Old Warriors

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Old Warriors

darkness at noon,

there was a fire

in 

 the 

    mountains,

               and

                  now

                     the

                       desert

                           is

               covered

                   with

                    a

             black 

         fog,

a roaring crackling snarling thing

that devours everything in its path,

lambasting the lushness

of gray-green-brown,

burning,

the sky alive with cinders and sparks,

burning,

arousing arroyos,

burning,

choking canyons,

burning,

toppling great trees,

burning

as if the earth was angry

and it had spewed out magma

like molten spittle

through granite teeth,

a sea of sagebrush afire,

the oil within bursting into flames,

animals fleeing,

whole towns gutted,

rag dolls, lincoln logs, mansions,

barns, silos, horses, cattle, sheep,

all burned

converted cruelly

to blister and char;

people standing in sad huddles

on high ground, weeping and praying

horns honking,

children hysterical;

firefighters with watery weary eyes

in hard soot-smeared faces,

carrying big shovels

with arms that ached

from twenty-two hours of labor,

with blackened gashes

in their broken helmets,

asleep on their feet,

moving thickly through a macabre nightmare

of death songs,

a whole countryside burning

with fifty kinds of blood

on the sun as creatures

struggling in the hellish haze

raised their swollen eyes

to the dark clouds above,

fire clouds, that suddenly

expelled torrents of reddish-orange rain--

as the aged metallic angels swarmed

out of the east with the gracious

gift of fire retardants,

and the cheers began

for the red-nosed fire warriors,

the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress,

the Gruman PBY Supercat,

the Lockheed C-130 Hercules

and the big kahuna--

the Evergreen 747 Supertanker,

as the arrogance of the fire

was reduced to the shame

of steam, and people shouted

until they were hoarse,

thank you, thank you,

goddamn it,

thank you.

Glenn Buttkus   

May 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets--Poetics

Gioia Libre

image borrowed from bing

"I can tell whether a person can play just
by the way he stands."--Miles Davis

Gioia Libre

jazz

is the ear

spice, the todDy,

the perFect pal,

pierCing

the glazed

gloom.

napPing riPariAn

beFore

conStrucTing a cairn

witHin

my own husk.

most jazz goes down hot,

scalDing

as it transForms

our aura,

our sphere.

free

floaTing

muSic, 

seeMingLy just

ranDom

notes, lanDing

midShips

and

cenTer

         chest

                 beTween

                             naVel 

                                     and

                                          nose

stirRing

         soul,

               sparKing

                            love

                                 pelLets,

shatTering maLaise

as

dadDy jazz

forms

the dart

striKing heaVy 

hearts,

pouRing_viBrant

hues, steaMing stanZas

inTo

the warp and weave

of life.

Glenn Buttkus

May 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets-FFA

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Victorian Spelunking

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Victorian Spelunking 

“Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can

be planted.”--Wu Cheng-En

Mother, mother, dearest Aurelia,

why in hell did we take you with us

on our honeymoon to Benidorm?

The Spanish coast lost its luster

with us fearing nightly that you had

given in to your mixoscopic tendencies;

somewhere, perhaps in another flat,

she heard a piano, someone playing Bach

here at 23 Fitzroy Road, then heard Nicholas’ 

chronic coughing, cousin to pneumonia, 

her thin sweater not sufficient to ward off 

the bone-chill during that coldest February 

in London’s collective memory,

sheets of silver foil clinging to her peripherary,

her chin resting on a soft flower-designed doilie,

her lungs beginning to ache with the gas,

her stamina collapsing like chaff aflame,

her nerves raw as a fresh wound, yet

her resolve relentless as her spirit seemed

to hover above the scene, seeing her there

on her knees with her head and shoulders

thrust deeply into her narrow refuge from

Ted’s lacerating lectures, his probing quizzes,

her mind scurrying about bathed in abstraction,

consumed by black pools of energy that pulled

her down hard and fast, down to some dark domicile

beyond God’s latchstring, feeling the deaf thunder

alive with bold bolts of black lightning,

dropping straight down breasts-first toward

a faint pin-prick of light that was busy expanding

expeditiously until the light filled the dark sky

completely, and she was hurtling into it like

a hungry comet, and as she grew closer to

the inner sun she suddenly shed her sins,

cleaved off her doubts, abandoned her

mental instabilities as she became encased

in the solar eye, and embraced the cosmic tongue

in His mouth--as He presented her 

with a hot kiss

that brought orgasms 

clothed in omniscience. 

