I Will Not Walk

I will not walk on the names of the dead

These, the empty graves, where no pyres burnt no absolution
no rose raised

I cannot beg forgiveness from the lipless wanderers
no path long enough to stretch to the depths of the final night

I will not speak ill of the shades of the lost and silent

Hanging in the air, tumbling, amid the plumes of dust which choke the sun

Ageless the moment of giving in, final scene captured
on a million one-eyed machines
of a new and trembling America

I will not be the same man, the same person

I cannot change the vision

There is no going back, it’s all gone, that bliss of innocence
feeling of immortality
the armored veil has fallen

what is left is all broken, all torn asunder,
torn the skin of the outer eye

Empty graves and open hands

Eyes now gone to the blind of eternity

All fire and flames, now raise your hands
All fire and flames
All fire and flames, now close your eyes

And take the light


© 2007 JR Maston

Under an Oklahoma Sky

Conversationally-speaking, we’re wearing thin
giving in, turning clods of words like so much cheap dirt
under an Oklahoma sky

This is the same stretched ground which has borne fruit before, sure,
but it’s old, it’s best days are long since
blown back
by tornado breeze of impending age

No matter how much bullshit you use to turn the soil
it’s never coming back

The toil becomes a wasted venture…

yet look around,
you see them?

There! And There!

Slapping at the mud until they are dripping..
pulling the same weeds they have pulled
every year, a collection, green,
pallid
collected
in a pile
near
the split-rail fence

The talking is now done
this field has borne it’s last
it’s time to move on

to till the new fields…

Modern fields, virgin dirt where there are no bones
yet the ideas will grow pristine in haphazard rows
fresh
exploding
thick and rich
new and new and new…


© JR Maston 2007

Seraphim, Descending

Spend all day chasing through the powder, under a scrim
of sun wearing moon’s clothing,
all short and shorn
under the vastness, the sweep
of gray mottled white
while the flakes fall, like seraphim,
descending
cold on my bald head, sting, melt, run…

I move glove over side of snowman,
smoothing edges,
as the excess falls to stain tops of my winter boots, brown
now edging to a darker blemish

I have no time, no time,
clock is edging within warmth
of inner pocket, phone lies silent
as the day has gone hushed,
yet still I run,
slipping

Watching as runes form themselves in contrast
white, black, underneath
the muted shade of the pine,
tall, bastion against sudden wind,
clumps of snow beginning to dissolve,
new shower
over the laughing
heads of children

Somewhere, yellow buses are
spinning tires
and sleds appear as an apparition,
taking to hillsides,
carving them,
amid the hum and chuckle of snowy young,
on the slope above the dead and cold schoolhouse…

I have no time,
no time left for childhood,
I am too modern
to stand in the shadow of the afternoon,
brushing the sting from eyes with the back of my gloved hand


© JR Maston 2007

Naked (The Stripped Edit)

naked…

turn away, can’t bear to be seen
stripped, all stitches

standing small, head in hands
wracked by swift death
who comes sudden
bone in throat,
rusty eye

I have brought you nothing…

salt and blood
have sealed this pact

all is barren
because I am barren
holding the husk

of what once was a man


© JR Maston 2007

Bodh Gaya

I.

I am a shade of my former self, a twisted wanderer who craves the light

and Sadness is a lurking construct, a golem, who prowls the proud night
with swollen eyes
and a mouth of shrew
a thing of angles and bends, who drags its knuckles and cackles at the passing cars
alone, in shade, of the shade,
breathing in sighs and mumbling whispers into scattered neon leavings

Along State, in the Avenues, along the broad shoulders, University Hill,
the weary move in droves, shouldering the burden one ache at a time
Downtown everyone lies, everyone is a mask of shame and delight
Impish Lillith in her crowed and steepled glory
with burning eyes and blood on her hands

and I, I am just another face in the crowd, following
deep swell of the tidal pull
stalking Sadness into caves and pools

a withered thing, bald and broken, fighting for one more dawn to pull the shade

II.

