I am here, and so are all of you

We

2009-03-06T11:23:00.002-05:00

Some say this is
worse
than it’s ever been. The threats
of violence, eco-
-nomic desolation, the
suffering of the earth
nuclear bombs populous as
butterflies
in the grass but
something tells me
every
generation thinks that; every
generation
thinks they’re the last. That
they endure
or have endured
the worst
the world
god
humanity
can throw at them—the
tearing of stitches of planet
country
and self
is
happening
in their moment in this mute
murmur of time. Every
generation believes they were
referenced
in some ancient tomb
a hieroglyph scratched in a shadow
describing
atrocity not unlike
our current ill

now
now
now

there is a lion at your door
gazing at you
or
there isn’t anything at your door;

and maybe the knights
of the 13th century
with their sword kills and
chainmail
had it good, had it easy, really
had
nothing to fear
that it’s we
with something to fear now—the

master who devours time
who
shakes our hand
we know his visage, odor, method…

to think this way, to admit
the whisper of god as
killer of
people. Every generation closes its eyes
in the sum
of these fantasies like warm
sunlight.

Of course, just yesterday
an asteroid
the size of a ten story building
whizzed by
at a mere 45,000 miles (that’s
close in astronomical speak)

and no one even
saw it
coming.

False Truths - Poems by C. Kursel

2009-03-04T17:09:00.002-05:00

As a close follow-up to a posting last month, I have digitally published a second collection of work utilizing Flickr.

It was written around the same time as my previous collection, but because of its theme and style differences, called for its own grouping.

Thank you and enjoy.

Goodbye Jukebox

2009-02-24T09:46:00.001-05:00

Given up to Lake Michigan’s stomach.
The green bottom.
Green of cat’s eyes.
The air that hovers
above a hornet’s nest.
An ancient philosophy
brought you and I here together; the
timely togetherness of death’s ring.

It was born out of it and now I doodle
its figure in the margins of a napkin.

Exasperella

2009-02-23T10:55:00.001-05:00

The cat breathes audibly
while she
on the other hand
snores
and the
angel in the room goes blind with cataracts.
Horses whinny
when they hear the name of God.
Here I am in the birdhouse, the
shed, the
mineshaft. Here I am
in the straightjacket
poolhall
hospital bed. Los Angeles
stretches
its legs and
saddens me. Children
crawl
from the tar pits of La Brea.
I recall pasts
that aren’t mine. Dunces
walk
the streets as geniuses and mock me.
The white room
oscillates, the
jail of light, the moon rings
like an alarm clock. Prey in
my
cat’s mouth
is my father as a hand puppet...

She left it at my feet.
I do not
recognize him.

TV

2009-02-19T10:17:00.005-05:00

the dummies wear
bathrobes
while the president eats
bone marrow
salad.
the ranch is dead. bull
mastiffs
sniff the corpse
of
jughead’s sister.
mary ann never got
off the island. no one
voted
that way.

Who Knows

2009-02-19T10:17:00.001-05:00

It was he
who
ate his man
in bed
with
the lights all off
Murcury
giving
red light to the room and
everything around
it swollen.
like a porkified summer.
like the knees of
sinners. as the morning sun
picks a fight. daring
the night
to
eat as much without
so much
as a belch.

Valentine

2009-02-19T10:16:00.000-05:00

Left over. Left
with teeth marks in it. After
Ghandi proved
it was violent. A knife
shaved his whiskers
down
to mathematical impossibilities.
Clinton
gagged on the
pit of a peach.

