Butch(part 1)

 The english bull terrier was a popular feature of the party.
It hopped forward and back and barked.
Many tried to make it's acquaintance and failed.
The freckled dark haired girls jeered the new guys who walked into the party. The animal was curious about me. But I wasn't going to give it the opportunity to fase me infront of forty guests.

It was the hosts birthday I guessed, his house upon a terrace above the roadway below.
Motorcycle repair clients had come to pay and congratulate the guy for his birthday.
Many of the guests formed semicircles around Butch, as he gave speeches about motorcycles.
How he'd fixed them, adventures he'd had on them. Attempting to share new material. With limited vernacular old bits getting in the way. But the audience was getting there, smoke and empty bottles littered the open garage.

He had his die hard friends, the guys that wouldn't leave his side. and half a dozen women who represented their girlfriends, yet Butch was already familiar with all of them at one time or another.
And they were the fuel for Butch's speech, they knew when to "whoah" or "hoorah" strategically, more from practice than tact and wit. 

After his "I am the best fucking shit you have ever seen" speech. He got to passing beers out and making jokes about the actions of some of his guests on those previous drunken nights of the current early spring.

SImple baby

 It blew a bubble
It told me life was sacred
It opened the clouds and gave sunlight
It chooses it's preference

it negotiates its vulnerablilities
it ingests and excretes under supervision
It spells love and wonder
It points and glares

What did it see
It chooses its likes and dislikes
It doesn't recognize its own hand
It got born recently

Felt like it

 Townsville, Australia, early afternoon. On wooden benches outside a nice cafe.


Both of us were seventeen
I went for your hand
instead of pulling back you left i there open
So my hand went into it

Told me about passions
we noted where they intersected and overlapped
It's quite a thing when the body vibrates with joy
But when the heart feels and the brain thinks it's just a...

Curse the hormones the forwardness fostering awkwardness
The sense that we can when we must go slow
Coffee arrived and conversation was a day
With it's shades and it's beams

You reached for my hand and I left it open
Then a young man came to the table
I thought he was the server
He sat not angry, not happy just present

I looked back at her her face neutral,
"Who is this?"
"It's my boyfriend." she said casually.
"Why did you call me here then, if you had a boyfriend?"

"Felt like it"

Parade ground address

 On flagpole arena were the gathering crowds
Their differences passing between them

Words rise as weapons once did
Arguments rubbed smooth by repetition

Swarms swallow every upchuck
The other person's idea into ear

Eyes move across the faces
searching for another interpretation

The words climb into cracks in convictions
out through the throat and into the voice

Straight into the waiting ears
of a multitude willing to listen

Wald tamer

 The leaves are september drowsy
the turn will come soon
The wald tamer come skipping
and in the small glade he is a believer

and his flute believes
his lungs believe
the trout believe
Even some of the humble villagers believe

and he didn't just get his inspiration from the buchen baumen
He got it from the roackfaces looming down from scowling alps
He got it from the sour turn to winter
and the sweetest blooms toward summer

Of the villages winter carvers
Who fashioned his flute from a choice piece of walnut
Yes he played in awe of their very creations
As the snow drifts and perpetual cloud put the valley in darkness

There were useful hands making things of worth
And thus the Wald taming flute man played in homage
And of children's games he played
And of village gossip he played 

Even of the stillness between equinoxes
when it was either too hot or too cold for living things to move

Flintsbach

 In the dell a small village
Untouched from the outside
That went on with it's way of life
When the rest of the world
ran wars of attrition and holocausts

Nestled between the foot hills
leading up to the alps
Every resident had their jobs
So everything would get done

Through the village ran a small creek
The rock bed solid no loose stones
Black rock inside and outside of the water
Summers cool, winters less freezing

Hidden from the world
Or ignored by it

Flintsbach lay flat beside the Inn, but the mountains began almost immediately, rising behind the farms as though the valley had made space for the tiny village, sheltering it from the necessary Hells of the continent.

The wall now painted over

 Certainty my uniform
Iron my flat hesitation
Buttons on every doubt 
The ones you dare not press

You'll never see me calculating
Never read words before they leave my mouth
My tone and vocabulary measured
Every response you surface memorized

Laugh when the joke has died down
Shake hands with your sense of humour
You won't read the truth on my face
Which version of myself I've spilled out

I'll never let your conclusion catch me
Everything is left open even when the door closes
Practising the predictable that gets me through
Another evening of being guessed about

I will turn my aloofness into anecdotes
Make every failure sound like an accident
Tell you I randomly ended up where I am
A piece of me wants to claim credit

I'll never let you see the machinery
Grinding beneath the plain surface
You will call it fitting in or camouflaging
Go on with that assumption