The Muses’ Days Are Numbered

If I keep writing poems on the train, the forces of literature will judge me as Grabinskiana

At least when America falls, it will be harder for the purgers to liken what I write as Americana

The muse prepares to say goodbye: not even she is immune to today’s unending dysfunction

Is it an AFI-style affliction, or has somebody tampered with the telegraph line of our psychic conjunction?

Was she a Californian with flowers in her hair that, upon my absence, started to wilt?

The drought started around the time I left: on top of a recipe for hate we now have a recipe for guilt

Art can no longer save my state from its imminent demise, but neither now will it save me

Once the Muse casts me loose, it’s only a matter of time before a force of darkness slays me.

I Am An Old Californian Poetaster

I am an Old Californian poetaster

A match among lanterns, but slave to no master

No Euro language wants me to woo, serenade

No East Coast city wants a parade, or cascade,

Of my worthless little verse at their gay little picnics

Showing me, instead, to the nearest abortion clinics

From the old forty-niners to the collars now breathing

My balladmongering cannot be fit for the living

When the stem cell harvesters grab their nano-ploughs

And sift through poem organs like many cows and sows

What then, will our nutritionists say about my verse –

“Ah well,” shrug the experts, followed by a juicy curse.

Another Year of Fires In My Beautiful California

Another year, another storm of fires

Forbid my state, with Germanic steel,

To have any history unless it be burned

Or crumbled via quake from time to time

Now that Paradise is gone the element of Satan

Aims to wipe out the next best thing

But

What might that be?

What better state can man achieve beyond paradise?

I asked the scientists we’re supposed to listen to

Regarding anything and everything

So forthcoming were their tongues they said nothing at all

Another year, another series of fire

Burn my beautiful California

This time the beauty relativists are upset

Took them long enough.

Ode to Joaquin Miller

Hark! A wild balladmonger

bursts out of the flaming

California bush

Hand over hat

Light over featherpen

Amusing Europeans

Entertaining Americans

Forgotten only as much as

The Golden State forgets its gold

Some treasuries get exhausted

permanently

Which one comes next?

This Years’ Desertification

This years’

desertification

brings Contra Costa

closer

to a Phoenix that will

never resurrect

should we weep or not?

why shed tears for

geography

once we are free of it?

I know now

why we never studied

the capitals in school

we float like asteroids

just not in cosmic space

aspiring for the gravity

of exoplanets

we know nothing about.