Curmudgeon

2009-02-18T14:18:00.001-05:00

Some people say
they
don’t like people
but when I say it I
really
mean it. I
don’t.
It isn’t anger. It’s
just a preference. People
bring about
such a
gooey trail of damage.
Inflicted
by
friends, teachers, bosses, the
government, enter-
tainment, and most of all, our
parents.
Loving and
eating us up, butchering
us with their love so
that we really
don’t
stand a chance.
We are stormed
by the glow
of
day. By the
skeleton’s face
in the mirror. The chair
at midnight like
one’s own bones. Murky
in their puddling. Masters
of empty clouds, anaesthetized. And
you know
that the future is a weed
covered
island in cold, choppy water
made of salt and iron
and it will only warm itself to you
once
you’ve given in; disarmed; laid
back and allowed
its mystery to greet you with
trust—as in
trusting
a cougar crouching in the
tree above you; or with its
fangs and tongue at your throat—trust
that this is occurring not in
your control or
anyone’s
celestial, divine or
terrestrial.

The Weed Gatherer - Poems by C. Kursel

2009-02-09T08:19:00.004-05:00

I have digitally published a collection of poems entitled "The Weed Gatherer," utilizing www.flickr.com.

Many of these poems have appeared in this blog, and three have been published nationally. However, here they are revised and organized, including cover art.

Epitaph

2009-01-29T09:52:00.003-05:00

Grace

2009-01-28T13:17:00.002-05:00

In the undone sink of dishes. In
The full cat box.
In the telephone with no dial tone.
In the hurting of your loved one, or the
Total exhaustion of spirit.
That means you’ve been through something.
And there is grace in it.
There is exercise in the heavens.
There is not stillness—ever—there is no
Such thing as fear, doubt or false
Intentions.
There is grace in the single cricket facing death in an alleyway
As he sings you, city dweller, to sleep.
In the cold remnants of a great meal. In
The temperature dropping below freezing.

Every day it arrives. This
Sharpening
Of the soul.

Always

2009-01-28T13:17:00.001-05:00

I am there in the bed
on
top of the covers
waiting for the thunder to start
so I can
go to the closet and
retrive an umbrella. Go down
and wait
to open it
for a
few seconds
while the rain lands on my head. There’s always
that. The cold rain.
There’s always anger and
being pissed off in the evenings too.
Screaming
silently at the wall, gesturing
at the dumb blank wall.
There’s always the cat in the morning
jumping onto bed and
I don’t want to touch her
though she hasn’t been touched in two or three days
so I’ll give in.
There’s always telephone numbers
and websites and the tunnels
between them that
people dig.
The RMV and City Hall.
Parking permits and broken
washing
machines and visits
from our parents.
There’s always the neighbor
watering her flowers
from a red can in a tanktop and shorts and
her lopsided hair, telling me about her
deceased dog and
psychics. And the men power
sanding
and sawing and making plans for buildings
and buildings that will be changed or
destroyed, and the wealthy
dogs
with their women and the poor crazy men
with bandaged fingers
waiting for change at the laundromat.

There’s always all of that.

And there’s me and then there’s
you and there’s
the both of us.

I don’t feel them though. I only feel
you in the bed, and the fan
blowing on me
and the quietness of the new apartment
we’ve moved
into together, and that
little sound under my ribs that’s
already
starting while it’s still dark.
That little sound of day
in me
that will
stand up when I stand up, and start to
boil
when I go outside and it will bubble
till I go to sleep with you, you
there you are,
and a few stars will still be in between leaves
and the cat will hop upon our bed.

There’s that every day.

What I'm Doing

2009-01-16T09:59:00.003-05:00

Now is when it’s
most
important.
When it
seems useless, or
impossible.
Where the end of one
night
accordions forward
years, years
and looks
itself in the face
and
with
remorse, accepts
its fate.
When the mirror
turns
its back on you.
When you dream of swimming in tar with
the mammoths and
saber
tooth tigers.
This is when. This is it.
When time is no one
and
nothing worth loving. When
there
is but one of you.
One plum on the earth.

The Intimacy Of Time

2009-01-16T09:59:00.001-05:00

You stare at the long-nosed

witch doctor.

It stares back.

