Fastfood disappointment

(Clerk)Where is your ticket?
Your licence?
Your papers?
Where is your permission to live freely?

(clerk)Couldn´t you make it to a printer?
A registry office?
The town hall?
Couldn´t you find the time in your nobody life?

(dumbfounded customer)But all I wanted was a hamburger sir.

(clerk)No hamburger without a ticket son, don´t you know the rules?
The inconveniente exceptions?
The extra hidden fees?
Don´t you know how to get brainwashed by dynamic advertising?

(dumbfounded customer)I guess i´ll try another shop then.

(clerk)Hope you applied for an all-inclusive exit stamp do you even know what that is?
Have you ever thought of applying?
The motto now is enroll or die.
Couldn´t you just get that stubborn hand signing?

(dumbfounded customer)I feel sick i think I need to use the restroom!

(clerk)So you must have procured the exclusive restroom pass?
What´s your deal, afraid of queues?
Life without documents is what´s eating you.
Get yourself stamped, screened and scanned through and through.

(clerk) But for now you´ll be stuck here for a time
 while I complete your thirty four fines

The broken beetle

I don´t want to know how it still lives
Singing amid the wounded beetle´s battle cry

I don´t want to know how it broke it´s legs
Or why...
 it´s pursuing me in the flooded dreamy lowlands

I don´t want to know it´s genus name
I just want to watch it die

I don´t want to live other´s dreams
And see mine come untied

I just want to fill the pool with my own insects
Ones that swim, crawl and fly

Enough about the broken beetle already
I´d rather watch it die

It won´t be me legless in the water
watching myself fail my last try

Dream at night and do by day

Quiet creatures are our goals
We know they´re there we´d just wish they were louder
More obvious more detailed
Wanted posters and loud stereo reminders

Just pick it up we say to ourselves
Take initiative and go for gold
Easy weeks of preparation often go by without an eye
firmly on the thing we want most

Waiting for a green light could be waiting in vain
We shout in our own heads to pick it up
Buy it acquire it realize it
For heaven´s sake life is short

Or if it´s patience you are after life is long
And if it´s tranquility you´re after life is still
But it´s neither and most other things only eat struggle
or they starve to death

So pick up that line I hear the sky scream
Make it happen, dream at night-do by day
Dream at night-do by day
Dream at night-do by day

Security and lost cousins

Guard the garage she said
As she guarded the front lawn
Guard it from what? The howling wind?
Guard the area as she put in her pizza order.
The warm house lit up and beckoning

She on the lawn looking at pictures of herself through the night
as if it were a mirror
Throwing love into the darkness reflecting her life long expression
Looking up at where god would be sitting if he wasn't so busy convincing us
of how much we needed security

Pizza came and I'd left my post
 I was eating like a leech on it's host
While she was guarding in the night's gail force winds
I heard a scream so out I went the wind collecting me
throwing me to the rescue

There it was facing her, the wolf
Bat and axe found my hands
Eyes looked to wear wounds would land
The wind blew the fear out of my heart courageously
The lost cousin was saved

Like fluid

The seats were all parallel
No one can ever save us now
Pouring out of the train like soft drink
The train askew on the rail as it growls
Progress is a clatter and a "clink clink"

Stuck together on the verge of sweating
The carriage like an oven baking discomfort
Tasty for the abandoned factories
Tasty for the waste and haste
Like fluid we squeeze into this sliding bottle

Shaken up on the line steel and stone
To make money for cellphones
To make money for screens
Waiting for the squeeze
You go by train when you live under the city's knees

No five lines of justice
Will make the pudding sweet
We're just fluid in containers
We're just drops of flesh on the street

Shine the way your supposed to under this late january sun
Our time has intertwined and is loaded like a gun
Our lives have just begun

Good advice is taken to the grave

Good advice comes and goes
and what you take is what you know
Use it in a fix to get through the day
Take it to the grave and that´s okay

Good advice might cure insomnia
Or harden that hellbound diarreia
If it´s given a place inside your ear
Your daily grind will be less impaired

Good advice a shining thought
Sensible answers not often caught
In an impulsive world where reason fought
Now entirely lunacy wrought

Our blindness to the obvious, our obsession of sorts
seeking what dead ambitious sailors sought

Train north

Capoeira old
The old man stares out of the window at the waist high weeds that line the tracks.
Now and again he glances back at my foreign face, then returns to the long fields of weeds.
Stations pass by exchanging passengers, my one is the next, with that thought the old man stands up.

