Tuesday, November 13, 2007


CONVICTS


When I get to Modells, I part hands with my mother.

She lets me go, and I always find my way
to the pet store section, to the mangy, blank-eyed spider monkey in his cage. He knew I couldn’t
buy him (I thought), but if I spent time meeting his gaze,

I was gaining a kind of penance.


When I wander back, it is through the forest

of the floor lamp section, my face flaring white,

the dust motes crackling, full of electricity.
The mannequins' eyes follow me,
always a desperate, bird-nest blue.
According to my brother, they are convicts,
murderers and the like, sprayed in plastic;

their damnation to be stunted in such

poses of the beautiful,

to be kept that half-inch of distance from us.

I know I shouldn’t believe him.

I find my mother’s hand, grasp it,

ask for an Orange Crush, go blank.

Monday, November 12, 2007


HUNGRY


Everything makes me hungry

I’m a joy-riding, self-hating SUV

I’m a buffalo on a spending spree

Just looking for the thing that will kill me


I’m a cannibal with a psych degree

Your huddled masses are a delicacy

The jaws of life just unhinged me

Because everything makes me hungry


I saw the desert past the cul-de-sac

And I knew that’s where I had to be

I knew that nothing could stop me

And nothing was my only peace


In a hollow tree, I left you a note

All it said was, “We’ll be free”

But right then, it occurred to me

The very first smile had bloody teeth

Sunday, November 11, 2007


GOOD FRIDAY


"I am the voice of the train, not the driver" – David West


Oh, bring me through this, through tar paper rooftops,

branches strained and naked along railroad tracks,

though Spring has come.

Through goldenrod bent to the earth,
father-tall weeds hacked at the roots, left drying in heaps,
through rust-stained, weeping concrete.
Workers cast off jackets, hold up their biceps
like proud, gleaming fish to the last leakage of sun.

Drums litter the rail yard, painted in vibrant yellow

EMERGENCY.


Last Sunday, a heavy-set Latino girl ran past me

through bleak empty streets of downtown Brooklyn,

beating a palm frond along coursened brick,

counting out a number song to herself, the green
in her clenched fist strangely luminous
amidst the grey air we walked through.

I had to remember what day it was.

Now, after work on a Friday, the leaden faces

all lean toward some secret, magnetic pole.

The train pours forward. I wish

for the snapping black of the tunnel,

so that we might be like Him,

rising toward something; a dull humming,

scythes cutting the sleek green grass of our graves.

All this gravel come up,

bone-sharded skull of a king.

All these rails tremble, limbs of electricity.

We are the Body, passing through.

Saturday, November 10, 2007


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.

Friday, November 9, 2007


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 monks
in 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.

Thursday, November 8, 2007


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.

Wednesday, November 7, 2007


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.

Tuesday, November 6, 2007


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?

Monday, November 5, 2007


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.

Sunday, November 4, 2007



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.

Monsters