DEAD WAKE

Nothing much has changed since I left here.
There is a pigeon resting, spattering
the face of another blunted saint.
There is a numbers board clicking
at the Irish bar across the street,
the neon weakly blinking
through wrought-iron gates.
There is the ungiving sluice of traffic
from the highway, not stopping,
constant as tides.

And there is smoke
from some early Autumn stove.
Smoke which rises, urgent and groping, forgetting the fire from which it's made.

ANTI-MATTER OF FACT

I guess our lives are just a metaphor,
like “Towering Inferno,” starring the folks next door.
Give us our daily bread. It’s wafer-thin, and we’re left wanting more, smoke-choked and chained inside this corridor.

EMBLEM

The shriveled-leaf oak enshrined in gold
at the end of my block by the last slanting
rays of sun between the roof tops—
I am drawn to you, like a message
flaming out. You can’t tell me
all that I’ve missed today, as I stumble into the dusk’s first radiance, here
at the end of the weekend, shaking hands with everyone I’ve already forgotten.
But I stand by you for a moment, and pretend so.

SUB ROSA

I whispered that last part: I didn’t expect you
to hear it. It was like the handmaiden’s breadcrumb—
I just wanted to keep you coming. Down the crimped tunnel,
toward the sound that echoed like every mother’s lungs,
toward the rewrite of the first word you ever heard.
We start you there. Class has just begun.

LOT’S SALT-LICK

You said you were armed beneath that lovely kilt.
But when I reached for a bomb, all I came up with
was silk. Well, the truce was breached
by my empty-handed reach, and I’m left standing still. I am Sodom, Gomorrah’s on the pill.

MARCH JAUNT

The seasons collide, each trying to outrace
the undertaker’s advance of the next.
A June sun burns in March, making us sweat
beneath wool, making the rain gutters salivate their icicled jaws.

“The snow turns black in Queens,” he said,
christened with soot before it meets the ground.
“Not like here,” he said.

Here, where the finely muscled hill-top
is splendid and glaring in white.
Our hungry tires want to devour it,
ride a surgical incision up its’ side.
Oh, let crystals salt shaker my eyelids,
let the blue turn so hard I can mail it to Miami!
And who ever said the sun’s not a woman to sleep with? Wake up to find yourself
thawed all over the bed sheets, a spring
chicken cooked without remorse.

INSTRUCTION PSALM

It’s all in the way you point your hunger.
What do you taste more now--blood, or the acrid blanch of certain oxides?
The rise of satellites is intrinsically tied to the deepening roots of gene-spliced tubers.
The underage cocktail waitress showing some cleavage understands herself as well
as an abandoned mine-field does.
The terror of the obsolete grows in every organism.
Remember your first test paper?
Filling in the blanks?
One hesitant scratch of graphite
across a long white field.
Your guess is as good as mine.

VACUUM PACT

When you live in a vacuum, you have a lot
of extra room. It’s like you’re single-handedly
bringing back the lost sonar language of dolphins and whales, gone the way of the power boat.
It’s like the whole dominion over heaven and earth
thing, but reduced to a convenient palm-pilot form.
It’s like call and answer, but you’re always on hold.
It’s like you already said what I was just saying,
and any room for disagreement was decommissioned.
It’s like they say, you can never go home again,
but here I am.

MESSIANIC OVER-RIDE

So, do you think it was worth it?
Speaking as one suckled mouth to another?
You went the extra mile, man.
Not everyone gets to see the name
of the toxin they slip into the school lunch
to keep us this complacent.
Not everyone gets to read the ad
from the inside. Maybe you should
be wearing robes, and I should
be setting your beard on fire—
I don’t know. I haven’t been cleared
for those kinds of protocols.
But I can’t shake the feeling
that you’re a circuit that should be closed.

FALL OUT

Am I that transparent? I thought
these asbestos overalls were a good enough
cover for a first date going south in a hurry.
Do we have a safety word? A shut-off valve?
I thought my death-by-horseback-riding-accident
could make some pretty good press.
Or are you going with a “nuclear incident?”
That’s just like you; head straight for
the scorched earth-and-vicious-spin-cycle, and let the fall out fall where it may
be able to poison a few other footprints
along the way. Your finger’s on the trigger.
I just smile, politely.