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.