MOST WANTED

I stole that mustache off
the most wanted poster
and posed with a few pilgrims
along the way. I offered them
a salt tablet and a couple of
compromising positions
with their favorite mammal.
I opted out of the most basic line-up.
Y’know, the one where the monkey
standing next to you is the second-guess
fall guy in the evolutionary process,
stuck in an ill-fitting suit,
the short-straw in the mix.
He’s spun an empty chamber,
an itchy trigger-finger,
always on the draw.
He’s the studio audience,
laughing ahead of the curve, a little
too ready to turn the gun on himself.

BACK FROM THE DESERT

Toward such a thirst, you would not falter.
Toward such a thirst, you would not know.
A tongue makes for shaky infrastructure,
through the ellipse of your tunneled logic,
past a back narrative you hold tent stakes for.
It could move at a moment’s notice.
Fold it down. Repent. Reinvent.

STRIKE

Bird song at dawn,
as militant as any
artillery strike, or
ham-strung symphony.

They gather their voices,
the night edges into
diffused blue. Who are we
to make any sense of it?

BELIEF

Diligent into the sun we face
another evening’s gathered shade,
full of rain, pestilent whispering,
floods of solace we haven’t yet
learned to say…
To lean upon a cripple
at a cross roads, to have
his shadow point the way,
a sextant we cast to the ground,
hymnals we know by heart and flip
through their skin-lisping pages.
Oh belief, I am as far from you
as I am from sleep.
A silence turned over
for lack of a beginning, or end.

REMAKE

The open window,
the antic crackling bug crunch
of a cigarette butt being put out.

A silence complete in its’ fullness.
The shadow of your last self
just lost in first light.

CROSS-TOWN

Riding the lonely, late-night bus
from Queens back to Brooklyn;
just me, the driver and a young
Latino boy slumped in his seat,
grasping a diet Pepsi like a drunk
would his own elixir of benediction.

Off in the distance, the Manhattan
skyline, a wilderness of mad, endless
expansion. Video billboards flash
like tarot cards telling someone else’s
fortune: a distant cousin’s, perhaps,
or maybe a visiting head of state.

I remember seeing “Bladerunner”
for the first time in high school;
taking in its’ vision,
hushed, dry-mouthed, dazzled,
and can’t believe how quickly
the future has come to claim its’ own.

EXPATRIATE

I take my razored fingers to the seething
multitudes, pulling up stubborn roots
that proclaim their hold, stuff visages
into black burlap sacks, send them off
to some sanitized legal limbo heaven,
and no, you, in fact, are the one
who first mentioned the word guillotine.
I have a report right here that proves it…

ELEGY

The frail pinwheels of fireflies
play out across the open meadow.
I draw my dark ancestor into a dance.
She cries against my shoulder,
recites a litany of dead names
that mean nothing to me;
a deaf-mute second cousin, a minister
who mended split-wood fences on the side,
a one-eyed sod farmer who bottled
personal misery. She asks my forgiveness
for all of them, but I am left
with open hands, too many
of my own mistakes, and the aching
code of dying light.

BIRTH DAY

The monkey dreams a radiant cacophony,
a kingdom of tendriled fronds and god’s teeth
gnashing the mulch of the world into creation.
The monkey sees the jungle he dreams
upon the jungle before his eyes.
The monkey dreams he is a monkey,
born of monkey, but more than monkey,
born this day, but every day, to arise.

RADIOS SING HEAVEN: I

My body is humming, my body is humming,
cold angel glow of the dashboard, radio on,
empties tossed by the roadside.
This is the sound of surrender, glutted and tinkling.

I am only half-aware of the parts of myself
that are dying right now, for lack
of air and water and light.
What is left I wrap like a shroud
of monoxide around me.

RADIOS SING HEAVEN: II

I glow with abandon, thirst,
and pray to those murky
rough voices behind the hedges
of the choir; those bitten,
spindley things warped for lack
of light and exposure, who sing
with voices of clear underground
streams, rattle roots in their
blackened hands—Oh, give me
something! All those starved
and bug-eyed, ferocious
with neglect, who are lost
in the naming and so grow stronger.

