Tiny Sparrow Feet

It's calm.
Too quiet.
My clear plastic bowl
serves as my bird feeder.
I don't hear the distant
scratching, shuffling
of tiny sparrow feet,
the wing dances, fluttering, of a hungry
morning's lack of the big band sounds.
I walk tentatively to my patio window,
spy the balcony with detective sensitive eyes.
I witness three newly hatched
toddler sparrows, curved nails, mounted
deep, in their mother's dead, decaying back.
Their childish beaks bent over elongated,
delicately, into golden chips, and dusted yellow corn.

- Michael Lee Johnson (2007)

(added 07.07.08)

Playful

Nothing
more playful
than a gray
moth dancing
- skeleton wings-
and a green-eyed
cat prancing
-paws swatting-
around a
lit kerosene
lamp
-shadow boxing-
and we all
had fun
in the
moonlight

- Michael Lee Johnson (2007)

April, I've Been Fooled Before

I blink, the electricity is off.
The day has brought
night to an end on top of me.
Lamp oil and flashlights save me
from myself.
I walk in darkness.
In this darkness I don't
see my shadow.
When the wind goes still
cold chills down my spine
don't feel anymore.
I walk in darkness like this
but I've been fooled myself before
at Halloween, fears of April thunderstorms.
April thunderstorms have knocked
the lighting out of me;
pulled the electricity out of my sockets, pulled plugs from my condo.
I lie in bed with only this conversation to keep me company.
I feel like an ice cube insulated
around in my words, looking for images
in shadows, quiet corners.
I creep myself out alone.
Here I lie on my back in bed, think,
then try sleep-with ghosts, witches, spiders, devils,
all kinds of nasty things.
Nothing brings Christ out of closed wilderness faster than darkness being alone.
I blink, and electricity is back on.
April, I've been fooled like this before.

- Michael Lee Johnson (2007)

Manic is the Dark Night

Deep into the forest
the trees have turned
black, and the sun
has disappeared in
the distance beneath
the earth line, leaving
the sky a palette of grays
sheltering the pine trees
with pitch-tar shadows.
It is here in this black
and sky gray the mind
turns psycho
tosses norms and pathos
into a ground cellar of hell,
tosses words out through the teeth.
"Don't smile or act funny,
try to be cute with me;
how can I help you today
out of your depression?"
I fell jubilant, I feel over the moon
with euphoric gaiety.
Damn I just feel happy!
Back into the wood of somberness
back into the twigs,
sedated the psychiatrist
scribbles, notes, nonsense on a pad of yellow paper:
"mania, oh yes, mania, I prescribe
lithium, do I need to call the police?"
No sir, back into the dark woods I go.
Controlled, to get my meds. I
twist and rearrange my smile,
crooked, to fit the immediate need.
Deep in my forest
the trees have turned black again,
to satisfy the conveyer--
the Lord of the dark wood.

- Michael Lee Johnson (2007)

Poem From My Grave

Don't bring the rosary beads
it's too damn late for doing repetitions.
Eucharist, I can handle the crackers and wine;
I love the Lord just like you.
Catholicism circles itself with rituals--
ground hogs and squirrels dancing with rosary beads,
naked in the sun and the night, eating the pearls
and feeling comfortable about it.
Rituals and rosary beads are indigestible
even the butterflies go coughing in the farmer's cornfields..
Cardinal George, Chicago, would choke on the damn things;
some of his priest would have thought it a gay orgasm or piece
remote found in scripture from Sodam & Gamora.
But my bones in ginger dust lie near a farm in DeKalb, Illinois
where sunset meshes corn with a yellow gold glow like rich teeth.
My tent is with friends there we said prayers privately like silent
moonlight. Farmers touch the face of God each morning after just
one cup of Folgers coffee Columbian blend,
or pancakes made with water and batter, sparse on the sugar.
Sometimes I would urinate on the yellow edge of flowers,
near the tent, late at night, before the hayride, speak
to the earth and birds like gods.
Never did I pull the rosary beads from my pocket.
It's too late, damn it, for rosary beads and repetitions.

- Michael Lee Johnson (2007)

Mindful, Mindless, October Date

Mindful of my lover
running late, as common
as tying your shoestrings;
I'm battered as an armadillos shell;
I put my bands around my emotional body
armor native to myself and walk like a stud
in darkness.
Everything in October has a shade of orange you know--
a hint of witch and goblin.
In the leaves between my naked feet
and toes, as I pace my walk in the parking lot,
I count them--
I count them color chart fragments and bites:
oranges, reds, still mostly greens.
Barefooted the time of the tear, the year-fragmented.

