BATTERY

Run your tongue upon the withered zinc; the dampness will help the connection.
If you slipped me in your pocket and held me close,
my radium, my quick-twisted crown,
I would know something so subterranean, it could make me sing.

I will arc across streetlights and saliva, the dashboards will glow blue
with drowning, or submission.
The song will come in slow, broken pauses,
the dance will ache like the palm on the hip of some distant cousin…

(Don’t slap me---I’m not through yet)
We’ll whisper the names already asked toward forgiveness:
My third grade teacher, my hypodermic nurse,
my father blackening the air with gin swills.
Oh, slit open the skin, as batteries run low;
Let the charge run home.

SCENARIO

"Do you begin to see there is no face there in the tarnished mirror?"
—William Burroughs

Gun-toting racist lawmen swagger drunkenly across the landscape.
Sexually repressed secret agents plot each other's demise. Hidden
enclaves of technocrats vie for power and unleash deadly viruses. A young boy abruptly blooms into a red-haired wolf, leathery femalesnake-beasts invade the English countryside.

We begin to see this story as its own kindof viral replication, endlessly mutating itself into new forms.

The leathery she-beast is now a captive sideshow attraction. Expose all faulty wiring and cheap, duct-taped bandstands,
the hollow flash of out-dated tricks! The trappings are there,
but their mechanisms are left dangling, half-completed.

We hear the staccato police report, the carnival huckster,
the dispassionate scientist, the Hollywood censors;
all purveyors of noxious light.
We wait for the explosion.

Once it’s over, we are left
with bald cacophonies, with a sick nostalgia
for a time just before the bomb went off--- the silence that up until then, we chose to ignore.

ANOTHER EMPIRE

It is Easter Sunday. A ruined egg on the pavement
reminds me; its scattered shell the blue tint of the virgin.
Girls in their pink dresses look ambiguous, swivel
their small hips to salsa, or lean from ground-floor windows,
blow kisses to each other, waiting for church.
Behind them in their darkened apartments, the immaculate corpse looks on, hung
from his cross above the solemn brown TV console,
its’ volume turned down.
In the park, on beaten stubble fields, families play soft ball, launch rockets from which white plastic statuettes of astronauts fall with parachutes back to the earth.
Children run to collect the remains. There is nothing simple in this.
Each event unfolds, small and cautious. Airplanes mark the sky
with their blue-etched trails. What is seen through the corner
window can seem as distant as a radio broadcast; can be us
or others. I see the slow smoke of restlessness,
momentum as its own song.

GRACE RUN IT THROUGH ME

Don't leave me, as sunlight spreads
its wound through the broken-jaweddoorways of morning. Don't let me
forget how I stood here, mouth open,afraid what might enter.

There are diamonds still caught
in the tough black gullets of crowswho swing toward the sun.
There are still fish alive in this river-- bright as coins they flash, searching the bottom

There are children racing
through nervous pews,
who trace dust on black Bible fronts,
and dream of cars like red-painted animals
with doors open, waiting for them.

There are men who jostle and shout around the spuming back of a garbage truck.
In the muddled half-sleep of work,
their faces dance to each other
like drowned garments.

They think of going home to touch
their lovers, to run the shiver
like a current through their fingers.

This is the shudder,
the current,
the hollow collapse.

Oh Grace,
I will not break.
Run it through me.

EMPTY PALM

Toss your arms toward winter, when summer
is the barren ground. Your loved ones become icons; senseless saints and vibrant clowns.
The hand that reaches is the hand that creates, is the one that refuses, turning all beauty to waste.
My prayer is the slim leaf that falls openwhen no one else is around.

UNION

Our skin is just starting to come apart. I feel it
like an annoying burr, how it catches on my bones, while all the howling circumference is around me, waiting to come in.

No wonder we are on edge, when the teetering
data banks are just waiting to infuse us
with a sense of something greater; whale sounds, ocean's pulsings, and suddenly
I am held fast to the catacombed bones of the earth,
and a silver-haired, white-skinned hag kisses me
with cold lips and tells me impossible things.

And then I am alone on rain-dark open grass plains, the first garble of man sounding around me,
cousin of skin who would eat me without pause.
How I could grow hair like him,
let it flood me, coarse and luxurious…

BEYOND HUNGER

You hate the feeling of looking over your shoulder,
but then there I am. How about this:
I'm the younger brother, the one recklessand beautiful, who tipped the speedometer toward red,
and now returns after years of quiet with an itchy
trigger finger and the insistent promise that this is it, the last scam, the last chance for us both to cash in.
As soon as the porch door clicks shut behind me, you know only trouble can come from my hunched but vibrant silhouette.

Or how about this one: I'm your bleached-blond ex-lover,
who split for beauty school and Hollywood a life-time ago,
but now comes back, oily and sensuous, barely coiledinside my red satin dress. That's the one where
the sweat on your forehead matches your internal landscape,
your constant state of indecision, until in a burst of fatal passion
you thrust me across the card table, spilling
drinks and religious icons, giving yourself up
to the kind of love that always spells death.

Some say I’m beyond hunger. What do you think?

SINGLE MAN BLUES

A single man
A carpenter, plumber or electrician Clattering along in a panel truck
Thoughts with his coffee gone cold

A single man, but
An ocean flows inside him
Grey shores circling the narrow
Coastline of his skull

He knew it was there
But turned his eyes from it

But if a single man would break
The streets would be flooded
The world would be water
And all this forgotten

Except for a single thing
An old dresser knob
Or a child’s wooden hammer
Left floating

A reminder of industry
That hands sleep somewhere below

FROZEN

It came like this…I thought the ice was trying to tell me something.
My whole weekend full of suffused and glittering light, battered by its brilliance, and the best any of us could come up with is, "It sure is pretty out there."

All the branches the leaves tree trunks windows clock faces
encased in ice, a world of frozen blossoms, a world remade,
brittle, temporary...
We walked and slid in clumsy pirouettes across its smooth
and stiffened skin, the flecked-off fragmented stars
stared down, spinning and spinning, and the cold empty
sky opened as my mouth opened, full of purple breath bruises,

pushed out, set aflame.

ENTROPY DELEGATE

We are all coming apart, piece by piece.
Here, the lost have voices, delicate as insects,
or the smallest yawn of tides dragging us under,
calling our ears to listen.

Here, that man with the dirty wet newspaper a week old
can speak in any voice allowed him, can quote numbers,
artifacts, tired marrow, the particular grin of car hoods, the hoops of air that birds made leaping through him.

Here, that language speaks on and on, a bludgeoned silhouette that never runs out of words.
Here, he is our mission.