RADIOS SING HEAVEN: III

Let the sky close down quarters.
Let the pumps and oxygen masks sputter.
Fear, paint me red, scurry my eyebrows
up to lightening rods. Caffeine, kick in,
blossom my capillaries. May my blood sing
wide as the Lincoln Tunnel, a fierce tide
flushing out the system.

RADIOS SING HEAVEN: IV

Let us count the heartbeats of the living
and keep time by this to the Motown of Heaven.
That Wall of Sound Phil Spector envisioned,
still coming out of cheap radios,
on Formica countertops, on oldies stations.
Hear that? That song made me feel today
that I was drowning, and was glad for it.

RADIOS SING HEAVEN: V

Somewhere, a bunch of sequined
black girls from Detroit are still singing,
their hair all curled alike, rigid waves
black as wax or glittering tarmac
after a rain. Singing the honey-sweet
failure of romance, so sweet
you want to start crying.

Like they were saying goodbye
to their childhoods, singing
to their crazy-mad boyfriends
who leave them for some stupid
teenage highway, Harleys, hot chrome
throbbing between thighs. But tears
streak the grease of his mechanic’s face.
He still has that song pounding in his head.
He still dreams hopelessly of deliverance.

RADIOS SING HEAVEN: VI

Hear that? Radios sing heaven,
rising off the dashboards
like a cheap hymn.
We’ll all keep time, clumsy-fingered,
and I’ll come back, I’ll sing along,
I’ll signify the air with my talking.

GURU NO

May you pray for the closing of jaws.
May you pray for such a thing.
May you pray for the thin forgiveness
that exists between lines that haven’t
been written or spoken yet.

May you pray that this doesn’t even begin.

NOTHING BLUES

I got no problem saying nothing.
It’s on the tip of my tongue, down
to the Isle of Sunder.

I got no problem saying nothing.
It’ll keep me company,
like no other.

I got no problem saying nothing.
With seeds split wide,
and no place to gather.

I got no problem saying nothing.
A wet, black bough
gasping in the ether.

HALF A MAP

Is that what they call your face?
I remember a time when it stood
for something besides the five
pillars of salt it does now.
Yes, I’ve been balancing
the apocalypse along with
the budget, and baby makes three.
I’ve been left speechless
enough times to know
every word is pending,
that only a wolf in bureaucrats’
clothing could hope to take
your howl, send it out on the wire,
and have it back within the hour,
losing a little in translation,
sure, but already on its’ way
to turning on itself.

SUTURE SELF

The incision was quick.
So was your come back.
But you won’t miss our reply.
What’s one small wire
in the great, cannibalized sprawl?
We’ve sectioned off your excesses,
drained some swamp land,
got a great redevelopment
opportunity for all parties
interested. You’ve already
made nice with the velvet ropes,
the SOS, the bright yellow
crime scene tape.
Your position is clear.
Now we have to define it.

QUESTION

How can a smoke stack
limned in sunset
suddenly seem so beautiful?
Or the pink-tendriled steam
cloud from a rooftop vent?
Or the distant, glass and steel
skyscraper, now a brief,
flame-filled skeleton,
like some pagan sacrifice
at the border of our memory,
to stave off the coming night?

NOTE TO SELF:

Careful what you look for
in the mirror. Negation vortexes
are not part of the bargain.
They’re off the table, non-negotiable.
Difficult to control when unleashed.
Buy an averted gaze, instead.
A self-taught lie. Universal patent,
pending.

SHELL GAME

Have you guessed my identity?
Of course not. I have ladled such hints
with dollops of cyanide.
Have you spun the threads of my eye net
to their logical conclusion? Of course not.
Such dramatic dividends are limited.
Have you seen me for who I am;
a smooth-faced fellow laying all his cards
on the table, just asking for the tell,
the reveal, the release?
Of course not. That’s my cover.
And who are you again?

TOTEM

This golden-flamed totem had to be
doused before he spoke; of another time,
an amoebaed past, one tendril to the next,
the smallest of touching, an uncertain
grope in a larger ocean, and there was no
talk of god, or gods, or anything,
just the busy, hard-wired communication
of filaments wavering in the currents,
who would think of nothing past
the blind brush of immediate contact.

