ENTREATY

I come up from the subway, where hunchbacks play
the accordion and drag long bags of laundry. I head
for the all-night deli, where a bulb has flickered out,
so it shouts to me, "ALL IGHT...ALL IGHT...ALL LIGHT"
I step beneath its canopy, to let the folds of harsh florescence take me in, and I look around,
witnessing the busy litter of late-night items:
oranges wrapped in newspaper, cantaloupe chunks
steaming, and the coffee sodas all laden with a yet
undiscovered poison. It's in their bright, quick
arrangements that I suddenly see a randomgrammar; foil wrap and chemically induced color
all flashing out mantras I begin to recite convulsively.

I see Abraham Lincoln watching a View-Master presentation
of the Moon Launch and saying, "There's not a free man
among them" and then wondering, "Is my check in the mail yet?"
I see the CEOs of Microsoft smearing their bodies
with bear fat to keep warm for the winter, while outside
Xerox machines spit out replicas of the rain forest,
inch by square inch. I see the new fruit glowing
like an emergency inside my vultured grip.
I say, "The story is dying, the story is dying. Don't let the story die yet..."

ZEUS GETS A HAIR-CUT

Well, let me start this by saying, “Fuck you all!”
You think scattering my thick, black curls will make me small, leave me a scalded mountain in my bed-sheet, as fit for the morgue as the barber?
It means nothing less than nothing to me. You're all so desperate nowadays to bring low
that which confounds your careful rooms, your four even corners.

Yeah, well, I held court in a hall with ten times
that many sides, while I set fire to drunken ingrates,
laid diagnose to a nation of infected throats.
Fuck the climate control! I want the fever
that's coming to me.

I still dream of maidens by above-ground pools.
I dug into them as a worm through rotted wood.
You think I'm ashamed of that? My hump
showing white beneath star-light younger than I am?
I've put myself through a lot worse just for a little contact.
Never mind you would burn in a second
from the glory of my open chest.

All I wanted was your dust, your cast-offs,
your incidental sweat, an eye-drop to see my reflection in.
But you, the dry ones, so sure of your counting, your medicine;
One lock, two, the whole mane come tumbling.
Who's to say I didn't want it this way?
That your slow dissection is not itself a kind of worship?

TRANSIENT

The spirits that live with us are dying. Each summer
we spend away from them, their voices grow dimmer.
Trampled here beneath these mile-high pylons of bone
is the smell of the first season, is your hair growing long,
is the time you first caught scent of your own body
and thought, “I've been smelling that all my life!”

Someone just shoved past me who could be an old lover
or a dead ancestor, but what does it matter?
Faces become emblems of themselves.We are shuttled from tunnel to tunnel, through miles
of massed blackness, our heads bobbing like long rows
of candles on an altar, waiting to be blown out.

The light comes on again. “Exit.” We jostle and push
toward our next hurried birth.

WHITE NOISE

I go looking for the white light of your skin in the rain. I go with the clinging impulse of dust to clutch the small noise your body gives off.
When I strain, I can catch it, even in this churning
chain-smoked bar. Our brief time together has taught me
your silence is a buried trick, thick with awkward
dresses, the ugly flowers of childhood, living rooms that gave off cold and never heat,
your father calling distractedly over the racket of jazz.
Your silence a tightly packed blossom that might explode
into spore, drowning your lungs, your voice.

It is raining. You are leaving tonight.
Rivers are joining to set off black currents between us.
Leaves are bursting into murderous green bounty,
the air is choking with life,
more weight to a city already too heavy.
Bats shriek nervously above the park,
the siren-wide, stretching pale light
of empty playing fields, where rain falls
in the smallest of particles, gathered
in vast black nets of grass. When I feel like this, I feel
I could come apart in my own hands,
I could hold you.

AURORA

In the summer, we go on trips. The lawn grows, the moon rises
while we are gone. We read the billboards on the way down,
but coming back, they'll be different.
For a while we float, as made up as balloons.
We look at him in the front seat, hunched at stop lights,
sweat clinging to his white dress shirt.
We hear him curse and fumble with maps.

Right now, far above us, on the moon we won't see
for another five hours, Apollo is accomplishing its mission.
The kicked-up dust hangs behind them
in dead-air tendrils as they make their way.
Stuck in traffic jams and broiling heat, we think
of the possibilities that TV has taught us;
of the astronauts' re-entry failing, of them burning up
in orbit, reduced to nothing but meat.
We hit speed bumps, jolt into rest stops for blessed
soda pop and the terrifying urinals of adults.

Then, we're back in the back seat again, ready
to shuffle our toys, telling new stories
as the afternoon lengthens and the moon pulls into view.
It burns above the super-heated blue of the highway—
but there are men up there, there are men!
Down here, we are Army generals, glow-in-the-dark
Aurora models snatched from lacquered dresser tops:
Wolf-Man, Mummy, Frankenstein,
poised to strike with the perfectly-tanned sabre-tooth
at the last remnants of the Planet of the Apes.

We are the angry men we've yet to become.

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.