Track List for Unreleased Country Triple Album

NSP Meditations, Poetry

Had to Put My Dog Down (wish it been my ex girlfriend)

I Get My News from Fox News Tits

Going to Winston to Get Laid

Jesus Will Rise on the Internet

Country Fuck from Tillamook

Elk River

Meth Town

Beach Bonfire Threesome

The Sin of Biscuits and Gravy

Loser Deluxe

Sweet Horny Math

A Country Song with No Double Negatives

Calista the Hustler

That Short Green Dress

Coquille Coquette

Sea Strip

Blackberry Love Potion

I Fucked the Wrong Brother Under the Christmas Tree

Nesika Beach RV Park Blues

Thanksgiving TV Dinner

She Likes it When I Fart in Bed

All Them Goddamn Lisas in My Life

Ode to Rickie Lee Jones

One Night Stand Heather Graham (Thank you Drugstore Cowboy)

Two Consecutive Mornings

Coos Bay, NSP Meditations, Poetry

Fog. A Sherlock Holmes pea souper.

5:53 in the morning,

homeless woman with shaved head,

wearing striped pajamas, barefooted,

pirouettes in the parking lot of a grocery store

dancing in gray, suffused by a cloud,

lit up by blunted spotlights,

She’s singing while pirouetting,

some unintelligible tune,

perhaps a nursery rhyme

or “All Star” by Smashmouth.

She took a ballet class, clearly.

Someone taught her ballet long ago,

or maybe she learned on YouTube a week ago in her tent.

Next morning at 5:59

she rings an old ship’s bell

outside the barb wire fence of a boat repair shop.

Clangs and echoes of clangs ricochet everywhere,

blending with the sound of a new loader

at the log yard across Coos Bay,

sounding like Godzilla when the great lizard flattened Tokyo.

Ospreys give flight.

Gulls scatter.

Geese wake up.

Creatures in the sloughs camouflage themselves in the sedge and mud.

Minutes later she stands naked at the fish cleaning station,

hosing herself off,

singing, running fingers through hair that used to be.

A fishermen carries over three tuna he wants to filet in the fog,

hearing Godzilla,

but will just have to wait until she’s done singing in the shower.

Newport High School Graduation Speech, Class of 2009

NSP Meditations, Poetry

Congratulations seniors, the Newport High School, state of Oregon sesquicentennial class of 2009, a special rock and roll class. You really did make it. A few minutes from now, you’ll walk out into the world with a diploma and embark on a new journey.

And then what?

Where will you go?

What will you do?

Who will you become?

Will you have fulfilled your unique promise when I write about you 20 years from now?

Many of you already know the answer to these questions.

Some of you haven’t considered them.

May I offer a little help?

May I humbly suggest a path to follow?

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.”

So begins Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken.

In it, the poet looks back on his youth and his decision to take the road less traveled.

He tells us how it made the crucial difference in his life.

Frost created a powerful and indelible metaphor for life with the image of the road not taken.

But really, have many Americans truly traveled the road not taken?

Look where we are today. So many of your predecessors took the road to the seas of plastic in our oceans, melting glaciers, a ten trillion dollar national debt, two million Americans behind bars, a million homeless, school shootings, 50 million without health insurance, two wars with no end in sight, Wall Street avarice, and the imminent mass extinction of species.

So seniors, other graduates before you may have believed they were taking the road not taken. They did not.

Today, you need to remake Frost’s metaphor for the future into something vastly more powerful if Oregon and America are to survive and prosper.

Let me offer changes to the road not taken metaphor.

How about the road not yet built?

The road not yet conceived?

The road not yet dreamed of? The road you must make in a way that no other American generation has ever tried to make before? How about building the roads of Martin Luther King and Rachel Carson, of Tom McCall and Harvey Milk, of George Washington and Emily Dickinson, of Susan B Anthony and Muhammad Ali, and of Elvis Presley before he became obese, drowned in Las Vegas, and died taking a dump on an upholstered toilet in Graceland while eating a ham sandwich?

