​From "Trump the Musical"


I'm full of elitist derision
It's not just my own decision
I'm stuck in a truck that's careening downhill
Strapped in my seat with a schmuck who's a pill
On our way to late night television 

Ohhh nooooh.... 
You can't say that!
What's next?

Our leader's a stumbling Dump
He's a ghoul in the night that goes bump
He leads us a dance in his fat underpants
That careens through a ball banned in England and France
To a scam that goes flat with a lump -- Where's the pump?

Ohhh dearrr...
Please don't say that!
What's next?

We're locked up in an ugly McMansion  
In a suite of retreat lacking scanscion
The grounds are a mess, with a pool merely cess
The Superfund techies are dying of stress 
In a-base-ment of dirty old man-fun

Pleeez...pleez!
No more of that!
What's next?

Dump's producing a show in an airport 
With a 'do' that's been laughed out of hair-court
He calls for a judge who won't care a fudge 
But the Pillars of Age prove too heavy to budge 
And his face is all covered with cream torte 

Boo-hoo...
Poor Dumpy!
What's next? 

Poor Dump is awash in old paper
He's looking for help from a neighbor 
There's a favorite loose cannon, his name is ol' Bannon
Who fires his mouth-piece, all fouled up with race-grease
And burns down Dump's house with his caper
 
Oh, my!
Is that gun smoking?
What's next?
 
Old Dump is a sexual abuser
Who seldom has faced an accuser
To underling's smiles he complains of his piles
As little nit-twits shout his empty denials
And dead-enders tweet cheers to a loser
 
Heaven help us...  
Pants on fire!
Whatever's next
 
When a stooge posse takes over a state
The electorate's not feeling great
People gather around, talk of taking them down:
"You can separate heads from a national crown!"
They're the gang that couldn't hate straight!
 
Oh, now — 
​You can say that again!
Next stop is the federal pen

Courage of the Wind
(based on Jim Lewis's photo of the Great Blue Heron)

You see me, as always, before I see you
You turn on a corner of the wind
where the air meets sky and the scent 
of salt marsh bathes the hours
I know you by the killer eye in your bone arrow, 
your linear head-piece head-on to the future
that houses both sense and brain, and the rapier jaw, 
the needle of thought sewn through sky and brine,
the silvery flesh of life in the quick
and the ocular penetration,
right-angled from your dagger stab,
seeing deeper into me than I can (or ever will) into you 
because your race is older
and your home is the wind 
and your wings are your freedom 
and your rooted danger looks back at you 
and knows the better course 
is to leave you to your wilder time 
and cling to his path in the grizzled earth 
(Jim Lewis's photo posted on Verse-Virtual Facebook page on Dec. 19, 2016)




Great Blue


You spy me, as always, the instant before I recognize you
like distant relatives at the holiday gathering of a mutual friend 
or solitary lovers fleeing from a second act, 
you turn on a corner of the wind
where air meets sky and the briny scent of sodden life 
and show me where earth clears its horny head 

Lighter than air your girdered wings make head 
I seek purchase on sky, my eye-witness of you, 
whether you sell your ascension to the taker of life 
or achieve your ambition, a new world to befriend
and straight to migration your flight path you wind  
and the heart of your homecoming approach by this act  

To give eyes to this wonder you so lightly enact,    
to follow your lightening lifts my world-weary head
to realms of earth angels who ride on the wind
to envy this world's fine ascension of you  
to puzzle your course -- off to lover or friend?
Still am I stranger, limbs bound to earth's life 

I to reflection, as you to your life, 
your wings, bone and arrow align for the act 
You marry your heaven alone, sky for friend
No back to your gearbox you plunge straight ahead,
fixed on the idée of high-riding you, 
to lives of the heroes who sail on the wind 

To follow the courses where gods bend the wind
and ride on winged horses who cling not to life,
but trust to the heavens, sky-writing with you
and so tell the story, the intention, the act 
feathering the tale from the tail to the head, 
the martyr to flight; the onlooker, the friend 

I cling to my vision, your apostle, your friend
Slave to the foothold, jealous of wind,
yielding to fixture, to the next bend I head, 
loosing my thought but to ponder on life, 
hours to think, seldom minutes to act,
holding flight's illustration but to wonder on you

I face to the wind, to your wild-wandered life,  
stranger to thoughts that ascend to enact, 
lifting my head to the 'friend' that is you. 

