Kraj

The changing face of the homeless image

Has deviated.
As a child I remember my mother pulling me to the over shadowed city streets
I was awed by old bearded handicaps
who dressed as if their wheel chair were a crashed chopper
Alcoholics, with peach core heads – scaly red skin and thin sparse yellow hair
A black junkyard crackhead revving
kicking his suitcase insisting that the “motherfucker get up”
war veterans waddling their wheeled body around
on one coral reef heel
like a flintstone firing on one piston
like a bird with one wing, flying in spirals
These sun dried, wreckage sailors of the brick work
They might have burnt sea weed hair
Barnacle teeth
And fat worn out black comforter jackets in summer time
But their chemical smell and blazing jelly fish eyes
At least let you know
They were drowned.

Now, we have a variation of the peddler
The image of the homeless man has blurred
The new post apolocalyptic hippies
Trickle down out of the woodwork
Like Haight Ashbury descendants
But uglier and smarter
One is a fat black kid in a faded bubble gum jump suit
Sparking a joint by himself in Harvard Square
Beckoning a congregation through the power of wind
An oval forms around him
A low pressure system waiting to get
Another black kid with a Mohawk, denim vest, combat boots and patches
Slaps his hand
A pear shaped white girl with a greasy pony tail and generic t-shirt
Holds two bulldogs who lay comfortably on the bricks
The air stirs, thickens and settles.

Across the street is another young beggar
with clean pressed cargo pants, a hiking vest, an extra sweater aroud his waist, sunglasses, a fully packed and organized back pack, a tent, a tarp and sleeping bag
His sign reads “Spare change for a new sign”
Mocking every truly desperate man who ever needed much more than that
He pokes the crowds yelling, “Spare change for marijuana”
“spare change for a space ship to mars”
Like a game show host or sweepstakes give away announcer.
At night when the square darkens and empties
He unfolds his giant body bag and climbs into its center
Lonely under the 2 am orange lamps.
Like Ishmaels leg he sleeps inside a beached whale.

The image changes.
The Worm Town festival rat
Can trickle into the banks of Harvard Square
And on his first night there jump about the triangle
As if it were his own figure skating rink, spotlight and soapbox
And the alligator eye ball Police duo would stare at eachother in their cruiser
Go crosseyed
And say “he’s celebrating”.
If he had a Polo shirt on
They’d arrest his ass and pulls his tendons down to the station.
But instead he’s found the perfect uniform,
The truly invisible camouflage
The volunteer homeless men
blur the lines of homelessness
Making travel easy
Making freedom obscure and accessible.

Kraj ran from my hometown
Became one of the volunteer bums
Though He looks more like an amazon medicine man
With boney facial peircings, long dreadlocks, colorful eyes,
sleeveless rags and back pack drum.
His first love was smeared across a rail road track in Wisconsin
He hikes the Appalachian, follows music like a nomad
And has been sited in grocery stores, bus stations and drum circles.
Homeless? The fucking kid seems to be filled with homes,
A surplus, overflow of homes across the country side.
When he’s older and settles in a tourqouise tent in the leafy forest
Behind a car wash or supermarket
And like letting go of a penny into a fountain pool
He drops acid so he can wash Blood Off the Tracks
Don’t bulldoze his vinyl mansion
Kraj carries with him no shield
And He would not want the mice plowed into the field

Irish Seisún at Greenbriar Pub, Brighton, Ma

Teams of Fiddles, accordions,
And flutes, a banjo,
guitar and mandolin
Are held and played with loyalty and precision
In a dim back room where tough varnished tables
And rows of thick wooden chairs
Are occupied by three dozen first and second generation Irish folk
Who don’t so much as clap, speak or turn their heads
when their kitchen symphony ends.

The next song strikes up from a seeming silence
Like instant sparks from a wooden bow drill
The seconds between each tune is any man’s chance
To throw wood on the instrumental embers.

Each musician burns with the same traditional sheet song memory
Which is like tracing over an intricate face so many times
You can draw it identical when the face is pulled out from under the thin paper.
When the cloth is whipped out of this dining table
the silverware, plates and glasses are hardly shaking.
The song settles and crystallizes.

