CONVICTS

When I get to Modells, I part hands with my mother.
She lets me go, and I always find my way
to the pet store section, to the mangy, blank-eyed spider monkey in his cage. He knew I couldn’t
buy him (I thought), but if I spent time meeting his gaze,
I was gaining a kind of penance.

When I wander back, it is through the forest
of the floor lamp section, my face flaring white,
the dust motes crackling, full of electricity.
The mannequins' eyes follow me,
always a desperate, bird-nest blue. According to my brother, they are convicts,
murderers and the like, sprayed in plastic;
their damnation to be stunted in such
poses of the beautiful,
to be kept that half-inch of distance from us.
I know I shouldn’t believe him.
I find my mother’s hand, grasp it,
ask for an Orange Crush, go blank.

HUNGRY

Everything makes me hungry
I’m a joy-riding, self-hating SUV
I’m a buffalo on a spending spree
Just looking for the thing that will kill me

I’m a cannibal with a psych degree
Your huddled masses are a delicacy
The jaws of life just unhinged me
Because everything makes me hungry

I saw the desert past the cul-de-sac
And I knew that’s where I had to be
I knew that nothing could stop me
And nothing was my only peace

In a hollow tree, I left you a note
All it said was, “We’ll be free”
But right then, it occurred to me
The very first smile had bloody teeth

GOOD FRIDAY

"I am the voice of the train, not the driver" – David West

Oh, bring me through this, through tar paper rooftops,
branches strained and naked along railroad tracks,
though Spring has come.
Through goldenrod bent to the earth, father-tall weeds hacked at the roots, left drying in heaps,
through rust-stained, weeping concrete. Workers cast off jackets, hold up their biceps
like proud, gleaming fish to the last leakage of sun.
Drums litter the rail yard, painted in vibrant yellow
EMERGENCY.

Last Sunday, a heavy-set Latino girl ran past me
through bleak empty streets of downtown Brooklyn,
beating a palm frond along coursened brick,
counting out a number song to herself, the green in her clenched fist strangely luminous
amidst the grey air we walked through.
I had to remember what day it was.
Now, after work on a Friday, the leaden faces
all lean toward some secret, magnetic pole.
The train pours forward. I wish
for the snapping black of the tunnel,
so that we might be like Him,
rising toward something; a dull humming,
scythes cutting the sleek green grass of our graves.
All this gravel come up,
bone-sharded skull of a king.
All these rails tremble, limbs of electricity.
We are the Body, passing through.

DISTANCE

What rises through me
could be breath or wind;
I shiver with the thrust of it.
Past my window, the stricken
corridors of Brooklyn, to the grey,
pulsing mesh of the screen porch
where my father steps out
and lets the dark air take him.

I can’t imagine what he hears,
swirling his cheap martini
to the stark clutter of leaves;
The way he could listen to thunder storms by himself in the summer
and I knew not to go near him.

The trees set off their soft,
urgent twinings,
the grass rises like the knives
of saints to greet him.

He already can't find his way back.

My mother snores on the couch, the gardens in her magazines
folded across her lap,
the garbled blue flower of TV
plays for no one in the kitchen.

Across the screen,
someone in a white shirt
wanders on a beach.

RIGHT NOW
Right now, my skull is thunderous and empty
with the left-over reverb of a rock'n'roll show--
I can hear anything at 4:20 AM.

Footfalls up the block--
A drunk man struggling to find
his key; he jabs it forward
like a single prow to make sense
of this stupid, mute ocean.
I can hear the oil of his left-over fingerprints in its silvered grooves--
I can hear anything.

Right now, the night sounds
like a thousand furnaces.
It could be airplanes taking off,
taxis missing their exits,
lettuce heads bobbing like green monksin the back of tractor trailers that see the last
gas station for miles but won't stop.
A slow, heavy throb that is less
like love and more like cursing--
a last drink poured,
a forehead steaming with fever.
Right now, I can hear anything.

REQUEST

I take the stars as needle holes
through which all blood has seeped,
leaving the polished gleam
of bone behind.

Night's black throat is closing.
Hunger is a way out.
Ask for me.

COMBUSTION
Everything burns within my sight.
Easter lilies, styrofoam collars,
the subway cripple trawling salvation.
I add them all to the widening pyre.

And He said,
"Stoop here, and drink, and live..."

Black waters of Christ, I am done with it.I can't drink you for this heat.
When I was young, I wanted combustion.
The Human Torch, “Flame on!”

