CONQUISTAWHORES

I have seen the darkened lands
Laid like a stain, laid like a plan
I’ve seen them spread across these shores
The ends meet the means; of course, you’re sure

Here is the fire, here is the hand
What we forge now takes command
We break like seeds, or tired whores
We feed the fire of conquistadors

God and the Devil, hand in hand
They’ve compromised, drawn up a plan
The feast is laid, the wine is poured
The word gets out, a poisonous spore

The Kingdom Come-and-Get-It Plan
Is bankrupt now, you understand
We blame the flame, the need for more
We drink the ash of conquistadors

THE HUNGER OF SAINTS

I stop in the park by a fenced-in statue of some Polish saint,
while nearby, a prowl-car sweeps the hedges with its low headlights,
searching out miscreants. From a block of plain grey marble
the saint's head rises up against a blue night sky swollen
with the city's incandescence, and he looks out into it
like a teacher expecting nothing more, nothing less
from an unruly classroom. At his feet, the old women
of the neighborhood have placed a procession
of store-bought candles which pucker and gleam
with the wind, and other, stranger offerings:
a plastic deli container full of pickled red cabbage.
Strange to leave at this altar some semblance of hunger
that has long since left him, given in a mute attempt
at conversation. The old women with their nameless
ointments and swollen ankles wrapped in ace bandages
and their long yellow corridors swathed in the sticky
grit of ammonia, the faulty fluorescents ticking overhead.
I try to look back to the first secrets of their long-given thighs,
of boardwalks and dance halls and the dim confessionals
that came afterward, of their steady eyes as they calmly blanched
a young son's wounds, wringing out the blood
from the washcloth into a dirty bucket.
How completely they have surrendered themselves to the future,
to stop the bleeding and heal the wounds, so that this one
may beget and beget, all the while laying
candles and red cabbage at the feet of the dead.
I ask for the songs their saints have never sung.
I ask for the way these women sleep at night,
heavy, stolid, broken but firm.
I ask for the flare they put to the sputtering wick,
for their careful grasp of the uncertain.
I ask for one small name to say against the dark
besides my own.

THE END OF HISTORY

Oh, the fathers of this country
with their fingers numb
from gripping the wheel,
as if that were the loom from which
they could spin new bread, or pry loose
land mines that never went off,
giggling with dark intent.

Happy accidents.

The war is not over, they said.
The war is still going on.
Victims made fresh daily.

Direct your attention, please,
to the bluish smudge on that satellite photo.
It shows us with our best face forward.
(Company picnics are not what they used to be.)

"Read My Lips.” Such a lonely slogan.
Someone’s father said it once.
Now it can be done from any corner of the globe.

Sign language is out.
Soon will come the Morse code of heartbeats.
Even that can be deciphered.
And the poisonous son claims
all our tongues are tied to his own.

Leave me the fuck alone.
I don't want my moods lying around
for fear of hearing them whistled as a jingle
on some stranger's lips.

Words are like insects, aren't they?
Burrowing through what white spaces
we have left.

And who are you? You’re not the wheel.
You’re not the dry-lipped father with the cold compress.
You can’t break the fever. Your words keep turning over,
back to zero --- the loom is stripped.
Like an amnesia patient odometer, like a car hood flashing
nothing but heat and combustible miles, like a tombstone
blank with glazed fire --- You call that an equation?
You expect me to buy that?
You think you can just add a period
And say that’s the end?

REGIONAL SLEEP
What a strange tune the dial of night is turned to.
Beneath the wind that whips through my window is a larger sound, a low, insistent chorus of trilling whispers that throbs like a pulse-beam in and out of my hearing. If this were the country I'd know it to be crickets or peep-frogs, but this is Brooklyn, so I have to assume its source is sickly and artificial. Some great asthmatic air conditioner unit wheezing from a factory rooftop, some gigantic engine shorn of gears, spinning idly out like an old man trying to make sense of his missing teeth. Or perhaps (and this is the best part) its cause is something darker, more looming and subversive. For all I know, an alien invasion is underway, and this is their mind-conditioning ray making its sweep. I am one of the few left awake to hear it. Most of my neighbors have already lapsed into a numbed and mildly troubled sleep, their dreams spilling into regions of white noise and emptiness as their cerebral cortexes are busily reknit. A lurid scenario, yes, but such over-saturated color schemes seem to fit best this era where, as all the big fiber-optic conglomerates are constantly reminding us, "anything is possible." I for one am shocked at myself that I don't throw on sneakers and shirt right now and run out into the streets, driven by an obsessive curiosity: Just where the hell is that sound coming from? Maybe it was all those air-raid warning drills I went through as a kid, my ears shrieking with mechanized hysteria. You come to accept that the sky is filled with invisible bombers, that the impossible is just another steady constant. So instead of maniacally searching, I shrug and switch on the TV, get ready for sleep, for my own dreams to succumb to a gnawing chorus of white noise. Perhaps the night is inventing for itself a new kind of dark music. Perhaps the wind is being retrained. Perhaps, if I only listened, I could learn something from it. I don't care if this mystery has an answer. Hang up. Refrain.

PERSONAL AD
So let me start this by telling you a little something about myself. I like to raise skeletons from sunken boats. I like to take the seaweed crusted to their tarnished skulls and comb it over into a variety of hair-dos, starting with classic 1940's styles and moving on up to the present. They say you're as naked as the day you were born, and I can't argue.

I have thrown whole dinner parties for the victims of airplane crashes, thinking how each place-mat might be a map showing them the way home. I am a great believer of etiquette starting in the womb. I have written whole theologies based on this fact.

What I'm offering is a gift. One free waiver to anyone willing to trust my methods without a second guess.

Is this a break with tradition? No. It's a way of shoring up the walls, of cutting to the quick of that overdone modern question: "Are we all really just alone?"

We are never alone. None of us are alone. None of us have ever really been alone. None of us have known a single second where it's been just us, and no one else. We are never alone. Won't you join me?

OPERATING INSTRUCTIONSBegin at night. The crippled rooster swings
a rusted wing outside your window. Ignore it.
A face, mottled in shadow, looks up in numb
wonder at a highway overpass. This is your subject.
His childhood is rushing through him. Not in memory,
but in a dim impulse toward growth. As if something
were naming him, and the wind, and it was the same name,
and he was forgetting it even as it's made. Approach him
with care. Forceps are too clumsy, tweezers an insult to scale.
Your open hand will do. Turn it slowly. Let him feel
how loose the ground is beneath him. Then close your hand,
make a cupped, hollow fist, like you once did with summer
lightning bugs. Wait for the trapped, sporadic glow to show itself,
until your knuckles flare like pinioned mountain lamps.
There is something fierce in its message, mindless but defiant;
a teletype no one will read. Think again
of the small life that pulses in your fist.
It is not the face of a stranger, or an insect.
It is something you invented.
You know you have it in you to crush it.
How reasonable it is to want such things.