HIDES

We heap them upon us
to keep warm in cold months.
We ask them to lie with us
when we are dizzy and sick,
when the tented skins only
provide so much, a construction,
a place by the border we tilt
to trap the sun, a shadow
we harvest, an empty robe
for someone else to step into…

MY THROAT DOES CATCH…

again and again
like a liar ahead of the mob,
like a workman ready to douse
the torch, like the repentant
leper willing to take back every touch.
I have everything ever owed me
in a pouch paper-thin and out of luck.
I am a stricken syllable. No,
I can still say even less…

LATE NIGHT HYMN

The barrow-eyed windows of Brooklyn
look back blank at this point in the AM.
We’ve got nothing left to say to each other.
The moon is a broken tooth flying
off the sky’s jaw in eternal slow-mo,
some sort of clichéd fight scene
replayed over and over again.
Some tiny slight led to this,
and now the tides are set
in our blood, and the dreams
we sleep are bigger than any of us.

TURNCOAT

I’ve turned mine—have you turned yours?
The fuse in the bunker has been lit.
I am my own worst enemy—
and I refuse to exist.

OPEN THROATS

A throat thrown open to sing--
A circus trampling the dust
of day-old post holes in their rush
to clear the next horizon.
I’m sorry. You may have
forged oxygen into a commodity,
out of thin air made even thinner,
you may have hard-wired the choir
down to the spine, but these breaths
we take are no longer stolen;
they are our own.

SANCTIFY

Do I live by the altar
of water meeting water?
Do I die by the tide it makes?
Am I less if I don’t drink of it?
Am I more if I stand away?

PRAYER

My lips can’t say it enough,
my arms can’t lift the air enough,
my eyes can’t strip-mall the nearest forest
to get the word out on the front page
fast enough---I pray that this new shore
breaking on boulders and shards can be ours,
that our thirsts can be answered, that we can
turn a page that leaves behind a blank testament,
that we can fill it, end the sentence, start another,
begin…

INVENTORY

The owl finds his perch, and what other song
can I hear, but, “Who, who, who, who?”
And the trees splay dead-strangled fingers
to the sky, thwarted capillaries
drained white against the porch light,
as I pace back and forth, trying to measure
a shadow to its’ course.

SHAMBOLIC

To walk upon seas that were once
oceans, oceans that were once
perforated pavement, pavement
that would crack upon impact
of a suspect dream.

To see it all before me
in shards, to see it all
like stars gleaming,
like the strip-tease
before the cops bust in.

To see it all, in the moment
before impact, breathing.

EXILES

I could take you out back and give you a whipping,
I could set fire to the postage stamp of our
long distance ancestors, I could claim no kin
in the frothy blood. I could erase everything
I’m about to say, I could say, “I’m penniless!
Redundant!” And you would still lay this key
to a forgotten kingdom upon my tainted brow…

NAPOLEON OF DUST

Oh, of course, the smudge
on the fine print wasn’t meant
as a sign of disrespect, or a misnomer
of your net worth, or a totem worth
building just for the burning in the back field.
Oh, that net isn’t even worth catching.
Oh, you have portfolios that will
sail you far, far away from this,
my bejeweled, beheaded prince…

ROOT CAUSE

Despite my drawn breath,
this moment still awaits us.
We are triggers left yawning,
pistols without punctuation marks,
diseases without causes.
I’m so far gone from where I started—

this close to the last word.

ABSOLUTES

You can declare anything, can’t you?
Your thirst never falters in wine-dark seas.
There is a bureaucratic redundancy
in your wish list of tidily apocalyptic
end-days. Your story the last story,
to end all others, all storms, your word
alive only in the shroud of the last
innocent animal you skinned to keep
yourself warm.

LOVE LETTER

such hints with dollops
of cyanide have you spun
the threads of my tongue

REPORT

There’s a report right here
that proves the frail elegy
of fireflies.

Fold it up, repent.
Reinvent bird song at dawn.

Let the sky close.
Let the sky close down.

Multitudes pulling
up stubborn roots that proclaim
they hold stuffed visages.

Sell the incision quick,
so that your name be doused
before the next dotted line.