He walks clasping the bars to the doors. As we pull into the station he takes off his shoes
and does a handstand, hitting his old feet against the grimey glass door Windows.

And from the waiting exiters also expecting to disembark, there was no reaction.



Cloudy morning

The youngest boy sits with his parentes and his brother in the corner of the train.
They are obviously awaiting a day of Family fun somewhere entertaining.
The boy kicks his mother´s and father´s legs softly with his sandals.
His brother whispers to him and taps his sunhat down just to tease him.

I turned my head as we pulled into a station to see who had boarded.
It must have been less than two seconds by the time I turned my head back.
The Family were all standing and I could smell a very odd smell indeed.
As the train picked up again leaving the station and the family grabbed support bars I could see...
The youngest boy was curved over finishing maybe his sixth or seventh eruption of milky puke.

I thought to myself thank god this is my stop another two or three stations with that smell
and I would be painting the seats myself.

Triumphant matrimony

Orchestra booms and clashes cleansing the air for their entrance
Fusing music and oxygen waking the prospective brides to be
Stirring the desires of potential fiancées
Hypnotising their waking dream of triumphant matrimony

Center aisle bouquets radiate auras as their eyes well up
Children throw rose petals to the violinist's skill
As the music changes to advance the nuptials
The doors open and in-laws mouths further still

In walks the celebrated groom
To absorb every eye in the room
Bride's aspiration acquired she lights the room like fire
Burning gloriously to trumpets as she walks by admired

They had both caught the future and their net was their vows
Their promises smelt like possibility and goodwill
Domestic bliss afoot in some well designed house
Where they can see tomorrow together from the windowsill

The dog eats it's tail

The dog licks it's tail's hair
Too lazy to go out and hunt food
It's hairy but familiar
The stomach will digest it soon

The body suffers as the mouth feeds itself
The tail is becoming short
The dog cares not about his body's just health
For the dog owns the courts

In each square inch of his abundant hair
Is a family of fleas feeding
But the dog is now bony and bare
So to the fat deposits they go breeding

The snout meets the lips
The ministers and conglomerates
Just under them are the teeth that bribe and bite
Ears deaf to the word contrite

Just a lazy potbellied dog
Fleabitten and indifferent
Now sleeping again like a log
It's tail stuck in it's mouth it's body bent

Her nature(For Maira)

She was born to be a teacher
She has taught me
Toward educating and touching minds she reached
And she became you see

Not simply becoming a teacher or some pidgeon hole
Not just having that typical role with time in a career to kill
But entering the pressurized transformation into teacherdom
Capable of being austerly sever yet incredibly flexible

Loving the difficult subjects and students who messed
Drilling a hole in their heads and filling it with language
Being remembered as someone who cared about their progress
And seeing the fruits of her labour when it came to the tests

For love of teaching has ripened her nature
Wise as an elder in her mind, her skin barely older than a teenager
(for Maira)

Family market

If you lose your way as an infant from under your motherś wing
Wandering far from your parents
Itś best you shout and scream and kick up a fuss as if you are selling something

If your brother complains bitterly of the heat first
Then your father complains of the quality
You can always count on your mother to open her purse

If the market closes early as clock hands wheel
Or the weather makes it inconvenient
Convince the shopkeepers to give you shelter and a meal

A family can be costly it certainly has itś expences
But you can often find a bargain
If you love them as much as you do common sense

Last wish (Faulkner's 1930 classic)

Funeral arrangements set calamity in motion
With the bridge washed away and an earful of good advice thrown to the wind
The coach was destined to capsize in the milky brown waters
As their father's words were heavy and unavoidable
Despite being from the lips of a toothless mouth

The coach did capsize and the coffin-maker broke his leg
as if god had ordained from the stubborn will of his old man
The insanity of sacrifice for a sentimental whim
Words that had brought them to calamity

Words that passed lips that now pursed and cold utter not a word
Words as described by the nymphomaniac as those things that shield us
from the moving living connectivity that exists when we are close
The toothless father would never comprehend perhaps purposely so

The aggressive horse whisperer, the overzealous coffin maker
and their deranged brother would realize their mother´s last wish

Through burning barns and bargained cement for broken legs
While vultures crowded the sky overhead.
As soon as the old girl was six feet under
Their toothless pop found himself new false teeth and another wife

His son´s faces filled with torment
Not a moment of thought from the old man.