The Buddha sat beneath the Bodhi tree, on the banks of smoking Ganges and was still

He saw not the life we see, all sharp edges and white and stable, no
but a life in motion, a pixalated universe, broken into a million shards

The sad, the lonely, the sick struggling with each breath
the dead and dying, the hungry who cry through broken teeth and gaping mouths,
the open hand, the forgotten whisper

And the Buddha touched his fingers to the earth and opened his mind

This is the world, a world of duhkha, a world swirling into the open eye of the Void
an eye that knows no closing, an eye that neither weeps nor blinks nor closes

And the Buddha knew it was so, that this world is a thing impermanent
of suffering from desire
of knowledge locked away inside, waiting for the right kind of vision to break through

And in his knowing, the Buddha awoke and was calm

Picking up his discarded sandals, he took the path down into Bodh Gaya


© JR Maston 2007

Must You Go?

Strange negation, like removing the first and last syllables from every word
I’ve ever known

Crinkle around eyes and one single tear tracing new course over cheek

One year too many, one eternity now frozen and sliding into the abyss

I can’t go, and you must

Where does this leave us?

Crossroads or abandoned mill along the county line?

Know you and love you still, can’t let the blond hair slip through my fingers again

I am left as a quivering thing, no bone or muscle to resist
this sudden implosion of fate, or god,
the end of my universe

© JR Maston 2007

The Birthing

You do not seek it,
it seeks you

so birth it in darkened rooms by muted glow of screen
paint ecstasy in grid-like pattern across the harsh, tumbled lines
of your drawn face

your flesh willing, hands stretched, tendons splayed
ready to receive communion of the mind,
pure vision
come
down,
to the supplicant, the faithful
who huddles night after night, your prayers
scraps of tobacco, wilted leaves
mulled tea, in chipped enamel cups
steam rising, like mind waves rise
shifting, pooled,
swirled

---

In light of day, you seek control
to twist here, to tug there, to make the vision fit the ordained
pattern you have chosen
the template

to appease hungry eye
critical hand

losing, always, in every receding step
while the memory of birth
becomes just memory
dying in repeated ticks of fingers on keys

oooooh, but

You wanna tweeeeeak it
You wanna teeeeease it
You wanna smoooooth it

pull it in a million different putty strains at once,
fit every expectation, move it from what it should be
and make it into something it's not

to please hungry eye
critical hand

---

Here, in the darkness, at birth's final gasp,
take the time to run your hand across it,
let the smooth progression become ice and wind

chipped cup, tilted, only food for the swollen eye

lick it, taste it,
for a moment, let it enter you
as you have entered it

tomorrow, it will become a changed thing,
Proteus, a million hues

for the instance before you let it breath and stutter it's own way
in the world,
appreciate

you did not seek it,
it sought you…

I Threw Him Down

I threw him down, me

as he flew, all angles and arms,
his face opened in wide-mouthed
frown of despair, total lack of
comprehension

there was a pause
all things hung in the balance,
still frame, motion capture,
a Muybridge epic unfolding in turn of young body

in the acute silence between
my final roar
and impact
of his solid head on carpet

between the corruption of rage
subsiding
and regret
taking hold
from pit of stomach

I had the chance to wonder…

how the fuck does this
make
me
a man?