A bearded drummer enters during the music, sits and begins clapping his ‘bones’
The stubby chop sticks
The Irish castanets march the song with a story teller’s waving arms.
A fighter would envy the way he flicks his wrists w such delicacy and sting.
The lone drummer swings the invisible reins to get the fiddle mules dancing harder
He whoops and yells in the back when the measures come around
Some of the clan smiles softly to themselves,
glad to have a backbone pushing them
glad to hear a ruckus again.

Another man approaches the drummer timidly
and moves his Bodhran laying on the seat to his left.
The busy Drummer snubs
Then he sees the brother in the stranger’s face,
stops his dream vision conductor hands and brightens to him
The pack continues on humbly without a driver again
The new comer puts one leg up on his own knee and his arm around the drummer’s chair head
Their narrow eyes shine into the same familiar plane of vision
Their culture alerts their hearts in a way I wish the world could remember
A white haired man 10 years their senior turns around w a stiff neck and a broad grin
He says something about ‘soods in a boocket’ and ‘shut the front dar’
All nodding to their mutually understood wilder drinking days
That they nurse now with a

The violin bows raise and fall like firing sickles
A field of pumpjacks
And chain gang pick axes
Scythes, yo yo weed slingers on the banks of a grassy highway
The wispy broken horse hair hangs and snakes
like the shreds of hay stuck on the blade.
A large heart falls to the floor pumping
skinned fish flopping.
I look closer to see its three hearts stuck together at the tips
Forming a single clover.
I want to kick it off the dusty floor or put it away
But its dancing to the factory whistle music
Like a kettle top dances to boiling water
Like a rock dances atop a quaking sifter.
So much delicate strength
at the end of these fading tales
At the fingertips of their sound
Their violin strokes cut me open
Without ever scraping a nerve.

Shower Head

Her pain was dew forming, filling, then dropping,
ticking slowly from a turned off shower head.
She wrenched the valve shut until it snapped in her palm.
The beads kept returning.
Like dribble from the seams of a stroke victim’s lips.
A vegetable love.
She dabbed away her pain with a clump of used tissue paper that she kept ready in her fist.

An Emerald Dancing

An Emerald Dancing [Difference between Sex and Oil Drilling]
Inspired by William Blake’s “A Memorable Fancy” from Marriage of Heaven and Hell

When she whinny’s and kicks
the horse head of the oil drill bows and strikes
If I can get this V-belt to revolve perfectly
I will make her soar like the edges of a crystal glass
The prime mover has always begotten the crank
But this time my arms and beams have (desired)counterweight
This time we can drill oil
Back into her guts
I grab tight onto the bridle
The polished rod diving and retracting
With the fringes of the stuffing box
Some Oil and gas expelled
Stroke length, sucker rod
In oil drilling you can’t fall out of love.

Impregnated with oil virgin woman turns red then white then blue then grimaces her mouth in rage and insanity and commands, “usurp wooden fires for oily sensation! drill me like an intravenous drip! You, slurp the oil from your dish bowls of chastity and return them to my furnace! I will burn the exhaust of man.
With straws harvesting black semen out of the earth, the fairies combust manhood and stink up the channels of information with his exhaust. “Pay the fairies!” shouts man from the deeper inner ball of earth, “and the new born man will contemplate on every cry from woman’s earth”

Smaller the brain
Smaller the reason
Bigger the harvest of the infinite season

Growing Down

When I’m walking and I hear the metallic, reindeer bells twinkling sound of someone coming up from behind me, I can always tell the jingle of car keys from the rattle of a dog’s medallion because a pocket didn’t jump up behind me when I was 11 and sink its teeth into the back of my knee.

Right now, Beer tastes like that strange metallic foam your father let you try when you were 12.
I’ve moved on though.
I suck from the teat of a white Russian pacifier.

Sleep After Farm Work

After twelve hours of casting sweat into dust
Handshaking the fingers of weeds that break off at the wrist
And form a bratty new hand next week,
The inside of the airy farm house feels farther away than it really is,
As if transplanted next to the smooth snore of the ocean
Though it only looks out over ripples of weeds and sunlight.

I walk to it.
Sweat and mud in my arm hairs hardens into a grey mortar sleeve.
The screen door breathes in
Then sighs.
Like separating the thick round staples
And knotted burlap
Around the ball
I remove my boots.
My eyelids lose their elasticity.
Broken window shades.
I want to sweep myself under the rug.
Sleep is no longer a task but a gravity and a tug.