RUINS

Look---There’s Rome
in my ashtray! The photo
of a ruined coliseum
beneath the grey-shaled
dust of cigarette butts,
shifting & snuffed-out.
I’m like a slave, who bought
his freedom, smiling…

HOLY ACCIDENT

Torn breezes
settled air
an impact I can breathe
Crickets after a long rain
the leashes of a distant hurricane
briefly eased
& me left guessing
at the thrumming engine
that goes on beneath each breath

WE ALL KEEP TIME

this roadside is
a snake swallowing itself
and we are one

for lack of air and water
and light, for lack
of what is left

give forth a still born
who sings in a voice
of clear, untrodden underground

for the rest, I wrap around
me like a cheap hymn
we all keep time to

INVERTED HYMNAL

I draw my dark ancestor
into a dance through
my own many mistakes

A cheap hymn we all
keep time clumsy fingered and
I come back to bite

A cheap hymn we all
are drowning and glad for it
rising off the dashboards

A cheap hymn
the hungry hunt and peck
A cheap hymn

When radios sing heaven

CONSTANT MAP

Map is what they
call your face
I remember a time
when we didn’t precode it
when the altars would break
upon your breath
when I was willing to be lost
on these broken shores
and not ask for any shard
to replace it….

COLLECTIVE

Summer collapses upon itself
We hold up torches in protest of heat
The burning ember-ribbed monolith
The quiet cupping of the hive’s eye
The lightening bugs rim our scattered sight
We beat the ground in unison
A tide ferociously dry
We have lived past our hour
Now we are just a rattling
In the throats that follow

TRAIN STATION, 1 AM

Oh, the scabrous humanity,
the hunt and peck, hungry
for an afterbirth. Faces
mutter to themselves,
study religious pamphlets,
Us and People magazines,
schedules and missed connections.

Between the thrumming
of trains coming and going,
a lone cricket chirps
amidst the trellised iron work.

JUNK

This world is so full of junk
our veins can’t open enough
to absorb it

Waiting at the station
a freight train pulls through
bells laboriously clanging
open-ended bed after bed
filled with grey, shaled
rubbish, from some other dream
hollowed out, made weightless
trundling the past past

As we look on
glaze-eyed, late night
waiting for our next connection

DIAGRAM

Thirst follows no tunnels, no maps. Thirst is a harrowed arithmetic, stuttered and freeze-framed.
Thirst is the snake swallowing itself
and we are the pilgrims shedding
a burnt offering, a chastened ember
to glow upon the bed of the tongue
and make stronger.

Thirst is the last word
gone up in flame, easy kindling.
Thirst is a release when nothing is left. Thirst is the dotted line
when you have no name to give.

MOON

You offer a stream
through towering, misted
elm trees, a shaft
for me to lay my last dance in

All I can ask as I stumble
toward your bone-white light
is forgiveness

SELF-RELIANT PUNCH LINE

no you in fact are
the one where the monkey dreams
he is a monkey

GOD’S AN INSECT

those starved and bug
eyed ferocious with neglect
who are we to make

OLD SELL

A mosaic of shattered interfaces!
A being of pure appetite seeking its'
sutured center! A time we said
we were wasting; broken down
to seismic plates and the approximation
of a smile…a billboard, redundant,
leaving off the details of that last mile…

TOTEM-ON-A-STICK

Megalopolis lives inside me! I give forth
a still-born shaken by shame!!
I am a be-all of the end-all
that is currently wrapping up, I am an after-thought, a refrain.
I am everything in a cup I thought
I could drink, I’m empty.
I’m a city, start again…

BIBLE BLACK

by heart and flip through
these skin lisping pages oh
belief i am

IDENTITY THEFT

To catch the untrained race of our many personas,
our miraculous familiars, our parade of faces we shed
before the world like flaccid seed shells to begin again?

TOTEM EFFENDE

no problem saying
nothing with seeds split wide and
no you in fact are

SQUALL

sputter fear paint me
red scurry my eyebrows up
to lightening rods

PHOSPHOROUS HALO

humming my body
is humming my body is
humming cold angel

MIRROR

put out a silence
complete in its fullness
the shadow of your last

ACCURSED TONGUE…

…always speaks its’ mind.
That’s part of the Money-Back Guarantee.
Do not taunt Accursed Tongue.
It’ll come back to bite you.
Do not try to second guess or use
reverse psychology on Accursed Tongue.
It’s up on the latest tricks.
Just sit still and bless your Maker
that Accursed Tongue doesn’t know
where you were born, cuz it would hunt
you down and burn you out from the roots,
motherfucker. Accursed Tongue
just wants to get along…

GERM OF MERCY

Tiny, imploded bloom.
Shrapneled petals.
Hands clasped asunder.
In our smiles are a
riotous extinction.
In our turning away, water
we cannot cross, though
our thirst for it saves us.
Your hand could be my hand,
but every palm opens empty.
What small mercy still
lends me something to say?

