A Visitation with Doctor Bones (For John Berryman)

Eyes peeking out pain from sockets

as the catheter goes right off rocket

past the unimaginable shock of birth.

Spread thin like salad dressing

by the American Medical Association.

Served up for billing purposes.

Let me be your gravy train.

Let me be your next victim

of the artfully intelligent artificial

laser-guided Davinci surgery machine.

There's not even a purr,

Doctor, do you concur?

Having already navigated

your impersonal professional gatekeepers,

read your data-driven beepers, soaked, no,

deep-fried into molecular

Sauce of Information

Inflammation A-la-Mode,

do you concur, Doctor Bones?

When I was young if they cut you up,

gutted you like sea bass, oh, they had class,

they stuck you in a hospital for your broken ass,

with nurses & smiling feces faces

shaped like bed pans, an energy

almost as bad as the airport,

but they didn't throw you out

on the street just for sport,

doctor, do you concur?

Meet the new cruelty.

Culture that consumes.

Keeps you live long enough

to let you die & die & die,

splayed across the operating table:

Doctor, what are the words?

Am I oxycontin able, pain pills

for the electronic staples?

A feast for your gauzy tray ...

Doctor Bones, am I going to be okay?

On Tolleson, Arizona When You're Dead

Chart a course to Starbucks.

Keep an eye out for bathroom crashers.

Hub of liberal-o-cracy, just a haze away

from Monument Mountain,

where the first surveyor's meridian line

was struck in the "arid zone" region,

at the confluence of the Agua Fria & Gila ...

I realize, this is more than just vaguely journalistic,

as a fact, but when you're deceased,

just can't follow the facts. And it's more

than just the loss of fertile soil or irrigated fields,

the flash-in-a-pan for gold roll, now so old,

... here comes the espresso rush, the touch

of Tolleson turned into parking lots

for trucks & gas stations & big boxes

so full of slaves all they can do is crave

the only corporate transactions

this cemented fabrication can provide,

words flowing in every direction,

free as birds, oh, the words, the words ...

See the drift of construction workers

in orange jackets, grimly greeting the morning

central caffeine station, looking for the cosmic bus

right on out of here, past the barrier reefs

of castle-crates big enough for industrious kings

who hot-branded the compromised wetlands

on my two-wheeled alchemical trek

& nobody here is getting wet ...

Who cares what the invisible see?

The Canis Latrans in me still runs free.

- Douglas McDaniel

Tolleson, Arizona

Mythville Books

On the Eve of Transit

The sky is brown dust 

at dusk on New Year's Eve

hovering over 

grimly tented nomads

& the night quiets

into an avalanche roar

& slowly I went low

behind the orange & white cones,

hiding where I've never hidden before

as the last night lights up

into a firecracker blow.

Meet the New Cruelty.

Meet the new universal scream.

All connected by silver strings,

pulsating seas of love & war.

Grasp the leap of faith it takes

to believe anything is quantum real.

Look & see: That chaotic madman

 of heavy-handed governance:

He nailed a closure notice 

to the door of the library.

Thomas Jefferson's rational animal

 bows before the burning

& doinks the kick toward 

the field goal posts of autocracy

in a dissipation of the glories

during that holiday ditch betwixt

Christmas & New Year's Eve

when the Earth lets out a breath

for those moments spared

from all the trampling around,

the compromised ground littered

with tricksters & tomb raiders 

& the know-how of Aknaton lying dead,

coal-black cables of Bad Bwana disrespect,

crazy white people shit

like salt-water aquariums

in the mile-high desert,

fresh-catch seafood at the ski resort.

Nothing but blunt pain here for growth.

Feel the new cruelties

pressuring the pineal pearls

in our oyster-fried hind brains.

Whisper beneath the muttering

of the so & so suckers

 in the neo-liberal mausoleum.

Meet the monk in his cloister

rolling hysterical on the river dancing.

See him speaking to vaporous ghosts

held together in some sudden

revelatory silent tsunami,

trying to make the words shimmer,

make them shine & shine & shine.

Him big Edward R. Murrow,

speaking truth to the ivory towers

with reports of rainbow smoke

mucking up the Mars-red Moon,

glaciers cracking & fizzling into herds

of Fibonacci sequence seahorses

& firenadoes raging across the cities.

Please spare us his year-end review.

Enough to say sanity was rare,

irrational animals tossing about

the singed globe with "passionate intensity ..."

Oh dear, Mister Yeats, I'm getting lost

in your reveries, gassed by your prophecies ...

And here's another: Look. Let me

introduce you to the new looming cruelties,

tight as the security at Times-Square,

pompous & pumped & primed

for the new Nero & his Trumpigarchy ...

Can't wait to get a selfie

with the next Ground Zero's dead heroes ...

But Captain! There aren't enough

metallic cages for them all!

No worries raging in, no worries raging out,

just shake your piggy banks all about.

Hear the tinkle & the shout.

Just wipe away the human stain

with your family's black rifle,

your Sheriff Joe Playbook,

your racially profiling amigos.

Gotta get me a Bible because

at the American greed-head

fireworks display before the transit,

the entire neighborhood

percolates like popcorn at midnight.

