UNION

Our skin is just starting to come apart. I feel it
like an annoying burr, how it catches on my bones, while all the howling circumference is around me, waiting to come in.

No wonder we are on edge, when the teetering
data banks are just waiting to infuse us
with a sense of something greater; whale sounds, ocean's pulsings, and suddenly
I am held fast to the catacombed bones of the earth,
and a silver-haired, white-skinned hag kisses me
with cold lips and tells me impossible things.

And then I am alone on rain-dark open grass plains, the first garble of man sounding around me,
cousin of skin who would eat me without pause.
How I could grow hair like him,
let it flood me, coarse and luxurious…

BEYOND HUNGER

You hate the feeling of looking over your shoulder,
but then there I am. How about this:
I'm the younger brother, the one recklessand beautiful, who tipped the speedometer toward red,
and now returns after years of quiet with an itchy
trigger finger and the insistent promise that this is it, the last scam, the last chance for us both to cash in.
As soon as the porch door clicks shut behind me, you know only trouble can come from my hunched but vibrant silhouette.

Or how about this one: I'm your bleached-blond ex-lover,
who split for beauty school and Hollywood a life-time ago,
but now comes back, oily and sensuous, barely coiledinside my red satin dress. That's the one where
the sweat on your forehead matches your internal landscape,
your constant state of indecision, until in a burst of fatal passion
you thrust me across the card table, spilling
drinks and religious icons, giving yourself up
to the kind of love that always spells death.

Some say I’m beyond hunger. What do you think?

SINGLE MAN BLUES

A single man
A carpenter, plumber or electrician Clattering along in a panel truck
Thoughts with his coffee gone cold

A single man, but
An ocean flows inside him
Grey shores circling the narrow
Coastline of his skull

He knew it was there
But turned his eyes from it

But if a single man would break
The streets would be flooded
The world would be water
And all this forgotten

Except for a single thing
An old dresser knob
Or a child’s wooden hammer
Left floating

A reminder of industry
That hands sleep somewhere below

FROZEN

It came like this…I thought the ice was trying to tell me something.
My whole weekend full of suffused and glittering light, battered by its brilliance, and the best any of us could come up with is, "It sure is pretty out there."

All the branches the leaves tree trunks windows clock faces
encased in ice, a world of frozen blossoms, a world remade,
brittle, temporary...
We walked and slid in clumsy pirouettes across its smooth
and stiffened skin, the flecked-off fragmented stars
stared down, spinning and spinning, and the cold empty
sky opened as my mouth opened, full of purple breath bruises,

pushed out, set aflame.

ENTROPY DELEGATE

We are all coming apart, piece by piece.
Here, the lost have voices, delicate as insects,
or the smallest yawn of tides dragging us under,
calling our ears to listen.

Here, that man with the dirty wet newspaper a week old
can speak in any voice allowed him, can quote numbers,
artifacts, tired marrow, the particular grin of car hoods, the hoops of air that birds made leaping through him.

Here, that language speaks on and on, a bludgeoned silhouette that never runs out of words.
Here, he is our mission.

CONTAGION PRAYER

Let the others shut the door, turn off the lights.
Let the silence bicker and murder itself until morning,
so we can turn to face each other with the drowsy sense of new-borns.
Let the riveted acres of the dead stretch on.
Our tongues flash, like car hoods with nothing on them.
Each new day bursts open, contagious with the past...

PURE

Had a pure moment tonight, going to see “Fly Ashtray” at CBGB’s
after a vicious, tremendous thunder and lightening squall
all over Manhatta and outlying regions, the drains overflowing,
women running, skipping puddles, holding up paper plates
in dainty, old-fashioned defense against the weather;
all this stirred-up energy, and there I was, waiting
for the light to change, ducking under the nearest canopy
to escape the rain, and I spot James out in front of CBGB’s
catching a smoke, and the lightening flashes, soundless now
over the roof tops above him, and the restaurant/bar where I’m seeking shelter actually starts playing, “Gimme Shelter”
by the Stones, a great tribal-rhythm song, and suddenly, my pulse
starts racing with the shots of Jim Beam running through me,
and it’s life during war-time, and I’m raggedly ecstatic
waiting to cross the street to meet my friends
and hear the dirgey gargoyle crowings of this,
our precious beast, our broken back, our rock ‘n’ roll…