The Last of the Tuckahoe
(A verse tale of Riverdale, Yonkers, Westchester, and a time before)

Haring off from the city, tires freed from the uptown blocks
like sprinters in the post-holiday Nationals -- Broadway, Parkchester, Henry Hudson -- 
leaving the squealing city behind
through the highways and into the wormholes of the beloved republic, 
the ancient land cut for the roads most taken by the late-comers, 
who later still lured hands
to cut the timeless white marble,
old stones, old stories, new traffic, eternal roar of the e pluribus nation.
Eternal too the "jong" couple, still new, though the son now thirty, 
his place aligned with the music of the spheres,
and the beautiful song-mate, the pair reminding their elders of their own first apartment,
the parental summit, nations treating carefully,
grandparents long since, 
walking sticks now in the year's last days.

Tunneling through land well greened and tree-full, 
Westchester, Yonkers, the Saw Mill River, a roadside
draped with the cloying green briar,
a place between places, the sprint to somewhere else.
Where do the old gods, spirits of the place,
the Ancient Ones find peace now?
Time returns at the traffic light:
how many hours at midday to that other 'new' countree?
Land of the Reader's Digest, the paper factory,
the roadside inn, the shipping lane to Albany.
Little of the Dutch remains, New Netherlands erased beyond 
Edgemont, Bronxville. A Dutchman marrying, courting, 
matchmaking by Wilder in tamer times, so many such 'our towns' line this route,
Tuckahoe a beep, a heartbeat en route to Drums Along the Mohawk,
deer trimming the roadside now after three hundred ghostly years, nibbling road-shy,
where farms were cut from the trees in the lowland 
between the river and the Taconics.

Below, the city fills up 
and spreads north, taking, taking, 
the roots of those whose tongue birthed "Tuckahoe" forced west
into the hands of Cooper and his ilk,
asleep for a generation pace Irving, 
children growing beards before his eyes,
his own ears sprouting a crop of gray thistle
kittens nine-lived to old cats in the cemetery,
a town grown up around his grassy bed,
the last of the Tuckahoe pioneers limping along the brook side
looking for his jug,
later discovered in the fly-buzz village selling roots, pansies, mushrooms.
The tailors came later still, hugging the sewing machine under an arm,
on the way up to their cousin's factory,
a landsman but a capitalist.
New people, Deutsch, Anglish, Gaelic, Swedes
settling first on the other side of Brooklyn Ferry,
but persisting, spreading northward through Manhattan
-- named for that tribe legendarily fond, in the old pejorative, of sparkling geegaws, trade goods,
shiny pieces to sew into braid and hair band, foot covering, medicine bag --
blooming like the apple, the linden, some tree or grass 
or a protected vine from the Old Country,
floral invaders: the English rose, the Japanese cherry.
Up through the city to the bluffs of the Jersey Palisades,
some hopping northeast to the Berkshires, 
taking to the woods in summer. The greensward. 
Some say 'New' England. 
Also New York, New Holland, New France in diverse tongues, 
the duty-free imported Dutch, French, Gaelic Scots, Yiddish... Anglish.

Yet the old names hang on the land 
Places where we grew up or went to school, Wantagh, Wyandanch, Merrick, Massapequa, 
Patchogue, Ronkonkoma, Setauket, Montauk, Napeague, Cutchogue,
the upstate towns and colleges, 
Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora.
Centuries, the conquerors' centuries, later here we are escaping (rather  
'seeking to escape') our fate, nosing those tunnels in time through 
the place the old ones named Tuckahoe for the globe-like shape of the edible roots
the land depicted to them; 
and still 'the land' when the late-comers chomped away at it 
for the excellence of celestial white marble, harder than time itself:
the blade that cuts away all the rest, buildable land, clear passage through 
the lowlands, Poughkeepsie, Peconic, Nyack, Taghkanic Creek;
but also bear and seahawk, bobcat, wolf, mountain lion, eagle, Fisher cat, moose, 
until finally the ebb tide of the spotted deer, those suburban cattle, floods back
in predation's absence, extinguishers now themselves, mowing the woodlands of flowers. 
Goodbye to the butterfly and the six tribes who hunted here,
the chestnut trees, hickory and elm, the sky-topping ship-building white pine, 
whose absence shadows the route entire to the nor'eastern hometowns...
where we emptied the Wampanoag and the Pequot, the Micmac and the Massachusetts
in the name of 'New' England, no different whatsoever from the lower counties 
of  'New' York, except now we live there:
we who are no longer the last of the Tuckahoe,
merely its spectators, well-wishers, passing-fancy voyeurs  
waving from the spattered windows of time.