LIKE THE FALL

What can I tell you? Tonight, I am the bitter but romantic sea captain, standing drunk at the prow
while his ship heads into impossible storms, raging mists.
My crew has deserted me. I have drained the decanters
of all my highly honored guests, who recently fled by helicopter. I am at last left alone with my terrible secret.
It is like the fall of Saigon, except I am one man. It is not a nation I am abandoning, a way of life—
it is not even a woman. I want to remainan anachronism, a thing of the past;
the man who would say nothing.
Better to slip into ruin with sea-spray and whiskey,
dizzily listing the constellations that once guided my way.

Now watch. This is my best moment---where I break
my empty glass and throw the shards into the boiling waves.
Where I smile and bleed and accept my fate, heading toward a collision that is certain
but never shown.

COMPOSITE

Have you ever contributed to your own composite sketch?
Shift the graphite a little to the left, shade the nostrils a bit,
make them flare, enlarge the ear lobes, crook the smile
like a clothes hanger?

There's no such thing as strangers. You've met them all
at one time or another. It’s in the tiniest details
that we give ourselves away.

TIRED PARAMOURS

The polish has gone out of the world There’s no talking to the boys and girls Outsourced ugliness all the time
And we stumble over ourselves to “Make mine, make mine”

I go walking with a thread in my head
I don’t stop until there’s a noose instead The koda-chrome trees are making like mimes
And I’m already late to
“Make mine, make mine”

The asylum gets asylum, the doors swing wide
A poison Kool-Aid moon changes the tide And the tired paramours of a dying line Wait in the shadows to
“Make mine, make mine”

The parade’s in a shambles, the float’s on fire
Someone’s screaming to a higher power
We’re always alone, but it’s not funny this time
Because all we tried to do was
“Make mine, make mine”

NO CASA DE MANNA

In this city, yellow-smoke sky,
Carnival groans, skeletal cries,
I seek the leaf, the frond, the bloom-- Fire the wallpaper of my room!
Lay your shadow inside my wound.
Leak your tincture to crusted ruins. Awake to me the startled grip
of branches sprung from ribcage-crypt.

No Casa de Manna for you--
It's doors shut to such solitude. Enlightenment's opened a franchise,
All ablaze with peace-bloated eyes. Something ferocious, this repose-- Carnivorous and razor-boned.
An ache of sweat, gasoline lungs,
Means to an end, corrupted sums.

I smell the cannibal afloat
In steaming street-side vendor's moat
of Orange Crush and hot pork pies--
Sell the weakened, we will abide.
It's true, the thick, brackish hue
of this degraded Bar-B-Que
Makes me op for an angel's taste
of road-kill plunder, Mainline Grace.

Oh, yank free my demon sweet-tooth--
An ancient hunger made to suit
Newport smiles and bright penny eyes,
A river littered, self despised.
Down in the hole, we gnaw and clutch.
Vision turns a convenient crutch.
What was once certain as our breath
Is nothing now, beget and beget....

EXPECTATION

Take me on a station wagon ride
through a dry-throated desert,
where hubcaps are hung as skulls,
laundry flutters and is not folded.
Lay me to rest there,
so I can watch my angular shadow
short itself out like a faulty circuit.

From a back window comes a sentimental song
no one believed in, even when it was written.
Kids play games with dust and broken furniture.
I was once one of them.
I learned that thirst was nothing
but the absence of expectation.
I let the aimless wind flip
text book pages, past illustrations
of steam boats, skeletons.
I stayed very still and listened
to my bones stretch beneath skin.

Now, I fry eggs, straighten bookshelves,
wait for death.
When I hear thunder,
it's never really thunder.

Lay me down in this desert,
in its cracked black riverbeds.
Let me use my fingers, dig.
Let me know what it is to raise
water to my lips, drink.

OUTPOST

The outpost, mistaken for a church from a distance, reveals itself
on closer viewing to belong to an entirely different order of the
mundane. A one-eyed ex-civil servant minds the store. He
coughs abruptly, to fill the silence. Long tin shelves
are stacked with dry goods, outmoded office equipment.
Telegraph papers scuttle like tired crabs across the floor, lifted by the hot wind. You notice on one an old message crossed
out and begun: "I wish....I wish to say....I wish I hadn't
said...Urgent."

The faces on the canned labels smile at you like an expectant
audience. They are buck-toothed youths mostly, idiot savants
perhaps, blanched and withered by the long filter of late-
afternoon sunlight. But still they beam out a kind of
uncomplicated happiness, like the memory of a first sister
before she died from scarlet fever at age two.

This is about the point where you peer out the window, looking
for the lone crow perched on a dead branch, thrusting up its
ragged black wing against the blue. It has been a long time
leaving your parents, and so you get to this. You can't find a
choice that doesn't seem false, and you can't open your mouth,
because you're afraid to hate what comes from it.

CHARMER

Oh, don't get like that. Every move I pull, you're always there
over my shoulder, shaking your head, pious and redundant. You
think it's easy slipping into what the moment requires?
Seersucker, trench coat, velvet pajamas. How many people have
I become, talking you in or out of situations? While all you do is
try to pretend I don't exist. So here's a funny question. How do I
sell myself to you?
Scenarios make the man. They might come cheap and worn-out,
but they wear whatever clothes we can spare them. You're
looking for the constants in life, while I'm a master of the
unsteady art; the shell-game of many fictions. But I can't keep it
up forever. You know the whole story about how there's only
twenty-eight basic stories to tell? Well, I'm getting tired of
shaving the angles.

I thought that by stealing every expectation, I could teach you
something, could make you accept me. Look around you.
The wheat fields bow down beneath the rain in the dark.
The wheat is broken down into loafs of enriched bread.
That bread will be shoved into plastic sleeves bearing
some cracker's likeness, who grants his down-home smile
to the emblem of a brick oven outmoded since last century.
That's your sense of natural wonder? Give me a break.
C'mon, man. It's wet outside. My engine is warm.
We've got some money to make.

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.

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

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.