Rooster Coupling with Train

The rooster courts the Empire Builder            
Flying floating naked
Past midnight with hours to go until the light
Echoing up Yaksum Canyon, bouncing back down  
They keep at it and keep at it!         
He has spirited out of the barnyard  
She has jumped the eastbound tracks  
Their love is happening  
Shimmering mourning petal punctuated notes            
Dispersing  sweetness, rosy ringing animation            
A spectacle sneaking into every sleepbound ear        
From old whiskey soaked orchardist  
To rooting babe  
In our little mountain town  
His strutting  praise studs her mournful dew      
Dogs whimper, paws twitch fast by the hearth  
Horses whicker, greying  embers  shift and drop           
Shameless  intertwined exploring, rising in the valley air      
We hear them          
Every time is the first time  
for the rooster and the train.            
             
Morning's flush, quickening          
Does not want  to stretch and rise,              
To pad downstairs in PJ's, sweet and bleary-eyed.            
Expectation stays  spooned in bed          
Co-sleeping with memory and reflection
 Still hoping to be left, tucked in by the tale        
Good morning honey,    
…Stood up again?!            
Why bother getting dressed today?            
             
Your train  wants daily coaxing,            
Half rust, half bright-aged polish,              
Worn as every seam erodes        
The track is a silver river,  
A girl’s  ribbon easily jumped             
Like a rock in flowing water,    
Like your canines and your molars  
The soft denim at your knee  
There is simply less and less…  
In the mobius band that winds  
Between the border towns of dusk and dawn  
That split your dreamtime universe  
From the island of your daytime world  
Can you take no prisoners when morning comes?.            
         
Little Hunger asks at breakfat bewildered,        
Frowning pouting knuckling sleepy seeds away,      
Nearly crying     
 what did I come in here for?!            
Was there an assignment?  
Did you hear it?  Did you write it down?            
My whiskers are gone!            
I can’t feel my legs…        
No,  I said I don’t want any!  
Did you hear that sound?  
I am looking out of eyes like holes  
Badly cut in a paper bag  
I cant see much,  
my breath is wet and loud      
How was I dumped here from where I was going?  
Where did you come from?        
No, I said I don't want any  
The sound in this room is dousing my dream  
It seems I was chased here from home.  
?            
   
The train and the rooster are gone at dawn  
The sticky sweet residue of their crimes  
Hangs  afterscent in the air  
Stirring coffee clinking spoons  
Slamming doors and starting engines  
Determined to drill rude into the big hipped day  
We have our stupid marching orders  
We blush and look away  
Talking louder trying harder  
To stay on the suddenly senseless track  
Of small and ugly working tasks  
As wisps of their love    
Cross our lips and stir the air  
                     
Are we to pursue and capture them like convicts?          
 They hide away, they take our senses hostage  
They grow thin, evade the light and vanish  
Hidden until night in the grotto of our dreams  
They throw smoke signals  
They send shots across the bow  
We hear a distant raindance  
And wasn’t that a shaking in the very ground  
Like a new mountain rose somewhere,  
Or a mighty tree came down  
Our fugitives of dream and night    
Who bend the rules and bomb the track  
Threaten havoc, merging, love making  
Chaotic mingling over space and time  
Raw coupling, singing crooning painting longing  
No  brakes and in the end no tracks  
We ride at night  
Ao merry band  
We leap from the plane wild fallng free  
Spinning  towards the ground  
We spot our train and pull the ripcord  
Drawn back up and slowed  
We leave the liquid night the host  
We harden as we fall,    
drawn back in to the cold of being one  
We tame our crazy aim  
to land somewhere hard by where we left last night  
When the liquid love of the rooster and the train    
Swept us up in a sweet lurid tide,    
And so remains for each of our days  
is we rise, we are capitve, we fall.  
   
   
         This poem stops here.  Another begun bu not done:
I  
A child leans over the bridge to listen              
White foaming rapids carrying, burying voices          
Faint notes leaping  slipping flitting braiding whispering beneath          
A word here, barely there, slips through          
Roaring band of water noise          
Like radio static, 3 AM television fuzz,        
Or the sound between Mercury and Venus            
He heard it before,  vast, full, troubled, mystic        
Something about something, lost            
The words reach, miss, cry for him, drown              
Diving back circling, cycling,  blipping        
An avalanche of frothing sound        
Like the passing cry of thousands riding some prayer wheel      
Birth and death, approaching present passing        
Falling in a chorus doppler sound           
Torrent walls of full disorientation concentrated           
       
Listen, close the eyes            
Your Down turns up, dizzying falling            
Volume jumps the barrier to balance;            
Amplified the sound is washing              
Singing codes of a foreign orbit            
Sublunary radio chatter rising            
         
You've just risen, not yet made sense            
Of objects, depth, movement, noise,            
The sediment of you settling back to silt            
After the stirring of your night          
Now you are only One.         
Would some message stand and wade out, if only you could scribe            
Decode the flotsam chaos          
Which flows from: Far realms, and the Inside?      
             
You thought, I’m dreaming,            
I’ll just pinch myself and go back home.            
But I never woke; the strange just ebbed and flowed daily              
Learning to navigate a foreign land, with nearful amnesia            
These four imprisoning corners of my new being              
Stung and filled with an ache, an impression            
Of a still warm form from some body nestled sleeping              
So recently the heat still lingers on soft grasses, the hollow speaking            
Shape of the sleeper who only just arose and left your side            
Crossing the misty meadow at dawn, leaving,            
Cobwebs between you tearing,          
Cold air snakes stealthy where once you pressed against me           
You slipped into the wood as I awoke,              
Last glimpses between the trees,              
Kissing away memory, robbing me in sleep            
         
Waking is actually an obliterating ink, a sinking        
Erasing memory, mercy intent to ease pain,              
Dropping the heavy blank blanket of peace and unknowing              
This now is your home, brideprice paid;    
Stop trying to remember more          
From some forgotten before?            
When it seems dream            
A note in your pocket,            
"I can't forget you, tonight can we have more?"              
             
A sleeping fever leaves hunger            
A brand where lips burnt your brow            
Turning my waking life into a search for smoking memory            
Burned into me yet gone            
To this myopic monkey on my back            
The daily world pales in black and white            
A magnet on my crown in a world with no lodestone            
Leaving me stupid, spinning, senseless, a dedicated fool.            
Chasing my tail and speaking in tongues for no one            
Ever distracted from taking this place seriously            
The knowing that something was lost, left,              
Is ruthlessly ground down daily            
So I erode to a nub, not much            
In the bobbing flotsam of such unhinged dreams            
             
Stung with abandonment I cannot speak            
Save through these few strange words            
Vessels of not-naming left behind            
Not built to ferry thoughts like these            
Confused, they flee my mouth, receding            
Refusing to wear their ideas            
Ignoring my will, thieves, bent on their play            
Like the rooster and his train            
Running away from me up the canyon            
Leaving me without a paddle            
They won't be penned    
In my castaway life,              
They consort crude and bawdy          
Trying to siphon the light-blood marrow              
Rob what flows in my veins            
What makes a dull shell pink            
Even the ocean              
Which should be heaving beneath my feet            
Has fled in the tightlipped night.