RADIOS SING HEAVEN: V

Somewhere, a bunch of sequined
black girls from Detroit are still singing,
their hair all curled alike, rigid waves
black as wax or glittering tarmac
after a rain. Singing the honey-sweet
failure of romance, so sweet
you want to start crying.

Like they were saying goodbye
to their childhoods, singing
to their crazy-mad boyfriends
who leave them for some stupid
teenage highway, Harleys, hot chrome
throbbing between thighs. But tears
streak the grease of his mechanic’s face.
He still has that song pounding in his head.
He still dreams hopelessly of deliverance.

RADIOS SING HEAVEN: VI

Hear that? Radios sing heaven,
rising off the dashboards
like a cheap hymn.
We’ll all keep time, clumsy-fingered,
and I’ll come back, I’ll sing along,
I’ll signify the air with my talking.

GURU NO

May you pray for the closing of jaws.
May you pray for such a thing.
May you pray for the thin forgiveness
that exists between lines that haven’t
been written or spoken yet.

May you pray that this doesn’t even begin.

NOTHING BLUES

I got no problem saying nothing.
It’s on the tip of my tongue, down
to the Isle of Sunder.

I got no problem saying nothing.
It’ll keep me company,
like no other.

I got no problem saying nothing.
With seeds split wide,
and no place to gather.

I got no problem saying nothing.
A wet, black bough
gasping in the ether.

HALF A MAP

Is that what they call your face?
I remember a time when it stood
for something besides the five
pillars of salt it does now.
Yes, I’ve been balancing
the apocalypse along with
the budget, and baby makes three.
I’ve been left speechless
enough times to know
every word is pending,
that only a wolf in bureaucrats’
clothing could hope to take
your howl, send it out on the wire,
and have it back within the hour,
losing a little in translation,
sure, but already on its’ way
to turning on itself.

SUTURE SELF

The incision was quick.
So was your come back.
But you won’t miss our reply.
What’s one small wire
in the great, cannibalized sprawl?
We’ve sectioned off your excesses,
drained some swamp land,
got a great redevelopment
opportunity for all parties
interested. You’ve already
made nice with the velvet ropes,
the SOS, the bright yellow
crime scene tape.
Your position is clear.
Now we have to define it.

QUESTION

How can a smoke stack
limned in sunset
suddenly seem so beautiful?
Or the pink-tendriled steam
cloud from a rooftop vent?
Or the distant, glass and steel
skyscraper, now a brief,
flame-filled skeleton,
like some pagan sacrifice
at the border of our memory,
to stave off the coming night?

NOTE TO SELF:

Careful what you look for
in the mirror. Negation vortexes
are not part of the bargain.
They’re off the table, non-negotiable.
Difficult to control when unleashed.
Buy an averted gaze, instead.
A self-taught lie. Universal patent,
pending.

SHELL GAME

Have you guessed my identity?
Of course not. I have ladled such hints
with dollops of cyanide.
Have you spun the threads of my eye net
to their logical conclusion? Of course not.
Such dramatic dividends are limited.
Have you seen me for who I am;
a smooth-faced fellow laying all his cards
on the table, just asking for the tell,
the reveal, the release?
Of course not. That’s my cover.
And who are you again?

TOTEM

This golden-flamed totem had to be
doused before he spoke; of another time,
an amoebaed past, one tendril to the next,
the smallest of touching, an uncertain
grope in a larger ocean, and there was no
talk of god, or gods, or anything,
just the busy, hard-wired communication
of filaments wavering in the currents,
who would think of nothing past
the blind brush of immediate contact.

“Greetings. I am Dr. Hayden Grace,
of the Wellspring Institute, and I’d like
to take you on an amazing journey
through the exciting field of bio-psychic
fusion technology to a radical new process
we’ve developed here, called…

CONVERGENCE.”

APPLY POMPEII DAILY!

The graven few might not have much to say,
stricken just short of the wanting urn, but I can fill in the gaps missing in mid-translation,I alone speak for the dead, outcast to memory’s
scarred and buckled edge, I alone have gained
their confidences, the exclusive interview, even
as their mouths are paved mute.

