GODSPEED

by Alan Britt

You enter the first pepper flower, mascara
disguised as lavender periwinkle kneading
Florida white kingdom limestone.

You forget to wear clothes——imagine
how I feel.

You decide once & for all to kick off
your shoes, hours, days, weeks, months,
years before your number's called.

You amaze everyone with your courage—
storm the courthouse, frighten summa
cum laudes on a fieldtrip to Vegas &
enjoy Latino thighs rinsed in red, green
& white flags of freedom, below diplomas,
singing only the good die young.

But you enter the cavern responsibly,
trailing an oil lantern guide who dies
by the wick & lives by the wick.

You pause, I notice, for grandmothers,
yours & mine, to cross Kennedy Boulevard,
circa 1972, against oncoming traffic.

Pirates arrive on flatbeds stacked
with papier-mâché ships & mutinies
round the clock upon this rolling ball
with frozen oceans, receding hairline
Wall Street turds shackled in shame
but tunneling a midnight blue artery
headed straight for our collective
medulla oblongatas.

IN THE MOMENT

(She busted in and she burglarized my soul,
but now the bad news, she's out on parole.)
                           -- Jagger & Richards

by Alan Britt

Snare dives, stretches
boney wings & sways its
lightning-in-a-bottle hips
to the thump & punk
of a hi-hat in heat;
angst flares & dies
into ash before rising
like a phoenix amidst a hail
of lead & blazing poppies
tattooed on stained-glass windows,
snakeheads dragging us
below tar pits;
what's left?

Hard G grinds afterbirth
into Zensensation, thereby
perpetuating what steam-fitters want,
what hairdressers, lunch counter matrons
& lonely teachers want, what the Assistant
Manager of Marketing wants; meanwhile,
F minor distracts local security with her
flimsy flat tire plus coral nipple or two
as Keith's Telecaster Blonde bruises
stainless-steel clouds
into 30 thunder beats.

THE HAZARDS OF POLITICS

by Alan Britt

How’d you come to this conclusion?

Leaning against lampposts,
following the opium trail
from Shanghai to London?

I hardly know you,
much less trust you.

How’d you suddenly
become my confidant?

Oh, now, I know you.

You promised Eastern Shore farmers
abundant corn
in the middle of a drought.

You promised everyone else Louisiana crabs
the size of badminton rackets
and rejoiced like the rest of us
at the sight of skinny blackbirds
warbling the graves
of West Virginia ancestors.

You warned us
if we fancied our cousin,
first or second-time removed,
we’d be quarantined for life
to a traveling circus
prowling Southeastern Florida
during the late 1950’s.

So, we remained hairdressers
and postal employees.

We waited for the big breaks
that never came our way.

In fact, we’re still waiting,
still waiting
for hollow politics
to restore our faith in humanity.

And regret, as we all know,
is a meal
best served raw.

ARMS CONNECTED TO MOLECULES

by Alan Britt

It’s like cobalt crabs
waving in all directions,
hailing cabs
or attending
Texas barbeques.

Political coals easily stirred
turn deep red.

But these molecule claws
stretch right through the smoke
of ancestors.

Their thin saxophone arms
in satin tuxedos
waltz beneath rivers
on religious holidays.

So, eventually, these saxophones
might again wander nude
through the forests of the night?

Ah, tonight, these arms are naïve,
much like the arms of Neruda’s mermaid
entering a coral tavern,
engaging the company of terrified men,
innocence wide open,
eyes like opals
swinging from Mary Magdalene’s cinnamon lobes.

You can’t imagine the social turmoil
caused by the mermaid’s arms opened so wide!

Reckless arms like these
create wars,
world wars,
wars worthy of trading cards,
wars important enough to be showcased
on Ripley’s Believe It or Not,
desperate wars like locusts
during the Dust Bowl years,
wars like aphids stalking the underbelly
of our DNA.

These innocent arms sometimes cause massive back-ups
on the Tappan Zee Bridge;
they turn Mazdas into snails
I-95 South into Baltimore
and cripple I-70 into Dayton.

Yet, somehow, these arms inconsolable, today,
wandering the fog
of my precious sleep at 3:30 in the afternoon.

Since, by 6 PM, after sedatives and coffee,
I’ll already have squandered the perfect world
I’d hoped to find balanced on a single strand of faith
stretched high above my Barnum and Bailey life.

LOVERS

by Alan Britt

Fanning the flame, teasing
each hepabreath that
chisels Roman numerals
on the mantle clock.

Each red filament overlaps
pheromones of enlightenment,
each one better than before.

Each time forcing the spring
unwinding slowly........as some
lovers prefer to be let down.

While others, it seems, can never
get enough.

SAME OLD, SAME OLD

by Alan Britt

From the caves of Lascaux
to a Lantana Beach, Florida-room,
fat flies cling to salty gingham curtains.

Opaque claws from a feral priest
or the governor of a slave state
overseeing plantations, herding cotton angels
with lightning breasts of 13, 14 or 15 years.

The chimneys of southern mansions
coughing pestilence, helicopter insects
migrating corner to corporate corner
according to the magic pipe.

Discipline……..rape of culture,
homogenization of one solitary human
to another.

Evolution as it stands today
gives me a fucking headache.

Tomorrow, dementia, that arcane disease,
sometimes known as monetary transfiguration
(from the 70 ruling families to you and me)
but otherwise known as he who has possession
of the bomb.

