RIND

How I set my arm upon you
and it ripens
like the slow yellow smoke of pollution choking under its’ own weight.

How I’m still left with what I’m hiding;
a dirty-curbed snow angel,
a mismatched address, a botched serum, an escape.

DRAWN

In the hushed and forgiving silence
after a snow fall, distant voices
sound like they’re right in your ear;
they ride from shoal to shoal.
Even the abandoned, graffiti-glyphed public swimming pool can seem
like an inverted cathedral, a bowl of hope. The street lights saucer out, the sky
is mute with mist. But I know
the constellations still burn above.
One of them an archer, bow drawn,
eyes on his prey, and his arrow never to hit.
We pulled him that way out of the sky, stitch by stitch. Trillions of miles drawn
in one hushed breath.

WITNESS

In rows, windows across the street flicker out,
their slow flames, their steady yellow notes fading.

Something goes dark in me.

But if I wait long enough, until morning,
I know those lights will come on again.

It's that simple, paying witness to the living.

MY LITTLE TURNKEY

You hold the key.

I check my watch. 2 minutes to Lights Out.
We make some small talk; the weather, the movies,
which latest starlet we’d like to fornicate with.

You say, the tattoo on my right forearm
is actually a hieroglyph, tying me to a proud
lineage of pre-Columbian warrior kings.
I say, Nice pitch. Try again.

You say, It’s really about my mother,
my real mother, the woman I’ve never met.
I say, Can you even read my right forearm? And just like that, the tattoo is gone.

You smile, a little abashed.
Time’s up. Lights Out.
You get up, gently close the door behind you.

Turn the key.

I’m under your watch, but I’m watching
you leave, down the long, scalloped
shadow play of the corridor, a light bulb
just starting to flicker out overhead.

I go to say something, but I realize
you’ve taken my tongue with you,
a mute and indefensible talisman
carefully folded inside a clean, white towel.

SKINS

My bones turned, I was laced to them.
I was called, Suckling, Dick-Weed, Geek. How I begged for them,
for their dense, sturdy length,
maroon and green, to cover me,
thumbs hooked through belt loops, stance casual as flipped baseball cards. Please, I'm old enough. I need a pair
of "Toughskins."

HALF-BROKEN

Here, where late sunlight slants
through green park benches, half-broken,and the first brown leaves of autumn are scurrying, two twelve-year olds flash past,
side by side on mountain bikes, furiously pumping.
One struts his voice, breathless,
Let's check out those dumb bitches down by the swing set.
They're gone, heartbeats coaxing the air like tiny engines.

And I think how much is told through the body, how little I know.

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.

SAVIOR

Your forehead says fever like a hot button meter
and I’m guessing you’re not alone.
It’s the multiple delirium of the One True Imperium:
When you’re righteous, you’re always home.
But when the sky is full of hammers
and you’re dressed in fire and antlers-- My, how you’ve grown!

A CAUTIONARY TALE

There was a bumper-crop of tall dark strangers that season.
You had a whole range to choose from.The vox populi sprang from every strangled chimney-top,
all of it a tournIquet of yearning. Nothing a needle and
thread couldn't solve. What was left marched downtown,
what was fiery was voluntarily doused. It might help
to claim radio interference at this point, out in some
far-flung province. Open mouths count as dark spots
in the integrated web. Their tracking system is like
infra-red, only a cruel inversion. So clear,
a bible could be written by it. My God, pain
was started for a purpose. It was made for you to look the other way.

DREAMS OF EMPIRE
Like everyone else I know, I live in fear
of a receding hairline, roots like the last stands
of virgin forest being pushed back, until each follicle
is dazed and isolated, a drunken party-goer
alone on the sun-bleached plaza at dawn, counting loose change, wondering what
happened to his companions, if the concert
is still going on.

Oh, I still dream of slipping into the evening
in a black velvet suit. But once I wandered,
hopelessly delusional, and found my way back
by spotting a Rambo billboard, his sweating gun
leveled against his own townspeople.
I knew I was close to home.

DREAMS OF EMPIRE #2

The 6 AM fish market stunk of guts, it glistened.
From a doorway, a leering stranger gathers his bones
long enough to ask for a light.
As I cup the sulfured tip for him, I see
I am speaking to my own ghost, spun
of clothes I am just beginning to wear,
flayed down to nothing,
to the merciful medicine,
to the buffalo bone.

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.

HUSK

So, I am quiet, and the chorus of dead things
rasps at my borders; dried husks, withered wheat. This is not night, but a forward hush of senses.
Deliver me of this, weighted by objects
I accumulate, these skirts which lift so gently,
their breath spelled out in dust.

CRUSADE

Bumper stickers proclaim
the wonders of the salt mines,
stretch their beckoning ribbons
across a continent.

Crusader ghosts wander
the outskirts of the great pyres,
their grey armor transparent.

A last radio crackles,
"No solution left
but to burn it all down!"

A man wavers, numb but jubilant.
I have never heard a voice
clearer than his as he sings,
"Match sticks, match heads.
Light me up--I'm ready to go!"