On the first day of the year,

the barbecued shreds of the celebration

tumble like weeds in the terrified wind.

The Bones of a Cheerleader

Not answering phone calls from Texas.

Too many lost relatives there buried

below the Alamo. Bedded down

with the bones of Davey Crockett.

Detectives say the skeleton woman

kissed & caressed & blew new breath

into him to go there and die

& she had the bones

of a cheerleader

Ain't eating ice cream no mo

no mo no mo .,. Not answering

phone calls from Kellogg or Coke.

Not from the president.

Not from Jesus or Buddha,

with their bones hid safe,

all phones being burners,

or even the bones of chairman Mao

Oh no ho no oh no

He had the soul of a cheerleader.

A suitcase in the ditch.

Jammies with pink polka dots

burst out from the sides.

A chess game missing three pieces.

One empty Hello Kitty wallet

left to fade in the desert sun.

One unhappy story unknowable.

There were no bones of a cheerleader,

The very next day I don't know

if I am ever going to be okay.

She had the bones of a cheerleader,

an angel with no light for a day

of smokes torn to shreds for tobacco

in my zombie space alien pirate party tray. 

Nothing more resourceful than a smoker.

Nothing to say to the devil running the day.

I have the bones of a cheerleader.

That's what the doctors say.

- Douglas McDaniel

Tolleson, Arizona

Mythville Book Store

American Mythville Unbound

 Mythville is the Gaia

of our mutual dreams

A great city lost

A history forgotten

Except in the imagination

It lingers with the muses

A magical floating tablet

perhaps read, if only briefly

within the circle

of the enlightened

But then it can turn

The Mammon mouth

into a random field

of Great Plains tornadoes

laden with lies

the GPS of the mind

in constant liminal polarities

of Visigoth spirits,

pagan portals

of pineal glands

for our pains

and hurts and cries ...

The mind's eye.

The mind's eye!

- Douglas McDaniel

Tolleson, Arizona

Mythville Bookstore

 

Doink

 

Polls close in ten nine eight seconds ...

The human experience

in the blink of unknowing eyes.

Invisible digits of the indivisible.

The truth is out there. Don't believe.

Idaho goes potato. Georgavania

goes uppity Humpty Dumpty's wall.

Florida goes Banana Republican. 

Sudden good places to get shot in Las Vegas

for wearing the wrong color denim jean dreams.

Too call. Too close. Talking heads verbose.

Quaker oats shoved down liberal throats.

The mutant vote. Take note. Take note.

Hear the sacred chords grind to a halt.

To keep up is to try to paint the wind.

Six five for three two to who won ...

Meanwhile, the referees confer

over a simple truth long dead.

Dreary never-ending eons ago.

Sharks will always hunt these waters.

Ballot box numbers both dead & alive.

For a universe no longer in existence.

For society sleeping before it wakes.

Mysterious bruises & blood splatters & sweat.

Rolling clouds of astronomical inconclusive.

We will clearly serve no queen here.

But instead a king in reptilian regalia.

Broken bric-a-brac of Democracy.

Might as well be Greek. Who is white,

who is wrong. Just Italianate me.

~ Douglas McDaniel

Tolleson, Arizona

Mythville Books

Doing it for the Dead

The sky a mile wide.

Election Day, sigh.

Revolutionary world.

Off-balance, tilted.

Mammoth Lake mouthwash

bulging the big spin again.

No change ever the same.

Snakes on the highway.

Rumblin'. Slitherin'.

Noise up the road.

Whistling fast & ready.

Loud enough to make

the deaf read the news.

Ghosts of the Civil War.

Blue & Grey visitations

in the shimmering motion

of Max Earnst dreams.

Ghosts of World War Two.

Walking, lost & vacuum Void.

The tundra is boiling,

sidewalks sweating ooze.

The Who-Knows-Sphere.

Just maybe. Maybe.

What will the deaf see?

Holding tin cups

out for their trickle?

Kitchen table tissues

for mom & dad tears.

What's the fear this year?

Anything is nothing down.

Innocence, in big damn debt

to the banks of the Holy Ghost.

Private panels & levers & checkers.

Who wrong & who white, right?

Kissing couches burning, too.

Potato skins of many races

attached to war-blooded skulls.

Drip, drip. Drubbing-a-dud, duh.

No bandages of grafted skin

ever quite the fractal same.

Dumbing down the vote.

Platonic pole star, democracy.

Forming into formlessness.

Effortless action no easy rider.

No free box in the mountains.

No easy surfers in snarled waves.

Not with Max Earnst at Hiroshima

painting bones into patches of flesh.

Dreams of green SUVs 

filled with Vietnam dead.

O hillbilly pollster super car

churning up the dust of dunces.

Lacking ever-loving verbs,

lacking the woody words.

I'll vote with a prayer,

do a ghost dance

& leave a lonely sign:

Please do not disturb.

