Fog

 Fog

The winter fog in Georgia is

Nothing like the fog of San Francisco

Georgia fog is still quiet

Bare mildewed limbs of oak

Entangled becoming disembodied

The dank mist distorting our vision our

Thought

The Pacific fog is all motion soaring over

Hills swift caressing the peaks

Giving moisture to the thirsty ground cover

Uplifting unlike the mist that consumes settles

Depresses us into a cold

Lethargy here in the Old

South

 

Solstice Collage

 Solstice Collage

December  gathers our anticipation

Watching rain turn frozen precipitation

Our winter city on the edge of ice

You invited  me to see today

Your veins your visions organic gay decay  

Icons enameled old book covers twice

Presented in living details of creation

Your wry cold eye your bold display

Images creatures entities that entice

There was nothing I could say

As I admired your art drank your warm libation

Swallowed and savored hoping that would suffice

Jack (for Richard) 12/12/9

Slope of Kīlauea

Kilauea from the air

My photograph

Slope of Kilauea

Confused doves fly into white walls

My complex condo living

Snow mist in the air

Sun cold

Like a character in Murakami's

Wind- up Bird Chronicle I

Pass through the wall of my well of

Debt and discontent

Soar  as I shall to the slopes of Kilauea

Spewing*

What better for a poet to do

Spew words as imagination grows into

Reality

Where my lover sleeps there on the

Slope of Kilauea

Hot with lava

Flowing like a song into the

Pacific

--Jack 12/5/9

* Kilauea is Hawaiian for spewing.

The Lips of Jimi Hendrix

The Lips of Jimi Hendrix

My time is up

Up

Soon enough the passions of my

My my Generation will be gone

Who will know who feel

The sunshine acid

Tab 

That was our experience

We are experienced our

Songs

I have to say are

Beyond up

Into a higher awareness

Lost  in the cyberspace all inhabit

Here now

For us the walls fell

Gender race orientation age

Dissolved in the haze of our eye
Our pupils dilated as

We kissed the sky

Jack 12/4/9

Hearing Ear Ring

Hearing Ear Ring

It (Tinnitus) never ceases
Singing my inner ear electric
Like the creases
In my long
Ear lobes deep as the lobes of my
Brain
The siren hum inane
More synapse buzz than ring
As if my brain all wired up
Floated in a genome jar
And all the illusory world beyond
My ear
Maya moon rising
Maya sun setting
Ultimate unreality
Were You
Your dialectic song
Jarring me with delightenment

-Jack 11-22-09

Tub and Torch

Diogenes by Gerome

from Wikipedia

Tub and Torch


He is honesty
Squatting naked in a tub
Haunting the streets of Athens
Clutching his torch
Seeking anyone
Who speaks the truth
Diogenes is no fool
He knows full well
The mirror yields no truth
Nor Alexander's shadow
Nor his black steed
Blocking the Sun's reason
Diogenes' dry tub
His hot torch
Reveal the emptiness of
Dogma


Jack, 11-20-'09 and 12-31-17

Whirling Dervish

 Grand Bazaar-
with Dar

 Kapali Çarsi

(photo by Jack)

Whirling Dervish

We could not resist the Persian

Boy his black Boss socks in hand

Tight at the edge of the bustling

Grand Bazaar of Istanbul

We bought from him five pairs

We had with us the fragrance of morning

Gardens rooms of jewels of the sublime

Hagia Sophia gold mosaics the perfection of the

Dome of the Blue Mosque none more exotic

Than this boy's eyes

How could I not notice your

Eye on him not imagine you

There on the Persian prayer rug

Tasting with him Pistachios

From our Whirling Dervish bowl

--Jack 10/30/'09

Sonnet to Leander

Photo of the painting from Wikimedia:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Theodor_von_Holst_Hero_and_Leander.jpg


Leander
 

You are the swimmer drowning in sweet love 
Women carry to the tower your torch

Bearded men seek out your white innocence
Pale as the blessed shoulder of Pelops
Your moisture is the elixir they desire
The sight of your bold dive sets them on fire
With your eye looking toward the tower
Where Bright Hero in anticipation

Awaits the naked hour of your embrace

You feel another's touch upon your flesh
You let his wanton wave wash over you

You sink into a swoon beneath the sea
Who would climb the steep steps of mortal love

