DISTANCE

What rises through me
could be breath or wind;
I shiver with the thrust of it.
Past my window, the stricken
corridors of Brooklyn, to the grey,
pulsing mesh of the screen porch
where my father steps out
and lets the dark air take him.

I can’t imagine what he hears,
swirling his cheap martini
to the stark clutter of leaves;
The way he could listen to thunder storms by himself in the summer
and I knew not to go near him.

The trees set off their soft,
urgent twinings,
the grass rises like the knives
of saints to greet him.

He already can't find his way back.

My mother snores on the couch, the gardens in her magazines
folded across her lap,
the garbled blue flower of TV
plays for no one in the kitchen.

Across the screen,
someone in a white shirt
wanders on a beach.

RIGHT NOW
Right now, my skull is thunderous and empty
with the left-over reverb of a rock'n'roll show--
I can hear anything at 4:20 AM.

Footfalls up the block--
A drunk man struggling to find
his key; he jabs it forward
like a single prow to make sense
of this stupid, mute ocean.
I can hear the oil of his left-over fingerprints in its silvered grooves--
I can hear anything.

Right now, the night sounds
like a thousand furnaces.
It could be airplanes taking off,
taxis missing their exits,
lettuce heads bobbing like green monksin the back of tractor trailers that see the last
gas station for miles but won't stop.
A slow, heavy throb that is less
like love and more like cursing--
a last drink poured,
a forehead steaming with fever.
Right now, I can hear anything.

REQUEST

I take the stars as needle holes
through which all blood has seeped,
leaving the polished gleam
of bone behind.

Night's black throat is closing.
Hunger is a way out.
Ask for me.

COMBUSTION
Everything burns within my sight.
Easter lilies, styrofoam collars,
the subway cripple trawling salvation.
I add them all to the widening pyre.

And He said,
"Stoop here, and drink, and live..."

Black waters of Christ, I am done with it.I can't drink you for this heat.
When I was young, I wanted combustion.
The Human Torch, “Flame on!”

Now, I see crucified silhouettes
hazy on the outskirts of Rome.
A lone man, numb but jubilant,
his skin in hock at the local pawn-shop.
God's vengeance on all the earth
smells like a fire in a Greek diner.
And this coffee, this coffee is awful.
It tastes like my ancestors.

I am asking, I am asking...
No God, I don't know what.
This fever ends when I want it to.
Rapture just a matter of letting go.

TRANSMISSION

In the future, celebrities will be hunted for their pelts.
An elaborate ratings-point system will evolve, based on whether
you bagged yourself an A-, B-, C- or even
the occasional anemic D-lister.

Macabre masquerade balls in urban public spaces will become near-weekly events, where participants wear the skin of their trophies, and act out corresponding scenes from famous movies &/or TV shows, ushering in a new Age of Viscera, which will make our clumsy forays into virtual reality seem as quaint as the eight-track.

Unfortunately, this depletion of the natural celebrity source-pool
will eventually lead to the outbreak of the great Reality Show Wars,
in which every citizen is drafted as an Honorary Celebrity… And when current trends are projected through to their logical conclusion…
Will the last person alive please shut off the camera, please?

BLOOM

As leaves fall through
the last steeples of light,
someone falls through me. He tastes of old seasons,
damp and mulch-heavy.

Let sway! Scatter the spore
of first hair-cuts, mowed lawns.
What is dead beneath
spreads its carpet of heat.

Let sway! Each leaf is a skin
shed-off, already ancient.
My father's hands, brown and spotted,
are leaves spiraling toward a stop.
Let sway! Let sway!

Withered man, you do not
speak for me.
Oh God, let this be
the first bloomings of amnesia.

AT THE NEW EARTH SEMINAR

Tell a tale of skin coming undone, of organs
standing in for continents.
Your fingers, please, will tug on the bell-pull.
The hired help will be summoned and this illusion can get cleaned up.
The paint's not even dry yet, and I am turning in my pecs
for a sturdy front bumper. It has the message I want to put across:
Robust, blunt in its self-interest, devouring the miles
and slick with the juice of incidental insects.

