JAMES RUGGIA


Endless Capture
It began small. They talked off a fleabag hotel's night clerk

for a few hundred bucks. Talked faster to out the hard earned

bucks of working gulls. They sought bigger better cons, stepping

stones to a rose and eucalyptus ground above the wash of blame.

They swept the counter clean and spilled a terrible pleasure into

what had been so very hungry. Then debonair they made the rounds

of high toupee and bright station. This paunchy, bald wheeler

dealer's fine defects charmed the nation's money men, buyers

epilepted on their campaign, but when the files hit the open air

managers emerged from departments on fire as they scrambled from

the unpaid ruins of their con empire. Once captured, our stars,

voice breaking in front of 13 cameras, had a message to preach,

if they could reach just one person's prayers. Turn on a light to

watch the roaches walk to reach a side door beyond the crowd.


The Hard Way
Back then he lived a pet store turtle's life with its little rock

island, tap water sea and plastic palm. Always in the fort of his

big popularity, he'd shout your deepest secret to the gym class

gorilla boys watching Monday Night Football in a suburban bar.

They didn't like it and they punched him down to the bottom of a

circle and kicked him from all points on the compass. His 

striding self confident smile gave way to the blinky demeanor of

a man riddled with shrapnel walking out of a burning town. An 

alien intelligence struggling to communicate as fire storms eat

forests off his planet.






Sadness Of Mind
He wants to thaw the pleas written in stone over the library.

This man prefers to climb bricks, to tighten his years, slowing

his life to a store of hours, ticking away 1,000 miles from

misery. In the old days, parents stripped the bad parts from

their kids. Though vowing the power to bring justice; to see

blame placed is all the greatest cop can do. Two dozen fears

crept into his life as unwritten rules changed and streets

shifted beneath his feet. The rock of ages cracks and fears come

unhinged to flap out of an old stone church where crash victims

sit on benches out front. In towns across America, a sadness of

mind sees that the same world used to be just fine.








Cherry Blossoms
When chilly rain poured,

	Hiroshi, feet sunk

in mud, pushed on to secure

	a warm seat in daybreak's annual shrine

beneath a dipping branch of blossoms,

	of wet morning's wonder pinks.



Then the sun emblazoned

	riverbanks and temple tops,

		glowed the blossom's appetite.

He soaked in throes of light,

	inhaled the golden entrance of spring.