Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

out on the cartoon railroad track to infinity and
zero between mickey mouse and Nero
I lived in a crumpled cigarette pack
the world went by like christmas light weeds tumbling
through ghost town atomic bomb test sights
waiting for that transfusion of delusion
from the venusian rain
but that ancient train never came
the christmas tree factory
was deserted and birds took up residence
until they discovered Arsenic beings
in that Death Valley home of the living rolling
stones I climbed out of my cave in the restricted
area where they hide the fake grays
it was a alien hobo paradise down by the galactic highway
and the stars were tossed like black hole dust on that vast
canvas of night painted by a clown shaman

out on the cartoon railroad track
I lived in a crumbled gypsy witch
playing card pack
and all that jazz
and all that poetry
and all that yakety yak
and all that talky talk
pick a moon
any moon
look at the cone hat
moon a moon
listen to the jelly radio
flyin purple people eaters
between static and white noise
all those Chinese plastic toys
and the mystic knock knocks
the tracks went by and the packs
of jacks and jokes
reflect off of diamond backs
and the ones between the cosmic cracks
Christmas tree lights
in the dirty distance
means nothing
to a real tree
and alien headlights
comin in from Ursa Major
a diamond on the moon
there is a drug that will heal
the earth
there are maps on mars
there are whiskey rain drops in a bowl
in the middle of nowhere
there are left over WWII Hershey bars
in jars of circus freaks
I lived in a Tv show called the twilight of the idols
and traded baseball cards with the fallen gods
down by that burned out art factory
we sold our dreams to a deserted Hollywood
and the poets went on strike for higher rages

an exquisite poem
I have check the meaning of the word exquiste
I use in the sense of mighty pleasing to read

the world sped through blinding empty
boxes snaking by, watched it all from a hill
wires in the sand, straight to a vanishing point
impatient to get a point across to the other side
made good time, linear thought until raw rock
pulled you aside, run to reverie

at sun wasted junctions the blues cook
and train whistle is a twelve-bar dry lake
statement, statement! of all that is restless
and ignored, buried deep in some government
and look for snakes on a full moon crackdown
desert galaxy, desert rat, can't live like that
uncivilized, the baseball chess and civil wars
like reality teevee on disembodied screens
two letters from scream, you trade them
for empires, empires a dime a dozen

if you travel the road, you wonder
no choice, and the black hole dust
headlights stuck to the eave, never stop
the plastic knockoff existence, the speech
you wonder

I lived on the road "in a crumpled cigarette pack"
What it felt like to be an over the road trucker
thousands of miles a week
blur by and the night lights of L.A. fade into dawn and the New York Skyline

And I wondered about the stuff I was hauling
and where it came from and was going
the endless warehouses filled with plastic stuff
the endless miles of clanking production lines
the bottles and cans
robotic arms like
the brooms in The Sorcerers apprentice

on the upside

the way the snakes in New Mexico would streak across the two lane black top road into Almagordo.

the way I could see the Lights of Lubbock from a hundred miles away in the flatlands of Texas and
the way the lightning illuminated the pitch blackness and revealed the funnel clouds a hundred miles away on one long night

I wish I was a poet
how do I condense a million miles of black ice and blizzards, mountain passes in winter, the desert at night, the stars, oh god the stars, so many I gaped open mouthed in awe
all the fear and the beauty, the sense of purpose drive from point a to point b which gave a place to be as ran from my spider love nightmares
the moonlight casting shadows on the snow coming into Truckee.
The snow flakes big as hubcaps falling coming over Monarch Pass as night fell.
the slipping and sliding the slice of glass that past through me


"with eighteen wheels humming home swett home"

I won't delete that but I am tempted to

I will try again


sorry.

pickup truck down a road, stops
dust riot follows and passes, hears
ringing silence, then drone and fade of a rig
near the junction, snaking box, long haul madman
headed to epic peaks, howling granite guru temples
guide his team through treacherous curves of nature
down the far side into the lost basin and range
fearsome rock walls soft-spoken on soft arcs
though mountains are known to jump

they sit for millennia and jump
and you're counting ravens or clouds
when the base unzips at shocking velocity
like an alien locomotive, and fissures spread
right at you and knock over your drink
and the mountain is sixteen feet higher
in the morning, but it's all on rock time
which means little to the road

that line "I lived in a crumpled cigarette pack"

following on "the cartoon railroad track"

that line I don't know, I almost wanted to drop it.

it is loaded with a felling of being on the road

kinda like that song , King of the Road.

but it also has the connotations of the days
they advertised cigarettes on Tv
with all that manly cowboy image.

my Dad smoked all his life.

I remember some kid in the late 60's that went into the military
telling me how they trained them to smoke, if they hadn't
already taken up the habit.I don't know maybe he was just
drunk and making it up.

Some poems you are glad got written; this one poem is one of them. I think I am going to read this one many times.

"man of means by no means..." cool. i can relate to drift of that tune, though i guess i've always had a beat-up truck to drive to the next place. excuse my verbose, wandering tangents. and i have no doubt the military created many smokers, among its multitudinous deleterious side effects, both documented and not...