PATIENCE

I am an amnesia patient of greater heaven. I come up, mouth open, and all the wonder
I could feel is a dull and half-lit thing,
a distant companion, something wrapped
in burlap cloak and bandaged feet,
while the gulls circling above
the earth mock and shriek and leave a single feather, a fluttering abundance,
something that when you find it you think
is yours alone and was meant only for you-- This is time muscled and bearded with teeth,
set to dripping just as it's stopped.

PROGRAM

Would that I'd foreseen you casting doubton all I've created. Would that I could cancel doubt
from every existent program. What do you bring me?
Hands full of famine, eyes like penniless oxides…
Does this count as knowledge? No!

Yours is one of the shortest nations
born from withered bones.
But just look at the neutered muskets,
the three-corner hats turned at a jaunty angle
during any recent small-town parade.
What once drew blood is now
the silken puff of illusionary corn starch.Name the bullet, name the substance. I could erase them all in an instant.
I am the speed-dial, the viral rewrite,
all that is best forgotten given a new name.
You should really learn to love me.
It’s going to end up in the program, anyway…

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.