~ Douglas McDaniel

Tolleson, Arizona

Mythville Books

Voltage Terrain

Twenty turtles sunning near a Tolsun pond,

some grave mistake by the concrete God,

poking their noses under the dry air

of the sickly-too-blue-water desert oasis

with a moat and a bridge,

reasons enough to daydream

in the electric wasteland,

the green-belted island,

as subliminal salamander men

dig deep beneath the Earth

& offer hovercraft to humans

who poke at them with blunt spears,

 then came the Huhugam river people,

building canals within canals,

holding water in red-clay pots,

embattled by summer monsoons, 

growing corn & squash & mesquite beans & cotton

 along the Laveen & Pecan Promenade,

the Gila gorgeous, shallow & broad,

with a tendency to rage when it rains,

a land now gone alienated, isolating minds

& the wind fails to turn pages for Tiowa,

Any witnesses worn by erosion, gone,

& the mandatory meetings

where we first meet Jesus

and all go out for a drink;

Oh yes, you're always rich

if the rest keep on winning,

sponsored & supported

by streaming stone scorpions,

Kachina-shouldered towers

lifting Palo Verde nuclear lightning

as the hawks fly in wonderment,

while all Tolsun roads south,

cut off by not-so-funky-Broadway,

a long stretch of farms & rancheros

& irrigated green fields stinking of manure,

as confused crows carry the drafts east,

hovering over a toxic dump long as a hippie jam

looking for the long lost gone-quite-secret lands

disappeared into box castles

 big and white as clouds, no people outside,

an amber-green prickly pear trampled by time,

all overlooked from Monument Mountain,

where the first meridian line was drawn

by pioneer surveyors at the confluence

of the Gila & Agua Fria Rivers,

farm implements clinging to the sand,

crunched into tiny plastic buttons,

crushed and fed right to people

with a gusto for high-fructose corn syrup,

slouching toward the suburbs, ever marching,

but the twenty turtles won't let you near them,

they instinctively feel your quantum GPS

approaching, perhaps a change in the light,

and then return to the faux-stone outcropping,

nearer to the road in the warmth of sun,

returning to their mummy depths, moonish white,

expecting to survive the next one-hundred-year flood

- Douglas McDaniel

Tolleson, Arizona

Mythville Bookstore

Sympathy for the Church Lady

Little Napoleon Antoinette

Stump in stature, gravity cursed,

the cross of Jesus hung

to the solar plexis of his chest,

holding him clutch to the hearth,

amplifying his Fundamentalist rage

toward the fly shit that surrounds him,

Politicking for a patron saintly state

of spotless oblivion in a "Freedom" T-shirt,

a tyrant rueful and fussy, grasping, invading,

leaning in to your every movement,

on the hunt for some dark relic for accusation,

throwing a wheel-chair-wounded Santa

out into the palm-lined heat island street,

loathing all he oppresses, the diamond necklace

affairs of the abode humming with OCD tension,

looking for the comfort zone in Christian skies,

hammered as a child for being left-handed,

& there's a secret silence in the mausoleum

now gone Bauhaus with printed paper squares

loaded with nanny state reminders,

authoritarian messaging issuing plain threats

as the ghosts of fear flow beneath shallow ice

since you can't compete with the Church Lady,

made of such over-sweet hysterical charity,

munching on wafers in the salted land,

loaded with dinero, never losing a penny,

bringing in an old grey, two of three strikes

already, a new cash cow for the pews,

complaining to his Lord & anyone else

who isn't listening. The falcon, the falconer

in a mismatch of abstract repressionism:

Nobody likes me here and I don't give a fuck,

calling everyone "assholes" as he ascends into the air,

& then, returning from the sin he failed to forgive

a giant mad mouse too small to roar

killed a broken man to clean a floor.

So they wave hosannas & roses & coins

& the perfect cure for donkey dung

satisfying the need to be in his lonely dream,

but he turns around and eats you, bone clean.

~ Douglas McDaniel,

Tolleson, Arizona

Mythville Bookstore

Burn Night

On the night amassed media

burned in pure blue-orange light,

the full moon was out and crisp

& Ayn Rand ruled the Eighties

& in the swing to the right

the devil's dark vinyl delight,

a bonfire organized by the local

zealot church on the Arizona sage,

mom & dads & kiddos with matches,

lighter fluid & stacks, boxes and boxes

full of records, pictures and books,

the glow of the fire in their faces.

In goes Santa, in goes Garfunkel

while Simon's mug is stamped out ash,

Tony Bennett percolating crispy plastic,

molten-lava disks sizzle and bubble

and you can see Salem in the shadows

as Chuck Berry bursts into flames,

cracklin' Lennon & barbecued Barbarella,

the smoke rising in the star-struck sky.

"But I liked that record," says one small boy.

"No, they are from Satan," says the tall mom.

Twenty Earth orbits later, that youngster tried

writing on his back, painting on his head,

his imagination an empty wound wondering

whatever happened to the coming of locusts,

whatever happened to the day of the arrival,

but all that he heard was the death beat

& he tried to ride his bike across the desert

but he could see no further than the skyscraper

towering over his mouth, vivisecting his voice,

& he can only bark, bark, bark one stupid song.

~ Douglas McDaniel

Mythville Bookstore