The axe of uncertainty

Where only few trees stood, just enough to cut the sunlight out from the chopping block
The shade invited the juicy ground for a season long feast
To eat and digest the pieces of bark and piles of sawdust
To show it´s satisfaction instead of burping the ground would sprout mushrooms

The axe lay dormant
But whenever there´s wood to cut...

So it the woodcutter´s labour began
The machine like swing takes place between a man´s shoulders and arms
it appears our passion is involved
Piece by piece, splitting the logs as they were our doubts

Doubt after doubt the woodcutter would split
The grain meeting his blade like an awkward encounter in an overcrowded city
The blade following through like a message cutting it´s way into the brain
The handle and it´s curve have now become neck and skull

The beauty of it as it descends into the wood like a shags beek into the pond´s margin
The reflection and repetition yields more than one week firewood
Each time the axe fixes itself into the wood the struggling woodcutter loses grace
And each time his swing misses, a tinge of foolish rage touches his brow

Like the uncertainty of life it´s often hit and miss
Though you should focus

Hospital walls

There he was being absorbed by the hospital wall
The damp hot air facilitating his absorption
His aggressive face now shaped by agony
his stretcher mattress sweat soaked and ripped

Into the wall he went like a stain fading into it
Nurses couldn't hear his cries
other patients were too connected to their own pain
So in he went to become part of the hospital forever

The music of patients complaining and pleading was eternal
Long sighs, panting and moaning would create an orchestra
And for others whose souls are thrown out of these fragile bodies
May they be thrown far from these hospital walls 

Monkey river by dawn

To the valley by dawn
The bowl of fruit aroma sweet
The sky still dark the day still being born
Down came the hoard of monkeys to eat

Shadows in the forest before the river's ditch
descending the hill as fast as thought
Surreptitiously breaching the forest edge
To eat what I had brought

I crossed the river and sunk into a bog
I jumped and kicked to free myself
Laughter of the monkeys rang out from a nearby log
Sunlight lit the child, this day, this health

I knew I couldn't get back fast enough...
To see my sweet love make breakfast

Kubrik's eye

There was fear and desire on the day of the fight
The priest flew in to intervene between brawling seafearers

Spartacus standing on the paths of glory
paved by the carnage of the killer's kiss

The hardest thing for Kirk was learning to love the bomb
After strangely embracing the orange hands of time

But he kept his chin wide open
as Tom kept his eyes wide shut
For there was something still shining from nineteen eighty
It was Kubrik's eye

Hospital floor

The I V drags along the filthy floor
A babies crying flares up and pulls ears
Heat and murmur sing like a choir
Bloodstained bandages littering the corners

Doctors hurry by as broken boned patients move legs
A small girl plays on her father´s cellphone
And the murmur and moan of the room doesn´t bother her
Though the complaining opens up as the day throws another degree on

Under pressure the nurses and coordenators burst into rude suggestion
And perfectly ill mannered patients pretend to be offended
The sticky day seemed to find a way of pushing itself into the waiting room
Sweat and whinging rolled down as the nurse came around to call names

The trash on the hospital floor rocked to and fro as if in a ship
Alas restless hot legs and feet would fidget and kick it back and forth
A mother teased her daughter in the sauna hot boredom
The daughter objected loudly echoing across the hospital floor

The muddy pond

The waterlillies would be backed up against the far shore
Slum kids kicking and splashing and complaining of the cold
Diving, jumping each leap so free and bold
Into the brown water not ten years old

The eroding grassy banks slowly giving way
To the feet that would propel bodies at play
The waterlillies would roll in and out on the waves created
And the civil police would turn up with faces that showed they hated it

The kids would all scatter but a handful would get caught
The ten minute lecture would see nothing taught
Because the very next day the same parade would take place
Diving and screaming in the muddy pond low income grace

Storm former

Storm former

Oh the winds between couples
The soft breezes and the forceful gusts
Connections slowly strengthen even in the weather...
Trying to Keep the storm former at bay from severing

  Peace and calm and somewhere dry to lay
Emotion thick and moist in the air a spray
And words of every shape not fitting in the puzzle
Resentment in not expressing worn like a muzzle

