Tuesday, December 25, 2007



THE PRODIGAL GODZILLA


(part 2)


The president’s forehead grows thin as paper. Inside,
a fire is burning, whole libraries are turned to ash.
The White House becomes a party hat,
passed around drunkenly by the side of the pool.
No one can decide a thing.


Switchblades flick open; horrible abortions are performed

In the shadow of the golden arches; Everyone is on

A blood-mad search for the True Son, the Son of the King.

If they can kill him, they might feel a little better.

Everyone’s in a mood that’s a lot like drowning.


Now their fingers strum a symphony on my belly.

They clamor for the placented sunlight to stream from me.

They are hungry; there can be no waiting.

They’ve always played a game with fear.

Now they want the real thing.


My breath, the angel wings of butane.

This is my body, I give you this gift.

I will give fire back its’ original name.

Monday, December 24, 2007


THE PRODIGAL GODZILLA


(part 1)


When I was old enough to stay up late without a babysitter,

the TV transfixed me: I would sit, afraid to let the blue glow fade,
to feel the cold photo of night press itself against the picture window, because I knew Godzilla would be there,
taken from the screen

like a drop from a petrie dish suddenly grown full-size and looming.

Godzilla, some stillborn child put on this earth horribly starving,

with a throat thimble-thin and a gullet wide as an ocean,
full of a depleted vocabulary of fire and rage, never able
to express his needs and so hated, fired upon

by toy armies of reason.


Godzilla, I get back the X-ray from the hospital;

He’s in me now, trashing against my ribcage.

I knew junk food was a curse, but not this bad.
I didn’t know it could have children. Now my womb
swallows the sky, and everyone is watching.

Sunday, December 23, 2007



HOW TO TAKE A LUNCH BREAK


Today, at lunchtime, I wish my eyesight could take me with it,

to glide the oil-slick East River waters, or to hover
in a nest of cool shadows beneath the Brooklyn Bridge,
and hear the cars screaming past, voices trapped

in their own relentless momentum.
Today, I wish I had the wind for hands,
so I could strum the steel twine of the Brooklyn Bridge

like a Marx Brothers’ harp, and play out the rapid pulse-rate of this day.

Today, I wish for an end to things—or a beginning.

I wish the “Watchtower” clock across the river,

which flashes the successive death of each

passing minute, would suddenly tell a new story,

would proclaim in a crowning digital display:


NOW

NOW

NOW

Saturday, December 22, 2007


SCHISM RELEASE


And suddenly, the walls around you are lifted, and you’re talking

to an audience you didn’t even know was there.

While outside, some cheap, hard-boiled narrator tosses off

one last cigarette into the East River, to ignite all the lost

gasoline and precious fluids floating on its’ surface,

and as the wall of screaming heat climbs higher,
and your forehead is a billboard selling, “SWEAT!”

all you can do is turn to your neighbor and shout,

“Some weather we’re having, isn’t it?”

RAW FOOTAGE


We are all swarming toward something, some vast light source.

We are like the nameless warriors at Troy, who threw themselves

at Helen’s beauty, only to be cast off and broken.

It is those who know how to get their actions “read”
who are remembered: an Achilles or a Hector with their sense
of good timing--when to enter a scene, when to stay out of it,
when, even, to die. Without that, the film reels loop and hiss,

gathering skin-moist in layers on the floor. Just hour after hour

of raw footage, taken as a security precaution, and nothing more.

Thursday, December 20, 2007


BATTERY


Run your tongue upon the withered zinc; the dampness will help the connection.
If you slipped me in your pocket and held me close,
my radium, my quick-twisted crown,

I would know something so subterranean,
it could make me sing.

I will arc across streetlights and saliva, the dashboards will glow blue
with drowning, or submission.

The song will come in slow, broken pauses,

the dance will ache like the palm
on the hip of some distant cousin…

(Don’t slap me---I’m not through yet)
We’ll whisper the names already asked toward forgiveness:
My third grade teacher, my hypodermic nurse,
my father blackening the air with gin swills.

Oh, slit open the skin, as batteries run low;

Let the charge run home.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007


SCENARIO

"Do you begin to see there is no face there in the tarnished mirror?"
—William Burroughs


Gun-toting racist lawmen swagger drunkenly across the landscape.

Sexually repressed secret agents plot each other's demise. Hidden

enclaves of technocrats vie for power and unleash deadly viruses.
A young boy abruptly blooms into a red-haired wolf, leathery femalesnake-beasts invade the English countryside.

We begin to see this story as its own kind
of viral replication, endlessly mutating itself into new forms.

The leathery she-beast is now a captive sideshow attraction.
Expose all faulty wiring and cheap, duct-taped bandstands,
the hollow flash of out-dated tricks! The trappings are there,

but their mechanisms are left dangling, half-completed.


We hear the staccato police report, the carnival huckster,

the dispassionate scientist, the Hollywood censors;

all purveyors of noxious light.

We wait for the explosion.


Once it’s over, we are left

with bald cacophonies, with a sick nostalgia

for a time just before the bomb went off---
the silence that up until then, we chose to ignore.

Monsters