Now, I see crucified silhouettes
hazy on the outskirts of Rome.
A lone man, numb but jubilant,
his skin in hock at the local pawn-shop.
God's vengeance on all the earth
smells like a fire in a Greek diner.
And this coffee, this coffee is awful.
It tastes like my ancestors.

I am asking, I am asking...
No God, I don't know what.
This fever ends when I want it to.
Rapture just a matter of letting go.

TRANSMISSION

In the future, celebrities will be hunted for their pelts.
An elaborate ratings-point system will evolve, based on whether
you bagged yourself an A-, B-, C- or even
the occasional anemic D-lister.

Macabre masquerade balls in urban public spaces will become near-weekly events, where participants wear the skin of their trophies, and act out corresponding scenes from famous movies &/or TV shows, ushering in a new Age of Viscera, which will make our clumsy forays into virtual reality seem as quaint as the eight-track.

Unfortunately, this depletion of the natural celebrity source-pool
will eventually lead to the outbreak of the great Reality Show Wars,
in which every citizen is drafted as an Honorary Celebrity… And when current trends are projected through to their logical conclusion…
Will the last person alive please shut off the camera, please?

BLOOM

As leaves fall through
the last steeples of light,
someone falls through me. He tastes of old seasons,
damp and mulch-heavy.

Let sway! Scatter the spore
of first hair-cuts, mowed lawns.
What is dead beneath
spreads its carpet of heat.

Let sway! Each leaf is a skin
shed-off, already ancient.
My father's hands, brown and spotted,
are leaves spiraling toward a stop.
Let sway! Let sway!

Withered man, you do not
speak for me.
Oh God, let this be
the first bloomings of amnesia.

AT THE NEW EARTH SEMINAR

Tell a tale of skin coming undone, of organs
standing in for continents.
Your fingers, please, will tug on the bell-pull.
The hired help will be summoned and this illusion can get cleaned up.
The paint's not even dry yet, and I am turning in my pecs
for a sturdy front bumper. It has the message I want to put across:
Robust, blunt in its self-interest, devouring the miles
and slick with the juice of incidental insects.

Turn me in. Update me. Set my wavering fingers around the pen,
I'll sign anything.
I have aged ten decades in a minute, and in another, I'll be back,
trailing a filament bouquet and mumbling a few pledges
about the future's bounty.

Some call me Lion. Some call me Prairie.
Some call me Worm of the Earth. Some call me Great Daisy,
Seedling, Stomper of Whims, Exploiter of the Growth Impulse.

I am a mouthful of dirt, I am the hollowing-out.
I am dinosaur tar calling for quarantine,
a fever on a match head that can't afford to be out-dated.
All niceties will be scissor-locked.
All second-guesses will be double-sealed
and mailed to their prospective buyers
(They'll get the message).

All parking lots will be set ablaze.
All breezes are being re-routed.
All party-talk will be reduced
to the squabble of fighter pilots lost in low-lying fog.
And you, Sweet Lady, take my hand.
We're about to do something they used to call The Twist.

TRACT EXTANT

Don't fool yourself. Do you think your life is still run by the
passing of the seasons, by some back-assed rubes calling in
the harvest, by thaws or freezes or tidal sways? No. The
instruments are much more subtle than that now. Fiber-
optics? We might as well be discussing a toilet brush; it's
gone way beyond that.

A feeding frenzy of minnows in the South Pacific, a
presidential candidate in his limo sliding up mirrored glass,
wind flipping the pages of a newspaper in Brazil. These are
the signs we should be looking for. You might be told that
the scattering of animal guts to divine the future is an
outmoded practice, but that is because they don't want
certain information leaking into the marketplace.

In the barrios, a white chicken is strung up facing east.
In the X-ray metal detectors, the patterns of key-chains
and spilt change make their own random prophecies. It is
all in the way you point your hunger.

But be careful. They're taking inventory.

I am not afraid. I have taken precautionary measures.
I have learned the sweet crisis of internal shut-down.
Beware. Even crop-duster planes, a seemingly pleasant
anachronism, cannot be trusted. Blacken the photo, dose
the back yard in gasoline. Don't think for a moment that
this is not a kingdom, that the categories aren't up for grabs.

The terror of the obsolete grows in every organism. It is a
biological trick, to keep its eyes open. But the tracking
systems are compensating for this. Remember the old
saying about the whites of their eyes? Now they've brought
the barrel closer, but kept it at a distance.