Val

2009-01-16T09:56:00.001-05:00

I liked Val because he
didn’t say anything. He just
asked me what I wanted done
and I’d respond in whatever fashion
I could muster; a little bit here, shorter
here etc. And then he’d go to work.
First, he’d fold my collar down
and wrap a length of gauze at my throat. Then
he’d pick up his shears and tap them a few
times against the comb.
Val worked fast, even around the ears. I knew
he wouldn’t cut me. He was a pro.
He had a few strange pictures of sickly
adolescents on his stand. One of a woman
I presumed to be his wife. A
cell phone. Cash tips. A magazine clipping
featuring the shop. I liked Val
because he didn’t say anything. Except, when
he was all done, he’d back away and lift his hands
and say: Now you are new again.

Following It

2009-01-12T17:32:00.001-05:00

I go to the door, check the lock again.
Poke through the mail.
The city is quiet out there. It sleeps
under blankets of conflict and doubt.
Observe a faint rectangle of light
on the kitchen tile, follow it to its source.
End up this time at the window
watching the half-eaten moon.

The not knowing
of what’s coming is very present;
what can possibly be generated
out of this still air, this block of salt.
What areas can be encircled; what inventions
are even possible.

Dry Wood

2009-01-12T17:28:00.001-05:00

Can it either open or close, or both? Does it have hands?
Can it be both large and small, like childhood?
I held it in my mouth like an acorn; the sameness of both sizes.
Hands on a gray rock, a fly, one strip of grass.
Can its waves cross the desk and touch me?
My father glued them in place.
In doing that, he opened it, and he closed it.
His hands occurred and then they died, while
the ocean indifferently watched.
Back to etiquette.
Bow to the forehead of time, seagull, swinging
through the snow like a block on a rope.
The beach turned and regarded its people.
They were invisible and sat cross-legged like monks.
Drank glasses of milk big as Stonehenge.
Why does the brain consent to something so outlandish?
It reiterates nonsense like facts, it kisses doom on the prick.
The forest on the outskirts stands steady as a priest.
Clues in the rainbows of skulls, the prism interred.

Animals

2009-01-06T11:46:00.003-05:00

A colossal bird came down
to be
the feeder of the whale. Each
moment passing, some bit of him
breaking off.
Coming loose from my
loose descriptions.
Drawers of silver
spoons and knives.
The bloody composition of
the sun
cooking its own head.
Forbearance. With balloons
tugging at our wrists
like dead tethered
planets
haunting earth…

we
all have plans
to die.

Not just make it there
but
actually do it.

Celebrate with a small
gathering of wilted relatives,
plum pits, music and
the firing of a
pop gun.

Serves you right.

There must have been something
all this time
as life
coagulated at the joints.

As evil men walked through knee-high evil
with pickaxes on their shoulders, and
sunk them into
newly
finished graves, calling out for
their mothers.

Near and far. In a
flatland called Medea. Her name
stitched
on maps. Sirens all night.
And the deep, macabre woof
of a dog

I’ve never seen. He brings
something to me in my sleep. Is it

the bone of my aunt Marnie?
Is it the bone she lost
when
she tumbled off
her bicycle?

The spotted moon limps through
the rotted door.

Entangled and newborn out of the hair of the universe.

That aimless glow-eyed animal
that prowls

the courtyard.

Now It's Nothing

2009-01-06T11:46:00.001-05:00

A window.
A Japanese Kimono closed against its
skin--white as apple flesh.
Nothing like a surgeon’s poison.
Nothing like a block of ice; like a salt-lick; like an undertaker’s dream.
Two nothings on top of one nothing.
I am nothing…
Now that’s a nocturnal idea. That idea has no teeth. That idea
is as complicated as a tarantula, with eight eyes
and as many legs, hairy as a dog.
That faint aroma of your mother’s perfume is very real
even though you’re six or seven states away. That’s nothing.
Nothing fleeing nothing.
Losing in a battle of zero.
A murderer’s eye with you in it, like the bloody seed of a tomato.
Your deceased cat come back to life, you swear it.
Your father’s urn crawling out of its grave.

These are characters who cry and we are addicted to their pain.
Their pain is a synonym for our own.

I am quiet as an ocean tonight.

Our brains consent to our deaths,

which is proof that they are indifferent to us.