“Greetings. I am Dr. Hayden Grace,
of the Wellspring Institute, and I’d like
to take you on an amazing journey
through the exciting field of bio-psychic
fusion technology to a radical new process
we’ve developed here, called…

CONVERGENCE.”

APPLY POMPEII DAILY!

The graven few might not have much to say,
stricken just short of the wanting urn, but I can fill in the gaps missing in mid-translation,I alone speak for the dead, outcast to memory’s
scarred and buckled edge, I alone have gained
their confidences, the exclusive interview, even
as their mouths are paved mute.

PILGRIMAGE

From your lips to god’s ears,
just the barest, stripped whisper.
From your heartbeat to the gnashing,
oil-drunk reservoirs of want,
merely a metaphor that could lend
your walk across water an extra mile
or two, your miracles stuffed and bundled
into a couple of old steamer trunks,
your budget cruise built on a pyramid
scheme of endless savings.
You, a hollow pharaoh, barely able
to cough up a decent blight or wind,
skimming off the top, never ready
to come in for a landing.

ROVE IN REPOSE

Because he looks in the mirror & sees
a perfectly groomed troubadour of love,
bringing forgiveness to all the land.
Because his meatloaf beats out
his severed neighbor’s recipe,
because the maggots are no longer
second-hand, because every map
is labeled, “Disaster” in every far corner
where we’ve already run out of ink,
because the money shot begat the cart
before the horse was flogged to death,
because he demurely crosses
his legs during art class & calls, “Break!”

FOREGONE

When you gone walking
on that good ground that’s
been sold from underfoot,
when an eagerly gnawed root
is called your very own,
when you claim two shadows
at Customs when you only
had papers for one, when your
hunch-backed cousin wasn’t just
a ploy to get a distant family member
over the horizon, then you know
you’ve been sold out for a lot less
than the story adds up to.
Then you know you’re just change
passing between pockets.
Then your alibi can’t have
A Once Upon A Time.
Then in a word and you know it,
You’re fucked.
Just finish out the time-line.

PRESS, RELEASE

I brought my throat like a birthday present
to the off-ramp, my fervent wish, an end
to all collisions, colluded orbits, frictionless
get-togethers; no tail spin parties allowed.
Take the black quarries of my open mouth
and make your own headline,
or discharge it, octopus ink
in an ocean too dark to even notice.

MAPS

Oh, to beat the grey matter tattoo,
past your run-on sentences
and awkward silences, down
to the scalpeled iris, the seed
of the word you wanted to say,
couldn’t say—Guess what?
It’s never been said. But
its’ cast-off husk is already
taking root.

DOMAIN NAMELESS

My eyes are like tea steeped
in petty recriminations,
my tongue tastes like gunpowder,
my sweat a salt-bed to lay down in,
where the pronged ribcages
of the slaughtered herd still show,
my voice is an interview-by-knife-point,
my soul the carrion crow’s laughter.
I am well schooled in the ways
of our fathers…

FLICKER

The Chrysler Building, as seen
from the end of a suffused, sun-setting
boulevard in Queens, is a mirage.

The old woman, the smile
stitched on her face, her eyes
blind to cross lights, is a mirage.

Tell me what I see, then.
A late afternoon collapsing in on itself.
Me, a willing cripple,

bowing toward the river of quick renewal.

CORRUPTION PSALM

Looking out the train window at sunset,
the sky-writing overhead just starting
to dissipate. The lazy smoke curly-cueing
into indistinct eternity helixes,
or lost DNA strains. They’re trying to say
something. They’re still words,
just the same.

BREAKING SHORES

If the rain were a telegram
then I’d be talking to everyone
at once, all of us under
a singular, spreading touch,
as tires sluice, and cast-off
voices echo down slickened night corridors, as
the desperate seek same,and the quiet
keep their own company;
a litany of raindrops outside
their plain-framed windows, a certain memory made uncertain, wavering, tide-like, breaking
and unbreaking, never
staying the same.