Who has felt the warm wet caress of god

Jack 10/24/'09 

Mishima

Pantheon

my photograph














Mishima

Who was it heard who understood

Within the harmonies of Mishima

By Philip Glass were the melodies of

Erik Satie

Piano and string quartet

Transport me to enticing Maya Sabha

Memory

Madeleines of Proust sweet and bitter

Every sunbeam moment through the
Window 
Holds potential for another note a

Sound to rend the heart

Joy in the encounter of a new soul in the 

Pantheon where enters such a column of light

Raphael rises from his rest

Hadrian embraces Antinoos

How is it on this cold sun filled day

How is it there is music in my long lived life

How is it in this period of adjustment

That the strike of a piano

Key
The soft friction of a violin
Are fine Sebastian's arrows

Mishima's ecstatic sword entering my flesh

Jack-- 10/18/'09

Silence

In Eclipse

It was when I met her
Your grandmother
That I knew you loved me
For you were as proud of me
As she of you


It was a simple day in Tennessee
A cookout for family
Yet I knew this was no
Ordinary gathering
It was your declaration


Now twenty years on
Your grandmother gone
You make no declaration at all
There is only
Absence

Once more I see the tide go out
Watch the full moon wane
Our lunar cycles spin in vain
Yet Zones of Totality dark as night
Must yield the sun again


--Jack Miller,  fall '09

wolf

Image from Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GermanWoodcut1722.jpg

  

Wolf

Another full moon

You are out gone

Into the deep night

Flesh hunting

You would not devour

Me

I am not your prey tonight

Fresh blood

You desire under the full

Moon

While I slumber in a nightmare

Full of my werewolf

Love and Death

Death and Love

There are two questions in

Life

How to achieve lasting love

And how to die

All else is myriad pink 

blooms

On one camellia bush

The rest is approaching thunder

Deepening damp a
Breeze

All actions from the meditation of

Bodhisattvas

Rantings from Libya

Chattering of talk show hosts

Sipping champagne

Downing Irish ale

To slipping naked into a lake at

Night

Are questions of love and death

As surely as green grass needs rain

Apricot Jam

Apricot Jam

My day began with cheese toast and

Apricot jam

Sitting on the screen porch

Our porch for eighteen years

I warmed my throat with French-pressed

Coffee

It was the fourth or fifth or sixth day of

Rain rain like never before here

Cool like the cure for melancholy

The Times had a long magazine article on

Jung

That now a dozen hours later I grow eager to

Read to take to bed our bed

To read as I let you go

San Francisco

Let you go as the ambien lets go my
Brain 

As solitude merges with dream


Jack 9/20/09

A Way

A Way

Recall our afternoon
Nashville
Napping abed
An embrace kisses
As we confess stress
Loss of temper we take out
On each other

In separate cities
We suffer still
Outburst hurt feeling
Resentment
Yet keep the
Awe
Twenty years of
Bare bones love
Inspires.

For Darryl, September 2009

Starr's Porch

Starr's Porch

There is plenitude on your screen porch
Where the doves from Mexico sit 
As the wind chimes deep intone 
The smile of your Buddha

The tweet of small birds in your yard

While you are away tuning your car

Bubbles of Buddha effervesce
From my champagne
As the smell of your terriers

And the fly buzzing from screen to screen

And the yap yap of your rusty ceiling fan 
Make me laugh

You and your porch are

Pure plum happiness.

Jack-- Sept. 2009

Ted Kennedy

Death has taken you
You who survived the horror of drowning
survived your high minded brothers
Noblesse Oblige
The knights of Camelot
Camelot as Jacqueline put it
Well

More than survived
You changed the nation
You enacted the dreams of your noble brothers
You turned wealth and privilege into
Work
For the poor the disenfranchised the victims of
Bigotry

From the day my father amazingly voted for
John F. Kennedy for President
To the day in my high school Latin class
When we heard murder
To the day brother Robert Kennedy was shot down
In the height of his love for and by so many
People

From those days to this
As I have learned to admire your commitment
To me as a gay man in the South
To the cause of health for every citizen
Even as death by cancer took you
You have been the ideal the good American
Statesman


Jack Miller, 8-28-'09

Elevator

Storm, Savannah
photo by Jack











Elevator

You call inviting me to
Your marsh
Riverside
We cannot bridge
Secret public
Instead across Savannah
Storm spreads
From the twelfth floor
I see steel gray
Shadows rain and lightning
Bolting
So many steeples poking
Up into these shadows
Wet aching
Like our lovemaking


Jack, Summer '09

God the Gerund

Opening of a
Wildflower
photo by Jack

God the Gerund

God is Being
God is the unfolding of a flower
God is the nurturing of nature
Spinoza -- the naturing of nature
God is the experiencing of ecstasy

Loving is God
Living seeing understanding evolving
growing dying existing in memory
Ascending rising like bread
Swallowing a rare red wine

God is diving into the deep
Awakening from sleep's delusions
The feeling and the burning with passion
Having compassion
Finally the arriving at the Beginning



Contemplating God is our realizing
Of the ideal out of the real.


