, on the nod,

settling into my ghost horizon.

She whispers sour and warm

to my sweet icy edges,

contemplating a tender burn

of steely wool failings.

-----

The subway takes me back downtown,

she follows drifting on a tide

of corporate sweat

from the workaday bodies

stacked like cordwood on the F train.

-----

Cupid creeps stalking his prey

on Bowery north of Houston,

writing Valentine's Day poems

on the back of dead band flyers,

torn off telephone poles

and abandoned holy shrines,

blown haunting down Bleeker

after the spectre of Joey Ramone.

I toast them righteous

with a goblet full of glass,

in the end bloody doomed

to shit out the shards

into tenement toilets

of artists unbowed.

-----

Side stepped sick to my soul

down the alleyways of promise

past a rain tickled insolence

free of ethics and ideals,

I taste sulfur and circumstance

and the cyanide of seekers,

when all along she's merely bleached,

free of stingers and the stung:

tied off,

pushing a hot shot

into her hell bound panic;

surfing plasma,

left to fade.

Ice

Encased in a February

labyrinth of ice,

my spastic crazy chipping

at the melting warmth beyond.

I haunt my flash frozen

nightmarish winter dream,

a ghost of roads not taken,

a spineless spectre of bloodless flesh.

My boyhood filled with climbing trees

and kites strung taut against the sky,

I grew up to something else unsaid;

ground down to something less unseen.

-----

The ambiance of emergency

room chaos pumping out my stomach,

fruit of concrete glassine dances

down back alley homemade drugstores.

I'm out of phase with time and place,

wobbly on the hospital gurney,

until I take my blinders off

of ambulatory sanity

and drop back into luminescent

summers running through the sprinkler,

winters sledding, snow fort battles,

drunken, choking smoke haze household,

boozed and battered fish and chips

and cookie dough raw as the nerve endings

I gnaw on.

And on.

And on.

1983

Father time's goddamn Lunar calendar has shed its skin again and drawn another ring around my trunk, forcing me to symbolically drop into the musical fetal position of my early 20s. Well, very early 20s - 20, 21 to be exact. 1983.  The first year I recall being relatively happy most of the time.

Which is odd because I spent a good deal of '83 on what constituted a floating prison with 5000 other people, 4995 of whom I didn't know or, worse, really didn't want to know. Strangely, it might have been great because I'd finally felt free. Free of what? Of the 20 years that came before it, I guess. It was my first real job, I did it well, and it was interesting if morally abhorrent (thus began the compartmentalization of my ethics).

Maybe it was all the great music I could buy really cheaply there (for some reason, very few others on the ship cared for Nina Hagen, The Jam, Elvis Costello, etc. yet the ship's store always seemed to have cassettes of their albums available, marked down because they presumably couldn't get rid of them).

Maybe it was that I saw a bit of Europe for the first time: Italy, Greece ... well, Italy and Greece, anyway. Qaddafi and troubles in Lebanon put the kibosh on planned visits to Israel, Egypt and Spain that year.

Really, though, I think it was the four months at the beginning of the year I spent at the Navy Intelligence School and Oxymoron Emporium in Denver, Colorado. There wasn't a lot of Navy in Denver (that was Air Force country) and it was more like college than the military, at least from my perspective. Slam dancing Thursday's (New Wave night) at Thirsty's and Friday/Saturday (not New Wave nights, but we slammed anyway) at After The Gold Rush, both 3.2 bars where us under-21 types could drink. I saw Wall of Voodoo live and hung out with other New Wave aficionados for the first time. Good memories.

Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom and The Jam's Snap compilation have been getting extra heavy play on the iPod, my feeble attempt to ignore father time's clock ticking off another year, one more I won't get back. One step closer to the proverbial grave.

These two albums bring me back to a specific year - 1983, in this case - more than any other music that I actually enjoy. There are a great many tunes that dredge up strong memories of the past, specific pinpoints in time; however, in almost all cases, they are songs I at least vaguely dislike and rarely have purchased (except when the memory overpowers the distaste and I need to hear the piece of shit jingle to help get me back to the moment).

Elvis and the Jam bring it all back home.