Do 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

Talking Head Injury

Laser-eye-lined game faces flood the electric air of the box

as limousines, slender and black, come down the block,

moving into position like tanks at the Western Front.

Surrogates for each campaign sauntering up to the bar.

Summoning the witch winds. Discussing the Latino

vote in battleground states: Are we at war?

Impersonating Nancy Pelosi,

the pink jacket and liberal jewels,

head bobbing like a pumpkin

at a Grateful Dead concert

Let us be healthier, stronger, all get along,

back to being productive, a real opportunity

to get back on our feet. Father Gawd!

Amazing what greed does to people.

Amazing what drugs do to people.

Amazing what amazement

does to people.

Do you mind if I 

rest for a few hours

beneath the sand

until I can stop the bleeding?

~ Douglas McDaniel

Mythville Bookstore

Dickheads in the House

Please allow the congresswoman lady of Las Vegas to speak:

Hand me my writeup. Thank you. We have issues, fix the needs,

in need of fixes, the autumnal enterprise angle has been diffused

& the trolls are rolling across the dais, the Hamilton Papers stolen,

the electoral ballots spirited from the room as General Lee comes to his mark,

begging for funds for his district to test the coldness of ice cream,

saying he'll bet a twenty-dollar-bill that his consumers, um, voters,

all well-bred on sugar, carbohydrates and Fox News fear

will keep the machine calibrated in a Discordian fall of hot, tired,

predator killers in the kitchen of Democracy as the Church Lady sings,

"Burn, them all, burn them all, burn them all to the ground. Hearye. Hearsay,"

as the Capitol lawns smolder into embers like the Library of Alexandria,

and the mingling of billionaire hillbillies in the backrooms of Congress,

votes there/not votes there, leaving the money to do all of the talking,

the Dickheads in the room undaunted but caged elephants all the same,

with a new plan allowing for paid exorcisms, Koch addicts on the ebb,

spastic angels of denial stuck in the methadone drive, the buffalo-headed guy

scratching his fingernails on the chalkboard and no ambulance is in on the way.

~ Douglas McDaniel

Mythville Bookstore

 Shop the Independent Bookstore | Lulu

Forty Days of Fire, Forty Days of Rain (lulu.com)

Particle

Problem,

Spooky

Green-eye sincere as corn flakes

giving you no chance for the "Ya, but,"

because they are calm and superior

with facemasks from God,

red blushes in blue faces

rushing fast to meet your denial,

silencing and disabling the doubter,

the electro-manic daemonic energy

flowing, throwing their skulls and bones alight,

each believer trying to out-believe

the other believers,

thus defining how religions are born

when at least two psychotics or schizophrenics

come to a Lake Placid agreement.

~

Many Christians over gauzy years,

battles and the bandages,

hounding and pounding,

wives and mother-in-lows,

bleach-blonde with pushed-out faces,

squealing pigs in the soft blanket

of their supposed salvation,

a hideous dream and source

of mass mental illness,

just ask the Cathars and Salem's wild-eyed children,

donkeys braying into the darkness,

hideous dreaming of the old man,

in a burned-black trench-coat,

invisible face, nameless but named,

who finds their interior lighting

out of order, for they are squalid,

weak, in need of permission,

blind in the dark con games of man,

yearning for an eternal life 

they never needed to ask for

since the day they were born.

... Only fools would argue with such people.

In the Yugoslavian war

they artfully assassinated the autocrat

with satire not playing fair,

with street-poster-protest comic laughter

clearing the fear in air of the square.

~

Recent revelations

in quantum metaphysics,

hard science, starry physics:

A sub-atomic particle splits,

the new pair continues to rotate in unison,

no matter how far the distance

indicating a cosmos

of constant union,

breaking the holy bank,

 the notions of false gods,

illusions of separation,

leaving no divide, eternally

in a universe of one,

happening in bloody Bethlehem,

Gaza and Rome,

happening on the turbulent sun,

and the never-turning moon.

- Douglas McDaniel,

Meteor Crater, Arizona

https://americanmythville.blogspot.com/2024/08/particle-problem-spooky-green-eye.html

Mythville

Engine in Contention (Can't Get Far)

Sheriff Bill came down the hill

Said I'd burned my dollar bill

Which is why I can't get gas

to cross the great water

No I can't get far

with my engine in contention

Feeling bored

with the whine of my engine

Spinning those wheels

across that desert

for miles and miles

miles and miles

Dirt on the dash

Gotta a bunch of scratches

Just might explode

before it ups and crashes

I can't get far

with my engine in contention

No we can't get far

with our engines in contention

Tweeting my missives into the Trumpster dumpster

Tweeting my missiles into the endless pointless ether

I am wearing camouflage at the coffeehouse

and my Ford Exploder broke down

Just might need a llama, Dolly

When all is lost

and the gloss if off the posh

My Ford Exploder can't get off

and running

to save the girl upon the bridge

I can't get far

with my engine in contention

No we can't get far

with our engines in contention

I can't get far

with my engine in contention

No we can't get far

with our engines in contention

Editor's notes: The updated lyrics for the lone Bards of Mythville hit,

"Engine in Contention," produced by Martin "Tex" Barringer

Greyhound Bus Driver Blues

Run it like a prison ship,

the bus driver said

as if he had a whip

Been there, seen that

and he's not going

to take any crap

So pull up your pants

I know it's a fashion

but nobody wants

to see your ass

I got the Greyhound bus driver blues

those sunset on Route 66 Flagstaff blues

He got at the wheel shouting orders over the mic

like a prison ship, oh lordy lo, keep your head low

Why you gottta be like that?

The bus driver main ain't nobody

running his deal 

on a bad trip

You have drugs, 

well, you do them for fun

but the bus driver man 

is going to leave you

and he ain't gonna stop

in Cleveland or Idaho

Even if you wave and run

I got the Greyhound bus driver blues

those sunset on Route 66 Flagstaff blues

Flying off the wheel 

shouting orders over the mic

like a prison ship, but I an't no psycho 

Why you gottta be like that

on the ear blasting device, Oh!

So don't talk back

on the road to Vegas

the bus driver man don't

 have no taste for it

and he'll leave you

in Tortilla Flat

You don't wanna

see him coming

You get my grasp?

I got the Greyhound bus driver blues

those sunset on Route 66 Flagstaff blues

the got at the wheel shouting orders over the mic

like a prison ship, oh lordy lo, can I ride my bike 

why you gottta be like that?