IDENTITY DOCTOR

You’ve got nothing in your palm
but a hybrid abolishment witchcraft,
a flower bloom in reverse;
the seaming of lips, the erasure
of fingertips, magnolia blossoms
made blind to the sky.

This Spring time hypodermic,
a symphony you’d best euthanize
a lull to cash in on, again and again.
Rub a finger, start a fire.
God bless the combustion
at the heart of every engine.

Delicate amidst sharp
stones; winter feet
on summer ground

Sparrows shiver
on telephone wires
the first rain in weeks

Resting in the cool shade
of a graveyard; car horns blare
past the iron fence

TRANSCRIPT

The immutable few round up the check, split
the difference, shell-game our fates with dizzying
dispassion, set up road blocks and listening posts,
pay off the angels of our best intentions, detain
any second thoughts, flay our dirty dreams
for the last bit of stripped flesh,
solve the mystery of Mona Lisa’s smile,
leave an opening in every conversation for,
“I’m not really into that.” (pause) “But I’ve got
a second cousin I’d be willing to sell out.”
They thread the camel through the needle-hole,
free up certain schedules, massage the truth
till it’s lackluster and compliant, moaning,
“Shiatsu, mi amore!”
We are all made up of what we give away.

MEMORY FIX

Do you mean to say that's even possible?
To fill in the missing pieces, to add caulking
to the dividing line of the misunderstood,
to rejigger all the missing fragments
like a cocktail mix on a flight that's
already going down for the count?
To add floatation devices to half-thought-out
rough landings, and to scribble me into margins
where I thought I was gone for good?
Call me a survivor in this scalded landscape;
I want a 12 month trial subscription
with an option to buy back my highest ideals.

CITY LIMITS

Strange, how your blood corridors
match the sewer systems of this town.
How you can call every ebb and flow
in kindness and cruelty, how you’re
already sending back that complimentary gift,
how if you cleared your throat,
you would have nothing to say right now.

The same wind which cracks
pines in Alabama rattles
my half-shut window

My apartment dark and still
only I make
the floor boards creak

Bread crumbs for sea-gulls—
they'd go for my eyes, too,
if I were dead!

ALTARED

All of us bowed and hunched over
the cross-circuited altar, gathering cinders,
left with a trojan horse god-husk of a cause
running on the purest flop-sweat...
Okay, I admit it---it was such a rush!
Getting you that close to the fever-line
of believing! I had a bet running.
Five angels with a suicide pact
against a blood transfusion to open arms.
What are the odds?

HOSTILE MEET

The elms, like stooped elders,
crowd the streetlight.
They’re all about tendriled benediction.
A face is forced in harsh relief.
It’s you, with a key, with a knife,
with an ointment for my knees
blown out during the last war
no one was told about.

I swallow the code entrusted to me.
I could slit throats with the shadows you make.
I’m waiting for your company, cuz
I can’t come apart.
A spore clutched in a fist, a loose thread.
You ring the bell. We’re about to start.

WITNESS PROTECTION

All eyes are on the hands that offer redemption.
All ears are tuned to the sluicing sound bite
wire-tap that proved I was somewhere else
when that revamped St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
went down. I am gut-shot and full of promises,
building the bridge to nowhere
off the sweat of my foreshortened brow.
I am offering a shelf life on my imagination,
a room with a view toward amnesia.
I’m already pulling up stakes, leaving town.

SAVE THIS DANCE

I dust these old bones off. Forgive me the comfort.
Here’s me getting down to bubblegum pop,
at the dock that is adjacent to the yacht club inclusive
of everything ever listed in the American Dream.
I bobble and twirl, a dashboard avatar with its’ own agenda,
a spoiled flank steak, an Ebola of best intentions.
Oh, Ava Gardner, grassy knoll, magic bullet,
I’m still dancing. I’m the blind spot, the slight
that settles the score. Close your eyes.
Can’t you wait for what’s in store?

Drunk on the roof-top
a praying mantis strikes
my shoulder—what luck!

Beautiful but cross-eyed
she walks by, wearing
a Jekyll and Hyde T-shirt