THREAD

My brother stands, a shepherd in wool-cap,
on the rough concrete stage of a half-finished housing tract.
He tells how a single lash of long white thread
could trick an angel down the sink-hole, how we could
tangle its wings with soda pull-tabs, then keep track
of it by its jangle and clank, how if that doesn't work,
we could do the same thing to a cat.

We both forgot what we were thinking
by the time we got home for dinner.

SCHEMATIC

I see eager bodies wasted beneath bed sheets,
late-shadow buses taking strangers to a place
where they ring the cord, Stop.
Street lights are the split-open veins of night.
This is a place that still sleeps.
What is cold was once warm.

Factories in their steady grease of silence, the old man drunk on the porch-step, letting
secrets slip, broken electronic bits swept off
the work floor, and in the dust
his grand-kids make turtle-shells, dinosaur bones
from the brittle shavings he brings home.

CYCLONE FENCES

Tapping toward the forest grove; we make up the trees as we go, past the floodlights and the blue
crinkled tarpaulin-covered swimming pools;
All of us in depraved backyards, by rust-colored
monotonous teeth of picket fences, wanting to poke
each other in the eye, thinking of the schoolyard,
its’ wider green boundaries marked by gym sneakers
and dull grey chain-link, bulging in certain places,
as if a tremendous force tried to find its way through.
“They don't call ‘em cyclone fences for nothing!”
(Dad said that)

Lipstick, pencil stubs, charcoal gravel kicked up
by the track team. Panties stained with algae beneath the bleachers. The sixth grade choral group,
the girl in the green wool sweater let her breasts rest on the beaten piano as they did their recital. My eyes could take in nothing else. If only
they marked holidays by events like these:
The Day I Discovered Breasts,
The Day When Sulfur Met the Match Head. The impossible maps we go crawling to.

HUNGER PSALM

I know my pores will open.
Swell toward that hunger, radiant.
To cling to any warm, uncertain body
like it was a fragment of the Creator. Rapture just a matter of letting go.

ARTIFACT

Here is my father, his waste, his skin shed and there in that old photo, his smile shining out like a religious artifact kneecaps exposed like undernourished fruit
waiting to harden into knobby posts
to fit the bristling trousers
of work and surrender, thrust off for the sex that would claim my first breathe.

Here is the father I could have wrestled to the ground, taught curse words to by the blasting heat of the old family furnace.
Here is the father I could have raced left breathless and expectant by the oak tree
his smile spread taut, teeth glinting
with the words he almost said
didn't say, will never say to me.

THREE WITCHES…

…stand at the cross roads.

One holds a branch, the other a rose, the last a knife.
Our lips move from each to each.
It’s no wonder, the blood that comes when we finally speak.

When we finally say something, isn’t it always the least?

TEETH AND INSIGHT

I have grown to know the world was once water,
the Grand Canyon a trickle in dinosaur-times,
my teeth once fangs, my eyes sulfur lamps
scanning jungle ferns for the first hint of danger.

I used to hide behind naugahyde fringes of the living
room couch, to sneak the last scenes of Star Trek
while my sister and her boyfriend furiously tongued each other above. I was that close to the forbidden.

I saw how a man could dissolve in a beam of blinding white light.

A TUNE

Something was hungry in me, and I denied it.
I proved I could outlast the snow and the outrage.
Grasping the frosted bottle, I shouted, "Fuck you to hell, Jim-Lee!"
Strung some piano wire between my teeth,
strummed a tune on it, at first cheerful, later a dirge.
Got a cup full of nickels for it, because people
like to be reminded how quick the turning can be.

SIGNIFYING BLUES

I walk through these streets
where the shit and sapphires meet,
steam boat weaving through crowds abruptly breathing,
but I can't touch the ground.

I am trophy-hunting through this
disconnected shunting--frame to frame. There's an uptown matron, and there's a homeless
wasteling whose brain's in flames.

It's eye for an eye and I bargained my pride,
so--who's to blame?

Me and this town--
a Babylon merry-go-round,
going down.

ROAMING CHARGES

Across a prairie
In a cushioned doctor’s office
From the bottom of a chlorinated swimming pool

Waiting for your voice to come back

SOME THOUGHTS ON TRAVELING

(Part One)

I am convinced certain things need to be said,
or maybe they’ve been said already, or maybe they’re being said right now.
I am convinced many bodies are at work in the wires we cross to reach one another,
and with every click of the receiver
a blood vessel opens to let our voices through.

I am convinced the delicious red flesh
of the central wire (which holds our most important pulse) is really the long tongue of history’s deceased, which we must
borrow, just to say,

“I love you.”
or
“Fuck you.”
or
“I’ll be home late tonight.”

And when we plunge ourselves into the darkened places
to hear our voices flap as gulls or crows do
against a storm, we must feel strained
(in a sympathetic way) by the barriers
those wings now fight against.