So let words scatter let the Wind tend them before they reach her ears
Let them bump as two fronts colliding sending lightening no fear
Each heavenly sky can be a stormformer you hear
Each cloud a feeling each raindrop a tear

To bully the afternoon

I stare the afternoon down
A bull scraping hooves back
Snorting grotesquely
So the late sun won't get the best of me

Taking on the pre-sunset
My cover won't be sweat
I won't be discarded like some peel in the heat
Like some fruit lodged in the forked branches sweetening

I will slap the blazing brazen four o clock sun
I will dump the breeze over the city
Push the clouds about for fun
Instead of perspiring and panting while I sit

Empty restaurant

If space is what you want
If it's peace and quiet you're after
Art stuck to the walls
Crowding the edges of an otherwise empty eating hall

Banquets await
Dishes under the lowlight
above the blue flame
wishing to be eaten

If it's a vacant spot you want
A hollow stomach for a hollow haven
The dimmed lights and the cool air
Part of you wants to digest

Taste buds clash
flames lick like tongues
saliva fills the mouth
But the restaurant is still empty

Jeremy and Ashley

Thrown down from up wintery Detroit way
The optimistic American arrived with his girl Ashley
Down here on these hot capricornian days
Jeremy and his girl top of Santa clara street fancy free

Copacabana was an oven during their stay
Still the excitement of engagement they made in Angra dos reis
When Jeremy knelt down and made pools of her eyes
Had the day been cooler he would have seen her cry

Two couples on a ledge over a hill of flowers and vine
Exchanging wild stories over water and wine
The following day together again in the crowds of new years eve
With the shameless champagne shakers and flowers on the streets

With the high and the dry and the bands of child thieves
weaving their way in and out of the messy mass
was the intrepid fiancées Jeremy and Ashley
All the way from Copacabana to quiet old Leme

To São Paulo they flew next of love convinced
To wander the vast extensive capricornian Labrynth
Back in their Northern hometown blizzards swung down
Touching down were the skies frozen lips and frosty kisses

Touching down was the flight of  Ashley's plane
And our friend Jeremy stranded what a shame
Soon they'll melt the ice together passionately
Jeremy and Ashley

Poet's saturday

The sky appeals to rhyme
The clouds stacked over the far hills
The singing valley emerald through the pollution
The wind reciting gusts of warm dampness

Reciting the passing of time
The sun reciting and beating down raw heat
Persuading our skin of it's greatness
Advancing across the sky still appealing to rhyme

The sun dancing with the wind
January day dance floor
Midsummer window to the kitchen
Poet's ink on the gates of the weekend

Saint christopher's fair

Sundried meat salted and chopped
Grilled cheese and tapioca
Pink guarana and cashew fruit pop
Slabs of peanut sweets, popcorn or "pipoca"

Wall to wall white Brazilian sugar cane rum gleams
Aphrodisiac liquors and herbs behind the bar
Fruits the northern hemisphere have never seen
Chili pepper conserves in oil and vinegar

Palm oils and various extracts of strange branding
Condensed milk and coconut candies
These are just some of the little treasures they deal
At the São Cristovão Fair in RIO

Little piece of paradise

Nowhere near the stars
Walking upside down on clouds
You can't call that wisdom
Losing gravity the sickly feeling of falling

Into the little piece of paradise you clean your eyes with
into the perception of somewhere fresh and sacred
Chosen by the sun and rain
Chosen by your vivid imagination

No you can't call me wise as I crawl vertically up a cliff
Ready to vomit
Roofs peel off houses and head toward the skies
Pictures of you accumulating before you lose the camera

Nowhere near the stars
Or the high mount on which the elder preaches
No wisdom or even sense in this mind
My brain a motor burning on thought

Burning on wonder
Challenge it all with the "why"
And not with the "if"
For if you doubt it was real, it was always false

Falling toward the heavens as gravity betrays us
I'm sad you had to find out this way I'm no wise man!