--Jack 8/11/'09

Dog Bound

photo by Dar












Dog Bound

Filling the morning air
Dry raw barking of a
Dog bound confined
Alone sexless in its yard
Yelping with determination
Dementia
The noise of frustrated anxiety

The reverse of cock's crow
Bird song
Mindless joy in the morning air
Dog's complaint
Cacophony without restraint
Slave craving its master
Snapping at everything else

Such want and loneliness exists in
Dog's cry
Cough hacking up the pain of man.

--Jack 7/8/'09

San Miguel de Allende

Fountain, San Miguel
by Jack


You cannot know her
Enjoy our photographs
Were they Walker Evans
Avedon Ansel Adams
Paintings of Okeeffe Frida Kahlo
Marion Perlet
Who loves her
You cannot know San Miguel

Nor I who have walked her
Streets
Knowing her no better than
a woman I have fucked
Three times
Heard her history felt kisses
Embraces
The abundance of being inside her

San Miguel de Allende
Unattainable mystery still
Breath stirring my blood
Heart
Cock's crow to Scorpio


Jack Miller
Mexico
June '09

Second Wind

Drawing by Don Bachardy



Second Wind

Through the clouds accumulated
Over the past week
Well into my second flight
Wanderlust
As I gaze from my round window
The High Sierras below
Knowing I am in Mexico

Turmoil of a week of
Weak emotions since another
Journey to California
Overwhelming
Wanting to stay home
Resisting the predawn Taxi
Hating the air terminal herd

Foreboding
Feelings of an old man
Without heart for more
Gazing at desire filled youth
While reading of Picasso at 90
Creating art as a magician
Wand intact casting spells

Glad for Mexico
Where desire death life are
Real as Don Bachardy's nudes.


--Jack Miller
flight to Mexico, 6/17/'09

Floating

Pool at Kalani

My photo

Floating

Deeper than the passion of

Sex

Floating face up naked in a pool

Midnight

The pure black sky

Sparkling with a million stars


--Jack 5/29/'09

Amber

North Georgia Moon
(not Atlanta)
by Jack






Amber


The amber Moon struggles to rise
Through Atlanta's humid mists
Mists of auto exhaust fine particle
Emissions May musk fragrant
Putrid
The Moon Struggles in a sky with
Maybe three stars in a night
Overlit with the incandescence of
Thousands of glaring street lamps
Lighting the asphalt


The amber Moon goes
Yellow to almost white
Atlantans filled with fright
Lock their doors houses filled with
Light
Bright white light to protect
Atlantans taking pills to sleep
As the Moon courses through
Trees shadows threatening
Their lives




--Jack
May 9, '09

Shuck the short term

RAINCLOUDS Puerto Vallarta
By Jack




Shuck the short term

Shuck the short term memory
Recall instead chianti we sipped near
Volterra
As the thunder claps as
flashes of lightning sizzle the
Rain
The Beach at Puerto Vallarta
Appears
With walls of rain over the Pacific
Better to repeat the pleasures
We had
Than whatever it was happened yesterday.

--Jack 5/2/9

The Death of Naomi Vine

Ad Reinhardt
Abstract Painting, No. 34, 1964

Death of Naomi Vine


Like an Ad Reinhardt painting
Black comes the news that you
Died seven years ago
For seven years I had thought
You were choosing art
Had imagined you sitting
As in the painting of you
Nude surrounded by art
Being art
Imagined what museum you were enlivening
You younger than I
All your energy creative verve
Vanished
Into the spirituality of the paintings
You love
Black as the purity of night.

--Jack Miller
For Naomi Vine
4/30/2009

Image from the National Gallery of Art
http://www.nga.gov/fcgi-bin/tinfo_f?object=52391

Who's Facebook

Who's Facebook

We are being sucked
Down the net the internet
World wide web
News source meeting place
Sextronic intertwine
Reading messages massages
Longing for email that is not
Spam

McLuhan saw the face in a tetrad
Media mad where hot or cold
"Past times are pastimes"
Our nerves our nervous systems
Linked connected hooked neurons
Electrically excited into an ethernet
Like "The Lawnmower Man" lost in
Cyberspace

Whose face book photos jpegs
Videos word processed power
Point to our displacement
Our dispersal our discontent
As Shakespeare disappears
Into that nexus only browsers
Grasp in their paneless
Windows

Jack 4/18/'09

Lost Fear

Kara Walker 1991
from a video by
Jack







Lost Fear

Looking at your images baring all
How is it that yours was a life of
Naked fear
Seeing you dance
All confidence all self assurance
Abandonment to rhythm for us to see
How is it that you were in
Throes of anguish

