All American boys_meditation on memory_for Jerry Waldon
I watch it waving daily in the Ohio River Valley breeze Across the street, at the confederate blue grey cinder Block building, a tire shop It protrudes out off the building on a rusted pole Every roll of its cloth in the wind The red white & blue Of my childhood days of always being the Miniature shadow of a veteran Those days of growing when my mind was a better Sponge Soaking up the wisdom & knowledge Of silence, war, and all American boys Who traded their Pittsburgh pirate dreams For an m1 & orders A life time ago, his and mine too Always bound by the road, mark twain & hank sr, beer & Indiana nights Bound by blood, by memories long gone Lonesome blues lifetimes of mad Knowledge DNA mingling with chemicals Altered through war, readjustment to Society; & a lingering ghost of youth Digging out the skulls of mans gods All American boy days, red white and blue Covered in napalm & agent orange Hony tonking, living fast busting loose Madison Indiana out to the world I remember going with him for tournaments All over Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky Any time he gave me money & I ate without him to save My money I would leave the waitresses a poem Just a teen & already scribing the road between the seen & unseen Its waving to the east, jutting out from the wall Across west main st, looking out my window Its' rolling form red white 7 BLUE SOUTHERN INDIANA WIND BLOWS THROUGH ME NOW AS ROKY ERICKSON SINGS A DIRGE TO SWEET DREAM & GRAND CHILDREN CONVERSE OVER A TABLET I HEAR THE VOICE OF AMERICA THE VOICE OF MY FATHER ECHOING THROUGH THE YELLOWING & RED LEAVES I HEAR THE VOICE OF FREEDOM AT THE EDGE OF THE OHIO RUSHING DOWN TOWARDS THE MISSISSIPI Oct. 13, 2020 The cool October day, sunny, hushed traffic busying by Mind funk locked trunk cant look through dream junk Hushed echoes of Ben Johnson, ancient Skalds, Or Bards; the dreaming oracles of eternity Grandchildren's brief voices in the kitchen All adults off guard; they seek the sustenance Of refrigerated cheese & play My skin goose pimpled, I recite the constitution I claim it As my balls to contemplate the age & sing Madly the temporal odes of the decayed body Of liberty Its' ink made from the blood of millions Its paper recycled broken treaties All the roads lead where? I laugh to myself, knowing the only quote Like that says Rome. I digress towards prosody now; The hustling life of Scott county like back- Ground music The cool October day, sunny, hushed traffic busying by Mind funk locked trunk cant look through dream junk A POEM for A.C.M. I dream of a belly dancer in a yellow sun dress, cheeks red And full of the motion of bodies Her twirling blond form, singing some kind of dirge To invisible crows Her skin glowing of a mid western sun Eyes like orbiting satellites transmitting the ecstatic hope of mothers & lovers Everywhere Voices in the dark, sje spins Whispering her songs To a lost star POEM Peeled back scars like gorilla tape revealing The seeping of stars Rushing water sounds Polished stones of eternity Madison-Milton bridge The once Charlestown bridge The Louisville bridges--- The sound of the furious water Like static or white noise from a billion televisions Glaciated currents of my childhood nightmares & dreams The mad coddling of the geo magnetic songs Of the Ohio river valleys Ectoplasmic oracles of genetic history A mirror of madness & culture The looking glass of mid Americas Addiction to visual waves from A flashing screen 6 feet from them As they drowse in to pillows Of LED light Muddy waters, willows, spiral notebooks & decades of revolution Around the sun The rushing water sounds Good beautiful river vibrations of diadem Perceptions Eyelids itch with the blood of gods Adventure time my whole life, woods Hugging the Ohio River like a warm lady Echoing the secrets of memory The baptismal of mind labyrinths Traced out in bones & history POEM #2 (BUTTERFLIES) Listening to the slowly fading out screams Of butterflies The machine gun beats of drums as fast As artillery spewing forth The music clings to ribs To memory the soft parade files Along The stirring of something unseen & powerful Fingering the senses I watch the vibrational ripples of air Twirl like some kind of dervish From the 13th century Or like monks drunk on wine Dancing through streets As if the mad infinitesimal energy Of our own divinities Clasped tight to hand Dragging our vision through Town “you got to meet you a few Animals at the crossroads” Their filming the scuffling figures Scuddling down the sidewalk At dawn Following them to the ledge High above them In the brownstone next To the liquor store Their vibrations sing with the sun rise The last poems of a drunken poet Crying on the shoulder of his muse Waiting for the unseen To pull them from the ledge The image is not new The holy renaissance of senses & star c(h)ords The music lingers Sinew, piss, and rivers Undiluted spirit of youth clamors “everything must be this way” Cyclical waves of never ending Impermanence Ever see the lips of an ancient bard Chapped & surrounded by hair Weeping 3 stories in to the night Calling to the dogs or the gods Looking for the lack of gravity “Tropic corridor Tropic treasure What brought this far to this mild equator” Looking for something new Like wine growing from the decomposing Bodies of Aristophanes & Jim Morrison Listening to the slowly fading out screams Of butterflies POEM _ Meditation i was thinking of a uniform Uniforms. how skin could be A uniform. Thoughts like an invisibility cloak Wearing it like being consumed In napalm Strange idols burning with blue flame Lounge chair made of razor wire & Mortar shells History's caustic finger nail scratch Across the bardic swirl This quarantined year lazily slouching by Looking for the absolution of freedom All the cyclical lips & their gutter odes Pouring from great speaker With a milky way subwoofer Permeating the rhythmic turbulences Through the living Organic microphones The laughter of clowns & muses Til their hips cant gyrate any further Or their livers stand the test Of the ambrosial significance Of love The slow embers of flesh in the throws Of passion & mortality The melting of beings in to singular Forms The tongues of unity flashing Beyond becoming Uniformed bodies of oneness Uniforms of the living Appearance Like individual flags or Syllables Or bio waves of invisible Waves that form whispering Bodies like static through Consciousness In to images we seek our selves Unrelatable to stars til we Take off the uniforms of our lives & Float on portrait by Ryan Heacock Merritt Waldon. Born September 12, 1974 Madison, Indiana just few blocks from the Ohio river. Born and raised by U.S. Air Force veteran of Viet Nam and his best friends sister. Merritt was almost named Stroh’s Waldon; after his dads favorite cheap beer after rotating back to world. As long as he has been able to hold a writing/drawing utensil he has dreamed of being a published writer. spending a lot of his late teens & early twenties traveling the united states & writing constantly, eventually returning to Indiana marrying having children divorcing marrying etc divorcing; still writing living . Has had work in Sun Poetic Times, Mojo Risin’, Beyond The Pale, One Hit, RoaDDawgz a magazine for the voice of the homeless ( under the pen name Ru mi), Smalltown Monthly, Crisis Chronicles, Cheap and Eazy Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Twizted Tungz, Fearless, Voices From The Fire, Bedroom Anatomy Lessons, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Black Shamrock, River Dog Magazine #1, Fevers of the Mind, Be About It #18, Americans & Others anthology, A Cooch Behar American poetry Anthology, Strange Gods From The Prairie: A Gasconade Review Anthology, The Sparring With Beatnik Ghosts: OMNIBUS vol 1., and Cajun Mutt Press Features. He has three books of poetry published; Oracles From A Strange Fire co-authored by National Beat Poet Laureate Ron Whitehead published by Cajun Mutt Press, then Pistol City Blues & Madison Street Screams and Smoke Break Poems published by Dead Man's Press Ink. 47, he lives and writes in Austin, Indiana. https://tinyurl.com/ne6m3j73
Fevers of the Mind 