IRIS

Geese gaggle across a misted moon.
A moment later, another wedge flies by, silent as sleep.
The black-veined lattice of treetops
beg the eyes to look up, but the feet
stay wistfully attached to the ground.
You wish like a stricken Christian soldier to stay far from the ruins of Rome,
to let this moment puddle open,
take you in, close.

MOTION

I motion to have my fingers planted as perennials
in a memorial garden, where disadvantaged school children with magic markers could scrawl their favorite rap star across the scorched text of my fingerprints, and so would wag the New Puppet Theatre of Pride and Appraisal.
I motion that DNA evidence be damned, that I be drowned
past recognition as a wet kitten, that
my head be held up high as I attempt to thread
a needle during a hurricane, that I head a committee dedicated to the end of debauchery, all and sundry,
except as it is applicable in public life.
I motion an end to everything,
except for what we can grasp, right now.

CURE ALL

The sky is filled with emblems of dead light.
All the facts of the world are set in a single bone.
Well, heal the sick, send the tired, mongrel dog
into the desert, be done with it.
We could start again in that new silence. The wind howls as you offer to write me
a blank check. I do a desperate pantomime,
but all I can spell out is, “I don’t care.” You forego the river, where the stricken are laid out in listless bowers. And I am left
with a medicine that can’t even cure itself.

SANCTIONED RANT

I have this reoccurring nightmare that I go to mail a letter, and find myself on every postage stamp. Ohmigod, which president was I? No, basketball player. No, serial killer. Question: What well-known torch singer with political connections was assassinated
on the night of the first moon launch?
I’ve seen plots to start wars scribbled
on cocktail napkins. I’ve seen cures
to diseases concealed in double-speak
on the back of cereal boxes.
And what about today?
What fly-specks of insight were drowned beneath coffee, in the rush to get to work,
on the slow-throated river to mutual decay,
where nothing worth happening was actually
happening? Yeah, try some vision with your
caffeine, you monkey-jawed fuck!

LONGWIND

The power plant thrums through the night winds.
Nested birds sleep, their heartbeats tiny engines
tuned to the monotonous, cabled swoon. Dark father god, hands on the bellows.
In sleep, we all assume the same form, the same curtain of breath passes
from bedroom to nest to burrow,
the same song, cubed and regulated, compacted and long.

WINE TASTING @ STEFAN’S

Robust, radiant...full of the overbearing
puss of a blind god bent on my destruction,
with the faint whiff of wood chips & pencil
shavings, & a pleasantly acidic after-taste...

ASYLUM

Inside this stale vault are long numbers no one is counting--- It is my breathing.
All is bone and grass grown through it;
the slow, rusted rungs are climbed. Sewers hum like black throats I follow
beneath the gutter's teeth.

I am full of the latched breath
of the air-lock, pilgrims turning
blue with envy, or lack of oxygen,
dim tubers which gnaw their way
toward light.

I am the ribbed cavern that completes
the circuit. I am the vacuum that lets
you know you’re not alone.

LONG PLAYING

The just-past-full moon parsed
and dissected by black tree branches
and a screen window open to a taut
Spring chill on this, the earliest Easter
to fall since 1913, to mark when
“our savior” came up quick-fingered
from the distended womb of the earth, and the moon spins in the sky
like an LP at the end of it’s side,
the needle stuck on the lip, clicking.

MY JESUS IS NOT THE JESUS YOU KNEW

Greasy-haired freak still owes me 18 bucks!
Standing out by the servant’s quarters,
acting all shifty, polishing the good silver,
and waiting on a blind date with some chick
named Rosary...

I heard he was once Union, but the carpenters
let him go; too many nails per halo.
I heard his dance card for the spring fling was signed, “Infinite.”

I heard we should cut him some slack, that his endless bounty makes up for lack
of charm, or social graces. But I don’t know.
He seems like any other poor son of a bitch to me…

GRAVE MELODY

I have found Sabina Melody among the graves,
beloved of Matthew, resting in this earth since 1891,
awaiting the Day of Rapture.
I have found the deformed faces of saints, marble fingers acid-eaten and up thrust, pointing the way.
I have found dirty white plastic doves, joined
at the wing, littering the walkway.
I have found an old man sitting on the bumper
of a black Cadillac, sipping vodka from a NyQuil cup.
Doubtless, he has his own way of remembering.