Buy My Book: An O.K. Corral of Poems

There, to your left, is a 'buy now' button, and underneath it is your opportunity to support the arts directly, by buying a copy of my book of poems, "An O.K. Corral of Poems."

The title is to suggest that the group of poems is meeting in the lot between two buildings to settle all hash now and forever.


Here's one poem from a very large group of lyric combattants:

Becoming Respectable


back then
the low life went where the hot shots went
the latter group gloated

My pal drove a Pontiac LeManns
faded yellow
with wide black stripes that did not augment its design
may I borrow your Wembly tie

A Dippy Moratorium

A pile of wet rags. That's the kind of peace that has accumulated in the rain barrel below the hole in the ceiling. I make sport some recent quixotic political campaigns. One man political campaigns. The high brow literary/rhetorical Rambo lone hero swell guy vigilante but with no violence, just words type of lone warrior struggle. I'm calling a temporary truce. I'm gonna be nicer, as if I was making a new year's resolution, but not, just tired of busting a nut on nit wits. Peace, pricks, peace. The next series of posts on this blog will be so positive and free of animus that you will shit.

Pulling a Quote

I'm a kinda guy who likes a pointed quote. There's sensuality drawing sharp words from their sheath in history. Pulling a deep breath, here's a boarding saber from the days of wooden ships:

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

Samuel Johnson

This quote holds an edge. Too, it can be built upon. Religion, nonprofit organizations and a job lot of social causes provide bad people an appearance of being good and a foundation upon which to be crooks and liars.


Seven years residence in Pittsburgh's South Side from 1991 to 1998 brought me visits by the late Samuel Johnson's ghost as rafts of hopeful entrepreneurs predicated their business plans on the environmental movement, the national mass marketing of therapy, and the on the New Age demand for spiritual instant gratification. The beautiful historic neighborhood was a refuge for scoundrels since the steel mill days, and the emerging new economy of air and fibs became a remarkable refuge for so many of the scoundrels that made the place special, insubstantive, hollow, ethically vacant, and outright friendly towards political dirt.

With a very special new president of the United States coming into office real soon it may be good to pour a table spoon of ethical cod liver oil, choke it down, and proceed with the closest thing to honor that can be cleaned out and fortified the old way. This is not a good time to provide refuge for scoundrels, and perhaps it will be a bad time to be one. Better morals may just be the cutting edge.

Milk Me, You Brute

Some time past the age of fifty, men don't become more like women, but do become more like cows. People probably carry a gene for future bovine humanity. In this parable I am caused to believe that men with this gene survive by auspices of institutions, the things for which Pittsburgh is recongnised.

The town is guileless and unthinking as soon as you step off the street and into a church, school, or community council. The non-cows tend to be more like wolves or jackals, as you prefer, and they are usually good enough to confine themselves to outdoors. A lot of the creeps are homeless. Others of them live a rudderless existence in smoke filled casbahs off of East Ohio Street, and I reiterate that these people are rotten scum, but you are never more than a block away from some place full of people who can't fight their way out of a wet paper bag, like a nice flat footed humanitarian aid group advocating for people they are unable to locate.

Well, that's all the meanness I can muster out. My udder is full, it's my milking time, then a nap. Moo.

Closet Executive

Amercan political radicalism was in a downward trajectory for a long time and more of less ended with 9/11. While the radical left spent the past three decades working itself into the main stream, Republicans have done the work of saints in easing right wing fanatics into our more hawkish family of man. We have never been more culturally diverse than now, and never did a better job of hiding it. It's the stuff that uneasy truces are made of.

Now that there is no such thing as an American radical, I have had to confront the problems that go with being an obsolete person. Not at a loss for strategy, I invented a phrase to define the political activist in a two dimensional society below Big Brother's cameras: closet executive.

A closet executive is probably unemployed or marginalized one way or other. Some consultants provide a neat working model. Yet a political activist can make executive decisions and take executive courses of action. If a new view point is wanted, projects such a letter writing campaign could net real outcomes.

Any good executive encourages the growth and development of both business and cultural communities. Even executives who live hand to mouth while supporting the unrecognised cause. The nearest thing to radical is a lone activist campaign to develop alternatives to nonprofit urban renewal. I am proposing a plan intended to create empowerment programs that would grant revenue directly to Pittsburgh homeowners who need the help and who can earn that aid in service to the community.

Eliminate the One Dollar Bill, You Dirty Leaders

Money is dirty. People have touched it. With their hands. With their fingers. They woofed snow up their filthy schnozola with it, and some of what is inside the ghastly organ got on the money.

But worse than this, the paper our bucks are printed on cost a fortune. There are good reasons to eliminate the one dollar bill. If we are going to be made sick by money, it could at least be for a fin or a saw buck. Not to worry. The treasury department has made an amazing discovery: People are honest. All of them. There isn't one single cheat or liar in the United States.

Rather than carry money and exchange it for gum, sex or drugs, people will need only say, "I am thinking of the money you are asking me for. I am picturing that money in my mind right now. Can you see the sum of money I am picturing in my mind?"

In the new emerging economy, the merchant, hooker or career criminal will respond, "Yes, yes, we are sympatico, I see the money you are thinking about, and I accept this clean, valuable currency."

Our leaders are wisely starting small, allowing only one dollar bills to be thought about so fondly. But if it works as well as I know it will, soon twenties, fifties and hundred dollar bills will be transacted in our depraved American minds.

You can't see it or hear it, where ever you are, friends, other individuals, people who think I'm a jerk, but I am pronouncing, "Tsk, tsk, tsk," while gesticulating. An article found on the Internet pulled the pin out of a metaphysical, imaginary and physically harmless handgrenade that I keep in the prop rooms of cognition. The article claims that vitamins A, C and E are not as good as was once believed. One or all of them could cause untimely death or illness, and I am most especially miffed with vitamin E, for such great hopes had lain on it.

If this new view of vitamins plants in your mind a cold war era loathing and uncertainty then welcome to the club. It is as if the agents of proper nutrition have revealed their dark side. But since it seems that antioxident vitamins don't work as orginally believed, and probably don't lengthen people's lives, there is a matter of civil duty to air.

It has to do with 'free radicals.' When the antioxident vitamins were still honored nutrients, it was believed that they worked their miracles by neutralizing free radicals which were said to be toxic at the cellular level. All X-billion of your body's cells will live longer and happier for the free radicals killed off by anti-oxident vitamins. But 'mais non, mon freres." The vitamins may have lead a Stalinist purge of innocent, productive and morally superior substances inside of you.

The free radicals killed off by vitamins A, C and E could have been the Abbies Hoffman, the Jerries Rubin, the Lennies Bruce of organic matter. I propose that we can not be free and healthy people in a hailing atmosphere of suppression.