FOUNDLING

I am the wearer of the Eternal Dunce-Cap.
Sparrows comb my hair.
My fingers are diamond speedboats,
my throat a turnpike which is always turning,
searching out the next bleary exit— signposts
full of stark and bludgeoned hunger. I am all
about the off-ramp, I am America’s Next Sweetheart,
blubbering about my passport and extradition treaties.
I stand for blunt instruments and catching the perfect wave.
I am the scissor in your pageant, the open blade.
I’m very worried about global warming,
if that’s where you want to go with this. I’m your foundling, swaddling and hypodermics aside.
I just want to put this parade in the past tense.
I just know I was born to decline this prize.

FISSURE WHEEL

You’re having a memory, or maybe a dream,
or was it a commercial you saw?
Of this kid in photo-negative, a snap-shot
of diffused, uncertain radiance,
but with a slightly poisonous hint to him,
like an atomic blast was brewing
past the strict safety of the park benches;
a fissure of threat and blooming.

You’re thinking about this when your subway stop
comes up, when it’s your turn to get off.
Goddamn. Your day has just begun.

BLACK TRANSISTOR

My great aunt gave me a black
transistor radio with tarnished gold knobs. I fiddled with it, spooned in soft
voices from the heavy, lisping tides of static.
I let it play quiet with candles burning while I lay in the bathtub and touched myself
for the first time to Barry Manilow.

They found her with music still playing low,
from the looming walnut wall console; a symphony station.
Face down in dark-stained roses of the carpet,
white lace doilies on polished tabletops still
hanging limp and dustless, windows shut.
I didn't want to play her radio after that, or hear the same song she might have heard
the music of the roses as she knelt down into them.

PARTIAL ECLIPSE

How I can darken like a stain
back to that same boy, full of tremors and uneven growth.
How the hurdles of third-grade race
fell like thrusting skulls behind me.
How I clambered the rope for yearbook photos.
How I hung there, burning, a wick seeking its end.

RIND

How I set my arm upon you
and it ripens
like the slow yellow smoke of pollution choking under its’ own weight.

How I’m still left with what I’m hiding;
a dirty-curbed snow angel,
a mismatched address, a botched serum, an escape.

DRAWN

In the hushed and forgiving silence
after a snow fall, distant voices
sound like they’re right in your ear;
they ride from shoal to shoal.
Even the abandoned, graffiti-glyphed public swimming pool can seem
like an inverted cathedral, a bowl of hope. The street lights saucer out, the sky
is mute with mist. But I know
the constellations still burn above.
One of them an archer, bow drawn,
eyes on his prey, and his arrow never to hit.
We pulled him that way out of the sky, stitch by stitch. Trillions of miles drawn
in one hushed breath.

WITNESS

In rows, windows across the street flicker out,
their slow flames, their steady yellow notes fading.

Something goes dark in me.

But if I wait long enough, until morning,
I know those lights will come on again.

It's that simple, paying witness to the living.

MY LITTLE TURNKEY

You hold the key.

I check my watch. 2 minutes to Lights Out.
We make some small talk; the weather, the movies,
which latest starlet we’d like to fornicate with.

You say, the tattoo on my right forearm
is actually a hieroglyph, tying me to a proud
lineage of pre-Columbian warrior kings.
I say, Nice pitch. Try again.

You say, It’s really about my mother,
my real mother, the woman I’ve never met.
I say, Can you even read my right forearm? And just like that, the tattoo is gone.

You smile, a little abashed.
Time’s up. Lights Out.
You get up, gently close the door behind you.

Turn the key.

I’m under your watch, but I’m watching
you leave, down the long, scalloped
shadow play of the corridor, a light bulb
just starting to flicker out overhead.

I go to say something, but I realize
you’ve taken my tongue with you,
a mute and indefensible talisman
carefully folded inside a clean, white towel.

SKINS

My bones turned, I was laced to them.
I was called, Suckling, Dick-Weed, Geek. How I begged for them,
for their dense, sturdy length,
maroon and green, to cover me,
thumbs hooked through belt loops, stance casual as flipped baseball cards. Please, I'm old enough. I need a pair
of "Toughskins."

