THE WHISPER’S PICK

You intrigue me. In the ghost halls
of meaning, you strum a singular tune;
a blaring, redundant binary code
that roughly translates as,
“I have embraced myself.”
And so the circle is complete.
Love, a vacuum of containment
shared with no one. You seem
an ideal candidate. An overripe fruit,
plucked from a grove doomed
to re-zoning. We could fill you
with something so beyond yourself,
you wouldn’t know what you were missing.
You could stare at the stranger
in the mirror, and not even come up
with your mother’s maiden name.
You could become your own chalice,
the blade of our conscience,
wearing the same clothes, reborn.

STITCHED RED CALLIGRAPHY

I am your accident.
Press your emblem-fist
into the soft wax of my chest.
I want to open
the lung-colored box,
to hear your secret talking,
to shift through the sulfurous
prairie of nerve endings
and bring back a message
that might have flared and died
back there---Can you hear it?
The signal, already decaying…

JUBILATION DECREE

I already feel lighter tonight, transparent.
A wordless jubilation is pumping up through me
amidst the tumult. There is something to be said for this. It is dizzying, champagne-hazy, like when I used to slip naked into my neighbor's swimming pool
at night, arching, breath-held, through the deep-silvered waters--though I am receiving word that those
memories, too, have been declared forbidden.

ENHANCE

You know, it doesn’t look right.
You can’t even say it looks
remotely all right, can you?
My perforated iris just gave up
an over-stuffed clown car at 3 o’clock.
My lazy eye just let a number of things go. Seeing’s not believing, is it?
It’s a matter of bringing hi-def
into real life. It’s an enhancement program—
some of us may not be up for it.
Those tears you’re shedding right now?
They’ll be like bullets
once they say the word, Go!

ALARM

I move through a place of bristling strangers,
each with their hands sharpened by neglect,
and still I can't reach the one I call you.
Each day is not a new beginning. It bursts forth,
contagious with the past.

CUSP

Can the moon tell you the same thing twice?
Can you stand on the same patch of ground
and be the same man twice? The wild reeling creak of the tree trunk in the wind
sets my baby feet running, and the howling
stars take me as their own.

UGLY AMERICAN

I never met a beheading I didn’t like,
or a blood-letting for a secondary cause
I couldn’t explain away.

It’s not my wallet, it’s my cousin’s.
It’s not my ass against the wall,
it’s a instructional diorama.
Take my wife, please!
Oh, wait, she was just stoned to death. There’s bound to be a surcharge.

Where’s a Geneva Convention when you need one?

You always smite the one you love…
Ga nite, everybody! I’ll be here all week…