A PARADE…

marches in weak autumn sunlight.
We are ghosts, firefighters,
devils and robots and melting men. Jack-o-lanterns set crooked grins.

What we hide is in plain sight.

SACRAMENT

The night burns. On the tongue,
some beer and last crumbs,
a murky sacrament.
I light a candle and look out.
Bleak, yellow-slitted windows look back. There are always candles burning
down to ponderous white lumps
by the open doors of a cathedral, breathing in easy sways against the daylight.
They burn for the dead, make you
want to whisper.
But these lights are for the living,
their slow, cautious corridors,their wax anthologies and bric-a-brac…

SHALLOW THROAT

I’ve been counting the words caught in my throat.
I know how my own hunger could split me open.
I see the wound of my body exposed in text book diagrams; coiled, naked organs.
Half-finished men trapped there, frozen beneath the icy lid of plastic overlays.
Each one a shallow grey boat,
each one a drowning victim.

INSIDER

Go ahead, count your blessings. While you're doing that,
watch me convert everything you've been saying
to a sagging cartload of Florida-ready credit and start up my own business of personalized mirages in a place
where saw-grass still creeps up through the porch-planks.

C'mon, join me in a tall-boy or two, a few sweatingaluminum delights. I have already sat with the natives
and nodded sagely toward the cicada-throbbing dusk through the screen door, watched bats chase the street light,
handed out some wilted business cards and a few false starts.
Do you know they still spit tobacco juice down here, and talk
about snake oil versus religion? It's quaint.

C’mon, any way you look at it,
any way you cut it.

I'm with you.

SPEED LIMIT

No wonder these kids want to race the open road.
It's because it no longer appears; it's the new frontier, an enforced mirage, breaking speed limits past
the unwavering lights of Burger Kings and McDonalds,
the Mobils and BP Gas. That is the real, jittery terror;
to get here from here, the same that started the same—
the most dangerous kind of anger forms in a vacuum.

WELCOME CIRCUIT

When you see a little circuit
and you want to see it closed
and you’re feeling kind of naked
but you have on all your clothes
and you turn around the corner
Baby Jesus says, “Hello”
and you got that black dog
barking in your ear and you know the outer limits
are right over here
and your teeth are a xelophone
clanking in your head
and you never feel better
then when you feel half-dead

Welcome to the Sacrifice
Don’t you think we made it nice?
You won’t even feel a thing
We will make your blood sing!

A JOKE

Three blind-eyed monkey cowboys walk into a bar.
The first orders a loaded gun, the second, a pregnant banana,
the third, a rum daiquiri.

Process the results.
Repeat.

CAUSAL

And the idiots have scissors
where their tongues used to be
and the mind ain’t willing
but the flesh is free
and there’s pennies in the eyes
of the blind oracle
and you’re stuck at a “Denny’s”
cuz that’s how it goes
and the satellites are clicking
like Las Vegas skulls
and you’re placing a claim
on your own lost soul
and Rudolph scavenges
the corpse of Santa Claus
and now we’re at the point
where the fever meets the cause

SPLIT SCREEN

The sky is a good enough place to start.
I have kept careful notes on all this, but of course,
they will be blurred by sea-salt, the bleeding ink creating
misreading after misreading that will be passed down over
generations, so what's the difference?
I know I live right now in a wild fear of the cavern,
the coffin, the closed lid. Now in the end all I wish is for those two edges to meet, to complete their seam.
I rush my prow toward the horizon, toward the split-screen,
where on one hand I am offered a Viking funeral
and on the other my younger self receivesa visitation by Christopher Columbus, who tells me
to seize the dream, ignore the maps, to turn the dinner fork into a divining rod, pointing the way across an open sea.

It is the posture of the forlorn, the hopeful,
the doomed and the loving all in one. Now watch.
Even as the mist grows deeper. This is the best part...

SURPLUS MEMORY

Sure, I could take to the talk-show circuit,
with its bright-lit carnival of enforced confession,
but what I keep to myself Is left to the mist, to the slow dissolve, to the ellipse of suggested suffering. I myself am not even sure
what I have suffered. Wounds are like that.
You get so used to living inside them
you might miss the fact
that they've long since closed.