Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

Brain Fumes

Photo by David Cassolato on Pexels.com.

I built a chair today in my workshop

I made it out of milk skin and aggression

God was my co-pilot but then the plane crashed

I wrestled with tangled earbuds

I woke up at 2 a.m. and ate English muffins with butter and honey

It’s hot outside but I’m cold

I like to play but I’m old

I want to be like everyone else but then again, I really can’t stand most of humanity. Humanity? Insanity in a skin wrap. Like a spring roll from a Chinese food joint. I need some Jade Wok and their orange chicken with a side of fried rice and an orange soda.

This is just an exercise in scrambled egg brains. I’m just tossing thoughts out there. Senseless, whimsical, ancient thoughts like from the time I sat atop the Sphinx and ate a bagel and watched the dip of the Egyptian sun. Then I turned to look at the great pyramidal power station. It’s so much more than a pile of rocks, Indiana Jones.

I wish I would have done so much more. I wanted to get a worthless English degree. I wanted to be a geologist. I wanted to be an architect. There was even a time I thought I wanted to be a priest. Whew! Dodged a bullet there.

I was once going to be an airman, a drag racer, a mountain climber, a boxer, a cartoonist, a photographer, a psychiatrist, a chef, a monk…

And now I’m this. A man who pecks at illuminated letters on a keyboard in concert with the thoughts in my maniac head.

Yes, I’m a sane maniac.

But at least I’m not maniacal about serving up the world’s best fried chicken.


Little Rock, Big Sea

Little Rock, Big Sea



Every day
is merely a little rock
in a big sea
see this philosophy
came to me from a glance through a window
a curtained kitchen window
with the tang of street lights
burrowing through
woooooo
and the ride takes off …
don’t paddle
swim
to the nearest point that is your heart
all these paths
we twist and turn
for patriotic bliss
a stranger’s kiss
lemon drops on the moon
pea-shooting gypsies
feeling for a fresh, new vein
gypsies flying to California
seeking a mad hideaway
beneath the pulse of it all
the pulse of the freeways
the pulse of the helicopters hovering above you in the
sky
naked and quaking
the jewels get the spotlight
and suddenly the curtains close
and the wind sways your hurt so elegantly …
The piano walked softly
from beyond the pillars of salt
there was someone standing on the edge
and the notes were begging him to hold on
for just one more day
for just one more little rock
in a big sea …
and he hoped to send her roses
through the mail
or in a pail
which he would set at her feet
and forever carpet every step she would take
with honor and love
with compassion for her dreams
with a hard, warm place to rest her head every night
and he would shatter every glass slipper
for none would fit her so well
as my kiss on her brow
my kiss on her teardrop
which he would swallow as his own … forevermore.
And he sits on the little rock in the big sea everyday
crushing glass slippers in his fingers
and damning the size
of this majestic sea.



Spaceship Gravy

The sky was black most of the day because the sun went and hid behind the world. It was something like Winter Solstice and the world was tipping over like a bucket of paint, a deep red spilling making a big wet mess on the universe. Our lives are universal, and we need to find somewhere else to live because this just isn’t going to cut it anymore. The big, blue marble is cracked, we’re cracked, we’re all cracked. Brains mean nothing, heart beats lonely, selfish, absorbed in oneself. Human, human beings? There is no such thing anymore most of the time.

This plague, this sickness, this depravity, this madness devouring human souls and bodies. Kids in cop cars. Cops in kids. Lanterns and fire hydrants spitting light on the streets, but the kids can’t even go out to play anymore, because, sun-burnt god and the Jesus train of fame had a wreck, a collision, a sinister accident. 

His favorite color was blue. Not any blue. A pale blue, a cold sky blue, a linen shirt blue, shallow ocean water blue, like her eyes, those eyes that look right through him during a deep kiss. She was there again last night. In his apartment in the country that was actually a part of a house but had its own entrance and amenities and so there was little interaction with the pudgy aproned landlady who loved to water flowers in the yard with a big metal can. He once tried to attach the hose for her but she shooed him away because she was from the old country and that’s how they did it. The geraniums in the window-boxes looked beautiful but smelled awful, so he thought.

So, the blue-eyed girl was in his bed, and they were naked under the blankets, and they kissed wildly and when this girl kissed, she would often open her eyes and he knew this because he too would often open his eyes so that he could see the shape and color of the lips he was kissing. But her blue eyes stared deep into him when he caught her at it and he saw this deep love in her soul and he wanted to just jump into that blue, dive deep inside and tumble through her soul awkwardly, passionately, freely. He wanted to drown in her. He wanted to hold onto her as he rode 3 a.m. dreams, those places where the dead we knew live on and interact with us, those places of complete upside-down nonsense, like orange gravy slow dancing in a spaceship.   


The Alone Test

I was alone to the bone

On an afternoon in Rome

The ballistic tests all positive

Spears sharpened to a bird-beak point

The traffic keeps rolling in honking circles

‘Round a statue of some Italian holy hobo

There are flaming balls on catapults

And smoky talk in the underground lounge

The voices rise into the street like sewer gas

Their words all full of shit

I just boarded a diesel-belching bus one day

And here I came to be

One head, one bag, one heart in a can

It’s all it’s ever been

It’s all it will ever be

Trippin’ out on mad Earth

Where is that high hip god to intervene?

The Swimming Window

And there were orange baptized bullets lodged in a wall of sea salt adobe and skull,

a hard skull of architecture burned and bandaged

the sun was far too bright as I dug them out with the tip of a knife

and I was suddenly cursing the violence of Southwest sweat and artificial love

and street corner Kool-Aid chillin’ like angels’ blood

the cherry, raspberry red brew that made a sore throat feel even more sore

when one is a rattled child on a planet with obscene purpose

and why do I do anything but idle and wail

if it just turns out to be nonsensical dreams anymore?

And now the late afternoon sun that pours through a front window in the house

is all stained with wandering soul and a life vanished

Everything is different due to the dead

There is mad swimming in Heaven

and I still wake up and I still buy bread

I walk over the land and pick up stones

they live in a pool of millions

yet straddle the whore world all alone

and the days are starting to feel like desert tin

hard, hot and shining

illuminating muscle

capsizing the eyes

spawning breathless, reckless wandering and wonder.