Wednesday, October 31, 2007


THE GRUESOME GET-DOWN
"Speak King's English!" sez the Narrator. He is wrapped in fine muslins and is blind as an oyster.
He is speaking from a transistor radio. He is

our next-to-best shepherd, he retains that faint,

hot-sand glow of a prophet, or a forgotten, two-bit sultan.

He gets paid by the hour to wear that thing on his head.

He is evangelical, or at least that's what it said on his calling card.

He operates out of the dead sea, out of the late-night static waves
we clutch to our ears like a conch shell as we shuck and jive over a municipal bridge at 2 AM, wishing we had our own music.
Why do you insist on listening to that son of a bitch?

We could have that much more silence if we counted him out.

As it is, we do the dance of the forty-ounce, hump the city's hypodermic sky-line, think of pigeons as doves and list
the automobile as this country's best approximation of the slaughtered lamb. I think we turned too-old just yesterday. I can't even pretend I've got anything left to rebel against. Just this dirty music of the forked-tongue and knife set,
the shine stolen from the glaringly obvious,

the salt poured from the salt mines onto old wounds;
anything to keep them in business.
I come from a region where it's all right to hate yourself.

I drive the highway, looking for another happy accident.

There are a thousand songs that could be labeled
appropriate for this occasion, but I'm giving up the safety net.
I've played the juke-box like a gas pump, and now I'm asking

for one, just one, just a straight-up, mournful melody

to call my own, just anything to drown out the Narrator

who's telling me this one's already been sung.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007


SUSPENSION


I look down and find my hands are play-things. They seem
frivolous, I can get by without them. One tired fact convinces
me: If I can't make myself better, I can make myself worse.
In that, at least, the results are readily proven. It's funny, but
hearing the same words so many times, the vowels seem to
widen, you can step right inside them. Suddenly, I've never heard
anything as lonely as, "House." Pour me some medicine,
I can barely see you in the dark, just the hurried glint of your eye-
frames. I begin to get the idea this might be a wake, that
we are sitting here, waiting for something. An elevator drops
near-by, hush of suspension. This could be a murder, a clumsy
frame-up, or the tail-end of a business convention. I never saw it
so clearly before, that we are the ones who hand out the knives,
who mouth the word, "Victim."

Monday, October 29, 2007


NEW MATH


I have told many lies from the middle
of these monkey bars, and will continue
to tell them, as long as I have an audience,
and do no traffic in the gossip of competing theories.
I dose old photos in sepia tones because
in that way memory has a cut-off.
I like time-lines, you can point them.
If you've got a wheel, forget it. I don't trade in that.
I've got Early American exit-wounds, cannibal train tracks,
the coarse, blond trellises of the first woman ever in distress...
Yeah, now you wish you'd been listening.
There's music, and then there's what I'm selling:
And Europe, that's a cosmetic I can apply liberally.
My arms flap like malaria blankets, my hand-jive is ugly,
like doves fed on sawdust and shot by the magician
who couldn't stop hunger. My pockets are full,
I could be angel, because everyone else stinks like carcass.
And you've got a mouth on you, I can't shut it.
Till it gets this simple...You never opened it to begin with.

Sunday, October 28, 2007


BLESSING


Even in their blue hallways, the red sign

shrieking, "Exit." Even in dark arches,

eyes creased with pantomime of sleep.

Even the crooked elder testing garbage lids

takes a small walk toward forgiveness.

Even the butter-knife spells disaster, relief.

Saturday, October 27, 2007




ANOTHER SKIN

I stretch the plastic to a perfect sheen
split it along ridged teeth, enough
to wrap the slivered half
of my bermuda onion, so I can forget it
behind the eggs, find it weeks later
a withered yawn of wrinkles
toss it out; so much
plastic for such a little thing

Up the street the
"All-Star Poly-Bag" factory
stitching and stitching through the night

Vagrant scraps slip from garbage lids
scuttle beneath street lights
run with hunger toward its humming
All tatters searching out the mother skin

I have a skin I wasn't born with
A scalded robe melded to my own

A botched mask
A corpse flag
A gasp which tightens

I dream of floating in silent orbit
with the oxygen I know
no one else has tasted

I reach for you and find
something I can't break

A shroud, a light
dust of static and whispers

I think, "I've always had this"

Friday, October 26, 2007


MY WARFARE

There is war out my window tonight.
The lights of the city flare and pixillate;
sirens, a lone shout quickly doused.
I am beyond vaccination.

In our small, cramped armistice, I stretch
arms gone numb, loops of blood
useless, busy forgetting.

