THE HOT FLESH BALLET

I love to see the blank billboards at night,
like sails for a voyage not yet taken.
I want to climb the pure white
background, act out shadowized remnants
of some third-grade play for passers-by
on the high way, cause a few to swerve
shuddering into the guard rail.
Afterwards, the rubber-necking packs
will strain themselves, gazelle-like
and blood-seeking, while a loudspeaker spouts,
“Here is another death caused by art!”And in the ensuing wave of mass hysteria,
new government crack-downs against
play-acting in the dark.
It’s like something I saw last week--
“The Hot Flesh Ballet.”
Tap-dancing on the third rail;
(the performances didn’t last long).
It made you think who would be that crazy,
that desperate to fill up the stunned
and empty expanse of our free time?

But you didn’t even mind the delay
as the squads came in to clear
the blackened remains of the dancers away.

NEAR THE DROWNING

Men still dangle fishing lines and traps,
drag up a plastic six-pack holder,
lank with seaweed.
They laugh at what they're missing.

TV helicopters tear wide the twilight, carrying news like a vaccine.
The water is sick, a snake peeling its skin, grey and glittering.

The sun burns in one final burst.
The Chrysler Building glows
like a church steeple tainted with gold. Seven shafts of light fall upon huddled
brown housing projects.

And the river moves in the way it always moves, full of its’ dark, constant rewritings.

Every open mouth gives up something.

HIDES

There, past the blazing green
and kicked-up, scalded dust,
behind the monkey bars that hung
like the ghost-bones of astronauts,
where the shade curled by the split-wood fence,
that’s where we hunched, furtive
and hot-breathed, scouring the sick mystery
of older kids: smashed beer cans and the rain-stuck pages of old porn mags,
cracked and dried like animal hides in the grass.

We fought over their furtive, glossy limbs,
brought back tatters to stick in our desks. We glanced at them between science lessons,
where we studied half-finished men
in crinkling, plastic text book diagrams, peeling back a hazy lung or spleen,
like we were digging down to the heart
of some Colorforms murder victim.
I knew the secret wound of my body.
I knew what was worth hiding.

FIRST BORN SON

He grips his shaft, shy as a crab's palpus testing the dark. He has just been dreaming
of entering everyone he has ever known. A freight train moans ponderously through him,
swaying its shank of metal across long-dead
sea-beds of Mid-West. He is long gone,
too far gone, afraid of his window,
of eyes that might flare out there,
harsh and valpecular beneath hedge-light. He has spent a life-time retranslating road signs
he has read, comparing the crumbling mountains
and waterless rills of the moon to his own mother's
thronged and sagging flesh. He has grown old
listening to her bathroom coughing fits. Now, somehow, he feels larger than the billboard
that blares white and empty by the entrance to the highway.
He is almost there, can hear the slow grind
of traffic signals shifting, green to red,
the hush and rustle of night-time wheat fields all around, closing in.
He has woken to know that no one thing owns him,
that to grow is not a tangle of roots, but release.

SPANNING

This city lost in mist, grey as the cold statues of the dead we know
are dead just by touching them.
In this mist which looks like remembrance,
I cross a bridge between two boroughs.

I like this span of metal,
the arch and rigid grip of it.
How it holds the thrumming of trucks
close to its marrow, how they pulse up through my feet, a deliberate memory,
long after they've rattled past.

Strangers meet, slung between two points,
fingering switch-blades and nervous coins. All their furtive iconography of want,
like mileage counters clicking silently
on each blue-lit dashboard below.
Nothing holds me here.

In the wind, the hump-backed
frozen bones of concrete,
the stricken hypodermic of buildings,

I am remembering you.

I wish you could know
what my mouth tastes like now.
My lips are open, I am spanning.

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.