SOME THOUGHTS ON TRAVELING

(Part Two)

And when you talk hurriedly to a friend late at night
from a pay phone, and the voice of that man
(one of the most frightening men I have ever met,
though not face-to-face) enters our conversation
to tell us with his cheerful hint of menace:

“Excuse me, Please deposit 25 cents for the next one minute…
or your call….will be automatically…disconnected…”
Is this the voice of the boat man
who we must pay to get to the other side?
He rises from the mist between our clamped eardrums,
taking us through the length of these smaller journeys
our restless change could buy.

UNHOLY CUP

There goes Apostle Bob’s Abomination Truck--
I’m still waiting for that unholy cup.
I’m way past due, I’m way past tense.
I skinned the village idiot to get his two cents.
I’m itching for a signal that I can trust, but now I’m the one breaking up…

“OUT, OUT, DAMN SPOT!”
(THE GAME SHOW)

I wouldn’t speak that way to me if I were you.
No, almost definitely, I would not. But then, if I were you,
I most likely would not speak at all, but curl up, fetus-like
in the corner, stricken with the ineptitude of God’s financing
in areas such as creation and genetic inheritance. And if I
were doing this, and I were you, who would you be?

Lost in the shuffle, that’s who; a blank spot, a shadow figure,
a dawn-day silhouette no one would be willing to step into.
And yes, all the crustaceans would curl up their tails in salute,
and the tad poles would do a slow dive backwards into
the sperm pool, and it would all be like some old
Esther Williams swim-&-dance routine;
A celebrity roast to the blind force of evolution.

Up to the podium walks a man we’ve never seen before,
and he would ask, “The envelope, please…” and your name
would be on it, announced to the crowd, the camera crews
searching you out, the spotlight frantic, and we would all
fall down the open keyhole of your identity, spiraling down
like a DNA chain, holding hands, not knowing whose hands
we’re holding, partners for eternity, like Groucho & Marx,
like Karl & Engels, like Fish & Chips, tumbling, deposited,
as safe as a rerun, as two lovers—each with their finger
in a socket—stretching across the long room
to meet in a kiss.

DEFUNCT KING

Today, I needed to talk to my father
and I had to go forty miles to do this,
and it only cost a few slim quarters
down the pay phone’s throat.
Me, a little lighter in my pockets,
and my legs no more tired for it.
“Kill the Messenger,” they used to say. Well, now the messenger can keep his distance,
but there are still ways to drip poison down the ear of a king just turned defunct.

HORSES

So, who was that ferocious god we answered to, who lay buried
in the coarse thicket of our pubic hair, in swigged beer and the serum
of our guilty sweat? He was our outpost of dog fur, our immaculate
boner, he was radiant. He ran through flaming sewer gutters,
exploded mail boxes, all juvenile pranks while our bodies burned
with tides we had no name for. We were wired to his spine,
we knew his dance which set us running, but we could not
speak to him. The power plant hummed at the edge
of the neatly combed lawn, which was green in a way
that whispered green even in the gathered dark.
And our shadows galloped like mad horses, afraid
their own muscles could tear them apart.

MR. CRUNCHY

(part one)

This dance you do, what do you call it?
This old thing? Oh, I don’t know.
Maybe Waltz-with-a-Hole-in-my-Pocket,
maybe the High Voltage Serenade.
Maybe I dance when I sleep and don’t know it,
my follicles swaying toward star light. Maybe I am photosynthesis in reverse:
All crimped and fetalized under sunlight, all milk tides and electric limbs by night. See how protectively your skin is gripped to you?
Force of habit, that’s all.
It just never found a better dance partner.
Let it slip off your coat hanger bones
and find the real freedom it needs.
Let it have an affair with a traveling salesman
in a sleazy motel, let it assume the form for him
of an aging movie star he was in love with as a child,
and as they sleep, their tattered bodies lit
by late-night TV, by its’ blue swarm
of itemized moonlight, someone on the screen
is squawking, about a 1-800 number.
A place where you can dance all night.

You’ll catch me down there
at the Omnivore’s Ball,
swinging with the spectacle,
looking for my latest victim
who could pass as my own lonely double.

MR. CRUNCHY

(part two)

This dance you do, what do you call it?

I call it the Caustic Two-Step,
I call it the Tango of False Intimates.
And let’s play a game:
You’re the forest, I’m the defoliant,
this world a ballroom of asphalt.
I am not still, dumb in the sway
of static’s ebb and pull, I am not
spindling out to match the galaxy’s black-sun demise---I am dancing!

These rooftops, they are not still.
They’re leaping; black-gapped jaws lapping up the sky’s oblivion.
And these leaves, scattered in the streets like the toilet paper of dead kings,
they are dancing, too!
These muddled street lights make islands of vacancy for us to belly-leap and frollicate
endlessly through, without any thought at all.
Whatever carries us, whatever moves us---

Dance the Bodily Holiday!
Dance the Contusion’s Delight!
My skull on a blind date with the Titanic—
I’m about to crack, I’m about to go down
drowning with champagne in hand…