PILGRIMAGE

From your lips to god’s ears,
just the barest, stripped whisper.
From your heartbeat to the gnashing,
oil-drunk reservoirs of want,
merely a metaphor that could lend
your walk across water an extra mile
or two, your miracles stuffed and bundled
into a couple of old steamer trunks,
your budget cruise built on a pyramid
scheme of endless savings.
You, a hollow pharaoh, barely able
to cough up a decent blight or wind,
skimming off the top, never ready
to come in for a landing.

ROVE IN REPOSE

Because he looks in the mirror & sees
a perfectly groomed troubadour of love,
bringing forgiveness to all the land.
Because his meatloaf beats out
his severed neighbor’s recipe,
because the maggots are no longer
second-hand, because every map
is labeled, “Disaster” in every far corner
where we’ve already run out of ink,
because the money shot begat the cart
before the horse was flogged to death,
because he demurely crosses
his legs during art class & calls, “Break!”

FOREGONE

When you gone walking
on that good ground that’s
been sold from underfoot,
when an eagerly gnawed root
is called your very own,
when you claim two shadows
at Customs when you only
had papers for one, when your
hunch-backed cousin wasn’t just
a ploy to get a distant family member
over the horizon, then you know
you’ve been sold out for a lot less
than the story adds up to.
Then you know you’re just change
passing between pockets.
Then your alibi can’t have
A Once Upon A Time.
Then in a word and you know it,
You’re fucked.
Just finish out the time-line.

PRESS, RELEASE

I brought my throat like a birthday present
to the off-ramp, my fervent wish, an end
to all collisions, colluded orbits, frictionless
get-togethers; no tail spin parties allowed.
Take the black quarries of my open mouth
and make your own headline,
or discharge it, octopus ink
in an ocean too dark to even notice.

MAPS

Oh, to beat the grey matter tattoo,
past your run-on sentences
and awkward silences, down
to the scalpeled iris, the seed
of the word you wanted to say,
couldn’t say—Guess what?
It’s never been said. But
its’ cast-off husk is already
taking root.

DOMAIN NAMELESS

My eyes are like tea steeped
in petty recriminations,
my tongue tastes like gunpowder,
my sweat a salt-bed to lay down in,
where the pronged ribcages
of the slaughtered herd still show,
my voice is an interview-by-knife-point,
my soul the carrion crow’s laughter.
I am well schooled in the ways
of our fathers…

FLICKER

The Chrysler Building, as seen
from the end of a suffused, sun-setting
boulevard in Queens, is a mirage.

The old woman, the smile
stitched on her face, her eyes
blind to cross lights, is a mirage.

Tell me what I see, then.
A late afternoon collapsing in on itself.
Me, a willing cripple,

bowing toward the river of quick renewal.

CORRUPTION PSALM

Looking out the train window at sunset,
the sky-writing overhead just starting
to dissipate. The lazy smoke curly-cueing
into indistinct eternity helixes,
or lost DNA strains. They’re trying to say
something. They’re still words,
just the same.

BREAKING SHORES

If the rain were a telegram
then I’d be talking to everyone
at once, all of us under
a singular, spreading touch,
as tires sluice, and cast-off
voices echo down slickened night corridors, as
the desperate seek same,and the quiet
keep their own company;
a litany of raindrops outside
their plain-framed windows, a certain memory made uncertain, wavering, tide-like, breaking
and unbreaking, never
staying the same.

IDENTITY DOCTOR

You’ve got nothing in your palm
but a hybrid abolishment witchcraft,
a flower bloom in reverse;
the seaming of lips, the erasure
of fingertips, magnolia blossoms
made blind to the sky.

This Spring time hypodermic,
a symphony you’d best euthanize
a lull to cash in on, again and again.
Rub a finger, start a fire.
God bless the combustion
at the heart of every engine.

Delicate amidst sharp
stones; winter feet
on summer ground

Sparrows shiver
on telephone wires
the first rain in weeks

Resting in the cool shade
of a graveyard; car horns blare
past the iron fence

TRANSCRIPT

The immutable few round up the check, split
the difference, shell-game our fates with dizzying
dispassion, set up road blocks and listening posts,
pay off the angels of our best intentions, detain
any second thoughts, flay our dirty dreams
for the last bit of stripped flesh,
solve the mystery of Mona Lisa’s smile,
leave an opening in every conversation for,
“I’m not really into that.” (pause) “But I’ve got
a second cousin I’d be willing to sell out.”
They thread the camel through the needle-hole,
free up certain schedules, massage the truth
till it’s lackluster and compliant, moaning,
“Shiatsu, mi amore!”
We are all made up of what we give away.

