Orange Plum Holiday Loaf

1 cup chopped plums (canned)
1 orange
2 cups flour
2 eggs
1/3 cup soft shortening
2/3 cup sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp soda
3 tbsp sour milk or butter milk
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

Grate orange peel. Add 1 tbsp (or to taste) grated peel to pulp, Cover with water and simmer 12 minutes. Drain and set aside. Mix the shortening and sugar until smooth then mix in the eggs and sour milk. Stir in the prepared orange and plums. Sift the flour, salt, cinnamon, soda and powder together and stir in. Fold in chopped pecans. Transfer to greased bread pan and let it stand for 20 minutes. Bake at 350 degrees F for 1 hour.

The Ballad of Whisper the Poisoned Gray Cat

Whisper was a mighty tom
Who lived in our neighborhood
Mighty gray of dewy main
His teeth and claws were long
His eyes flashed green
And his broken tail pointed
Sixty degrees to the moon.

By day he slept in our house
But rarely did he take a meal
He captured his prey by night
He went on the prowl by night alone
He ruled our neighborhood

He would present us his fair in the morning
Whether carcass of rabbit or bird
He dragged his prize through the kitchen
And presented it to our mother

We knew it was the hateful bird woman
Who poisoned our Whisper to death
The fearful bird woman who lived next door
She resembled the pets she adored

Her nose was fashioned a pointy beak
Her jaw jutted forward grotesquely
So her mouth could not close completely
Her knees bent backwards like a flamingo’s
Her bulbous ass teetered ridiculously
On the top of her spindly legs
Her huge butt propped precariously
On the top of her skinny legs

The cat was chivalrous and proud
His green eyes shined through the night
His gnarly gray main was damp with the dew
His large fuzzy testicles switched as he paced
He ruled our neighborhood

The bird woman was mean and fearful
She was cowardly and obtuse
She poisoned the heads of some cod fish
And left them out for our cat
She poisoned the heads of some cod fish
Our brave cat is dead of the cod fish

T’was a drizzly evening when Whisper returned
Early from his nightly sport
From the moment he entered
We knew what had happened
He stumbled across the floor
A sick gleam thrust from his eyes
He meowed a mournful song

Though mortally ill he stood proud and tall
And issued these final words:
“I have been poisoned by the ugly bird woman
The ugly bird woman has killed me.
I must not die an ignoble death
But must find a place proper to die”

With these words he bowed
And lowered his eyes
Then he sauntered towards the door
He journeyed to find a proper place
And a noble death to die

Never more did Whisper return
Nor again have we heard his meowing
We never have seen his dewy gray main
Nor his fuzzy balls switching
Nor his broken tail pointing
Sixty degrees to the moon

Pete's Green Pepper Corn Bread (its poetry)

1 Chopped Green Pepper (med)
2 cups corn meal
2 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 tbsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp Lowery's Red pepper seasoned salt (sub. reg. salt)
1/4 tsp Red pepper flakes

1 pint milk
2 eggs
1/4 cup butter melted

Mix dry ingredients in large mixing bowl and make a well in the middle. Add the wet ingredients and mix until smooth. Add the green pepper. Transfer to large well greased baking pan. Cook at 350 degrees F for 35-45 minutes or until a toothpick stands up in the middle. Serves 8 or makes 24 muffins (for muffins reduce bake time to 25 to 30 minutes).

Aquarium (from '01)

Today as I watched my fish
Swim to the borders of their little universe
And feed on the manna
Which I sprinkled to them from Heaven
I could not help but complete the analogy

Them with their rocks and plants and bubblers
Carried away with their social pecking orders
Day and night they perform their routines
Unable to sense or to comprehend
The vast teeming reality that lies beyond them

I get so tired of this scenery
Little plastic cars
Little plastic phones
I stare out from inside
My glass partitioned space

Once with my minds eye
I swam up to the glass of my existence
My little fish eye pressed against
The smooth limit of my senses

I did not hold a candle
To that dark outer room

Risk

I’m not sure if the earth
Can sustain the weight
Of another bad poem

Just one bad poem
Could tilt the balance of fate
The back of Atlas cramp and spasm

Wouldn’t it be better
Not to risk it?
Leave the page to its perfection!