Follow the bomb,
& you’ll find the money.

SOUTHERN BOULEVARD

by Alan Britt

Give blood.

That’s right.

Donate blood: O negative,
B positive, A whichever way
the windmill blows,
but give blood to future governors
and presidents in incubators,
blood enough to clot glaciers,
razor-blue glaciers crumbling
daily into Eagle Lake.

Sure, you could legislate
the gradual demise of blueblade glaciers
crumbling into the Pacific,
raising sea level by a mere
twelve to eighteen inches,
(that’s one and a half feet, to you and me),
but blood, my friends,
my terrestrial brothers and sisters;
there’s simply no substitute
for good ‘ol red and white corpuscles,
generations in hindsight, of course, that end
with a fist and a sickle spilling blood like oil
through the plaster walls and Venetian blinds
and wooden frames of Afghan, Iraqi
and Palestinian apartments.

You think oil and blood
are the same thing?

Regular citizens crucified
for another 2,000 years?

Well, friend, and I say this
with critical sincerity,
our sand, like all sand,
struggles tooth and nail
through the hourglass hips
of a black hole,
or an outdated religion,
or whatever else you
might call it.

But the point is,
this newest bullshit version
of a monarchy, planetary domination
via your tax dollars and mine,
well, I just have to say
that plain speech is sometimes underrated.

Plain speech can alert us
to a whole host of priorities
(sometimes known as periodic corrections
to the moral market);
plain speech can deliver us
from the depths of wretchedness
not unlike Rapunzel,
Hansel and Gretel, the Emperor in designer nudity,
or those train tracks revealed one afternoon,
tracks buried in the front yard
of a dingy white clapboard house
just off Southern Boulevard.

OLD HORSES

by Alan Britt

(Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail.
The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love.
With the word reason you already feel miles away.)
--Kabir

I wonder if I could swim, effortlessly, like Jack LaLanne,
the English Channel,
my happy teeth pulling tepid lovers in aluminum boats.

I wonder if there really is a devil, Lucifer dressed as headmaster
of a local elite all girls school
featuring an equestrian program
fueled by 24 and 25-year-old
horses donated by local thoroughbred farms.

Horses that slyly cut the corners of daily bureaucracy
with their arthritic hips
when the headmaster isn’t looking.

Horses which, oddly enough,
never became the horses of instruction, after all,
but instead pace their darkened stalls with a principal intellect,
no longer awaiting the equestrian god
to bless old horses.

RIDING FOR OUR LIVES

by Alan Britt

Buzzards from the afterlife
circle the entrails of words.

Serrated wings
shadow
the buried keys to your door.

*

Remember when history
was more popular than dodge ball?

Remember those dreadful tidal surges
exceeding all expectation?

Remember Mary’s fury when confronted
by three unwisemen
from some lame Ivy League accounting firm?

And whatever happened to the original Magi
fueling Harrod’s god-awful misery?

Those three humble Gnostics?

So?

She could’ve discharged
all that.

Imagine granite appaloosa stallions
galloping the vaulted walls
of art museums
in the Hague,
in Tuscany,
at the Met,
in Hagerstown, Maryland.

Now, imagine you and I riding those granite stallions,
riding for our lives.

Then imagine British rock’n’rollers
tossing and turning in their nihilistic beds during the Blitzkrieg,
imagine attaining emotional brain functions
often attributed to aliens
circling our explosive blue planet?

Then, again, imagine you and I drifting
dangerously out of control,
dining at Taco Bell, for instance,
in an Einstein universe?

Tell me, where’s the sense in that?

FALLING FROM GRACE

by Alan Britt

The ironic handkerchief,
Desdemona’s or Othello’s?

Whose irony is it, anyway?

That handkerchief on marionette strings
like some wobbly Saturday morning marionette
with googly eyes and freckles,
possibly of Irish descent?

That handkerchief
was the axis
on which his play revolved.

They didn’t have Renaissance festivals
in Shakespeare’s day.

So, he invented his own diversions,
like handkerchiefs
scented by impossible love
falling from grace.

BOB DYLAN

by Alan Britt

Bob Dylan,
a unique genre,
so American,
so adrift.

Almost like Whitman lounging,
today, in Central Park.

Or Emily Dickinson
juggling metaphors like torches
on the Tonight Show.

The greatest balladeer of his generation
sent Joey: It always seemed
he got caught between the mob and the man in blue,
into the streets of Little Italy.

Weaving the lives of Hurricane Carter and Hattie Carroll
into a tapestry of impossible retreat.

Giving us hope and leopard-skin pillbox hats
just when we needed them the most.

So, how about this balladeer of ours,
stumbling past a cracked saffron mirror,
through squeaky saloon doors,
fashionably late for his showdown with God?

HERE TODAY

by Alan Britt

As I sit here today
I cannot say
if the east side
gets better sun
than the maple-infested west side
of my brain.

As I sit here today
I cannot say
whether or not
your closest confidant
is Iago
or someone
resembling him.

We should never forget Beethoven’s violins
complaining in his deaf quartets.

Ludwig hammered those strings
until they bled all over his music sheets.

And as Ludwig sits here today,
he cannot say
if Easter egg hunts are yet permitted
in the Count’s courtyard.

Still, the sun blazes like a snail
across our twin foreheads.