Glenn Buttkus

May 2012

Posted over at Monday Melting 19

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Carnivale

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Carnivale

Those seedy brilliantly lit carnivals

that caravanned in late at night, 

shouting down the freeway, 

as the rides were bolted together 

one more time in some vacant lot 

near the train yards, always had

an air of naughtiness about them,

like maybe squads of street walkers

had slid in with an army of pimps,

and the tired purple feathers, slit skirts,

and push up bras were pulled on over

perfumed bruises, broken knuckles

and jagged fingernails; all painted up

and ready for the suckers;

but never really having the majesty

of the Big Top, no parades, 

no ringmaster, although I once saw

an old elephant at a county fair

in Montana, and there were

camel rides in Kent one spring,

shit,

Ringling Brothers never had camel rides,

nor did they have those Carnie harem girls

who shook their asses after you paid 

your dough, and sometimes flashed

their breasts, and the freaks, man,

old Barnum never let the freaks loose,

those bearded lady weight lifters,

those hilarious midgets dashing through

the legs of stilted giants, the dwarf tossing,

the houses of horror, the houses of fun,

those damnable mirrors that twisted your

body into grotesque positions--bizarre

mirrors everywhere, infinite reflections

of mirrors inside of mirrors;

a real sordid affair that assaulted 

you with wafts of steaming animal dung,

sweaty canvas, sticky sweet cotton candy,

wet ropes, dozens of engines churning

providing the energy to power the rides,

a calliope around every corner chugging

out a carnival beat, pounding your senses,

always with the carousel in the center,

the hub, the gentle heartbeat of the place,

offering those beautifully garishly painted

whirling horses, hippos, lions, tigers, zebras

and ninja turtles, pumping up and down

like bored prostitutes--anybody could ride

them for the right price,

punctuated by ten kinds of screaming,

pretty girls and frightened men

who screamed like little girls,

dropping through chutes,

spinning in tea cups, clanking up

the roller-coaster rails and diving

headlong into valleys of calculated

chaos, swinging wildly in a ferris wheel

chair, the lock bar drenched with sweat,

rotating with loud gear clunks higher

and higher until that magnificent moment

when the car stops at the very top, 

the pinnacle of the evening,

and within that tiny mechanical window

all the music stops, you notice the stars

and the lights on the refinery miles away

as your date kisses you and uses her tongue

for the first time, and your right hand fumbles

for a breast just as the car lurches back

toward earth, and you become aware

of lunatic empty laughter

and the screaming starts again. 