Or else the earth gone spinning
Off its axis
Locking our globe in the permafrost
Of ancient night

Or is it because wisdom
Feels no affection for truth
That no great poem
Is given this generation

Ghosts

It’s funny the way the ghosts
In an old house
Will use the same sounds
The house itself would make
If they weren’t there

Wet leaves scratching on a windowpane
Wind moaning and sighing in the eves
The draughts creaking and slamming the door
At the top of the stairs

It’s only their footsteps that give them away
As they creep along the flexible wooden floorboards
But perhaps that too is only the house settling
Shifting imperceptibly in the cooling night air

How funny I must appear
To that being I’ve been trained to imagine
Who watches my behavior with
Suspicious moral gaze

As I call out: “Who are you!
What do you want?”
In the dampening darkness

“What strange questions to ask of one’s self!”
He must be thinking
But what’s truly unnerving
Is that that voice too is really only me
Only me
This dwelling, my uncanny doppelganger
Rising up to ape me in my solitude
As I am the only one here.

Burnt Offering

At that first sacrifice
Cain committed a gross error
He should have anticipated
That the God of the Old Testament
Would prefer one of blood and fat

Or maybe it was God’s mistake
That he didn’t know how to accept it
Perhaps if Cain would have rolled it up
In a leaf of papyrus, say
Or even struck the match and taken
The first pull before offering it
Then things could have turned out differently

Time it was when Cain and I
Made copious sacrifices
Of marijuana
To our highness

By day a cloud of smoke
At night a pillar of fire
No wonder those crazy Israelites
Followed us across the desert

On Reading Alden Nowlan

Your book waited for me thirty-eight years
In the Indianapolis public library
No one had ever lifted it from the shelf
Or opened its cover
So stiff was its binding

And to me the astonishing thing is not
That no one reads
Not that great poets cannot be anthologized
Because they are Canadian
And so the next generation will never remember them

But that money existed to publish and print
The work of your life
That money was there to preserve your words
Pressed into paper in 1970
Kept in air conditioned comfort for thirty-eight years
Until I could discover you
To me this is an enduring astonishment.

For what interest could money have in you?
You, who hated the rich and their richness
Who growled at famous poets
Who would have kicked Robert Bly in the nuts
To facilitate his investigation into the nature of masculinity.

Look, there is what is real and what is fake, you said.

Death Is Funny

I hope that I find a funny way to die
The sight of the blood from the shaving mishap
Causes me to swoon hitting my head on the sink
When they lift my face from the water of the bloody toilet
With the blue disk still lodged in my airway
“Ha ha” they will say
“His life was sad but his death was hilarious!”

Or when I drunkenly pee
On the running engine of my car
And the electricity runs back up the stream
Making my balls clack and chatter like coiled copper
And the smoke rises from my scorched arm pits
“Ha ha ha” they will say
“What a fucking stupid ass!”

Pop

Pop

We should know that there is a threshold
Which limits the goodness of a poem
Beyond which a poem cannot exist
For humility’s sake

When a poem exceeds this threshold
It pops

This unfortunate popping happened to several
Of my shorter works
Before I skillfully learned to incorporate
Errors into my poems

This is why one can never find
Perfection on a page
And also is the reason why we should
Not examine our poems too carefully
Or try to peter out the perfect wording
Of a certain phrase

Better to let a flawed poem fester
Than to risk its total annihilation

Thankfully the contrary to this is equally true
So that a poem cannot suck
Beyond a certain magnitude

For example if a poem is rife
With Romantic convention
Or contains the word rife
Or if the words flotsam and jetsam
Appear together in a poem
That poem almost certainly must pop
Out of utter badness

The very fact that the phrase
Flotsam and jetsam is allowed to repeatedly
Appear in this poem
Speaks to its overall merit
And the craftsmanship of its construction

Some Other More Recent Poems

Toward a More Tangible God

Anyone who seeks to test the powers of his imagination
Should try to make a constructive reading of the bible.
God, the ultimate reader response critic
Arranged the bible in such a way that only the most creative
Of readers could see the coherency of it.
Only that perfect audience could provide the mental mortar
That would hold those bricks in place.

In my own reading, I progressed all the way to the sixth chapter of Genesis
Where I read: “God repented that he made man.”
At this point, a critical reader may fairly question:
How does an all seeing, all knowing, infallible being
Come to the place where he admits his mistake?
And so close to the beginning of the book!

And how the implications of those words contradict
What we've been taught about God.
When God repented he not only admitted his error
But he admitted that his actions resulted in consequences
That he did not intend and could not foresee.
Also, his penitent state proves his willingness to end his error
And to repair the damage his wrong action perpetrated
But Noah found favor in the eyes of God.

So to recap, God,
Whose initial error was the creation of man,
Is now unwilling to destroy the evil which he has created.

This failure I can understand
Having created many bad poems myself

I cannot destroy them
Because I love them

There is something about them which is invaluable to me
Even though they are flawed horribly and entirely defective
Even though evil seems to be innate in them
I cannot destroy them
Because I love them.