CHARMER

Oh, don't get like that. Every move I pull, you're always there
over my shoulder, shaking your head, pious and redundant. You
think it's easy slipping into what the moment requires?
Seersucker, trench coat, velvet pajamas. How many people have
I become, talking you in or out of situations? While all you do is
try to pretend I don't exist. So here's a funny question. How do I
sell myself to you?
Scenarios make the man. They might come cheap and worn-out,
but they wear whatever clothes we can spare them. You're
looking for the constants in life, while I'm a master of the
unsteady art; the shell-game of many fictions. But I can't keep it
up forever. You know the whole story about how there's only
twenty-eight basic stories to tell? Well, I'm getting tired of
shaving the angles.

I thought that by stealing every expectation, I could teach you
something, could make you accept me. Look around you.
The wheat fields bow down beneath the rain in the dark.
The wheat is broken down into loafs of enriched bread.
That bread will be shoved into plastic sleeves bearing
some cracker's likeness, who grants his down-home smile
to the emblem of a brick oven outmoded since last century.
That's your sense of natural wonder? Give me a break.
C'mon, man. It's wet outside. My engine is warm.
We've got some money to make.

CONVICTS

When I get to Modells, I part hands with my mother.
She lets me go, and I always find my way
to the pet store section, to the mangy, blank-eyed spider monkey in his cage. He knew I couldn’t
buy him (I thought), but if I spent time meeting his gaze,
I was gaining a kind of penance.

When I wander back, it is through the forest
of the floor lamp section, my face flaring white,
the dust motes crackling, full of electricity.
The mannequins' eyes follow me,
always a desperate, bird-nest blue. According to my brother, they are convicts,
murderers and the like, sprayed in plastic;
their damnation to be stunted in such
poses of the beautiful,
to be kept that half-inch of distance from us.
I know I shouldn’t believe him.
I find my mother’s hand, grasp it,
ask for an Orange Crush, go blank.

HUNGRY

Everything makes me hungry
I’m a joy-riding, self-hating SUV
I’m a buffalo on a spending spree
Just looking for the thing that will kill me

I’m a cannibal with a psych degree
Your huddled masses are a delicacy
The jaws of life just unhinged me
Because everything makes me hungry

I saw the desert past the cul-de-sac
And I knew that’s where I had to be
I knew that nothing could stop me
And nothing was my only peace

In a hollow tree, I left you a note
All it said was, “We’ll be free”
But right then, it occurred to me
The very first smile had bloody teeth

GOOD FRIDAY

"I am the voice of the train, not the driver" – David West

Oh, bring me through this, through tar paper rooftops,
branches strained and naked along railroad tracks,
though Spring has come.
Through goldenrod bent to the earth, father-tall weeds hacked at the roots, left drying in heaps,
through rust-stained, weeping concrete. Workers cast off jackets, hold up their biceps
like proud, gleaming fish to the last leakage of sun.
Drums litter the rail yard, painted in vibrant yellow
EMERGENCY.

Last Sunday, a heavy-set Latino girl ran past me
through bleak empty streets of downtown Brooklyn,
beating a palm frond along coursened brick,
counting out a number song to herself, the green in her clenched fist strangely luminous
amidst the grey air we walked through.
I had to remember what day it was.
Now, after work on a Friday, the leaden faces
all lean toward some secret, magnetic pole.
The train pours forward. I wish
for the snapping black of the tunnel,
so that we might be like Him,
rising toward something; a dull humming,
scythes cutting the sleek green grass of our graves.
All this gravel come up,
bone-sharded skull of a king.
All these rails tremble, limbs of electricity.
We are the Body, passing through.

DISTANCE

What rises through me
could be breath or wind;
I shiver with the thrust of it.
Past my window, the stricken
corridors of Brooklyn, to the grey,
pulsing mesh of the screen porch
where my father steps out
and lets the dark air take him.

I can’t imagine what he hears,
swirling his cheap martini
to the stark clutter of leaves;
The way he could listen to thunder storms by himself in the summer
and I knew not to go near him.

The trees set off their soft,
urgent twinings,
the grass rises like the knives
of saints to greet him.

He already can't find his way back.

My mother snores on the couch, the gardens in her magazines
folded across her lap,
the garbled blue flower of TV
plays for no one in the kitchen.

Across the screen,
someone in a white shirt
wanders on a beach.

RIGHT NOW
Right now, my skull is thunderous and empty
with the left-over reverb of a rock'n'roll show--
I can hear anything at 4:20 AM.

Footfalls up the block--
A drunk man struggling to find
his key; he jabs it forward
like a single prow to make sense
of this stupid, mute ocean.
I can hear the oil of his left-over fingerprints in its silvered grooves--
I can hear anything.

Right now, the night sounds
like a thousand furnaces.
It could be airplanes taking off,
taxis missing their exits,
lettuce heads bobbing like green monksin the back of tractor trailers that see the last
gas station for miles but won't stop.
A slow, heavy throb that is less
like love and more like cursing--
a last drink poured,
a forehead steaming with fever.
Right now, I can hear anything.

REQUEST

I take the stars as needle holes
through which all blood has seeped,
leaving the polished gleam
of bone behind.

Night's black throat is closing.
Hunger is a way out.
Ask for me.