RIDDLES
Static riddles the line
with indecipherable squawks
and hums, the empty-aired
ghost dance of some lost tribe
telling their story in furious,
crackling bursts, where
you have to read entirely between
the lines, while all I was calling
to say to you was, “I’m sorry.”
But I’m just not in the same place
I used to be.

APPLIANCE

On the forlorn formica counter is the old muttered toaster, which choked out toast
grounded in such personal detail, full of dirt, grubby roots and lost teeth,
that it became a presence in the kitchen itself,
a sharp-jawed repository of memory, willing to come alive, while you remained still
and everything around you moved too quickly. Funny, the things our minds will latch on to.

SIMPLE MATH

No, it’s like reverse psychology, but in reverse.
You’re not acting the opposite of what I’m saying
to make you become what I actually want you to be,
you’re actually becoming the opposite of what I am,
operating against both our best interests, thereby
creating a duplex-vortex (better real estate value)
where ample but affordable housing is made available
for every dissatisfied soul that ever gnashed
the watermelon rind of this realm, and wanted more.
It’s simple math. I’ll walk you through it.
I need you on board with this.

SHADOW DOWN

I walk through sunlight that would welcome
even the most callous gallows-man, past the first
crocuses and lilies of the season, gathered in eager garden pews, just unbending
their tender heads toward prayer.
I walk past the dormant up-thrust,
the quickening veins, sprung of the frame I have so long tried to hammer down,
roofless in the rain under all this sunlight, uncertain where to set my shadow,
even now.

BLIND GAME

Who are we without conflict, but slaves
to the cesspool of habit? Like the scorpion
hoarding the last hot rock in the desert,
like the seedling growth gripped beneath
the shell, like a three-card monty game
full of singularly empty vessels, set by
the blind dealer to an endless carousal?

SISYPHUS GETS A DAY JOB

In the old days, they would have called me
a paper-pusher, but now it’s only data; rows of shifting numbers and codes, weightless, mutable. It’s like an infinite ocean of light
I keep forcing through a spigot,
hour after hour, day after day.

But it’s OK. I get OT, full bennies,
and a little girl a few cubicles over
I’ve been putting the eye-fuck on.
It’s good to have a change
in your life, y’know? A new routine.
All things considered, I’ve never
felt so free.

FORLORN

We are shadows leaking into the greater whole, knife-thin mirrors spinning on a dime.
You can taste our emptiness, wafer-crisp and insidious.
We are gone, no spot can hold us for long,
like the memory of salt near the edge of a vast ocean.
And our own limits become the kind of time
you can tell our lives by.

CONSTRUCTION

At the thick-misted East River dusk, dogwood buds overhead just opening,
five high-rises across the way in Long Island City, where there was once just one.

Old Megalopolis’ fresh crown,
uneven and thrust up.
Oh, his will is our will, to break
and unbreak, and never be done.

Just then, two birds trill back and forth among the dogwoods. Another construction
set up, debriefed and sent running, already making room for the next one.

THE WHISPER’S PICK

You intrigue me. In the ghost halls
of meaning, you strum a singular tune;
a blaring, redundant binary code
that roughly translates as,
“I have embraced myself.”
And so the circle is complete.
Love, a vacuum of containment
shared with no one. You seem
an ideal candidate. An overripe fruit,
plucked from a grove doomed
to re-zoning. We could fill you
with something so beyond yourself,
you wouldn’t know what you were missing.
You could stare at the stranger
in the mirror, and not even come up
with your mother’s maiden name.
You could become your own chalice,
the blade of our conscience,
wearing the same clothes, reborn.

STITCHED RED CALLIGRAPHY

I am your accident.
Press your emblem-fist
into the soft wax of my chest.
I want to open
the lung-colored box,
to hear your secret talking,
to shift through the sulfurous
prairie of nerve endings
and bring back a message
that might have flared and died
back there---Can you hear it?
The signal, already decaying…

JUBILATION DECREE

I already feel lighter tonight, transparent.
A wordless jubilation is pumping up through me
amidst the tumult. There is something to be said for this. It is dizzying, champagne-hazy, like when I used to slip naked into my neighbor's swimming pool
at night, arching, breath-held, through the deep-silvered waters--though I am receiving word that those
memories, too, have been declared forbidden.

ENHANCE

You know, it doesn’t look right.
You can’t even say it looks
remotely all right, can you?
My perforated iris just gave up
an over-stuffed clown car at 3 o’clock.
My lazy eye just let a number of things go. Seeing’s not believing, is it?
It’s a matter of bringing hi-def
into real life. It’s an enhancement program—
some of us may not be up for it.
Those tears you’re shedding right now?
They’ll be like bullets
once they say the word, Go!

