Saturday, September 5, 2026

David Robert








David water colored at five.
David went swimming at the Y.
David pitched in Little League. David had Archie Comics.
David went to Camp Emma Farm. David went to the Ivy School of Art.

David performed stand-up comedy in his Freshman year at Ohio Wesleyan in the Dad’s
Day Fall Festival. Our parents and I drove up for the event. He played trumpet in the band too but was looking over his notes for the stand up routine during the set.

David played Ping Pong and Dean Martin.
David drove Corvettes and a Mercury Cougar with hide-a way head lights. 
David had moroccos in his closet and a bongo drum.

David and I waited for Diana Ross and The Supremes at The Steel Pier for nearly an hour before The Supremes rushed through a short set.

We looked out the window of our Atlantic City hotel room at the Traymore Hotel and thought about the future.
We saw Help together, and Come Blow Your Horn. We stayed and watched some of Come Blow Your Horn, twice.

David had an easel and could pant and draw. He drew cartoons on a cotton sheet and gifted it to Flip Wilson. Flip Wilson met with David twice during a stay in Pittsburgh after performing at the Holliday House.

David was head counselor at Frick Parklett in the summer of 1968.

David taught me to listen to the radio under the pillow.
David and I sat in our father’s car and pretended we were traveling far away.

David was invited to mysterious private sessions by his 9th grade English teacher and we drove him to her apt. somewhere in Shadyside. once or twice.

David was a contestant on The Price is Right during the period celebrities would play for the audience member contestant. His friend’s celebrity answered correctly and won a trip to Paris. Davids’ celebrity, Charlie Weaver, made a joke out of the question and and answered incorrectly.

David had an open heart and the soul of a child. He was vulnerable like a child that got thrown into a fire and punished himself over the consequences.

David was in the audience the day a guest on The Dick Cavett Show dropped dead.

When I was in 11th grade, David took me to the Schaffer Music Festival in Central Park to see Bill Withers. I visited him at his W.86th and Riverside apt. His roommate was the young filmmaker Robert Bordega who would ask David where he goes when he leaves the apt. David would say: Left. Bordgea would shake his head and say BliwasWorld.

David owned the 45 of Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley, which I cracked in half hoping to discover the little musicians that must be inside. Our parents actually bought him another copy but it didn't sound the same.
David had a deck of cards that said David on the back of every card!

David brought our fathers penny gumball machine charms to school one day and the Science teacher Mrs. Strauchler called our house thinking they were precious stones.

David came to pick me up from 10th grade one afternoon and was parked outside the front of the school.  A kid, who had been terrorizing me the entire year was insisting I fight him so we were taking off our jackets in preparation when David got out of the car and the kid backed down like silly putty.

I started an article about Elton John earlier that year and left the notes on the desk in his room. In the morning there was a typed up finished review better than I could have written all ready for me to take to school where it was published in the school newspaper.

I thought David learned to speak Korean when I visited him at his Flushing photo studio right before I moved to New York. He seemed like Zelig transformed into an elderly Korean man even though he was only about 35.

David and I serviced a Rubber machine at the Edison Hotel in Downtown Pittsburgh and David was caught pocketing coins by the manger, who then locked me in an office with a German Shepherd and counted out the rest of the money we took from the machines while David waited in the car. This was our one and only service call together and it was lucky we both got out alive.

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

Daystar




Black night Daystar 

Color of older brother 

Darkening ocean sand 

Sun bathing light

Fading to acorn and plum

Imprinting what developed outwardly 

Sealing inner muted trauma baked sun fire

Open arms of dreaming 

Cascading trumpet drawing inwardly 

Focused frown out the window 

Saturated back to the center 

Jokes at the darkest corner

Crossing the accidental candle 

Traveling the longest distance inside the closing eye.





Sunday, May 24, 2026

Kombucha










                                                           


                              Once the ripped wrapped funnel

                              hop roped immersion

                              Dripped for certain,  

                              Thoughts curdle in the morning sun. 


                              Gravity bubbles beckoning reign in the letting up. 

                              Descending press the fennel gurgle. 


                              Sprouting ahead in a quiet winding of cobalt secretions. 

                              Open ended cast charade foreshadowed the lighting curtain.  