HALF-BROKEN

Here, where late sunlight slants
through green park benches, half-broken,and the first brown leaves of autumn are scurrying, two twelve-year olds flash past,
side by side on mountain bikes, furiously pumping.
One struts his voice, breathless,
Let's check out those dumb bitches down by the swing set.
They're gone, heartbeats coaxing the air like tiny engines.

And I think how much is told through the body, how little I know.

A PARADE…

marches in weak autumn sunlight.
We are ghosts, firefighters,
devils and robots and melting men. Jack-o-lanterns set crooked grins.

What we hide is in plain sight.

SACRAMENT

The night burns. On the tongue,
some beer and last crumbs,
a murky sacrament.
I light a candle and look out.
Bleak, yellow-slitted windows look back. There are always candles burning
down to ponderous white lumps
by the open doors of a cathedral, breathing in easy sways against the daylight.
They burn for the dead, make you
want to whisper.
But these lights are for the living,
their slow, cautious corridors,their wax anthologies and bric-a-brac…

SHALLOW THROAT

I’ve been counting the words caught in my throat.
I know how my own hunger could split me open.
I see the wound of my body exposed in text book diagrams; coiled, naked organs.
Half-finished men trapped there, frozen beneath the icy lid of plastic overlays.
Each one a shallow grey boat,
each one a drowning victim.

INSIDER

Go ahead, count your blessings. While you're doing that,
watch me convert everything you've been saying
to a sagging cartload of Florida-ready credit and start up my own business of personalized mirages in a place
where saw-grass still creeps up through the porch-planks.

C'mon, join me in a tall-boy or two, a few sweatingaluminum delights. I have already sat with the natives
and nodded sagely toward the cicada-throbbing dusk through the screen door, watched bats chase the street light,
handed out some wilted business cards and a few false starts.
Do you know they still spit tobacco juice down here, and talk
about snake oil versus religion? It's quaint.

C’mon, any way you look at it,
any way you cut it.

I'm with you.

SPEED LIMIT

No wonder these kids want to race the open road.
It's because it no longer appears; it's the new frontier, an enforced mirage, breaking speed limits past
the unwavering lights of Burger Kings and McDonalds,
the Mobils and BP Gas. That is the real, jittery terror;
to get here from here, the same that started the same—
the most dangerous kind of anger forms in a vacuum.

WELCOME CIRCUIT

When you see a little circuit
and you want to see it closed
and you’re feeling kind of naked
but you have on all your clothes
and you turn around the corner
Baby Jesus says, “Hello”
and you got that black dog
barking in your ear and you know the outer limits
are right over here
and your teeth are a xelophone
clanking in your head
and you never feel better
then when you feel half-dead

Welcome to the Sacrifice
Don’t you think we made it nice?
You won’t even feel a thing
We will make your blood sing!

A JOKE

Three blind-eyed monkey cowboys walk into a bar.
The first orders a loaded gun, the second, a pregnant banana,
the third, a rum daiquiri.

Process the results.
Repeat.

CAUSAL

And the idiots have scissors
where their tongues used to be
and the mind ain’t willing
but the flesh is free
and there’s pennies in the eyes
of the blind oracle
and you’re stuck at a “Denny’s”
cuz that’s how it goes
and the satellites are clicking
like Las Vegas skulls
and you’re placing a claim
on your own lost soul
and Rudolph scavenges
the corpse of Santa Claus
and now we’re at the point
where the fever meets the cause

SPLIT SCREEN

The sky is a good enough place to start.
I have kept careful notes on all this, but of course,
they will be blurred by sea-salt, the bleeding ink creating
misreading after misreading that will be passed down over
generations, so what's the difference?
I know I live right now in a wild fear of the cavern,
the coffin, the closed lid. Now in the end all I wish is for those two edges to meet, to complete their seam.
I rush my prow toward the horizon, toward the split-screen,
where on one hand I am offered a Viking funeral
and on the other my younger self receivesa visitation by Christopher Columbus, who tells me
to seize the dream, ignore the maps, to turn the dinner fork into a divining rod, pointing the way across an open sea.

It is the posture of the forlorn, the hopeful,
the doomed and the loving all in one. Now watch.
Even as the mist grows deeper. This is the best part...