Glenn Buttkus

May 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets-poetics

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Crazie

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Crazie

I find crazy

in the damnedest places,

in my yogurt,

in my jeans pocket

after it has gone through the wash,

in the middle of my quilt

while investigating an odd lump,

as a mystery ingredient

in my breakfast cereal,

borrowed from bing,

stumbling onto some perverse website,

behind my dusty hiking boots,

in the thumb of my gardening gloves,

in a mouse nest

within my old paint cabinet,

on the shelf right between

NIGHT AT THE OPERA

and

PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT, 

in my socks drawer,

while reading William Burroughs

or Hunter S. Thompson,

or Philip K. Dick,

in the medicine cabinet

at my best friend’s house,

in the cat box,

in my treasured Roy Rogers

lunch pail under the Buck Rogers

decoding ring, on the seventh page

of the first issue of Conan the Barbarian,

in Frank Frazetta’s biography,

in Woody Allen’s mind,

while listening to John Belushi,

reading a Jim Carrey tweet,

within the wound in my right leg

five inches into the hematoma

after crashing through my deck,

in Taffy’s dog house

four years after she left us weeping,

holding her while she reluctantly

received the prick of death,

in the desk drawer of a Motel Six,

under my spare tire,

in the backyard where we buried

the cat from ten years ago,

in every production shot

from every theatrical play

or film I ever appeared in,

in an old cigarette ad

John Wayne did for Chesterfield,

in the bottom of my golf bag,

wedged into the thumb webbing

on my high school mitt,

under the Hudson hub cap in my garage,

in the plain brown envelope holding

the last hand-written note

my mother left me before she made

her last trip to the hospital,

and the translucent mystery man

who held my hands tightly

just before the hour of the wolf. 

Glenn Buttkus

May 2012

posted over on DVerse Poets-Stream of Consciousness

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Loyalty

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Loyalty


after

your death

a cat

will wait

one day

before eating 

you,

but

in the

case of 

your dog,

it will mourn

your death

until it

joins you. 

Glenn Buttkus

May 2012

Cristofleoge

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Cristofleoge

imagine baxter’s bafflement after losing

his long battle with cancer, emerging

from the tunnel of photonic rings

not into the cloistered halls of bardo,

but rather encased in some translucent egg

attached to a broad leaf, suddenly returned

to life, morphed magnanimously into a

gelatinous fertilized vulnerable globule

of white homogametic (ZZ) dna,

still sentient, nothing forgotten, intelligence intact

with transcription tapes of past lives on board

before burgeoning into a bug;

another new beginning, this time 

without

any pause for pre-planning,

without

gentle counseling,

without 

a life review,

just some kind of kafka-like mandatory 

unsolicited spiritual surgery, being injected 

whole into a gob of butterfly spermatophore,

before marveling at the speedy week

of gestation as the egg proteins split open

and his furry new form unfolded into

a yellow and black knobbed larva,

with 12 husky hirsute caterpillar shoulders,

and a demon hunger providing vital volition

for the fuzzy segments to bristle with purpose,

funneling herbivoric sustenance non-stop

via the voracious maw, burning with the need

to feed, to serve, to worship the glowing

insect helix, while simultaneously excreting

pungent turd sap trails that spiraled sticky

around branches,

busily sending pheromone telegrams to his

ant cousins, vibrating vociferously delta blue

work songs, prompting the tiny red soldiers

to set up protection from predators--

in return for access to reciprocal piles 

of honeydew secretions,

driven manically, never at rest, until

the end of the third larval instar,

when the horrid hunger dried up,

when the passion for consumption ebbed,

when tiny incipient wing disks blossomed

as infantile mimics and the caterpillar

persona was penciled into lethargy, 

into porous pupa, weaving his personal

chrysalis into a magnificent mud crochet,

a buff bastion this caterpillar keep,

soon lured into a trance of tortoise-shelled

dreams of flight, of sensual delight,

of sun-dog days and fructose nights--

dropping even deeper into the cosmic

mystery of metamorphosis, clearly hearing

the crystalline click of completion before

swimming back to the surface light with

great lunges, gathering blinding speed

before cracking open the chrysalic chamber

with incredible strength and inexorable vigor,

to emerge imago, triumphant, his powerful

wet wings dappled deliciously with black,

yellow, and golden eyespots, furiously flexing

his twin antennae, his proud proboscis swelling

with the sumptuous scents of sap, dung, rotting

fruit and decaying flesh,

launching himself into mountain meadows

that he would become endemic toward,

the first of his kind, double large,

three sets of wings, more than a monarch,

approaching messianic, a king of kings,

announcing himself as papilio jaguaris,

a papal prince of love set loose

among the fluttering multitudes.

Glenn Buttkus

May 2012

Posted over on Monday Melting 18

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