ALARM

I move through a place of bristling strangers,
each with their hands sharpened by neglect,
and still I can't reach the one I call you.
Each day is not a new beginning. It bursts forth,
contagious with the past.

CUSP

Can the moon tell you the same thing twice?
Can you stand on the same patch of ground
and be the same man twice? The wild reeling creak of the tree trunk in the wind
sets my baby feet running, and the howling
stars take me as their own.

UGLY AMERICAN

I never met a beheading I didn’t like,
or a blood-letting for a secondary cause
I couldn’t explain away.

It’s not my wallet, it’s my cousin’s.
It’s not my ass against the wall,
it’s a instructional diorama.
Take my wife, please!
Oh, wait, she was just stoned to death. There’s bound to be a surcharge.

Where’s a Geneva Convention when you need one?

You always smite the one you love…
Ga nite, everybody! I’ll be here all week…

IRIS

Geese gaggle across a misted moon.
A moment later, another wedge flies by, silent as sleep.
The black-veined lattice of treetops
beg the eyes to look up, but the feet
stay wistfully attached to the ground.
You wish like a stricken Christian soldier to stay far from the ruins of Rome,
to let this moment puddle open,
take you in, close.

MOTION

I motion to have my fingers planted as perennials
in a memorial garden, where disadvantaged school children with magic markers could scrawl their favorite rap star across the scorched text of my fingerprints, and so would wag the New Puppet Theatre of Pride and Appraisal.
I motion that DNA evidence be damned, that I be drowned
past recognition as a wet kitten, that
my head be held up high as I attempt to thread
a needle during a hurricane, that I head a committee dedicated to the end of debauchery, all and sundry,
except as it is applicable in public life.
I motion an end to everything,
except for what we can grasp, right now.

CURE ALL

The sky is filled with emblems of dead light.
All the facts of the world are set in a single bone.
Well, heal the sick, send the tired, mongrel dog
into the desert, be done with it.
We could start again in that new silence. The wind howls as you offer to write me
a blank check. I do a desperate pantomime,
but all I can spell out is, “I don’t care.” You forego the river, where the stricken are laid out in listless bowers. And I am left
with a medicine that can’t even cure itself.

SANCTIONED RANT

I have this reoccurring nightmare that I go to mail a letter, and find myself on every postage stamp. Ohmigod, which president was I? No, basketball player. No, serial killer. Question: What well-known torch singer with political connections was assassinated
on the night of the first moon launch?
I’ve seen plots to start wars scribbled
on cocktail napkins. I’ve seen cures
to diseases concealed in double-speak
on the back of cereal boxes.
And what about today?
What fly-specks of insight were drowned beneath coffee, in the rush to get to work,
on the slow-throated river to mutual decay,
where nothing worth happening was actually
happening? Yeah, try some vision with your
caffeine, you monkey-jawed fuck!

LONGWIND

The power plant thrums through the night winds.
Nested birds sleep, their heartbeats tiny engines
tuned to the monotonous, cabled swoon. Dark father god, hands on the bellows.
In sleep, we all assume the same form, the same curtain of breath passes
from bedroom to nest to burrow,
the same song, cubed and regulated, compacted and long.

WINE TASTING @ STEFAN’S

Robust, radiant...full of the overbearing
puss of a blind god bent on my destruction,
with the faint whiff of wood chips & pencil
shavings, & a pleasantly acidic after-taste...

ASYLUM

Inside this stale vault are long numbers no one is counting--- It is my breathing.
All is bone and grass grown through it;
the slow, rusted rungs are climbed. Sewers hum like black throats I follow
beneath the gutter's teeth.

I am full of the latched breath
of the air-lock, pilgrims turning
blue with envy, or lack of oxygen,
dim tubers which gnaw their way
toward light.

I am the ribbed cavern that completes
the circuit. I am the vacuum that lets
you know you’re not alone.

LONG PLAYING

The just-past-full moon parsed
and dissected by black tree branches
and a screen window open to a taut
Spring chill on this, the earliest Easter
to fall since 1913, to mark when
“our savior” came up quick-fingered
from the distended womb of the earth, and the moon spins in the sky
like an LP at the end of it’s side,
the needle stuck on the lip, clicking.

MY JESUS IS NOT THE JESUS YOU KNEW

Greasy-haired freak still owes me 18 bucks!
Standing out by the servant’s quarters,
acting all shifty, polishing the good silver,
and waiting on a blind date with some chick
named Rosary...

I heard he was once Union, but the carpenters
let him go; too many nails per halo.
I heard his dance card for the spring fling was signed, “Infinite.”