HANG-OVER ANGELS

Why am I so sick of transmissions?
It is the New Year, and I have nowhere to go.
I've been listening to the radio. It gives me
Bach, Western Swing, new sofa ads.
All it asks is that I sink in.
I'm tired of the impossible made visible.
Please, at least leave that alone.

I’ve been very concerned with angels lately;
I keep thinking they must have teeth.
Pearl-white, or nicotine-
stained incisors, it doesn't matter.
They will be extinct, and so collectible by next century.
They pop open our oxygen
the way we do some fizzy, overly-sweet childhood drink.
They're after one thing: the dull, comforting
redundance of memory.

Why can't one snow-drift stranger
find me among the muddled many?
Why can't he look at me, eyes steady
as airplane warning lights, and say,
“Now you know what angels know,
and that's nothing. Between each step,
there's just bare air and grace...”

IMMACULATE

The packed caravan of days wander away from him.
He wishes he knew how to undress in public, and not be
arrested for it. He remembers the stiff wooden pews
smelling of Lemon Pledge, their beaten red velvet knee
rests, the dense, stern, evenly arranged Protestant air. He
remembers sitting there, trying to imagine God in all his
tired glory, not being happy with what he came up with.
He is curious when this comes back to him in a soot-weary
alcove of Grand Central Station, among a scattering of
homeless men sleeping beneath plastic bags and Army
blankets; a swollen foot peering out from a broken sock
strikes him. Isn't this why we heard prayer to begin with?
Can a mouth find its way back to its first expression, when
words meant nothing but how they felt, lifted and thrust
out like apostles into the storm? Saint Peter. Saint Paul.
Peter. Paul. Almond Joy. Clean-teethed and suckling.
Token. The Immaculate Expression. Grand Central
Station, swarming. Siren. Place-mat. Snow-Pop.
Daybreak. Cross word. Influx. Robe. Satin. Breast.
Perfect. Perfect. Perfection.

THE GRUESOME GET-DOWN
"Speak King's English!" sez the Narrator. He is wrapped in fine muslins and is blind as an oyster.
He is speaking from a transistor radio. He is
our next-to-best shepherd, he retains that faint,
hot-sand glow of a prophet, or a forgotten, two-bit sultan.
He gets paid by the hour to wear that thing on his head.
He is evangelical, or at least that's what it said on his calling card.
He operates out of the dead sea, out of the late-night static waves we clutch to our ears like a conch shell as we shuck and jive over a municipal bridge at 2 AM, wishing we had our own music.
Why do you insist on listening to that son of a bitch?
We could have that much more silence if we counted him out.
As it is, we do the dance of the forty-ounce, hump the city's hypodermic sky-line, think of pigeons as doves and list the automobile as this country's best approximation of the slaughtered lamb. I think we turned too-old just yesterday. I can't even pretend I've got anything left to rebel against. Just this dirty music of the forked-tongue and knife set,
the shine stolen from the glaringly obvious,
the salt poured from the salt mines onto old wounds; anything to keep them in business.
I come from a region where it's all right to hate yourself.
I drive the highway, looking for another happy accident.
There are a thousand songs that could be labeled appropriate for this occasion, but I'm giving up the safety net.
I've played the juke-box like a gas pump, and now I'm asking
for one, just one, just a straight-up, mournful melody
to call my own, just anything to drown out the Narrator
who's telling me this one's already been sung.

SUSPENSION

I look down and find my hands are play-things. They seem
frivolous, I can get by without them. One tired fact convinces
me: If I can't make myself better, I can make myself worse.
In that, at least, the results are readily proven. It's funny, but
hearing the same words so many times, the vowels seem to
widen, you can step right inside them. Suddenly, I've never heard
anything as lonely as, "House." Pour me some medicine,
I can barely see you in the dark, just the hurried glint of your eye-
frames. I begin to get the idea this might be a wake, that
we are sitting here, waiting for something. An elevator drops
near-by, hush of suspension. This could be a murder, a clumsy
frame-up, or the tail-end of a business convention. I never saw it
so clearly before, that we are the ones who hand out the knives,
who mouth the word, "Victim."

