ALARM

I move through a place of bristling strangers,
each with their hands sharpened by neglect,
and still I can't reach the one I call you.
Each day is not a new beginning. It bursts forth,
contagious with the past.

CUSP

Can the moon tell you the same thing twice?
Can you stand on the same patch of ground
and be the same man twice? The wild reeling creak of the tree trunk in the wind
sets my baby feet running, and the howling
stars take me as their own.

UGLY AMERICAN

I never met a beheading I didn’t like,
or a blood-letting for a secondary cause
I couldn’t explain away.

It’s not my wallet, it’s my cousin’s.
It’s not my ass against the wall,
it’s a instructional diorama.
Take my wife, please!
Oh, wait, she was just stoned to death. There’s bound to be a surcharge.

Where’s a Geneva Convention when you need one?

You always smite the one you love…
Ga nite, everybody! I’ll be here all week…

IRIS

Geese gaggle across a misted moon.
A moment later, another wedge flies by, silent as sleep.
The black-veined lattice of treetops
beg the eyes to look up, but the feet
stay wistfully attached to the ground.
You wish like a stricken Christian soldier to stay far from the ruins of Rome,
to let this moment puddle open,
take you in, close.

MOTION

I motion to have my fingers planted as perennials
in a memorial garden, where disadvantaged school children with magic markers could scrawl their favorite rap star across the scorched text of my fingerprints, and so would wag the New Puppet Theatre of Pride and Appraisal.
I motion that DNA evidence be damned, that I be drowned
past recognition as a wet kitten, that
my head be held up high as I attempt to thread
a needle during a hurricane, that I head a committee dedicated to the end of debauchery, all and sundry,
except as it is applicable in public life.
I motion an end to everything,
except for what we can grasp, right now.

CURE ALL

The sky is filled with emblems of dead light.
All the facts of the world are set in a single bone.
Well, heal the sick, send the tired, mongrel dog
into the desert, be done with it.
We could start again in that new silence. The wind howls as you offer to write me
a blank check. I do a desperate pantomime,
but all I can spell out is, “I don’t care.” You forego the river, where the stricken are laid out in listless bowers. And I am left
with a medicine that can’t even cure itself.

SANCTIONED RANT

I have this reoccurring nightmare that I go to mail a letter, and find myself on every postage stamp. Ohmigod, which president was I? No, basketball player. No, serial killer. Question: What well-known torch singer with political connections was assassinated
on the night of the first moon launch?
I’ve seen plots to start wars scribbled
on cocktail napkins. I’ve seen cures
to diseases concealed in double-speak
on the back of cereal boxes.
And what about today?
What fly-specks of insight were drowned beneath coffee, in the rush to get to work,
on the slow-throated river to mutual decay,
where nothing worth happening was actually
happening? Yeah, try some vision with your
caffeine, you monkey-jawed fuck!