I heard we should cut him some slack, that his endless bounty makes up for lack
of charm, or social graces. But I don’t know.
He seems like any other poor son of a bitch to me…

GRAVE MELODY

I have found Sabina Melody among the graves,
beloved of Matthew, resting in this earth since 1891,
awaiting the Day of Rapture.
I have found the deformed faces of saints, marble fingers acid-eaten and up thrust, pointing the way.
I have found dirty white plastic doves, joined
at the wing, littering the walkway.
I have found an old man sitting on the bumper
of a black Cadillac, sipping vodka from a NyQuil cup.
Doubtless, he has his own way of remembering.

THE DEAD MAKE LIGHT

I have seen this graveyard from the highway
on a hundred family trips to the city. Grey legions of marble flashing by
in sunlight, and always impossibly seated at their center, the massive black squalid factory
spuming smoke.

From our station wagon's back seat, my brother whispered to me, "Of course, stupid-- Where do you think we get electricity from?
They burn the dead to make light."

And another time,
"That's where you lived before you were born."

I saw myself sleeping small beneath the cool green shade, hands folded,
my face blank white marble.
Until somehow from a bedroom in Long Island
mom and dad together crackled the current
that set me breathing.

DEAD WAKE

Nothing much has changed since I left here.
There is a pigeon resting, spattering
the face of another blunted saint.
There is a numbers board clicking
at the Irish bar across the street,
the neon weakly blinking
through wrought-iron gates.
There is the ungiving sluice of traffic
from the highway, not stopping,
constant as tides.

And there is smoke
from some early Autumn stove.
Smoke which rises, urgent and groping, forgetting the fire from which it's made.

ANTI-MATTER OF FACT

I guess our lives are just a metaphor,
like “Towering Inferno,” starring the folks next door.
Give us our daily bread. It’s wafer-thin, and we’re left wanting more, smoke-choked and chained inside this corridor.

EMBLEM

The shriveled-leaf oak enshrined in gold
at the end of my block by the last slanting
rays of sun between the roof tops—
I am drawn to you, like a message
flaming out. You can’t tell me
all that I’ve missed today, as I stumble into the dusk’s first radiance, here
at the end of the weekend, shaking hands with everyone I’ve already forgotten.
But I stand by you for a moment, and pretend so.

SUB ROSA

I whispered that last part: I didn’t expect you
to hear it. It was like the handmaiden’s breadcrumb—
I just wanted to keep you coming. Down the crimped tunnel,
toward the sound that echoed like every mother’s lungs,
toward the rewrite of the first word you ever heard.
We start you there. Class has just begun.

LOT’S SALT-LICK

You said you were armed beneath that lovely kilt.
But when I reached for a bomb, all I came up with
was silk. Well, the truce was breached
by my empty-handed reach, and I’m left standing still. I am Sodom, Gomorrah’s on the pill.

MARCH JAUNT

The seasons collide, each trying to outrace
the undertaker’s advance of the next.
A June sun burns in March, making us sweat
beneath wool, making the rain gutters salivate their icicled jaws.

“The snow turns black in Queens,” he said,
christened with soot before it meets the ground.
“Not like here,” he said.

Here, where the finely muscled hill-top
is splendid and glaring in white.
Our hungry tires want to devour it,
ride a surgical incision up its’ side.
Oh, let crystals salt shaker my eyelids,
let the blue turn so hard I can mail it to Miami!
And who ever said the sun’s not a woman to sleep with? Wake up to find yourself
thawed all over the bed sheets, a spring
chicken cooked without remorse.

INSTRUCTION PSALM

It’s all in the way you point your hunger.
What do you taste more now--blood, or the acrid blanch of certain oxides?
The rise of satellites is intrinsically tied to the deepening roots of gene-spliced tubers.
The underage cocktail waitress showing some cleavage understands herself as well
as an abandoned mine-field does.
The terror of the obsolete grows in every organism.
Remember your first test paper?
Filling in the blanks?
One hesitant scratch of graphite
across a long white field.
Your guess is as good as mine.

VACUUM PACT

When you live in a vacuum, you have a lot
of extra room. It’s like you’re single-handedly
bringing back the lost sonar language of dolphins and whales, gone the way of the power boat.
It’s like the whole dominion over heaven and earth
thing, but reduced to a convenient palm-pilot form.
It’s like call and answer, but you’re always on hold.
It’s like you already said what I was just saying,
and any room for disagreement was decommissioned.
It’s like they say, you can never go home again,
but here I am.

MESSIANIC OVER-RIDE

So, do you think it was worth it?
Speaking as one suckled mouth to another?
You went the extra mile, man.
Not everyone gets to see the name
of the toxin they slip into the school lunch
to keep us this complacent.
Not everyone gets to read the ad
from the inside. Maybe you should
be wearing robes, and I should
be setting your beard on fire—
I don’t know. I haven’t been cleared
for those kinds of protocols.
But I can’t shake the feeling
that you’re a circuit that should be closed.