NEW MATH

I have told many lies from the middle
of these monkey bars, and will continue
to tell them, as long as I have an audience,
and do no traffic in the gossip of competing theories.
I dose old photos in sepia tones because
in that way memory has a cut-off.
I like time-lines, you can point them.
If you've got a wheel, forget it. I don't trade in that.
I've got Early American exit-wounds, cannibal train tracks,
the coarse, blond trellises of the first woman ever in distress...
Yeah, now you wish you'd been listening.
There's music, and then there's what I'm selling:
And Europe, that's a cosmetic I can apply liberally.
My arms flap like malaria blankets, my hand-jive is ugly,
like doves fed on sawdust and shot by the magician
who couldn't stop hunger. My pockets are full,
I could be angel, because everyone else stinks like carcass.
And you've got a mouth on you, I can't shut it.
Till it gets this simple...You never opened it to begin with.

BLESSING

Even in their blue hallways, the red sign
shrieking, "Exit." Even in dark arches,
eyes creased with pantomime of sleep.
Even the crooked elder testing garbage lids
takes a small walk toward forgiveness.
Even the butter-knife spells disaster, relief.

ANOTHER SKIN

I stretch the plastic to a perfect sheen
split it along ridged teeth, enough
to wrap the slivered half
of my bermuda onion, so I can forget it
behind the eggs, find it weeks later
a withered yawn of wrinkles
toss it out; so much
plastic for such a little thing

Up the street the
"All-Star Poly-Bag" factory
stitching and stitching through the night

Vagrant scraps slip from garbage lids
scuttle beneath street lights
run with hunger toward its humming
All tatters searching out the mother skin

I have a skin I wasn't born with
A scalded robe melded to my own

A botched mask
A corpse flag
A gasp which tightens

I dream of floating in silent orbit
with the oxygen I know
no one else has tasted

I reach for you and find
something I can't break

A shroud, a light
dust of static and whispers

I think, "I've always had this"

MY WARFARE
There is war out my window tonight.
The lights of the city flare and pixillate;
sirens, a lone shout quickly doused.
I am beyond vaccination.

In our small, cramped armistice, I stretch
arms gone numb, loops of blood
useless, busy forgetting.

You can rest your gun in the funeral
stone of my mouth, you can call my slashed
red ribbons the first sign of Spring coming.
I don't care. You can say anything. My warfare
is the all-night news station, eggs hot off the plate,
the heating element a lover engraves
into his palm to prove he's beyond pain.
I say these things because such spaces
yawn between them.

I hum along with owls extinct on telegraph wires,
waiting for the last signal to be complete.
I am the Undertaker's Son
after a horrible accident: Grey-tied, rubber-gloved.
Give me your coupons, they are your face
trapped beneath glass.
Give me champagne and Dramamine
and I'll dish out last moments like flash cards
just before the crash: Hands Held, Fire, Regret.

MOTIVATIONAL

There was an incident at the border of my memory. Whole areas were suddenly shut down, parking lots stretching out, rain-wet and empty. While the young guards looked on, nervous in chain-link shadow, certain conclaves held protests by torch-light. They were ignored, their words reduced by official radio to proper grunts of the forsaken and obnoxious.

Entire regions have been named off-limits. I couldn't reach them even if I had the proper papers. Several verdant fields are being torched under the cover of night; it is thought the ashen-lunged stubble left behind will be less aesthetically compromising. There will be relatives I miss on the other side, friends whose faces are even now becoming little more than phosphorous smudges, fingerprints wiped from a used bar glass, to be filed away only as evidence.

A list is being passed hurriedly around, written in a thick, blunt monotone of capitals. I am sure once it is cleared, I will be allowed to read it.

I count the minutes, which seem larger now that there are less of them. There is something to be said for this, this feeling. They are calling tonight a clean-sweep operation, a mopping-up, and it is true, I feel cleaner. I have shed countless fevers, doctor's visits, nauseous rendezvous, distended pronouncements of love, when all I felt inside was a vague terror.

It is true, I look in the mirror--there is less of me, and so I see myself better, every detail sharpened in the burnt air of absence. It is for my own sake this being done, I am told, as I wait with passport and raincoat, as rifles crack through the mist in the distance. For the sake of my body, something must go:

We are not speaking for ourselves,
we are speaking for the body.
We are speaking for ashes and glory,
and the hallowed things.
We are saying, your kingdom must be settled,
accounts wiped clean.
We are saying, thy will must be done,
thy will is everything.