Turn me in. Update me. Set my wavering fingers around the pen,
I'll sign anything.
I have aged ten decades in a minute, and in another, I'll be back,
trailing a filament bouquet and mumbling a few pledges
about the future's bounty.

Some call me Lion. Some call me Prairie.
Some call me Worm of the Earth. Some call me Great Daisy,
Seedling, Stomper of Whims, Exploiter of the Growth Impulse.

I am a mouthful of dirt, I am the hollowing-out.
I am dinosaur tar calling for quarantine,
a fever on a match head that can't afford to be out-dated.
All niceties will be scissor-locked.
All second-guesses will be double-sealed
and mailed to their prospective buyers
(They'll get the message).

All parking lots will be set ablaze.
All breezes are being re-routed.
All party-talk will be reduced
to the squabble of fighter pilots lost in low-lying fog.
And you, Sweet Lady, take my hand.
We're about to do something they used to call The Twist.

TRACT EXTANT

Don't fool yourself. Do you think your life is still run by the
passing of the seasons, by some back-assed rubes calling in
the harvest, by thaws or freezes or tidal sways? No. The
instruments are much more subtle than that now. Fiber-
optics? We might as well be discussing a toilet brush; it's
gone way beyond that.

A feeding frenzy of minnows in the South Pacific, a
presidential candidate in his limo sliding up mirrored glass,
wind flipping the pages of a newspaper in Brazil. These are
the signs we should be looking for. You might be told that
the scattering of animal guts to divine the future is an
outmoded practice, but that is because they don't want
certain information leaking into the marketplace.

In the barrios, a white chicken is strung up facing east.
In the X-ray metal detectors, the patterns of key-chains
and spilt change make their own random prophecies. It is
all in the way you point your hunger.

But be careful. They're taking inventory.

I am not afraid. I have taken precautionary measures.
I have learned the sweet crisis of internal shut-down.
Beware. Even crop-duster planes, a seemingly pleasant
anachronism, cannot be trusted. Blacken the photo, dose
the back yard in gasoline. Don't think for a moment that
this is not a kingdom, that the categories aren't up for grabs.

The terror of the obsolete grows in every organism. It is a
biological trick, to keep its eyes open. But the tracking
systems are compensating for this. Remember the old
saying about the whites of their eyes? Now they've brought
the barrel closer, but kept it at a distance.

HANG-OVER ANGELS

Why am I so sick of transmissions?
It is the New Year, and I have nowhere to go.
I've been listening to the radio. It gives me
Bach, Western Swing, new sofa ads.
All it asks is that I sink in.
I'm tired of the impossible made visible.
Please, at least leave that alone.

I’ve been very concerned with angels lately;
I keep thinking they must have teeth.
Pearl-white, or nicotine-
stained incisors, it doesn't matter.
They will be extinct, and so collectible by next century.
They pop open our oxygen
the way we do some fizzy, overly-sweet childhood drink.
They're after one thing: the dull, comforting
redundance of memory.

Why can't one snow-drift stranger
find me among the muddled many?
Why can't he look at me, eyes steady
as airplane warning lights, and say,
“Now you know what angels know,
and that's nothing. Between each step,
there's just bare air and grace...”

IMMACULATE

The packed caravan of days wander away from him.
He wishes he knew how to undress in public, and not be
arrested for it. He remembers the stiff wooden pews
smelling of Lemon Pledge, their beaten red velvet knee
rests, the dense, stern, evenly arranged Protestant air. He
remembers sitting there, trying to imagine God in all his
tired glory, not being happy with what he came up with.
He is curious when this comes back to him in a soot-weary
alcove of Grand Central Station, among a scattering of
homeless men sleeping beneath plastic bags and Army
blankets; a swollen foot peering out from a broken sock
strikes him. Isn't this why we heard prayer to begin with?
Can a mouth find its way back to its first expression, when
words meant nothing but how they felt, lifted and thrust
out like apostles into the storm? Saint Peter. Saint Paul.
Peter. Paul. Almond Joy. Clean-teethed and suckling.
Token. The Immaculate Expression. Grand Central
Station, swarming. Siren. Place-mat. Snow-Pop.
Daybreak. Cross word. Influx. Robe. Satin. Breast.
Perfect. Perfect. Perfection.