Dust Town

I. 'The Grave'


Sat smoking on concrete walls of recent grave heavy with fruit
of its burden

No headstone or footnote yet someone
mailed a father’s day card
(in a steel lockbox key taped to the lid)

Left photographs of baby smiling on daddy’s knee

Piece of river down quartz smoothed wrinkled watercolor
child’s painting
unsure, unsteady hands placed for blind (and rotting) eyes

It startles me the kinship I share with the dead

speak no more and say so much

Dry body in a dust town

Little to mark the passing of day

Weeds grown golden, sighing oaks, rattle of squirrel
screams of angry blue jays hunting for scraps among
moldering marble plaques

These old California towns amaze me
how they eddy in currents of age while the mechanized
world presses in against them

Old road, old concrete, leaning barns yet no more than
a bare handful of miles away the zoom of a hundred automobiles
scrapping machined rubber against the government subsidized asphalt

somehow these old mining ruins remain untouched

not even to cough up their dead


II. 'Dry River, Dry Town'

heat presses shade
gives no relief
I can’t believe my life has
stretched
so far
so fast

my memories of California rise
in mind as nuggets of ore
washed to the banks
after the toil of the river

(dry river dry town dry
once my life)

I speak only of memory

now I
forget to forge new ones

this really is the backbone
of my development
these dusty stones
chirp-chirp of crickets
hiding in
manzanita

landscape of my dreams even now

thought I returned July to see
the things I knew as a child
but I can’t...

I can’t
whisper away the mind of myself
now grown children
of my own

dead oak lends little shade

can’t wide-eye imagination any longer

no illusions left to my old eyes
nothing left to see


III. 'Rosebud'


The rosebud grows in the fields of El Dorado
The rosebud grows in the fields of El Dorado

Strives up against dry weeds all the same color, gold
yet rosebud is a thing of green
life, eyes

Though it has been three years since I gave it dirt
or took its image into my sore solemn mind
it grows
it grows unbidden

Something for unwashed summer children
to pluck and carry home (weary)
for further investigation

I have looked into the rose
looked into folded soft silk leaves

seen it from all angles on countless starless nights

it is still a rose

Dust and Salvation

I lay here, dust,
bones of dust
Ginsberg's rot, now feeding earth

shining funeral dirt of Eliot
caught between Jesus and the Buddha

It’s the way of things to give in
break down, elemental

entropy, path of sainted lunatics...

mind giving in, soft fruit
hollow bones,
empty, glass of dust
poised on edge of ruin,
tipping…

Is there salvation?

let it come

Chai (for Scottie Robbins)

I would sit with you
again on indurate curb in
front of the tea shop,
where you taught me to drink chai tea,
heavy with cream, topped with cinnamon

I would watch with you,
as the Pacific swallowed laden sun

good Santa Cruz sun,
harboring no illusions among hippies
and literalists, so different from foggy naked prophets
of Telegraph Avenue…

there were no musings
like Beach Street musings,
double-reinforced cups in loose fist,
watching the girls chase
tans among heat mirage of sand

now, there’d be no need to try and score in San Lorenzo park,
behind oleanders, stepping carefully
around drying condoms used hypodermics

Amused, I recall the night
we ran through sea caves
hundreds of feet
arched above rocky cliff
waving flashlights and chasing
silhouettes stalking youthful madness into mottled corners,
alternating between fear of wind and hum and throat of waves

this time, there would be no need
to chase chalky apparitions
of remaining high…

only the mellow imperative liquid musing

of chai … finely constructed dreams

Anger (Fuck Me Too)

Your voice raises
two octaves
twenty decibels,
grown fur, spastic claws, a bend for
destruction

makes it’s flash move for me
diving loop, twisting,
piercing gap between eye and bone
to get at the meat

starts to dig nails in,
ripping into soft rippled tissue…

the part of me
that wants to argue

I bristle
before it’s voracious onslaught
it’s humming breath

while complex flesh, shredded,
falls like ash
to bury my ankles

I feel the collapsed mind go,
a red sheet
across undiscerning eyes
and I let fly

“well, fuck you”

highest thought possible
while disrupted cells, cerebral fluid
leaks through my upper reasoning

“well, fuck me too”

This is not how I wanted
to start virgin day

rather…

we should be wrapped
in muted blankets,
serpentine
devouring each in flush
lazing in armchair bliss
before wide, ice encrusted
sliding glass door
watching snowflakes
chase each other earthward
to melt on
concrete