AMERICANA

Once, I liked to recite
the place-mats from diners:
Rob Roy, Tom Collins, the dead
medicine of 1930's cocktails.
Now I don't bother smiling
when old radios play old songs,
when the crumbled Italian cobbler offers
a gulp of olive oil to boost your hard-on.

The great wars are over.
I know nothing of food rationing,
of headlights painted black
to fool U-Boats along the dark coast.
No dead soldiers washed up on my holiday shores.
Only a salty taste, sand grit bathing suit,
my disconnected howl from the back seat
as I learned to read from billboards,
saw the Moon Launch between cartoons on a Saturday.

Oh, black-finned Cadillac,
body of angel and hearse, bring lovers
to the dripping resin of young pine trees.
Do the Twist 'n' Shout
while missiles moan in silos below.

I am tired of it. Lay me down. Take me over.
Let me sit as I once did by the kitchen table,
split from the womb at the World's Fair,
fingers stuffed with prayer.

HARD FORMULAS

Upon your silence, I come crashing.
I am lost salt and siphoned minerals,
I am your accident.
Let me take a light shaving from your bones,
a tangled grey snarl of hair.
I will taste something tonight of who I am.
I wish for the hard formulas binding me to you;
stitched red calligraphy, the spider-light of veins.
Let me touch the stem of iron still gleaming in you,
because I know I will find through this I am only
a deduction, a nub, a glistening sea-root that broke for air.
Inside, each of us carries a portion of the first ocean.
When you break, what will be left?
Only your scrubbed, grey shoals.
Only me, gripping like lichen to my own bones,
a scattering of rocks and calcium,
my blood running rich and dark as tar
to mark the lasting burn of your deposit.

TALK OF DUST

You go through several stages in the acceptance of dust:
Revulsion, a vague, feeble want of escape.
This settles into the mind at last as a kind
of terrible glory.
What vibrates in our lungs
could be the final, desperate filaments
of Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson, Jimi Hendrix.

Look! The late afternoon sun blazes with dust,
gold motes lit up like a decaying consciousness.
But the awful science is always behind it--
That dust is just our sloughed-off spores of abandon;
bone-shavings, hair and skin, our umbilical cords
murdered worms, burned as medical waste in New Jersey.

There is no life without dust.
Nothing can be said without
the low murmurs of the dead behind us.
We're alone, yet we know that is not the end of it.
My last lover still here, gathering her ashen beards,
her spider's nests beneath the radiator.

GODDESS

Whoa, I said. That sounds like you saw a goddess.
That time you took too big a hit off a joint
at your friend's place in Philly, started coughing
your lungs out, got a really bad head rush
and sat back in the spindly, second-hand easy chair
to close your eyes, and let the black come funneling in.
That's when you received your particular vision,
or hallucination, or whatever you want to call it,
of a real Fifties-style house wife in white dress,
all cool, immaculate moon-strung flesh,
who waved her arm like a game-show girl
at a painting in dark Rembrandt oils
of sausages and various kinds of sandwich meats.
Oh yes, I said. She might not have had
many arms swirling in helicopter-blade embrace,
she might not have had a dun-colored bosom
you could have been drawn up into
like the beginnings of deepest ocean.
But yes, certainly. She was a goddess, none-the-less.

FRAGMENT

Who among us is up on the latest theories? You once thought time
was portable, sensuous, like the molded pink plastic transistor
radio, so cool in fifth grade, that now sits on your shelf, a
truncated muscle, a side of beef sliced from the prom queen.
Remember your theory on nuclear holocaust?
How outmoded is that? And who was contaminated?
The boy who peered through the dreary summer screen door
at dusk? There was a glow to him, like the sulfur of smashed lightning bugs, the screen door stretching like a net to catch some specimen. When did fear of others become a guilt you couldn't get rid of? You can't hold onto these things, there's nothing in them except the overwhelming urge to go under. Why keep returning to your hometown, just to note how the building goes from neighborhood movies to porno theatre to born-again church? Who can keep time with the shift of dove-grey rubble? Who can stand such restless breaking, and still hold a voice?

SLOW NUMBERS

How easy it is to think my parents have pulled up to the curb
in their silver Hyundai to kidnap me. I have been bad. I have squandered their money, drank their liquor, burped up vomit at 1 AM. There must be a resort somewhere that will take me. Some silver trees, empty egg-shell fountains, a few dead ferns reminding me toward piety. I could almost beg for the Venetian blinds shut against afternoon heat and starched white lab-coats crossing their knees, tricking me into saying something so familiar, I never heard it before. If you asked me now, I could already fill in the questionnaire from memory.