My blankets are sheets of turf
My mattress- dirt.
My pillows are quick sand shaping to the shell of my head.
Tired, I drop into bed.
Like matted down grass the surface conforms to my body.
Dissolving what touches it.
August has overlooked me and I am too weary to fold myself under the sheets.
They sometimes clothe me when I awake.
Sleep creeps in.
A black sun hovering,
Petting my head, squeezing room temperature water from a rag,
it trickles down the length of my spine.
My bed slowly begins to open the gate of its mouth.
The branches of veins in my limbs
take root in the ground.

Night Crawler

When you don’t sleep for a couple days your mind
creeps away,
slips off like a startling beaver scurrying under the sticks,
goes to bed without you,
shrinks into the backgrounds of your head,
closes,
like the pupil reacting to light,
like a camera focusing, shutting down
like a crook
winking.
Like the center of a circular ripple caused by a throaty rock dunking into a pond,
the perfect center that implodes and then spits one beam of water directly up
in the opposite direction
of the falling stone,
your anchor mind sinks
in to the vast ocean of your head.

Suddenly your senses reappear as sturdy, good and whole.
Like a fish you can only survive with your senses submerged.
A tiny carpenter redoes all your wiring,
brand new again and fit to size,
no cat screech door hinge,
not one drill with dying batteries in the house.
Acute senses why have I not skipped heaven’s daily death more often?

I can see a face behind a surrogate fog face on the trolley
peering through its own finger painted eye holes.
I can see it now from the footsteps of the library.
Noises sound different, more accurate, organic.
My teeth Severing the squeaky clean Pentium processed chicken
Sounds like sneakers on a basketball court.
March madness.

A girl I don’t know routinely jerks her head like a dog’s cute misunderstanding of a note
And then she twists like an owl.
The cracking of her neck sounds like squeezing a soda bottle with the cap off and the wrapper on.
Doesn’t she know there’s only a finite number of rearrangements
the neck can make before you have to adjust something near it?
Doesn’t she know the neck becomes like a paper clip.
If she continues this grotesque habit into her adult years
she will become a school yard poll with a tether ball head.

The clicking of the mouse
Sounds like clipping nails.

Coming Back

Four Crows pull 4 long cables
Attached to my shoulders and toes.
They Move me like a crane does a heavy pipe.
Like a helicopter dragging a cargo almost too heavy to pull
They puppet master me one block back,
Struggling.
I’m An oversized couch squeezing into a narrow apt.
The Crows are hacking and Jerking in different directions to budge the cow further.
Like most domesticated beasts
I give up once I get to the pen.
What’s the point in fighting now?
In fact, swiping off the 4 chains as if spider webs,
I walk myself in.
Never choosing defeat until it’s the last chance of dignity.
Never wanting sleeps darkness
Until it blinds me standing.
I give in.
I make a fort out of this prison.

Branded in my cellular sleep
A Hot bath burns the brass horns off of my ear.
Sizzling until I’m numb
I cool and harden like a blacksmith’s molten rod into a pool.
Welcome to night.
Fish from the darkest oceans of my mind
wiggle upwards like a lone seltzer bubble that doesn’t burst at the top.
They look sideways out my aquarium eyes
Trying to Peer through the ferns of my eye lashes
That begin to Open and close and breath softly like swaths on a pine tree.
They can see the cavern of another universe,
Faint impressions of my bedroom
Illuminated by Two rhombuses projected on my wall by the street lamp outside,
The shiny edges of the deodorant stick and jack knife on my dresser.
They can’t make sense of these dim foreign images
That slowly flicker from my windows open, curtains closed eyelids
As I try to make sense of theirs.

Going To The Tavern Lubricated

I march to the cadence of a spinning, wobbling, off balance washer and dryer,
A sheet metal factory
and some steam engine crack head expending his roller arms onto a 5 gallon drum.
So that each one of my toes is keeping a different rhythm
And they take me off like ants under a watermelon.

Standing on my toes
They move like hummingbird fingers across a piano
Blowing wind into the sails of my back
I wiggle down the street.
My feet start to move together like a centipede
sliding sideways.

Like when you lift up a vacuum and brush it to the next room
I glide over to the next crosswalk.
When I’m drunk
I feel like C3PO hay wiring.
My feet move beneath me
As if the sidewalk were an airport escalator,
conveyor belt.
I’m a floor sander
accidentally plugged in.