Thursday, March 16, 2023

Road Trip






Rest stop flashing yellow
light up road signs. 
Don’t chew that gum. 
Mud toned antenna tuning out farm wire frequencies.  
Waifing to receive.  
Dirt field snatcher opposing footsteps. 
Symposium of the buried. 
Bodies in rows like crops lay
coffin scented highway concussion.
Stupor came first then supper. 
Once again the loopy stories and stone rubble shirt frame
buttoned exit lacked all culpability. 
Living a dream can take its toll.
Who’s to say the dead ahead won’t be arriving late anyway?


Tuesday, February 7, 2023

The Spill





Secluded enclaves. 
Doped schooled cul de sac constellations.
Doodling eye glasses
in a loose leaf green notebook. 

Drink to swallow the code.
Cracked Jungian belt
orbiting crying echos. 
Corollary sounding Orion mode.
Stargazer conveyor.
Ash trays of bayer empty
space unmapped navigation
radiowave coercion.

Defective canned contraption.
Gravity devastated the flow but revealed its milky way. 


Thursday, June 23, 2022

Mind Reader






What was sky fever is now a wet plate moon mound. 
A crescent grey rose coin. 


Misread commas calming soothing mint. Daily wound wire mileage.
Simmering focus. Fence post collapsing.


Ten yards down and untouched. 
Resounding rewind and solar couplet 


Jitney of trinkets
around the corner, the odds were nowhere to be seen or conjured. 


No sleep ahead despite the upcoming sleep just ahead signs on the 
barns and billboards. Reheated creature. 


Cast back washed iron coffee cup.  
Dust work coated book worm gloss. 


Set back to lower proof the obvious vice. Smoke back the deep breath of the old case.
Inside the water of the wave,
beside the humming of the hive,
along the narrow sheltered seed.
Away from refugee, away from facing the push of sandcastle sorcery. 
Along the sunny side of the draw bridge.


The player reel of danger dirt.
Dark outlook, cast a harrowing net of skeletal choices.


It wasn’t long before the thought of passing it by became the only means of keeping time.
Sacred horns previewed the pouring sad rhythms echoing in the footsteps.


Around the block at morning bay window the heart adrift. Order of chasms, scales announce their watery sequence.
It won’t fall into the dream pipe and change.


If it can’t see a way into the forgotten river it won’t return Itself into the one you remember.  




Tuesday, May 31, 2022

Journal Entry



Circling the ceiling with a red crayon.

Stirring the cereal considering

sealing the circle. Sliding further away.


Partial coats and wicked forsaken sacred whispered buttoned up secrets.  

The open palmed oracle of seething.


Broken shoed and token.

For shadowed and cloaked in opium. 

Deluded and soaked in narcissism. 

Drenched and famished in trauma. 

Tossed and marbled in hypnotic karma.


If I thought about it there’d be no believing in that 

kind of magic. 

If I dreamt about it, there’d be no believing in this reality. 

If I talked about it there’d be no denying its gruesome grinding. 


Got a sound booth in the receiving page. A message in a gray box. 

It was a diagram.  

It echoed decluttering the silence in the old wood. 

It frosted the lining in the soft tube.

It felt the motion of the glowing from the galactic lamplight

It summoned the fuming of the fire sky.

It rescued the notebook of the lost recipe. Missing a page. 

This won’t go on forever.


Sunken beet forest.

The wind below the wheat beneath the street beneath my feet 

won’t offer the code to the angel of secrets. 

It won’t blow the air from the angel of silent breathing or strike a match to the smoke from ash piles.


It will watch trance protected connections to the undetected through a wintery lens. 

Paper offerings sacrificed in peppery cremation drifting even further away.  


Dumbstruck sun drenched snap in a stone bowl. 

Sentence noodle throttle back to a rest. 

Stop ascent at the steep height.

Quarter tones bend to the drop light. 

Blood stained telephone ringing. 

It winds to zero in elastic glass capillary synapse. 

Settled and befuddled moments counting three or four collapses to forgotten starry skies.

It clicks and snaps like a shutter. 

It confounds like a riddle.

It becomes what it has lost. 

It’s ambient lingering ring has five to the one. 

Centrifugal calendar crippled fire to the four. 

In descent through counter balance, rains premonition of this finger and that consenter.  

This subito forte to begin and become That finale of seem. 




Tuesday, November 3, 2020

Teleportation

 





The memory appears like a headless horseman.

It was a carved pumpkin kind of head in a bag of carbon.