I enjoyed the train ride here. Someone told me they still shoot stray dogs, out beyond the scrub-brush fence posts that mark the edges of this county. Someone told me the cafeteria is terrifying, but only after it is closed and the dishwasher is running. Someone told me that the band here only plays slow numbers, no matter what your request.
I get to work with a scalpel, whittling away at the alphabet. I send a telegram asking for the Sultan's head and a quart of whiskey and am surprised to have it answered. At the weekly auction, I do my best, try to stand still, keep my place on stage. But always, I lose myself to the beat of slow numbers, click my fingers, start to sway.
They picked me first before the lights went out.

ARIA

I'm your star, and I'm singing. How far can that light go?
When radio voices still speak through the static between planets,
nerve endings can be stretched from here to San Francisco;
all the facts of the world fitted on a single microchip.

I will sing tonight as I heard the drowned mistress sing,
on a tug-boat buoy in the open mouth of New York harbor.
It was an aria, but if you wish, I could lay down
a disco beat, or a loping, Big Band swing, or maybe
Country Western would be best.
The category is True American. You take your pick.

You told me by this Spring we will have run out
of new things to say to each other.
I guess there's some comfort in that.
I made up that bit about the drowned mistress;
it seems to have stuck. Everyone's asking me
how many songs she has left in her.

I'm spinning, my nerves stretched from Chrysler to Mission Street.
I'm channeling the Big Bopper as his plane goes down.
It is night, there is snow, but I can see every glossed kernel
of wheat rush up at me. I'm counting all the loaves
of bread that will be made from that silent field,
but those are facts, not miracles.
I'm standing, mouth open,
full of light going black, swallowed whole.

CONQUISTAWHORES

I have seen the darkened lands
Laid like a stain, laid like a plan
I’ve seen them spread across these shores
The ends meet the means; of course, you’re sure

Here is the fire, here is the hand
What we forge now takes command
We break like seeds, or tired whores
We feed the fire of conquistadors

God and the Devil, hand in hand
They’ve compromised, drawn up a plan
The feast is laid, the wine is poured
The word gets out, a poisonous spore

The Kingdom Come-and-Get-It Plan
Is bankrupt now, you understand
We blame the flame, the need for more
We drink the ash of conquistadors

THE HUNGER OF SAINTS

I stop in the park by a fenced-in statue of some Polish saint,
while nearby, a prowl-car sweeps the hedges with its low headlights,
searching out miscreants. From a block of plain grey marble
the saint's head rises up against a blue night sky swollen
with the city's incandescence, and he looks out into it
like a teacher expecting nothing more, nothing less
from an unruly classroom. At his feet, the old women
of the neighborhood have placed a procession
of store-bought candles which pucker and gleam
with the wind, and other, stranger offerings:
a plastic deli container full of pickled red cabbage.
Strange to leave at this altar some semblance of hunger
that has long since left him, given in a mute attempt
at conversation. The old women with their nameless
ointments and swollen ankles wrapped in ace bandages
and their long yellow corridors swathed in the sticky
grit of ammonia, the faulty fluorescents ticking overhead.
I try to look back to the first secrets of their long-given thighs,
of boardwalks and dance halls and the dim confessionals
that came afterward, of their steady eyes as they calmly blanched
a young son's wounds, wringing out the blood
from the washcloth into a dirty bucket.
How completely they have surrendered themselves to the future,
to stop the bleeding and heal the wounds, so that this one
may beget and beget, all the while laying
candles and red cabbage at the feet of the dead.
I ask for the songs their saints have never sung.
I ask for the way these women sleep at night,
heavy, stolid, broken but firm.
I ask for the flare they put to the sputtering wick,
for their careful grasp of the uncertain.
I ask for one small name to say against the dark
besides my own.

THE END OF HISTORY

Oh, the fathers of this country
with their fingers numb
from gripping the wheel,
as if that were the loom from which
they could spin new bread, or pry loose
land mines that never went off,
giggling with dark intent.

Happy accidents.

The war is not over, they said.
The war is still going on.
Victims made fresh daily.

Direct your attention, please,
to the bluish smudge on that satellite photo.
It shows us with our best face forward.
(Company picnics are not what they used to be.)

