CAUSAL

And the idiots have scissors
where their tongues used to be
and the mind ain’t willing
but the flesh is free
and there’s pennies in the eyes
of the blind oracle
and you’re stuck at a “Denny’s”
cuz that’s how it goes
and the satellites are clicking
like Las Vegas skulls
and you’re placing a claim
on your own lost soul
and Rudolph scavenges
the corpse of Santa Claus
and now we’re at the point
where the fever meets the cause

SPLIT SCREEN

The sky is a good enough place to start.
I have kept careful notes on all this, but of course,
they will be blurred by sea-salt, the bleeding ink creating
misreading after misreading that will be passed down over
generations, so what's the difference?
I know I live right now in a wild fear of the cavern,
the coffin, the closed lid. Now in the end all I wish is for those two edges to meet, to complete their seam.
I rush my prow toward the horizon, toward the split-screen,
where on one hand I am offered a Viking funeral
and on the other my younger self receivesa visitation by Christopher Columbus, who tells me
to seize the dream, ignore the maps, to turn the dinner fork into a divining rod, pointing the way across an open sea.

It is the posture of the forlorn, the hopeful,
the doomed and the loving all in one. Now watch.
Even as the mist grows deeper. This is the best part...

SURPLUS MEMORY

Sure, I could take to the talk-show circuit,
with its bright-lit carnival of enforced confession,
but what I keep to myself Is left to the mist, to the slow dissolve, to the ellipse of suggested suffering. I myself am not even sure
what I have suffered. Wounds are like that.
You get so used to living inside them
you might miss the fact
that they've long since closed.

SAVIOR

Your forehead says fever like a hot button meter
and I’m guessing you’re not alone.
It’s the multiple delirium of the One True Imperium:
When you’re righteous, you’re always home.
But when the sky is full of hammers
and you’re dressed in fire and antlers-- My, how you’ve grown!

A CAUTIONARY TALE

There was a bumper-crop of tall dark strangers that season.
You had a whole range to choose from.The vox populi sprang from every strangled chimney-top,
all of it a tournIquet of yearning. Nothing a needle and
thread couldn't solve. What was left marched downtown,
what was fiery was voluntarily doused. It might help
to claim radio interference at this point, out in some
far-flung province. Open mouths count as dark spots
in the integrated web. Their tracking system is like
infra-red, only a cruel inversion. So clear,
a bible could be written by it. My God, pain
was started for a purpose. It was made for you to look the other way.

DREAMS OF EMPIRE
Like everyone else I know, I live in fear
of a receding hairline, roots like the last stands
of virgin forest being pushed back, until each follicle
is dazed and isolated, a drunken party-goer
alone on the sun-bleached plaza at dawn, counting loose change, wondering what
happened to his companions, if the concert
is still going on.

Oh, I still dream of slipping into the evening
in a black velvet suit. But once I wandered,
hopelessly delusional, and found my way back
by spotting a Rambo billboard, his sweating gun
leveled against his own townspeople.
I knew I was close to home.

DREAMS OF EMPIRE #2

The 6 AM fish market stunk of guts, it glistened.
From a doorway, a leering stranger gathers his bones
long enough to ask for a light.
As I cup the sulfured tip for him, I see
I am speaking to my own ghost, spun
of clothes I am just beginning to wear,
flayed down to nothing,
to the merciful medicine,
to the buffalo bone.