FALL OUT

Am I that transparent? I thought
these asbestos overalls were a good enough
cover for a first date going south in a hurry.
Do we have a safety word? A shut-off valve?
I thought my death-by-horseback-riding-accident
could make some pretty good press.
Or are you going with a “nuclear incident?”
That’s just like you; head straight for
the scorched earth-and-vicious-spin-cycle, and let the fall out fall where it may
be able to poison a few other footprints
along the way. Your finger’s on the trigger.
I just smile, politely.

WARNING PSALM

You must not keep still, but vibrate, like any given crop or mineral. At least these things understand that
the center will hold, that the molten core is a far-off
goal to grow toward, but whose outskirts offer extinction. My God, that any of us makes claims on the absolute.
That only comes after the disaster. While we're in it,
we're as naked as Kansas. Do you begin to see that in our role as survivors of nothing, we give up
everything? The flash of eyes, the groping reach---truly, an international moment. Do you begin to see?
That in the muting of our differences, we might
lend ourselves to silence?

SACRIFICE

All the dead men in their fancy waistcoats flip you the finger, say, “Give up all hope.”
The cannibals are dining strictly on their own
and the lion lays down in King Tut’s country home.
The sun is always shining but you’re cold
to the bone, and you’re buying steak knives over the telephone
and you’re eyeing the lamb
and the cub and the kid
and you know you love them
but something’s gotta give.

CONSTRUCT

This is a house of worship. You can tear it down
any way you decide. You can say I was praying,
or burning inside. You can hand me the torch,
let me do it myself. You can tell me again
how innocent I am, once it’s done.
How I was chosen, how I was always meant
to be the one.

NAMELESS

Five dark winds collide, and from that, you begin
to weave and fabricate excuses, trying on one voice,
then another, until the right one fits. You are finding
your orbit, the anxious crowds in the air you breathe.
You are an incendiary cross-breeze, a napalm of second guesses. You lay the blame, seed the crop.
You gnaw the fox’s haunch, and call the help line.
You can’t help but wonder about the blank spot
on your diploma, the “X” that marks
the beginning of all things…

TIDAL

Guide me through this open mouth, the tidal scream,
a gathering of waters here at the broken sore.
I am slick with algae, my arm is up-thrust, I am a statue sunk to the bottom of this most available ocean, a convenient back-drop,
something to tell stories against.
I am the Roman, with nothing left in store.
I am the aqueduct that goes nowhere,
the barber with dull blades and the hot smear of shaving cream and throats
that live to tell the tale.
I am the sliver on the ice-choked river, the clanking of loose change.
God, believe this:
I am you without a name.

DREAMS OF EMPIRE #3

Look! It is late afternoon, and the sun breaks open
the window, lighting for a moment what is usually invisible, gold motes clutched into twining cloaks.
This empire of dust, which settles overmy kitchen glass, my scattered, entrenched laundry,
my eyelids as they flicker and doze.

Through me drifts the Revolutionary War scene
that actually happened down the street, the first fissures of the Manhattan Project,
Boss Tweed’s popped vest button long since
ground down past the salt of the earth.

I blink my eyes again. Just dust.

YOURS & MINE FIELD

What is love but the right to devour?

The black-out lights reveal
a yours & mine field. Step lightly now. Through the words, to the knives
dipped in water that can also heal.

REDACTED SCRIPT

Blank kills Blank, to seize the position of Blank.
But Blank was foretold the prophecy, and acted
against it, setting into motion a horrible blank
of his own blank intentions, that ended in
a blank, an unholy marriage, a dirty thimble,
and a renouncement of all blanks.
Blank follows…

EXPLORER

So, the moon launch launched of its’ own accord
and we followed, creating our own
chicken wire & papier-mâché replicas.
For a while we float, as made up as balloons, full of shut air and air sickness bags.
We love the whole idea of a backyard miracle,
that flight could somehow come from this.
But always, we end up with the end of the afternoon, us peering out at the burning spur beneath our window;
a tender strip of asphalt glowering with heat ripples,
a simple driveway waiting to be filled. Dad's home.

BLINDNESS

My family had a TV repairman, and I had no idea
how he sat in front of his own TV, blue-lit and repetitive, with lids barely fluttering beneath a great weight.
He had his father's name blazoned across the side of the brown van that pulled into our driveway sometimes, when trouble arose, when our reception was marred by oceans of static, licking at a sodden, sore wound that threatened to grow. This might be blindness,
but we are waiting for someone to tell us otherwise.

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.