MOST WANTED

I stole that mustache off
the most wanted poster
and posed with a few pilgrims
along the way. I offered them
a salt tablet and a couple of
compromising positions
with their favorite mammal.
I opted out of the most basic line-up.
Y’know, the one where the monkey
standing next to you is the second-guess
fall guy in the evolutionary process,
stuck in an ill-fitting suit,
the short-straw in the mix.
He’s spun an empty chamber,
an itchy trigger-finger,
always on the draw.
He’s the studio audience,
laughing ahead of the curve, a little
too ready to turn the gun on himself.

BACK FROM THE DESERT

Toward such a thirst, you would not falter.
Toward such a thirst, you would not know.
A tongue makes for shaky infrastructure,
through the ellipse of your tunneled logic,
past a back narrative you hold tent stakes for.
It could move at a moment’s notice.
Fold it down. Repent. Reinvent.

STRIKE

Bird song at dawn,
as militant as any
artillery strike, or
ham-strung symphony.

They gather their voices,
the night edges into
diffused blue. Who are we
to make any sense of it?

BELIEF

Diligent into the sun we face
another evening’s gathered shade,
full of rain, pestilent whispering,
floods of solace we haven’t yet
learned to say…
To lean upon a cripple
at a cross roads, to have
his shadow point the way,
a sextant we cast to the ground,
hymnals we know by heart and flip
through their skin-lisping pages.
Oh belief, I am as far from you
as I am from sleep.
A silence turned over
for lack of a beginning, or end.

REMAKE

The open window,
the antic crackling bug crunch
of a cigarette butt being put out.

A silence complete in its’ fullness.
The shadow of your last self
just lost in first light.

CROSS-TOWN

Riding the lonely, late-night bus
from Queens back to Brooklyn;
just me, the driver and a young
Latino boy slumped in his seat,
grasping a diet Pepsi like a drunk
would his own elixir of benediction.

Off in the distance, the Manhattan
skyline, a wilderness of mad, endless
expansion. Video billboards flash
like tarot cards telling someone else’s
fortune: a distant cousin’s, perhaps,
or maybe a visiting head of state.

I remember seeing “Bladerunner”
for the first time in high school;
taking in its’ vision,
hushed, dry-mouthed, dazzled,
and can’t believe how quickly
the future has come to claim its’ own.

EXPATRIATE

I take my razored fingers to the seething
multitudes, pulling up stubborn roots
that proclaim their hold, stuff visages
into black burlap sacks, send them off
to some sanitized legal limbo heaven,
and no, you, in fact, are the one
who first mentioned the word guillotine.
I have a report right here that proves it…

ELEGY

The frail pinwheels of fireflies
play out across the open meadow.
I draw my dark ancestor into a dance.
She cries against my shoulder,
recites a litany of dead names
that mean nothing to me;
a deaf-mute second cousin, a minister
who mended split-wood fences on the side,
a one-eyed sod farmer who bottled
personal misery. She asks my forgiveness
for all of them, but I am left
with open hands, too many
of my own mistakes, and the aching
code of dying light.

BIRTH DAY

The monkey dreams a radiant cacophony,
a kingdom of tendriled fronds and god’s teeth
gnashing the mulch of the world into creation.
The monkey sees the jungle he dreams
upon the jungle before his eyes.
The monkey dreams he is a monkey,
born of monkey, but more than monkey,
born this day, but every day, to arise.

RADIOS SING HEAVEN: I

My body is humming, my body is humming,
cold angel glow of the dashboard, radio on,
empties tossed by the roadside.
This is the sound of surrender, glutted and tinkling.

I am only half-aware of the parts of myself
that are dying right now, for lack
of air and water and light.
What is left I wrap like a shroud
of monoxide around me.

RADIOS SING HEAVEN: II

I glow with abandon, thirst,
and pray to those murky
rough voices behind the hedges
of the choir; those bitten,
spindley things warped for lack
of light and exposure, who sing
with voices of clear underground
streams, rattle roots in their
blackened hands—Oh, give me
something! All those starved
and bug-eyed, ferocious
with neglect, who are lost
in the naming and so grow stronger.

RADIOS SING HEAVEN: III

Let the sky close down quarters.
Let the pumps and oxygen masks sputter.
Fear, paint me red, scurry my eyebrows
up to lightening rods. Caffeine, kick in,
blossom my capillaries. May my blood sing
wide as the Lincoln Tunnel, a fierce tide
flushing out the system.

RADIOS SING HEAVEN: IV

Let us count the heartbeats of the living
and keep time by this to the Motown of Heaven.
That Wall of Sound Phil Spector envisioned,
still coming out of cheap radios,
on Formica countertops, on oldies stations.
Hear that? That song made me feel today
that I was drowning, and was glad for it.