I am male battered in a relationship
tested without my testosterone
no sexual rectification or recharging
of my batteries needed.

I lie limp.
Native to myself--
mindless of my lover running late.

Then she arrives.

- Michael Lee Johnson (2007)

Forked in Itasca

I am so frustrated
I want to chew
the dandruff
out of the internet hair implant
and dislodge it,
for a lost love affair I never cared
about and hardly knew.
Don't tell me about my sentence structure,
I am human in these simple words.
I swear to you I curse.
Then the ram of my affair falls short
frustrating my approach to the world
at my fingertips.
No Yellow Pages here my love.
The dial up of my local connection
is wretched, stuck unincorporated
in the land I approved to live in,
monopolized by Comcast the
robbers of the poor and the humbled.
All I hear is the rambling of the railroad tracks.
I grow numb in my deafness faint with my hearing.
Did I ask for your opinion?
I am a frustrated foreign camper
in my own community.
Of a village I don't live in,
but I love this local village I lie about.
I am estranged.
I tie knots in contradictions
when I travel light and far,
visit home I long for a journey
past where I have never been.
Is this the reason I am lost
forked in between
the poet I think I am
and the working man
my bills dictate?

- Michael Lee Johnson (2007)

Jesus Walks

Jesus lives
in a tent
not a temple
coated with blue
velvet sugar
He dances in freedom
of His salvation
with the night and all
days bearing down with sun.
He has billions of ears
hanging from His head
dangling by seashores
listening to incoming prayers.
Sometimes busy hours drive Him
near crazy with buzzing sounds.
He walks near desert bushes
and hears wind tunnels
pushed by pine stinging nettles.
Here in His sacred voice
a whisper and
Pentecostal mind-
confused by hints of
Catholicism and prayers to Mary-
He heals himself in sacred
ponds tossing holy water
over himself--
touching nothing but
humanity He recoils
and finishes his desert
walk somewhat alone.
Contemplative.

- Michael Lee Johnson (2007)

I'm a Riverboat Boy:
Poem on Halsted Street

As sure as church bells
Sunday morning, ringing
on Halsted and State Street,
Chicago,
these memories will
be soon forgotten.
I stumble in my life with these words
like broken sentences.
I hear and denounce myself in the distance,
mumbling chatter off my lips.
Fragments and chips.
Swearing at the parts of me I can't see;
walking away rapidly from the spiritual thoughts of you.
I am disjointed, separated from my Christian belief.
I feel like I'm at the bottom of sinner's hill
playing with my fiddle, flat fisted and busted.
So you sing in the gospel choir; sang in Holland,
sang in Belgium, from top to bottom,
the maps, continents, atlas are all yours.
I detach myself from these love affairs
drive straight, swiftly,
to Hollywood Casino Aurora.
Fragments and chips.
I guess we gamble in different casinos,
in different corners of God's world,
you with church bingo; and I'm a riverboat boy.
No matter how spiritual I'm once a week,
I can't take you where my poems don't follow me.
Church poems don't cry.

- Michael Lee Johnson (2007)

Hanging Together in Minnesota

Two thousand men on death row
in the state of Texas. I've never
been here, still I'm worrying
myself to death.

Webs of worry travel fast,
scan over my memory bank
back and forth like a copy machine.

I refuse to get out of my bed
I'm covered with burnt dream ashes
held in custody my cobwebbed anxiety
sheets waiting for the on looking armed
system of justice to take me away.

Their loud speakers keep screaming channeled
commands through vibrating my eardrums;
their messages keep cross-firing against my own desires.

There must be a warrant out for my arrest.

I will not listen period. I will shut out the sounds period.
Insanity echoes with stressed sounds.

It's Sunday morning, prayer time, I swear I will block out
the church bells ringing on Franklin Avenue, ringing
at St. Paul's Baptist Church.

Religion confuses me like poetry or prose.

I curse I will hang where Christ used to dangle;
wooden cross-post in a Roman Catholic hole,
or was it protestant reformation?

I'm the thief, not the Savior.

I don't want to die in my worry, my words, stranger in this world alone.
I want to resurrect the dream before the wounds came, and placed me in exile.

Long before the sounds of cell phones came ringing.
There must be a warrant out for my arrest.
Mixed in war, thunder, and sentence fragment.

- Michael Lee Johnson (2007)