HOW TO TAKE A LUNCH BREAK

Today, at lunchtime, I wish my eyesight could take me with it,
to glide the oil-slick East River waters, or to hover
in a nest of cool shadows beneath the Brooklyn Bridge,
and hear the cars screaming past, voices trapped
in their own relentless momentum.
Today, I wish I had the wind for hands,
so I could strum the steel twine of the Brooklyn Bridge
like a Marx Brothers’ harp, and play out the rapid pulse-rate of this day.

Today, I wish for an end to things—or a beginning.
I wish the “Watchtower” clock across the river,
which flashes the successive death of each
passing minute, would suddenly tell a new story,
would proclaim in a crowning digital display:

NOW
NOW
NOW

SCHISM RELEASE

And suddenly, the walls around you are lifted, and you’re talking
to an audience you didn’t even know was there.
While outside, some cheap, hard-boiled narrator tosses off
one last cigarette into the East River, to ignite all the lost
gasoline and precious fluids floating on its’ surface,
and as the wall of screaming heat climbs higher,
and your forehead is a billboard selling, “SWEAT!”
all you can do is turn to your neighbor and shout,
“Some weather we’re having, isn’t it?”

RAW FOOTAGE

We are all swarming toward something, some vast light source.
We are like the nameless warriors at Troy, who threw themselves
at Helen’s beauty, only to be cast off and broken.
It is those who know how to get their actions “read”
who are remembered: an Achilles or a Hector with their sense of good timing--when to enter a scene, when to stay out of it,
when, even, to die. Without that, the film reels loop and hiss,
gathering skin-moist in layers on the floor. Just hour after hour
of raw footage, taken as a security precaution, and nothing more.

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.