THE NEW HOLLOW

I float with ruined cargo, heaving on the river.
I am nauseous and blood-fed. Take me over.
Tell me of the still-damp edge within our reach.
Lay me down there, startled on new land.
Let me begin the long hollowing-out…

WEIGHT

I have come to feel the weight
of strangers who live as close
as the windows across the street. Although for me, they weigh
no more than a snatched breath,
a stuttering film clip, something
held in a lidless blue light,
in a grip so steady and determined
it must be a dance; one that is heavy,
twists under its own weight.
Her fingers by the sill,
a mute instrument ready
to draw the curtain, to forget all this,
to say, “the dance is closed.”

LIKE LAZARUS

Like Lazarus, I make of myself what I pick and choose
A raiment on the battlefield
stripped clean from a very lost deal

Like Lazarus, I turn over a stone
find a new leaf that’s more like a loan
It’s obvious, I’m spread too thin
A name’s not a name if it can’t wear a skin
Like Lazarus, I begin at the end
My heart’s in my throat in a box that says, “Pretend”
Take it on faith, like oxygen
that the story, yeah, the story, starts again…

IMPULSE PYRE

I am here, and yet I'm not
I'm in Japan, I'm an astronaut
I am Polyurethane
Witness Protection has changed my name
I'm in every time slot
A nouveau toxic forget-me-not
I split the cost with God's domain
Now line up to feel my pain

Like a lamb to the slaughterI have tasted Zeus' daughter
I'm the itchy fingered fevered
lust you wish could linger

Face it, I'm contagious!

I'm so wired, I'm on fire
an impulse buyers' funeral pyre
I'm the sum of all my parts
I feed the need, hit Restart

I am Megalopolis, spit out
from Heaven's dust
I'm so in, I'm out of frame
You do my work, but in your name

FALLEN PSALM

I am drowsy with ashes.
They swirl past me, uplifted.
Angels.
Angels are grey and weightless,
made of dead things.
Their scissors cut
shadow-lines through the light.
I feel the dusty sleep of their wings. Fallen, their flight can only come
in the burning.

CRANIUM NIGHT

There are only the smallest moments left, when branches twining up among
the last steeples of light can make me feel a weakening inside, a wonderful
and hollow cusp of nothing.
Let sway the rigid atrophies! Scatter the spores of old hair-cuts,
nail polish, sweaty vinyl back seats,
gasoline and mowed lawns-
devour the immaculate!
The cranium night is long.
I am awake.

CLOSE

How close, the sharp insistent
edge to a word that says, Open?

My chest heaves,
slamming like a shed door in the wind.
My long shadow goes out to meet the trucks
rumbling, reverse lights on,
who mate their ends to the loading dock.

I gather up the rough splinters
of packing crates, the bent,
shrieking nails, the corsets of rain.
I wear them all like a wedding dress
of the newly drowned.
I stitch together anything that might break
into the victim's steady handshake.

BASTARD PRAYER

I once took a rubbing from the mahogany baseboard
of the bed where my grandfather first knocked up
my grandmother, the carved vines and flowers
and cornucopia looking mutely on, the leaves of Autumn falling far from their cleared five acres of Maryland farm land. All they had was the bargain between them.
Outside, the ridged breathing of corn, the sibilant wheat hung on the wind.
I will never know how to grow anything.

COMES A POINT

Who was that guy who called himself Ulysses,
laced with tattoos and lank, slickened curls?
Wet even in the driest seasons. Sitting alone
in the wine-dark glow of the juke-box, he spent
all his quarters on "Sea of Love."

If this sounds sentimental, forgive me, but it was all
we had to live on out there; that, and the hag-thick rouge
of our single wasted bar-fly. Tommy kept
his glass of brine, our lost teeth floated in it,
marking every single fight. They were like periods to our sentences, stories began
and ended with them.

We would break out the salt and sandwiches
when morning sputtered to life,
radio traffic reports, the horizon wearing its’ first belt of long, sullen red.
That's just like us, to witness what we knew was coming.
Nothing was there, that's why we stayed.
Comes a point you can't live long without it.

ESCAPE CAUSE

Under the streetlight, the skins
of old animals are dancing,
laughing at the white thing that huddles by the tree,
afraid to breathe.

A face is raised to me
in pity like poor bread,
but I’ve already crossed the street.