"Read My Lips.” Such a lonely slogan.
Someone’s father said it once.
Now it can be done from any corner of the globe.

Sign language is out.
Soon will come the Morse code of heartbeats.
Even that can be deciphered.
And the poisonous son claims
all our tongues are tied to his own.

Leave me the fuck alone.
I don't want my moods lying around
for fear of hearing them whistled as a jingle
on some stranger's lips.

Words are like insects, aren't they?
Burrowing through what white spaces
we have left.

And who are you? You’re not the wheel.
You’re not the dry-lipped father with the cold compress.
You can’t break the fever. Your words keep turning over,
back to zero --- the loom is stripped.
Like an amnesia patient odometer, like a car hood flashing
nothing but heat and combustible miles, like a tombstone
blank with glazed fire --- You call that an equation?
You expect me to buy that?
You think you can just add a period
And say that’s the end?

REGIONAL SLEEP
What a strange tune the dial of night is turned to.
Beneath the wind that whips through my window is a larger sound, a low, insistent chorus of trilling whispers that throbs like a pulse-beam in and out of my hearing. If this were the country I'd know it to be crickets or peep-frogs, but this is Brooklyn, so I have to assume its source is sickly and artificial. Some great asthmatic air conditioner unit wheezing from a factory rooftop, some gigantic engine shorn of gears, spinning idly out like an old man trying to make sense of his missing teeth. Or perhaps (and this is the best part) its cause is something darker, more looming and subversive. For all I know, an alien invasion is underway, and this is their mind-conditioning ray making its sweep. I am one of the few left awake to hear it. Most of my neighbors have already lapsed into a numbed and mildly troubled sleep, their dreams spilling into regions of white noise and emptiness as their cerebral cortexes are busily reknit. A lurid scenario, yes, but such over-saturated color schemes seem to fit best this era where, as all the big fiber-optic conglomerates are constantly reminding us, "anything is possible." I for one am shocked at myself that I don't throw on sneakers and shirt right now and run out into the streets, driven by an obsessive curiosity: Just where the hell is that sound coming from? Maybe it was all those air-raid warning drills I went through as a kid, my ears shrieking with mechanized hysteria. You come to accept that the sky is filled with invisible bombers, that the impossible is just another steady constant. So instead of maniacally searching, I shrug and switch on the TV, get ready for sleep, for my own dreams to succumb to a gnawing chorus of white noise. Perhaps the night is inventing for itself a new kind of dark music. Perhaps the wind is being retrained. Perhaps, if I only listened, I could learn something from it. I don't care if this mystery has an answer. Hang up. Refrain.

PERSONAL AD
So let me start this by telling you a little something about myself. I like to raise skeletons from sunken boats. I like to take the seaweed crusted to their tarnished skulls and comb it over into a variety of hair-dos, starting with classic 1940's styles and moving on up to the present. They say you're as naked as the day you were born, and I can't argue.

I have thrown whole dinner parties for the victims of airplane crashes, thinking how each place-mat might be a map showing them the way home. I am a great believer of etiquette starting in the womb. I have written whole theologies based on this fact.

What I'm offering is a gift. One free waiver to anyone willing to trust my methods without a second guess.

Is this a break with tradition? No. It's a way of shoring up the walls, of cutting to the quick of that overdone modern question: "Are we all really just alone?"

We are never alone. None of us are alone. None of us have ever really been alone. None of us have known a single second where it's been just us, and no one else. We are never alone. Won't you join me?

OPERATING INSTRUCTIONSBegin at night. The crippled rooster swings
a rusted wing outside your window. Ignore it.
A face, mottled in shadow, looks up in numb
wonder at a highway overpass. This is your subject.
His childhood is rushing through him. Not in memory,
but in a dim impulse toward growth. As if something
were naming him, and the wind, and it was the same name,
and he was forgetting it even as it's made. Approach him
with care. Forceps are too clumsy, tweezers an insult to scale.
Your open hand will do. Turn it slowly. Let him feel
how loose the ground is beneath him. Then close your hand,
make a cupped, hollow fist, like you once did with summer
lightning bugs. Wait for the trapped, sporadic glow to show itself,
until your knuckles flare like pinioned mountain lamps.
There is something fierce in its message, mindless but defiant;
a teletype no one will read. Think again
of the small life that pulses in your fist.
It is not the face of a stranger, or an insect.
It is something you invented.
You know you have it in you to crush it.
How reasonable it is to want such things.