MEMORY FIX

Do you mean to say that's even possible?
To fill in the missing pieces, to add caulking
to the dividing line of the misunderstood,
to rejigger all the missing fragments
like a cocktail mix on a flight that's
already going down for the count?
To add floatation devices to half-thought-out
rough landings, and to scribble me into margins
where I thought I was gone for good?
Call me a survivor in this scalded landscape;
I want a 12 month trial subscription
with an option to buy back my highest ideals.

CITY LIMITS

Strange, how your blood corridors
match the sewer systems of this town.
How you can call every ebb and flow
in kindness and cruelty, how you’re
already sending back that complimentary gift,
how if you cleared your throat,
you would have nothing to say right now.

The same wind which cracks
pines in Alabama rattles
my half-shut window

My apartment dark and still
only I make
the floor boards creak

Bread crumbs for sea-gulls—
they'd go for my eyes, too,
if I were dead!

ALTARED

All of us bowed and hunched over
the cross-circuited altar, gathering cinders,
left with a trojan horse god-husk of a cause
running on the purest flop-sweat...
Okay, I admit it---it was such a rush!
Getting you that close to the fever-line
of believing! I had a bet running.
Five angels with a suicide pact
against a blood transfusion to open arms.
What are the odds?

HOSTILE MEET

The elms, like stooped elders,
crowd the streetlight.
They’re all about tendriled benediction.
A face is forced in harsh relief.
It’s you, with a key, with a knife,
with an ointment for my knees
blown out during the last war
no one was told about.

I swallow the code entrusted to me.
I could slit throats with the shadows you make.
I’m waiting for your company, cuz
I can’t come apart.
A spore clutched in a fist, a loose thread.
You ring the bell. We’re about to start.

WITNESS PROTECTION

All eyes are on the hands that offer redemption.
All ears are tuned to the sluicing sound bite
wire-tap that proved I was somewhere else
when that revamped St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
went down. I am gut-shot and full of promises,
building the bridge to nowhere
off the sweat of my foreshortened brow.
I am offering a shelf life on my imagination,
a room with a view toward amnesia.
I’m already pulling up stakes, leaving town.

SAVE THIS DANCE

I dust these old bones off. Forgive me the comfort.
Here’s me getting down to bubblegum pop,
at the dock that is adjacent to the yacht club inclusive
of everything ever listed in the American Dream.
I bobble and twirl, a dashboard avatar with its’ own agenda,
a spoiled flank steak, an Ebola of best intentions.
Oh, Ava Gardner, grassy knoll, magic bullet,
I’m still dancing. I’m the blind spot, the slight
that settles the score. Close your eyes.
Can’t you wait for what’s in store?

Drunk on the roof-top
a praying mantis strikes
my shoulder—what luck!

Beautiful but cross-eyed
she walks by, wearing
a Jekyll and Hyde T-shirt

Pigeons peck between
cobblestones; I note
the dimming light

AMERICANT

Well, I been through the desert on a horse
with no name, but I had to shoot it, and
strip off its’ haunches for dinner.
I didn’t really think that one through.
Now I’m sitting very still, and it’s good
to be out of the rain, but I’m dying of thirst.
I’d be the world’s perfect cannibal,
but there’s only me, and I don’t think
I love myself enough. My horse!
My kingdom of porn for another horse
with no name, but one with sufficient
papers to get me across the border.
Note to self: Take up horse breeding.
Also: Find a way to smite my enemies
using only a rusty thimble, the elastic
band from my sock, and a losing lottery ticket.
Wait! That meager dowry enables me
to open an account on Ebay!
I am vast, I contain multitudes—
and every one of you is up for deportation,
unless you listen very closely…

REPULSE HYMN

We could start again, free from the pale gaze
of nostalgia or newsprint. But our nerve endings
can't stand the blank air, they glow like threaded
coal when released from the skin.