Have you now
Undone that fear overcome what secret
Sorrows you endured
Seeing your vision of Southern
strife abuse pain surrender loss
Oppression
Have you healed yourself
With your art

Has fame been a confirmation a
Burden another source of fear
Will you emerge from the shadows
Or flee back into them
Will you find peace of mind
In the gray between of
Black and white
Transcending the past

-Jack
for Kara Walker
4/'09

April Thunder

April Thunder

Dark bruise clouds
Thunder tornado snow
All in the first week of
April

Pink and white
Scattered azaleas and dogwood
Green yellow sludge washed from
My red eyes

Over the hills of
Georgia

--Jameson 4/5/9

Below the sternum above the gut

Below the sternum above the gut

My pain is right here
Below the sternum
Above the gut
Dead center
A stab that keeps sharpening

Is it too much sugar
Coffee acid fat
Grease from pizza
Excess of packaged food
Gas

Or Is it you

--Jameson 4/3/'09

Sara

Sara

A smear of pink yellow purple
Garden in the rain
Makes it impossible to be
Awake and quiet
My mind full of memory
Sailing at dawn past Sicily
That summer


My aunt with her sly smile
Is eighty today
My distant family gathers
Like the ancient Roman senate
A forum of disconnection
As we sip wine and pretend
To enjoy chicken and fish

Marcie reminds me
The wind and rain erase it all
Except the image of my high buttoned
Grandmother standing in the garden
Sun on the azaleas
Her daughter Sara
Smiling like the Mona Lisa

--Jack 3/28/'09

Stimulus Package

Stimulus

In these days of winter lethargy
Economy falling like sleet
Shiny and cold
You offer us the warmth
Of your stimulus package
Diverting us from couch consciousness
Waking us up with your elan
Vital to our every interest
That big big package
Making us want to spend
More
With spring so close
We can feel it
Wanting the ecstasy again
Unlimited wealth unlimited credit
Surely those screaming children
Out on the merry-go-round
Spawn of exuberance
Past
Will take care of it all
One day
And we can feast now
Aroused by your stimulus

--Jack 2/'09

Somnia

Somnia

Every night
Sirens
Screaming fire emergency crime
I see Atlanta burning
I see gun shot wounds
I see the darkness
Before dawn

Each night
Sounds
Stopping sound sleep
Tinnitus
Inner sirens whistle
Ear and brain
Heart beat breath

Every night
Machines
Click on off on
Heat air condition
You in the adjoining room
Restless as I awake going
From computer to staircase out

One sound alone soothes
The train with rhythm and horn
Carries me away

Jack
2/'09

Knots

photo from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu

Knots

Khipu colors harmony
Contrast the lackluster life of routine
Of nots
Of not a leader, not a nabob
Not rich not poor not flying
First class to Bariloche
Not Cuzco not Peru
Not young not famous not mother not father
So defined gives definition to this
Journeyman lover of one Inca
Poet thinker teacher seeking
Music rhythm passion epiphany
Weathered and eroding like Macchu Picchu
Wanting wisdom on a cold afternoon
Thinking of the rise and fall of cultures
So many knots unraveled
So many drops of blood secret secretions
In the aesthetics of khipu


Jack, 1/'09

Bouquet Obama

Bouquet Obama


What has it to do with me
What new flower will bloom in my garden
As this gathering of two million
As this multiracial leader
As this handsome bold man
As his regal glam wife
Walk the White House lawn

Will wealthy moguls no longer
Skim the cream from our milk
Will the mercury cease to infect fish
Will the air clear at long last over
The Grand Canyon
Between rich and poor black and white
Gay and str8


From my winter garden filled with eager buds
Comes hot desire for a full bouquet.


Jack Miller 1/21/09

Moon River

Moon River


Such a trite name for a song
The house I enjoyed that summer
By the river now called yes
Moon River
Who could have thought
Of such a vision a full moon rising over a river
A moon like tonight big round white
Obscured by a river of rain

We lived there that salt summer
Naked in the garden the postman
Scandalized we kissed too two men
On deck chairs facing the river bees buzzing
Johnny Mercer and his wife sweet as rain
Cto visit he tipping his Greek sailor cap
A memory in the winter rain

Moon River in the Marsh
Narrow at low tide I imagine
Allen Ginsberg
Sitting on the dock
Dilapidated dock and he before the moon
Buddha of the swamp grass beatitude
All the anguish of eight acres dispelled
Not quite dead despite the
Smell of marsh gas and
Cawing flapping crows...

--Jack, Jan. '09