by Gino Sky

How many tools are required
to keep us going on D Street?

Plumbing, electrical, carpentry, painting, gardening,
medical, mechanical, computers, grooming, cooking,
washing, scrubbing, spiritual.

And that’s for amateurs.

At what point do we become professional?
At what point do we become professional human beings?

With a Ph.D. at being human,
that’s the rub.

What about the bums living on the street?
The Nobel Prize winners?
The Dalai Lama?

How many tools do we need to get it right?
What about getting right down to the basics?
Simplify. Pare the redundant.
Reduce all things to their simplest forms,
as someone once said.

Will that make us more spiritual,
or more financially efficient?

What about happy?
The golden mean?
Being the fool?
(The fool’s card in the Tarot deck is the god card).
Now that’s a mind bender.

Being rich, i.e. money?
That one left town along with the railroad a long time ago.
What we have is a house, garage and shop full of loving stuff.
Oh yes, a six foot garden gate shaped like a butterfly.
Like one of those bar doors in Hollywood westerns.
Splits in the middle.
The butterfly has red marbles for eyes
and two antenna made from 24 gauge copper wire.

A garden path that goes around the house
so we can circumnavigate our home when necessary.

It’s like circumnavigating our stuff as spiritual ceremony.
Lots of flowers to talk to and nut hatches and butterflies,
and snails who believe escargot is not their future.

Inside stuff, outside stuff.
I think the important thing is to keep}
the outside and inside as one. How’s that for
spiritual insight. The epiphany of epiphanies.

Keep the doors and windows working,
the glass polished, and forget about
all the rest on the list. That’s about it,
except put out cheap beer for the snails
once in a while
and forget about our next reincarnation.

Doesn’t add up.
It’s one of the paradoxes — like being a vegetarian
and refusing
to offer mouth–to–mouth resuscitation to a carnivore.

Like all the prophets tell us . . . just kiss the fool
and get it over with.

by Gino Sky

My head. A ragged beard
covered
with snow. Burning candles for

heat.
Using the ’lectric toaster through

the inner–spirit

the expense of being winterized

a luxury. Saved only for the
service station’s harem.

The postfreudian heart show
down
the Danube
A lack of oxygen Be–

Ins. Can

I be IN & still feel
the
touch of man on my face.

Ready for the Acid Test?

Ready for the invisible land
at
my throat. Mouth. The Pioneer Spirit
reaches
its own renaissance.

In

the
loins.

In
side the migration.
Melting history into wax amulets.
Intentions.

’Lapsing into silence.
The sea begins again. Human
shape
reforms itself into beauty.

Touch me

where the world begins.

Touch you
and
the sun inside
of
You.

The 12 signs inside of me. The
zodiac
all being me.
Not one month
not a Leo. Not
one
chapter of the I Ching at any moment
of
arrival. All the text from
where
I stand holding the sun & earth between
my
thighs.

Once I ask
the sticks roll coins in changes
my footing.

A difference of prayer. A
difference of

motion.

Inside

time to roll through

The action of arrival

the prayer understood.

by Gino Sky

I rode out the west like a velvet tornado of american
baby blues with my chromed rig atomic beer and
high school steady indian girl driving me hot out at
nineteen cents a gallon from Pocatello Idaho through
every western novel of shotgun marriages and
manifest divorces and I didn’t understand what it was
that ghosted the highway except there were a
thousand miles of indian towns and cowboy bars
where we drank and sang the sweep along hunkered
streams and everything was american gospel so long
as gasoline and dreams were as cheap as buffalo stew.

This version won the Boise Weekly Literary Prize for fiction in 1997, with the rules of using only 97 words. Published in a slightly different version (Gospel Hump) as a broadside by Limberlost Press, 1987; and, in a chapbook, Spirit Bone, Limberlost Press, 1992.

by Bob Perelman

Wake up,
touch senses
to what’s
out there,
sorting what’s
changing from
what isn’t.

Claim your lane
but be realistic,
use real time speed,
leave eternity
for the fundraisers.

You may not
have been here
when today was built
but act like it.