I will sing tonight as I heard the drowned
mistress sing, freed from any repetition
of remorse, a carol to the choir at arms,
a soldier with an innocent smudge
on his cheeks—Oh please! I’ve been waiting
to break through for weeks. Just let me speak…

ARTIFICE

I still worry that this arts 'n' crafts camp is just
a pretense, that I am its’ real exhibit, that simply
by counting, I am creating some soundless,
idiot-savant arithmetic that lulls the rest
of the world to sleep; their concerns eased
because my concerns seem so limited.

I solve the newsletter’s cross-word,
and suddenly, you’re slipped into a more
aerodynamically ordained grid,
satellite-friendly and free of questions.
You wince, and crush the single pamphlet
of orientation material---Apparently, you
were looking for a higher tax bracket bump.

I’m crawling the walls, I so want to whisper.
You tap the paper, and I receive the latest
tattoo to be beaten into song;
a death march, a jingle, a wedlock of breath
and formless function. But I’m done.
Close this heart, and hands, and eyes.
Wait to make up the next encoded sunrise.

LEGAL BRIEF

Perforce, subsiliquent

Perforce, ballowdahlia

Perforce, thukhalanigh

Perforce, indulfeckistan

Perforce, abborathon

Perforce, validaphrate

Perforce, anon

The neighbor's air-conditioner rattles
all night; I dream
of crickets

Asleep in the wheat field
ears full
of a brown whispering

Petals stuck
in the lungs
of the withered river corpse

BLANK TESTAMENT

Stars flicker, and the planets are steady.
Or is it the other way around?
You try to remember, staring up
at your own wedge of cold night sky,
crowded with a testament
you couldn’t begin to decipher.

It’s easier for you to imagine
an army of flesh-eating zombies
shambling down the hill-side
off the back deck, than the deer’s
pricked ear, or the quick-sulfured
eye-glimpse of the fox.

You go inside, take a piss, come back
and just like that, the stars are gone.
Out of the black now tumble
glistening lisps of snow,
like the stars had come unstrung
and were swarming down

gasping ashes desperate to tell you
the story that you missed, turning
a blank white as they hit the ground.

CROWDED WORLD

We walked onto the beach, the glowering ache
of hang-over in our eyes. The dark, cold waters,
the seaweed spreading open its palms,
the long stretch of road leading out past marsh grass
to the farthest, wavering point of salt and sunlight
will always remind me of you, how we lost each other
to something we were sure was there, guessing
at its’ breath, like a net that would catch us.
We could have touched like two white, un-named animals.
But the crowded world found us instead.

RETOLD FEVER

I climb the stairs, breaking out in a fever, while above,
a lightening storm splits wide the sky with gashes
and quick incisions. I’m looking, and inside its’ rending
slits of white light, I see motion pictures, many of them,
all told in glimpses and whispers. I see John Wayne
lying on the ground with a blood-spattered groin,
the Indian holding up his severed penis as a totem.
I see Abraham Lincoln watching a view-master presentation
of the moon launch and saying, "There's not a free man
among them" and then wondering, "Is my check in the mail yet?"
I see the the bottom screen crawl fall past, asking of no one,
“I love you...Where are you? I love you...Where are you?"
It’s an emergency. Please respond.

LAST PRAYER

My apartment dark and still; only I make
the floor boards creak. The same wind
which cracks pines in Alabama rattles
my half-shut window. Sparrows shiver
on dawn-lit telephone wires--the first
rain in weeks. I am the bones
and skin of a single waking equation.
Answer me.

BARON MIND’S DANCE TIME

So, if the scandal ever hits the front page---
Yes, I kissed George Dubya, but he asked me first,
and God, he tasted awful!
But I just wanted to dance, and for that
I would plant my seed in Gandhi’s skull
just to see roadside weeds grow.
I would turn to Lucifer, say,
Pick up your fiddle, go back to Charlie Daniels
and give it one more go---I’d even listen
to that goddamn song again!
Gawd, give me the remote control!
I chiseled at the gaps in the best minds
of my generation until their synapses screamed,
More! More! Turn the channel!
Where’s the chips? Pass the salsa!
And get up and dance!
Man, I could really make them go…