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Note: Here's a couple from ANGEL OF THE AVENUES, By Doug McDaniel

MILTON MORNING SONG

Celestial heavenly lights blinking
At dawn over Camelback Mountain.
The rose is left in view, rosy
And true. The sky is a blue frame
For madness or his nameless name.
Milton wrote, he choked and smoked:
The mind is its own place,
and in itself,
Can make heaven a hell,
A hell of heaven.
But if this the Void,
it..s a Void of truth.
The stirs of green cirrus streaks
In the cloud, the chair-back
Alignment of Venus and Mars,
The waning dusty moon;
All simple proof there..s no real
Distance between me
And unknowable you.
Silhouette of a Praying Monk,
I smolder and move
to get a better view,
lay my shitty pocket things
into a fire pit and sit
on a merry temporary throne.
Light up. Listen to
a raven..s haunting call,
The trickling of cool waters running
Beneath the surface of the desert:
O Milton, poor bastard, you only
Had it half right. Man, his heart;
The only Void in view.
I climb this tree, O Bard,
And sing a sad song for thee:
Thy sun,
thy surface,
thy furnace.

THE SECOND ECLIPSE

I wept about what I feared,
Feared what she wept,
Wrote up a list of timid sorrows
And faults, fell dead, laying awake,
Trying it out in wordless whispers
Into a mirror: Pride, hypocrisy, manic
Moods and shame; finally fell asleep,
A fuel-stained moment of empty bliss.
She pegged her donkey to a target
And sealed it with a kiss. Told me
I had to wait till the second eclipse.
I turned a half-moon, mooned white my ass,
Unbuttoning my Levi mask of blue ash,
Went back to my puny dry barrio abode,
Listened to the sweet Popsicle truck bells
And faced a loaded lighter. Couldn’t keep still.
Her delicate rebirth. My cold season.
My prayer, a whisper of self-made ritual,
My salty Hohokam tongue licking
Small circles around
The anatomy of love.
You crave my body, I crave you,
When moonlight passes cool.
I live in terror and wonder
Of a woman’s churning bones.
Listening to music
So loud it’s not true.
I could go deaf
Trying not to
telephone you.

THINGS I DIDN'T Do THIS YEAR

Drove down the highway in spring
in a wannabe Corvette.
Thinking of you: As always. As in always.
You know, in Cataract Canyon these days
the runoff will put hair on your ass,
ice cold waters running fast,
hooked on the phone, talking to you.
I had a bill for seventeen million dollars
that I outright refused to pay.
Earlier, the archons of paradise
flew me in for free. I asked again,
and they said, "no." Not this year,
not even the next.
So I ran to kill this thing inside,
crushed nicotine cigarettes
beneath my feet. I burned one and I thought of Atlanta, burning.
I won't be running like Sherman
through the South.
I won't even be near there,
I promise you, no doubt.
Got a memo from Nantucket. Knew a woman there who liked to ...
Then the mail pile fell
and the words scattered in the wind,
convenience man came in,
said it was the air-conditioning.
Still couldn't fix that thing
and tomorrow it's goin' to roar.
Had an image of a pretty girl
and I waited by the door.
Put the Blasters on the stereo,
buck'n'bronco rock'n'roll.
Felt your touch in the rhythm,
sweet pie, blue blue eyes.
There's a beach house near Portsmouth.
Won't be there. Made plans for
a Christmas party on a mountaintop,
another bottle of dreams in black light.

BARRIO FIRE KISS
Don't have much time to smoke,
damn, I line up the little critters
in a row upon the ashtray, unfinished
bizness. And unfinished is as business
does and does not. Fear of failure
and whatnot.
What I do know, well, the teen Latinos
line up in the stairwells here,
kissing up a firestorm.
Time enough to swell in the emotions
stirring in your sudden disappearance:
O gawd, how many cassette recordings
you must inspire. O gawd, that hope
you might listen to this song or that,
so you feel what we all end up feeling.
Longing along, leaving it alone.
A kiss under a streetlight, a wave
goodbye. I guess where there's fire,
there's hope. I don't have time to smoke.

DA VINCI BLUES

Consider the totality of stress
on the renaissance man.
Hustlin' to & fro',
talkin' wings off birds,
puttin' eyeballs on kites,
makin' list of daemons.
Start one thing no sooner
you're burning the next green branch,
jugglin' chaos and oozing blood
to congeal the form,
breakin' time's inscrutable pane a' glass
& gettin' no fuckin' sleep in the process.
There are days when ideas
rise in the sequence
of smoke holes to the ceiling,
and you gasp for air,
allowing the muse to take form.
There is no sex life, nada,
no time for introspection,
only invention and monk's tea,
as if mere air were a seven-course meal
before you turn to bed to weep.

TRANSMUTATION

Turn the bad into good.
Glass into sand.
The agent is the pulverizer.
Beat up the plastic.
Improve the soul.
Trauma separator.
Matter turning to smoke.
Three moon shots separatin'
nine stages to nirvana,
seven steps to satan or Sarah.
Think of performance art
and persecution
as one. Fear nothing
and nothingness will run.
Embrace everything,
everything will come.
Leave this place clean
as when you came.
Reflective sand,
driveways paved
with Cibola gold,
mustang mosaic,
round Indian shield...
creativity expands,
censor's cage contracts,
the tao of two is whole.
High performance standards
increase the odds of survival.
O protected one, carry us,
to a higher plane.
While it may not be apparent,
everything is in order.
Mobius strip, everything eternal,
ebbs out, then in, then out again,
the feedback loops gain force
or devour, depending upon
the potency--or, poison,
of the form. Interfere,
as little as possible.
Live in the present.
Study the past.
Know the future,
nature, soul fire,
is a never ending cycle.
Real time is irrelevant.
Strip mine Mobius:
Reduce, solve, practice
what is preached.
Wear often,
a plastic pop bottle hat,
corrugated cardboard shirt,
shoes and old rubber tires,
for a head like an alien.
Who says Augustus
would never amount
to anything?

Douglas McDaniel is publisher of Mythville.com. In past lives, he has served as editor for such national magazines as the Robb Report, Access Internet Magazine and The Diamond, an official publication for Major League Baseball. His literary efforts includes several books of poetry, including “The Road to Mythville,” which is available at iUniverse.com, “Ipswich at War,” and the “The Kachina’s Son.” His poetry has been published in a number of baseball literary journals, including “Spitball,” as well as such Web sites as Troikamagazine.com. Several poems can also be found in an anthology, “Baseball and the Literary Life,” put out by Birch Brook Press, New York. “Human Search Engine,” part of the series that began at Disinfo.com and G21.net as the Mythville Project, is the third book in a series that also begins with “The Bog In the Hole Where the Animals Fell,” leads to "Godz, Cars & Cannon," then, "Human Search Engine" and "William Blake in Cyberspace," and ends with the most recently released, “Glasnost Lost.” The first three works of what Mr. McDaniel calls “speculative non-fiction” are also compiled in a single book: "23 Roads to Mythville." In 2006, he released two new books, "One Quarter Now, One-Click Wars to Come," which is a collection his most recent essays on contemporary culture, and a new book of poetry loosely based on his experience with pedestrian lifestyle in automobile-mad Phoenix, Arizona, "Angel of the Avenues." McDaniel is currently lives in Telluride, Colorado, as a self-publshed, and, of course, radical bookseller.For more info see:

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