A man needs a place to just be...

good evening captain... good evening son... just another muleskinner blues...

So the snow peas are ripening on the vine, sweet and juicy freshly harvested
the zucchini are coming up as are my carrots
as for myself, these things are slipping out of my mind as fast as I can.
I'll take the easy way out tonight and post another poem.
Some Muskrat ramblings and other goodies to come soon I promise...

Here are two new ones from my new house and giving due to my garden.
Chasing away the lonelys with poems and digging in the dirt...

There is an almost full moon

Stuck in the dead limbs above the backyard

Chuck Berry’s singing rock and roll music

Baking powder biscuits warming in the oven

There’s a whiskey sour on the kitchen table

Nothing has grown out the back screen door

That doesn’t exist in small patches and

Different shades of tan and light browns

The almost full moon is staring down at my watered garden

In a backyard where nothing green has grown in years

Fresh tilled dirt, turned with a pick ax

Mixed with coffee grounds and bat guano

Freshly watered

The smell of life and soil and fertilizer on three-year-old blue jeans

There is a goat head stuck in my ring finger

Marrying me to the back yard and an unspoken lease

An agreement signed with toil between me and dirt

A lease signed in harvests and metallic watering cans

Obligations to roots and worms and wilting brussell sprouts.

untitled  (with apologies to ann struthers who always said that untitled poems were a sign of laziness; sorry i'm feeling lazy these days)

I wake early now

to wash other people’s dishes

from last night’s midnight dinner

leave the drying rack to be emptied

later in the afternoon and another

load of dishes to fill their place.

Needs listed in scraps of paper on the refrigerator-

potting soil

Larger gloves,

row separators for snow peas

More orange juice,

sweet and sour

And for someone to crawl into bed with

Or out from in the morning

before I wash the dishes

Thirty and alone and working a coffee shop job

I guess they are right when they say

Men grow up later in life, I guess I never got the memo

And forgot how to grow old gracefully

Or in the arms of any one else

So I button my shirt, click off the bedroom light

Think about the morning crossword

And wake alone early with the sun

Accepting of my lot in life.

once again these are rough drafts... They'll get better as time goes on

dig your fingers in the dirt in the morning when the soil is cold and damp and human like...  

Touch me make me feel human

Solidarity Forever... Work hard... Be safe... Ride Free... 

two finals down and one more to go

just nine or so more pages to type and another semester is down.
Kind of enjoying this perma-student thing.  Not a bad way to go.
The wind is picking up outside, I can hear the dirt shifting
spring time again i guess,
Someone pointed out that this year is my golden birthday... 31 on the 31st of this month.
it is what it is...

here is a poem i spat out on demand a few months back for a fellow worker...

There’s a heaviness hanging over the Sandia’s in the early afternoon

Capped in anticipation and the southern edges of a blizzard system

Dropping blizzard conditions in Denver

Low, northern rambling clouds in Albuquerque.

There is a glare off the rim of the white coffee mug

The sun stressed and hanging in intervals between breaks in the clouds.

Breaking and stretching themselves into patchwork

Over the Rio Grande as they lose momentum heading west towards Grants

And a badlands of lava flows and mud.

He’s left post-it notes of haikus

In work break rooms

to push out algebraic formulas from his frontal lobe

frog

To make room for music lyrics and abstract theory

pond

Recipes for blended coffees and caloric counts of whole and non fat

Concoctions that leave you bloated and restless

kerplop

His espresso is cold and the foot of his bed empty

Three wool blankets leave gaps between each other

Like the clouds over the rio grande rambling east

Towards grants and a train yard of rust and ankle sized ballast

It’s Febuary and the tree’s remain empty

Arms stretched in prayer for an early spring

A winter without moisture and the sky sinks heavy

Over the mountains with false prophets of chills and apple cider weather.

maybe the next one will be more recent maybe not...

until then keep up the good fight.

solidarity forever... ride free... be safe... ride hard, die harder

First post and a new poem

Well Howdi
So here goes nothing
and I must say I am pretty darn good at nothing.
Welcome to Muskrat, he's small, furry, opinionated, likes his music and books and his garden and the what not...  Right now the sausage is burning on the stove top and the screen door is hanging off its hinges begging for attention but that will have to wait for another day.  As for now here's a new poem or two rather that I feel pretty satisfied with at the current moment.  But you know how it goes, what is life without constant revision.

The poets hands listening intently to Philip Glass playing six piano Etudes

Folded hands framed by creased blue jeans

Silhouetted against the darkness

Illuminated lines and veins

Fingers, three outstretched

Cross hatched charcoal shading techniques

Adopted by fingers at rest

Stark and lonesome like the faces in Walker Evans

Depression era photographs

These hands have seen the trouble

Lightning Hopkins gin soaked voice preached

And they have seen such beauty

Play piano on a Tuesday evening

Applause

An orchestra of hands collaborating between compositions

To compose a Philip Glass symphony

The musician framed in

by a stark Japanese brushstroke

a lonesome microphone stand

behind the arched back of the pianist

simple and black and linear

his arms crossing to strike a low note

I hope you enjoy and more poems, ramblings, reviews of music and ideas and books and the such to come as my mind spits them out...  

As always solidarity forever, and be safe and ride free