My two latest books from Stubborn Mule Press. The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away Selected Poems 1983-2018 (Finalist 2019 Arizona/New Mexico Book Awards) and Atlas of Wolves, 2019.

After the Funeral in Denver, Driving South into New Mexico

February on the winter betrothed plains. I share an anonymous rest stop with a lady trucker, she cooks something in the parking space on a small grill. I watch her breath as she empties the used grey coals into the snow. Short walk to the fence line and not far beyond it, near the Canadian River, they say a trail stop, some vernacular structure, a homestead, once raised a family, was a life-giving lone prairie light against the darkness and was abandoned un- ceremoniously, maybe to the last straw of a blizzard, or the coming of the railroad, maybe to the last man standing over Johnny Cash singing, "There Ain't No Grave", the night when there was no darkness worth its weight in damnation more remorseless than this prairie dark. the last of the whisky finished with a flourish in the gothic cold, rolled empty back into the black space that was once a well-lighted room. -John Macker >

Savage Defectives

A place in the desert,
once known for its heaven,
its perfected Aprils, became a city
of special hell:
not of Hieronymus Bosch, El Topo,
Peckinpah,
or chastened by Mephistopheles,
but where cities go that are too hot to die,
that perpetually reconnoiter eternity
for dollops of feral shade.

There was a national moment of silence
for the newly
fallen, language was
riding shotgun down the
hot, hate speech streets and
sighed:
you can lead
spoken word to metaphor
but you can't make it think.
Glocks cavort across the landscape now
with demystifying candor and extended clips
of the Sonoran chaos ferment in our
common dream.

Out here,
heavy, Moorish misting morning
hangs low over the foothills,
the white cowled peaks,
the winter temperatures adhere
to lows only whispered and beneath
us all,
a solstice underground juggernaut
of soul speaks: our guns

wait for us in heaven to die.

John Macker

Artaud in Mexico

Wearing his coyote death mask,
he tells the clueless Tarahumara
Rimbaud never met a French poet he
didn't disdain.
Eats peyote by the handful
from a painted gourd,
intuits the last words Sam Peckinpah
spoke to God,
reads A Season in Hell
by firelight
next to a graveyard
with its
fanciful colored metal crosses
and plastic
flowers;
chants: one must be absolutely
modern!
as the incantatory clouds climb like
smoking gun blossoms high over
Sierra Madre.

The Indians have mercy on this
tattered schizoid soul, install his
junkie ass upright on a drunken mule
for the long road home.
They recognize a kindred spirit
when they see one,
his garish, provocative nature not
at all at odds with
the fellaheen.

They dig his otherworldliness,
his seer's heart.

-John Macker
August/2011

Las Conchas

This is the summer of drought.
The playas dried up like cracked words on the lips,
the heat wore steel-toed boots,
the wind pillaged sacred Chicoma Mountain
in dry wrathful blasts. The
snake-tongued flames drifted north on
Santa Clara land. A
cool fire they say,
slow to crawl lone wolf
low to the ground, not hot
like Cerro Grande was:
insatiable, a terrorist. How do you say
in Tewa,
the hell hound is on our trail?
how do you pray away these
orchids of smoke?

The spirits
of the dead drift from grave to
Indian grave ahead of the fire,
some of them grieve for rain,
some are armed and dancing,
some stay safely underground,
cooled by the timber still
white moon.

-John Macker

Discovering the Presence of Beauty for the Temple of Man

Tony Scibella greeted me the other night
on the dawn threshold of a dream,
Said: How’s that poetry thing working out
For you? I was high
over Taos and told him everything
was fine, fine, that I’ve known Her for over
30 years and I still get all tongue tied
in Her presence, my
heart races
my feet swell, I’m
docile and feverish, both, my
mind becomes a circular firing squad
of Catholic boyhood images.
At times, cold sober, I
feel like the most stoned Western
ever filmed—
I asked him what he was doing, he
said just smoking, dreaming, walking
the beach, I go to Hollywood Park
and win everyday.

I asked him: Tony, are you and Stuart myths?
He said, I don’t know about him,
But I am and I know why I am where
I’m at, at
Any given moment.

I told him I thought
Stuart Perkoff had an assortment of mini-
gods running through his veins, that
his human love stories could never compete
with his romance with the Muse,
Our Lady of Venice, spirit-sister of
born tricksters/
Lover to human poets.

I said I’m always getting turned
on: by
a meteor shower high over the Pecos River,
the elongated summer of September, with
its dry soaring highs and star power nights
where the Milky Way looks like
electrically-charged
grace on black velvet,
by the Kid in America sipping
brandy coffee outside the Suicide Room,
by hearing Alphabet mouths
speak Love is the Silence in
dreams of
autumn waves on pale
dawn beaches.
By Frankie’s center ring--

WORDS!
Scibella said it best:

For it is a mad quest
This poet gig
Ridiculous if you choose it
Doomed if you don’t

It chose me, Tony, and you
helped lead me through the mindfield of self-
deception and broken blossoms
of prayer and promise until we
uncovered beauty
on this landscape of sighs—
and she sang like Aretha Franklin.
Emoted like Brando.
Was as silent as John Cage.
Cursed like an Irish Priest.
Exploded into the existential border
mayhem of
bad whisky Peckinpah,
her guns of September cradled
in the revolutionary doomed passions
of Zapata;
she did the bars in the badlands
with Venus,
she flowed out of Miles’ horn like
a death row butterfly,
and in the end, beauty,
was as elusive and mythic as
Zapata’s white horse.
That’s why we craved her. That’s
How she revealed herself
To us.
Salud!
Jimmy, Frankie, Tony, Stuart, John, Philomene,
S.A., David, Larry, Ed and everyone who taught
me that beauty is
always more than dream deep.


--John Macker

"Alaska's Flag"*

Mad helicopter gunship
a hair's breath above timberline
thundering over tundra
dead flat out ahead,
inside,
a drunken pale faced war dance
of serial wolf hunters, arctic whoops
and weapons, singing:

the gold of the early sourdough dreams
the precious gold of the hills and streams

below,
a mythic creature bounds
across the forget-me-nots
into the hills of deep snow,
the midnight sun illuminates
everything;
no longer territorial governor spends a life-
time separating in her mind
wilderness
from soul,
while down below
the epic chase of lobo the tragedian.
Her tattoo reads
"death from above"

the forty-ninth state.


*Alaska's state song