SURPLUS MEMORY

Sure, I could take to the talk-show circuit,
with its bright-lit carnival of enforced confession,
but what I keep to myself Is left to the mist, to the slow dissolve, to the ellipse of suggested suffering. I myself am not even sure
what I have suffered. Wounds are like that.
You get so used to living inside them
you might miss the fact
that they've long since closed.

SAVIOR

Your forehead says fever like a hot button meter
and I’m guessing you’re not alone.
It’s the multiple delirium of the One True Imperium:
When you’re righteous, you’re always home.
But when the sky is full of hammers
and you’re dressed in fire and antlers-- My, how you’ve grown!

A CAUTIONARY TALE

There was a bumper-crop of tall dark strangers that season.
You had a whole range to choose from.The vox populi sprang from every strangled chimney-top,
all of it a tournIquet of yearning. Nothing a needle and
thread couldn't solve. What was left marched downtown,
what was fiery was voluntarily doused. It might help
to claim radio interference at this point, out in some
far-flung province. Open mouths count as dark spots
in the integrated web. Their tracking system is like
infra-red, only a cruel inversion. So clear,
a bible could be written by it. My God, pain
was started for a purpose. It was made for you to look the other way.

DREAMS OF EMPIRE
Like everyone else I know, I live in fear
of a receding hairline, roots like the last stands
of virgin forest being pushed back, until each follicle
is dazed and isolated, a drunken party-goer
alone on the sun-bleached plaza at dawn, counting loose change, wondering what
happened to his companions, if the concert
is still going on.

Oh, I still dream of slipping into the evening
in a black velvet suit. But once I wandered,
hopelessly delusional, and found my way back
by spotting a Rambo billboard, his sweating gun
leveled against his own townspeople.
I knew I was close to home.

DREAMS OF EMPIRE #2

The 6 AM fish market stunk of guts, it glistened.
From a doorway, a leering stranger gathers his bones
long enough to ask for a light.
As I cup the sulfured tip for him, I see
I am speaking to my own ghost, spun
of clothes I am just beginning to wear,
flayed down to nothing,
to the merciful medicine,
to the buffalo bone.

THE NEW HOLLOW

I float with ruined cargo, heaving on the river.
I am nauseous and blood-fed. Take me over.
Tell me of the still-damp edge within our reach.
Lay me down there, startled on new land.
Let me begin the long hollowing-out…

WEIGHT

I have come to feel the weight
of strangers who live as close
as the windows across the street. Although for me, they weigh
no more than a snatched breath,
a stuttering film clip, something
held in a lidless blue light,
in a grip so steady and determined
it must be a dance; one that is heavy,
twists under its own weight.
Her fingers by the sill,
a mute instrument ready
to draw the curtain, to forget all this,
to say, “the dance is closed.”

LIKE LAZARUS

Like Lazarus, I make of myself what I pick and choose
A raiment on the battlefield
stripped clean from a very lost deal

Like Lazarus, I turn over a stone
find a new leaf that’s more like a loan
It’s obvious, I’m spread too thin
A name’s not a name if it can’t wear a skin
Like Lazarus, I begin at the end
My heart’s in my throat in a box that says, “Pretend”
Take it on faith, like oxygen
that the story, yeah, the story, starts again…

IMPULSE PYRE

I am here, and yet I'm not
I'm in Japan, I'm an astronaut
I am Polyurethane
Witness Protection has changed my name
I'm in every time slot
A nouveau toxic forget-me-not
I split the cost with God's domain
Now line up to feel my pain

Like a lamb to the slaughterI have tasted Zeus' daughter
I'm the itchy fingered fevered
lust you wish could linger

Face it, I'm contagious!

I'm so wired, I'm on fire
an impulse buyers' funeral pyre
I'm the sum of all my parts
I feed the need, hit Restart

I am Megalopolis, spit out
from Heaven's dust
I'm so in, I'm out of frame
You do my work, but in your name

FALLEN PSALM

I am drowsy with ashes.
They swirl past me, uplifted.
Angels.
Angels are grey and weightless,
made of dead things.
Their scissors cut
shadow-lines through the light.
I feel the dusty sleep of their wings. Fallen, their flight can only come
in the burning.