"RIDERS

Lean Riders--clean Riders! YES! on the tall-neat-beautiful horses
passing across terrain of green-and-growing things, gun butts
atwinkle, metal of spurs ajingle, chaps and rider-use boots
real-horses-up and gliding across sagebrush -- and Texas. --NOW!
   WHAT?!
do we have on the fast-down sprawling of concrete that stretches
on -- ON -- the long-gray-dread-bones of this country that loooves,
JUST WORSHIPS! its wheels -- AND "Death-on-the-Highway" threat-constant
on those long-gray-dread-bones? WHY!! WE HAVE many (MANY!) horse-powers
in oil-grimy-suffocates, where paw the small, mighty hooves of pistons
up-down, up-down up-...in the slick-dark holes (enclosed) that ARE!
CYLINDERS! ...how many CYLINDERS! ya got there, HEY? Twelve!!? OH, my!
YAY!! gee whiz! I have an "eight". -- We're speeching on gasoline engines
here (the "fabled" internal combustion) and wheels attached underneath to roll
all hell out of Land-Miles, especially those set in Distances-paved (HIGHWAYS!)

BUT now, let us consider just "wheels two and cylinders few," (rigged) set-up
(engineered) to "split the wind," and slightly resembling (reminiscent of) those noble
horse-rides-of-the-old-times, because there is a steed-like object here,
and one Rider shall "mount up and take off." BUT this is a "hog"! called
that in the language of the hogmen -- the "hog riders," themselves.
(Real road-slurpers, YES!) And mean little pig-eyes boo-peep out of MUCH
hair of the Riders on their "hogs," AND not ANY (discernible) Higher Purport
than the Going -- hog wild. -- Jewel-flapped saddlebags, fringe work
to impossible! unnecessary optionals to god-awful, the flash and the flaunt of cheap-show
to Ostentation's hell's limits, and the handlebar thongs lying out rigid-and-long
to whip like sticks in the air thick-made by the wild beast's wild passing --
THAT is a "hog" being ridden by a "hog rider." AAARRRGH...pop-pop...phuuummm..."

--David R Bunch, The Heartacher and the Warehouseman (Anamnesis Press, 2000)
[Need i add, his prose is much finer...?] Bunch's poetry makes a good case for the
use of different color typefaces, i think (instead of all that typographical differentiattion),
just as Dickinson's dashes might be better replaced, for us moderns, with a half linebreak...

I have a poem in the new anthology from Nthposition, Times New
Roman (a typeface, alas, that i really like--!). Be the first on your block to download the whole thing for free!

If the impeachment of Clinton was "about the lying, not about the sex", then i think they have a good
case for impeaching Bush, eh?

Here are Three Tankas from Richard Wilbur's recent Mayflies.

"On Lyman Flat

Scattered raindrops fall
On the roadside trees, jolting
A leaf here or there:
So troops stand at attention,
Motionless but for eye-blinks.

All Hallows' Eve

They are not the dead,
These sheeted tykes at the door,
Asking for candy:
But they are our successors,
And we their ghostly elders.

Wild Asters

In the frost-quelled field,
Asters yet fly the yearning
Colors of desire.
All honor to Aaron Burr,
Whose last whisper was "Madame...""