UISGUE BEATHA*
(*Gaelic word for whiskey, literally: "Water of Life")

The water I come from grows smaller; a puddle, rivulet or mug.
What glitters in strips across rooftops, on dirty
ponchos and slow-breaking waves of faces, is not the
same as what once ran from house gutters, where I
cupped my hands in some small semblance of prayer,
not the same as the stream that slid through dark
curves of earth, where the red lizard ranand doves were left in bloody tangles as totems or offerings, "Don't go beyond this."

The old women called me from the woods,
their china teeth stained with sugar and tea.
All I found were pine needles and the terrifying eyes
of crows. The older kids, stinking of gasoline,
tried to teach me how to strangle birds,
but I wouldn't listen.

I lay down beneath the flag of my country:
a red-checkered picnic cloth.
I saw my ancestors curled on it, amidst the sharp-
edged grass by the river bank, applauding fireworks,
and later, artillery shells.

I saw them pass milk and bourbon, cold chicken,
fresh butter spooled out beneath the fading sun.
I saw them act amazed when their men stared out
at them like grey-coated ghosts from newspapers and
wanted posters, but the eyes, a shunted, dense anger, were of a color
they poured into them, same as the bourbon.

There were questions I had from the back-seat, about
funerals and grand-ma's panties.
I forgot them. I drove around,
Schlitz and finger-fucking behind grave stones.There were fire-works, video-blips of exploded towns,
broken teeth of the quarter-back I never wanted to
be. There was a thirst I learned
for drink, furious, my tongue
plying the dryness between my father's ribs.
Now the water comes, and I can't leave it.
Endure me.

ROUGH SCRIPTURE

I am bending the leaves of autumn to my liking. I am a dunce knitting them together at some
arts 'n' crafts camp. I'll fold their stricken
golds and reds into tin cups to feed the needy,
I will create from them a whole diorama
of the city's populace holding hands, and wait, numbly smiling for someone's approval.

I will sit there and still hear the leaves falling,
stitching their piecemeal armor to the highway,
while tires sluice through a late rain outside. I will see headlights fall through the front gates,
send their caustic gaze my way, until the engine
shuts off, ticks over: anotherfamily member stopping by to rattle my cage.

Oh, I know they have their hopes: that I will grow
to be an adult, driving on a highway past fifty
anonymous front gates just like this one and not think another thing, that the leaves will fall to words
like "Bourbon" and "Automatic Traction," that I will have one damn pop-song so stuck
in my head I couldn't get rid of it even if you shot me.
But I want to stay as stupid as I am right now.

Because each leaf that falls meets the soil,
and you know what happens then, don't you? I was born of a few leaves falling and I count them,
gathering them up into a rough scripture that’ll do
no good, because the last line always ends with,
"Forget."

DOMINION

Bells toll in the distance, announcing a long and steady ache. This day begins and ends like a kingdom. As if nothing
were your own, as if the next word you spoke
could be traced back to the first word ever spoken, and so on. I think of the perfect egg cream waiting
at the corner luncheonette, where men with sagging faces
and arms like rough corded fire-wood crack their beer cans and talk about the last days of some other empire.

A story is being told. Wrap the dying hero
in his bloody birth-cloth and launch him;
this has been going on too long.
The father who curses his daughter for losing
a quarter in the pay phone, who kicks his son
for wearing the same swollen, slit-eyed expression
he does, who grips and grips a roll of electrician's tape
and a half-drunk Pepsi while he lists the fifty-odd
forms of hate; there is nothing personal in that. It is all part of a larger dominion.

Look, the father rises, puts on his work boots and a few sturdy words; he's a new man by the end of the weekend.
His daughter's lips are crooked and blue. She has a story
to tell at school that Monday, about the beginning of the world. In it, her father's hand is a fish.

There is nothing alive on the surface of a snow-pop.
When the sun melts us, that is all we have inside—
a wooden popsicle stick. They are gathered
and sterilized and brought to the school nurse, to depress the tongue. Is this a time of sickness?
A mouth hangs open, and from that
words and words will come.
Your forehead is hot, is it a fever? Is this where the world came from?

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.