You can rest your gun in the funeral
stone of my mouth, you can call my slashed
red ribbons the first sign of Spring coming.
I don't care. You can say anything. My warfare
is the all-night news station, eggs hot off the plate,
the heating element a lover engraves
into his palm to prove he's beyond pain.
I say these things because such spaces
yawn between them.

I hum along with owls extinct on telegraph wires,
waiting for the last signal to be complete.
I am the Undertaker's Son
after a horrible accident: Grey-tied, rubber-gloved.
Give me your coupons, they are your face
trapped beneath glass.
Give me champagne and Dramamine
and I'll dish out last moments like flash cards
just before the crash: Hands Held, Fire, Regret.

Thursday, October 25, 2007


MOTIVATIONAL


There was an incident at the border of my memory. Whole areas were suddenly shut down, parking lots stretching out, rain-wet and empty. While the young guards looked on, nervous in chain-link shadow, certain conclaves held protests by torch-light. They were ignored, their words reduced by official radio to proper grunts of the forsaken and obnoxious.

Entire regions have been named off-limits. I couldn't reach them even if I had the proper papers. Several verdant fields are being torched under the cover of night; it is thought the ashen-lunged stubble left behind will be less aesthetically compromising. There will be relatives I miss on the other side, friends whose faces are even now becoming little more than phosphorous smudges, fingerprints wiped from a used bar glass, to be filed away only as evidence.

A list is being passed hurriedly around, written in a thick, blunt monotone of capitals. I am sure once it is cleared, I will be allowed to read it.

I count the minutes, which seem larger now that there are less of them. There is something to be said for this, this feeling. They are calling tonight a clean-sweep operation, a mopping-up, and it is true, I feel cleaner. I have shed countless fevers, doctor's visits, nauseous rendezvous, distended pronouncements of love, when all I felt inside was a vague terror.

It is true, I look in the mirror--there is less of me, and so I see myself better, every detail sharpened in the burnt air of absence. It is for my own sake this being done, I am told, as I wait with passport and raincoat, as rifles crack through the mist in the distance. For the sake of my body, something must go:

We are not speaking for ourselves,
we are speaking for the body.
We are speaking for ashes and glory,
and the hallowed things.
We are saying, your kingdom must be settled,
accounts wiped clean.
We are saying, thy will must be done,
thy will is everything.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007


AMERICANA


Once, I liked to recite
the place-mats from diners:
Rob Roy, Tom Collins, the dead
medicine of 1930's cocktails.
Now I don't bother smiling
when old radios play old songs,
when the crumbled Italian cobbler offers
a gulp of olive oil to boost your hard-on.

The great wars are over.
I know nothing of food rationing,
of headlights painted black
to fool U-Boats along the dark coast.
No dead soldiers washed up on my holiday shores.
Only a salty taste, sand grit bathing suit,
my disconnected howl from the back seat
as I learned to read from billboards,
saw the Moon Launch between cartoons on a Saturday.

Oh, black-finned Cadillac,
body of angel and hearse, bring lovers
to the dripping resin of young pine trees.
Do the Twist 'n' Shout
while missiles moan in silos below.

I am tired of it. Lay me down. Take me over.
Let me sit as I once did by the kitchen table,
split from the womb at the World's Fair,
fingers stuffed with prayer.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007


HARD FORMULAS


Upon your silence, I come crashing.
I am lost salt and siphoned minerals,
I am your accident.
Let me take a light shaving from your bones,
a tangled grey snarl of hair.
I will taste something tonight of who I am.
I wish for the hard formulas binding me to you;
stitched red calligraphy, the spider-light of veins.
Let me touch the stem of iron still gleaming in you,
because I know I will find through this I am only
a deduction, a nub, a glistening sea-root that broke for air.
Inside, each of us carries a portion of the first ocean.
When you break, what will be left?
Only your scrubbed, grey shoals.
Only me, gripping like lichen to my own bones,
a scattering of rocks and calcium,
my blood running rich and dark as tar
to mark the lasting burn of your deposit.

Sunday, October 21, 2007


TALK OF DUST


You go through several stages in the acceptance of dust:
Revulsion, a vague, feeble want of escape.
This settles into the mind at last as a kind
of terrible glory.
What vibrates in our lungs
could be the final, desperate filaments
of Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson, Jimi Hendrix.

Look! The late afternoon sun blazes with dust,
gold motes lit up like a decaying consciousness.
But the awful science is always behind it--
That dust is just our sloughed-off spores of abandon;
bone-shavings, hair and skin, our umbilical cords
murdered worms, burned as medical waste in New Jersey.

There is no life without dust.
Nothing can be said without
the low murmurs of the dead behind us.
We're alone, yet we know that is not the end of it.
My last lover still here, gathering her ashen beards,
her spider's nests beneath the radiator.

Monsters