Some Sunny Day

I never said 

I was more

Than a keyboard Machiavellian.

I never said I was more than

A soft-shoe 

Dancer with my song.

Did I say I saw your song

Eviscerate the river?

I won't forget 

How you stabbed that wrinkled water.

I watched you on the shore

Dance my fingers down

This keyboard.

I saw you eating night

One star at a time. You broke
The chipped plate of the moon.

The crippled hand of dawn
Picked up the pieces, one by one.

I'll be damned if I didn't see Moses

Try to steal your song.

I saw you slice his fingers with your song.

I saw you didn't see 

Johnny Cash pick your pocket

And hock your song.

He got five dollars for your song.

Damn, Girl, 

Stop flashing that song

You keep in that ankle-sheath

But don’t know

Yet how to sing

Some sunny day

For me.

Follow Me

I won't forgive suicides and

Long coats on the prairie 

Lying in the dust. 

You listening, 

Frank Stanford? 

Pick up your plumb bob. 

Let's go.

First Spring Home from War

Thunder mutters in the Delta,

a storm shouldering Vicksburg,

striking town with blunt

punches that shake

tall windows in the room

where my wife plays her violin.

She stands there

like the tame doe of our neighborhood,

startled, and staring out.

I take her hand,

and we dance in the downpour,

and we sing to all the small

nouns that pound human lungs

and drown human voices,

one syllable at a time.

Hennessy Youngman Talks Post-Structuralism

It’s just like how

On Countdown to Ecstasy

Steely Dan's smooth-rock 

Album from 1973

They got that song

“Show Biz Kid” 

How it’s got these motifs

These themes from Stravinsky's

The Rite of Spring

That part that's called

“Games of the Rival Tribes”

We Were Dead Before the Ship Sank

Language we possibly invent

Under the direction of all the weary birds

Who call down doom, those fly-blown

Half-broke angels of dawn 

Call down doom.

We sing that song. 

The effect is lust.

It gives us what we want to know,

What we don't know

Why we feel this soft, 

This cat-nosey day.

This day we can't 

Stay on a boat in Michigan,

We can't stay here 

Listening to the Old Man’s radio—O,

Muskegon, dirty old town,

Turns up the volume.

The rest of the summer will be

The best we ever had, we say,

This word's true. We want

A day that's true, is what we say

To ourselves.

We say that to ourselves.

To me next to you, if we wonder if

We make a list of all 

The persons we have harmed—

If we had a word 

More worthy than

The yearning and 

All the cigarillos burning in

This narcissistic dance hall—

These dull stars in this dim room.

If only we had a word  

To give us all.

And we rip these tattered syllables

From our bleeding palms, 

From what we call another— 

These unwrapped gifts we

Stole from our mothers— 

From what we call

Could call

Worse than we'll ever know.

Ever know,

Ever o-o-o-o know.