Seniors, build this new road for yourselves, your state, your country, your world, your children’s children.

Engineer it like no other road in American history.

Hack it out with a machete if you have to.

And when you build this new road, take it, travel it. Inspire others to follow it. I have no doubt this road will, to quote a horribly underappreciated American rock band—CREED—it will, the Newport High School class of 2009, it will…it will, this new road will…

Take you higher!

Poem for JL, 4-23-23

NSP Meditations, Poetry

Sometimes,

someone,

something,

some thing,

some entity,

some superstition,

some specter,

moves me to write a poem.

You move me

with your potential

for mystery achievement.

This won’t be a

confessional,

ode,

sonnet,

sestina,

although you surely are worthy of these.

Your ass alone a haiku,

always worth writing

and rewriting.

It says in the Book of Job:

You sow the wind

so shall you reap the whirlwind

Is that you?

You might consider sowing seeds and harvesting what grows.

The seeds could be of anything. Use your heart. Use your imagination.

Fling seeds with abandon, utterly without grace, never with indifference.

Oh the joys of random germination and seeing sprouts!

Remember, sowing not the same as planting.

Perhaps we reap a whirlwind

and it flies us back to Cape Sebastian

to see those green coves again.

A Walk to Astoria High School on Aug. 26, 2014

Astoria, NSP Meditations, Poetry

My walk to school began at 6:23 a.m.

I wore new brown Hush Puppies

a dead grandfather once wore,

old brown cords.

I felt like John Travolta

in the opening of Saturday Night Fever.

I was strutting to my new teaching job!

Bald eagles chirped overhead.

A low fog drifted through the neighborhood.

I surprised a contractor loading his truck

on his way to undo rain.

That’s his life’s work in Astoria.

He said, “I thought you were a bear!”

We laughed, I moved on.

I saw three deer in a garden watch me pass.

They never moved or blinked.

I want to learn how to live that patient in this world.

A large man let his Schnauzer out to shit.

He looked hungover, the man that is.

His dog wanted to join me; we both knew it.

The litter lady merged with me on Florence Avenue.

She was right on time; she is every morning.

Tapiola Park spotless after her routine.

Should I worry that she stopped to pet a black cat?

Or doesn’t wear sensible shoes?

Or that Tapiola is the name

of a Finnish forest god’s domain?

Light was coming up over Youngs Bay.

I didn’t see a single gillnetter.

Dairy Queen was dark.

An empty log truck blew by.

Saddle Mountain called to me: climb!

The sidewalk was wide and good.

I picked a few blackberries along the way.

And here I am writing this from my classroom,

with a little purple smear on my fingers.

Christmas Morning 2014

Astoria, NSP Meditations, Poetry

I took the old husky

to the beach.

It was probably our last romp

of 10,000.

Ten thousand!

Rain ripped through Astoria.

I love rain; not this time.

The beach was different.

Fresh erosion sheared the dunes.

We’d have to climb down.

I wasn’t sure she’d make it.

Erosion is like that.

Erode—to erode—an action verb.

Sonny eroded the coarse, uncaring

contours of my heart in our 17 years together.

We made our way south.

Huge piles of kelp looked

like dead kraken.

I took photographs.

One might be the last one.

A rainbow appeared.

It seeped through the gray.

I couldn’t believe my eyes.

They write poems about these moments.

Sonny ate up the sand with gusto.

There was gusto in my grief.

We left.

I stopped at a convenience store in Warrenton,

for wine or coffee.

I don’t remember.

I was still reeling from the Christmas rainbow.

A student of mine was eating a convenience-store burrito

for breakfast with his mother and sister on Christmas morning.

I wished him a “Merry Christmas!”

He wouldn’t look at me.

I put my hand on his shoulder.

He didn’t introduce me.

He gave a funny laugh.

To our left, an old man played

blues on harmonica.

He played the blues,

I had the blues,

my student lived the blues,

and Sonny was named for a great bluesman.

«‹ 3 4 5 6›»