There wasn't enough food for the weekend so we rode to a restaurant. 

Remembering knowing the way like it was yesterday.


The thought connects what can't be touched, wearing the absence of itself

like an old sweater on an invisible man.

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Sunday Paper




Silly putty newsprint dissolving into play-dough powder.

Nothing more could airway through the intermittent solid pop

curtailing to the looney headline. 


Caught! Red handed invective.

Cavernous back and forth,

Following all the turbulent folly commotion of funny pages. 


Escape finessing the funnel of opulent dissolve.

Balancing the pendulum of wishing wear. 

Flat other worldly toy soldier. 

Quietly collecting surrenders. 

Sunday, September 13, 2020

Night Street









Distant sound of pounding trash can drum circle. 

Exploding bottles. 

Later in the cab she said:  See, I can talk to you. 

Strange familiar wild stoop drifter. 

Fuel the ritual park fire. 

Dialing the soaked shoe line. 

Opening the numbered letter. 

Catapult uptown echoes off chapter street.

Looking glass gleam. 

Yellow night light sheen. 



Tuesday, September 8, 2020

Hanging

  

 


 

 







Wood from the needled forest. 

Paint from the wet wrinkled dimension.


It sewed into the morning. 

It wove its weaving through the pouring

shattering threads of yarn into rice sized knots. 


Gone are the low hanging clouds. 

Gone are the cartoon trees and the nooks of rope that submerge the dirt filled box.


The par boiled conductor dismantles perspective.

Medieval constrictions. 

Hearing instructions in droplets of syrupy rain. 


The sand in the poppy.

The eye in the onslaught. 


The finger in the mitten.

The fat in the mutton. 


The knuckle in the window. 

The twist in the thread. 


The flight in the sliding. 

The falling of seeding. 


The seeding of sorrow. 

The end of sadness. 


The alchemy of clarity.

The secrecy of sorcery. 


The hollow in the grape. 

The amulet asking.


Oak smoke. 

The commutation after lunar prayer dawdled in delirious delusion its comedy of frailty.

Friday, September 4, 2020

Summoning

  



Time for reconciliation was over locked hands across a table. 

Questions bounce off cavernous walls.

Only in retreat was the presence felt.

Its voice wavered out of focus in unseen channel.

It moved the way beyond its own circumference after miles under capsule.

 

In rows of one the aroma of curtains.

A card overturned when stones were gambled.

 

Beats cropped into offered articles and curds with pepped up crumb nubs in coat button hearts and sea songs that go on without repeating.

 

A power reappears to a forgotten spirit with its foot in the pipeline.

No simple rhyme or cataclysmic séance could bare the lofty presence and incandescence of the return.

Saturday, August 29, 2020

Crime Room

               





Bloody candle wax stained cigarettes. 

Red rice soaked foot print. 

Hollering banshee in the corner the light nurtures 

concealment of darkness.

It flickers and can’t resist partial diagrams of complicitious shade.

There wasn’t a memory of this venomous smell or taste to compare it to. 

No snake charming remedy at the front door. 

How could you know it would recoil? 

Blind and with nowhere to move even in the back woods.

 


Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Opening






An image develops in a dark room.
A crowd moves past rope knotted seahorse drawn pencil and ink ushers.
Mirror strung sand reflections distort gallery sections.
The loose cannon powder from the austere veneer.
Light proof theory worn woodcuts.

Facing mistaking no time to think
the serene machine triangle points to what’s next.
The crooked wave appearing without pitching tent in sand or heaven.
The stuttered cicada echo chanting evening.
The ghosts in a dark row can’t wait to be seen.

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Astral Train




I’d forgotten how well my body remembers descending
its reservoir of map turns down empty streets.

There is no fixing the broken roads phantoms parade through the camouflage.
There is no tempering the taciturn ode to the odd returning.

It wouldn’t resemble a familiar red beacon
or a sinewy splinter in the hood of your wooden urn.

It can’t answer.
It’s lost in the trees.

I’ve seen the rivers rewinding east and west.
It can’t remind me of this aroma or that refrain.

It turns its madcap lid on my cup of mud.
Its broken braid can’t be undone.

Underplaying the cosmic groove of noticing
the astral train through the shadows of its locomotion.

Derailing the unveiling was on the drawing board for hours
and for hours remembering the old ways.


Lyric to Astral Train : https://richardbliwas.bandcamp.com/track/astral-train