ROVE IN REPOSE

Because he looks in the mirror & sees
a perfectly groomed troubadour of love,
bringing forgiveness to all the land.
Because his meatloaf beats out
his severed neighbor’s recipe,
because the maggots are no longer
second-hand, because every map
is labeled, “Disaster” in every far corner
where we’ve already run out of ink,
because the money shot begat the cart
before the horse was flogged to death,
because he demurely crosses
his legs during art class & calls, “Break!”

FOREGONE

When you gone walking
on that good ground that’s
been sold from underfoot,
when an eagerly gnawed root
is called your very own,
when you claim two shadows
at Customs when you only
had papers for one, when your
hunch-backed cousin wasn’t just
a ploy to get a distant family member
over the horizon, then you know
you’ve been sold out for a lot less
than the story adds up to.
Then you know you’re just change
passing between pockets.
Then your alibi can’t have
A Once Upon A Time.
Then in a word and you know it,
You’re fucked.
Just finish out the time-line.

PRESS, RELEASE

I brought my throat like a birthday present
to the off-ramp, my fervent wish, an end
to all collisions, colluded orbits, frictionless
get-togethers; no tail spin parties allowed.
Take the black quarries of my open mouth
and make your own headline,
or discharge it, octopus ink
in an ocean too dark to even notice.

MAPS

Oh, to beat the grey matter tattoo,
past your run-on sentences
and awkward silences, down
to the scalpeled iris, the seed
of the word you wanted to say,
couldn’t say—Guess what?
It’s never been said. But
its’ cast-off husk is already
taking root.

DOMAIN NAMELESS

My eyes are like tea steeped
in petty recriminations,
my tongue tastes like gunpowder,
my sweat a salt-bed to lay down in,
where the pronged ribcages
of the slaughtered herd still show,
my voice is an interview-by-knife-point,
my soul the carrion crow’s laughter.
I am well schooled in the ways
of our fathers…

FLICKER

The Chrysler Building, as seen
from the end of a suffused, sun-setting
boulevard in Queens, is a mirage.

The old woman, the smile
stitched on her face, her eyes
blind to cross lights, is a mirage.

Tell me what I see, then.
A late afternoon collapsing in on itself.
Me, a willing cripple,

bowing toward the river of quick renewal.

CORRUPTION PSALM

Looking out the train window at sunset,
the sky-writing overhead just starting
to dissipate. The lazy smoke curly-cueing
into indistinct eternity helixes,
or lost DNA strains. They’re trying to say
something. They’re still words,
just the same.