The metubesubo

Along the lines it licks the metal
Windows darken through tunnels
You pray it fills with pretty
Often ugly overruns it with odor

The doors shut and some phone rings
Two stations later you're halfway through
someone-else's conversation
A child's hand pulls your hair

Each carriage gets carried away
Can you be sure which station
Which line to take
Each suburb crawling into your eyes

Inside the scales you look out of the snake
As it pulls it into another pollution ridden district
Perfume and dyes and paints
Metubesubo advertising troll sits and gulps your perception

The coffee cup

It arrived beside me
Warm and delighting
The lips and tongue approached
As sneaky as a poacher

The steam rose up as the mouth bore down
The cup was empty before the sugar could drown
Caffeine hand patting me on the back
The remains were sweet and black

One degree more awake
One more sip for coffee bean sake
Another line of Simon Elliott's poetry
Another cup of expresso coffee.

Michael King(Back home)

Mike there you were in germany
The cheese and the fields
The pines and the pasture
The boutique architecture

Out there in a curiosity
One that took you far beyond our oceanic bounds
A curiosity that spun just enough for you
Satisfaction and your wife Nina

Now our hair is thinning my friend
Art has combed your hair
With one tine in your brain
One tolerance for a friend like me

Mike far afield a little town
that's roads could have been cut
And the people would slowly turn into syrup
You being the grain of southern tussock stuck there

And back to the thin strip of Aotearoa
Where cousins and old friends still call you
Where your father worships you
And where your mother longs for you

For this big wide world
With all it's decoration
With all it's novelties
Charges it's own fee

These foreign lands
that have colored our eyes
These cultures and languages
That have shaped our lives

It must be good to be home Mike King
To the cool extension of the islands
To the humble rugby loving villages
To the surroundings that raised us

Wild dogs of the Tijuca

Near the ridge where the lizards bask
And the sun eats away at the hole in the forest
Lies the track to the high hill
Where the wild dogs kill

In the undergrowth the pack lies low
Monkeys and parrots passing overhead
And in the distance a deer forages
Springing up like a thunderstorm above the ridge

Leaping and barking
Stalking the terrified deer
Sprinting and slamming
The hand of a tropical war god

"Crash" the deer is trapped in a patch of wild bamboo
Nashing teeth dig down, shock will touch death soon
Bloodstained insects and geckos fly out like balls in snooker
To make way for the grievous foray those wild dogs of Tijuca

A card of a class

Teach the universe
Piece by piece
Rivers of paper and faces pour down
Into the desks

Each a puzzle each a mirror
Each a mystery
The mind is a furnace
Ash memory accumulating

On each card there are names
And in each classroom a group
The cities eyes and ears being processed
A card of a class where I've no excuse or fancy mask

Words and sentences tickle the senses
Rules and patterns and the exceptions on which they depend
Inserting it into their brains
A card of a class on each there are names

Heal them

Take them and drain the poison
Replenish them from what the sun and smoke stole
Give them back whole
Bless them oh heal them bless them, yes

Paint them back to vitality
Throw a sort of luck upon them to make them the same
Protect them so that they may kiss one day again
Brush them with hope brewed deep in your heart

Let the worried mind be calm now woman
Let there be a comfort held by faith through and through
For at the end of the day if you've done all you can do
It's in his hands now, heal them, bless them, yes

Rich kids cry

Rich kids cry like gulls and normal kids taunt like crows
Rich kids clasp their parents hands desperately
The fourty degree heat bearing down on poor kids
Across the sizzling streets they´re dragged uncaringly

Rich kids burst into tears near the gutters
Normal kids talk back through jibes and mutters
Rich kids plead for their mother´s comforting
Normal kids don´t stop conning and fronting

Rich kids cry and they cry hard
Spoilt kids awry soft wills and hearts
The heat and luxury, blind to the poor´s suffering
Sheltered from their very own farts

Sensato

Bochechas de Tio sensato
 A lua brilha menos

As bochechas de tio sensato
São como maçãs polidas com graxa

Morros de alegria que se destaque
no rosto sem vergonha de Tio sensato

O encrenqueiro de idade
Que fica dominado pelo garrafa

Pingo depois pingo
as bochechas de tio sensato
Se tornam rosadas e brilhantes
Ora alto tio totalmente desequilibrado!

Risada depois risada
O tio não consegue esconder as piadas
Que caem da boca dele para mesa de jantar
Como um dragão assoprando fogo

Tio sensato com bochechas mais brilhante que a lua
Fica causando em cada festa que há!
podemos confiar em tio em cada trote que faça
podemos confiar sim ele sempre é uma graça!