Voices In The Blue Hills

2008-12-08T17:01:00.001-05:00

This is the place for translation.

For making rubbings of
things into other things, other forms.

Where the skull gets translated
as leaf and log, where lists of my gentry
are unraveled
and dispersed like seedpods. Where gravestones

sprout like hens of the forest.

All around me is the unbrushed
hair of years. Bunched, yellowed. This, too,

gets translated

into words and bodies
as I lunch in the abandoned stone house.

Why have I brought these terrible
apples here

to eat alone?

It is with this question that I continue
with my work. Push the softened

blue hills at their rest
to mold with
future’s unloving blueprints.

How Many Of Me

2008-12-08T16:59:00.001-05:00

How many of me were there
when I came out?
Flailing and reaching with
how many hands
at the glowing streams of light,
eyes flickering
to the
tunes of autumn?

And was it a terror
to see me there, upside-
down and shaking, gargantuan
mass of myself
so gustily birthed, with so many limbs
and so many eyes, and to
kill all but one
and
allow it to leave?

One ingenious invention
from the
billion-celled
ocean.

How many of me did you drown?
Bury without marker?
Did their toenails drag when you
hanged them? And with how much
rope?

There is, somewhere,
a photo album entirely of my
portraiture. My
likenesses;
which, every moment, expands
and enfolds.

Will they march with me through the years?
Twins masked
by the blurred cone of time’s hat.
Roaming like invisible clocks.

A layer of feathers
growing upon me in equal number to they,
and to years.

It is good to die with
eyes open, they say—and my eyes
were open. Taking
stock of the
moods and allegories of this world,
this sparkler in the green night
towed behind us.

Learning To Write With My Left Hand

2008-12-08T16:57:00.000-05:00

In the dark, frost coated blue.

Fish meander
about in the
tank, dulled blades of the tropics,
murmuring
in only
cheap silences.

I wait and watch my brain
record its solemn, loyal functioning;
oh, how cute. How brave.

Muscles twitch like violin strings.

The lamp just
went out
in the neighbor’s window.
I didn’t even know it was
on to begin with.

And that box of tissues on the
bequeathed dresser
looks almost morose; but maybe
that’s just because
I know who brought it there.

The Postcard

2008-11-17T09:35:00.001-05:00

Someone probably paid a little money for it.
I didn’t pay much. Three for a dollar out of a shoebox
in a maritime chopshop. The sign said
“Relatives For Sale.”
Then a stack of old postcards
in see-through envelopes. Photographs of people
all of which I figured were long dead. The ghost-like
faces of children. Women in black dresses
at the beach. A family on the bumper of an automobile.
One man standing proudly with only a
foggy lake behind him.
This one had been tinted blue and given a decorative border.
And in the middle, two people from the stomachs up
kissing. The man almost shorter than the lady,
as she seemed to bend to him.
Her face merely a profile, his more
of the whole thing. Taken by surprise, I think,
a tight and flat pucker to his mouth.
Whereas she had full control of her grace and love.
Or the appearance of it. Softer. Her sweater buttoned
to her sternum. Daring in what
corner of her eye could be seen. On the back, a space
for a message. And a space for an address.
Neither one filled in. Rather, sideways along the top in
blue pen written: Josie and Luther Goreman
Taken in Wilder, Tenn
about 1920

We had a few short
happy years together.

I have since wondered about Josie and Luther Goreman.
Who was it that arranged this photograph? Said, alright
now kiss you two. Said, we’d like it blue please. Or maybe that
was just the blueness of time. Who wrote
the message I’ve read so often? Summed things up
with such courage and simplicity. Was it Josie,
or was it Luther?
Whose fence is it
behind them? And why were their happy years
together so short?

I’ve also come to think, since I purchased this piece
of paper so long ago in that damp, quiet store in winter--
among maps and hooks and buoys, harpoons and
wheels as tall as me, a full scuba suit in one corner
a hundred years old with a skull behind the cross
hatched mask--that it is my most beloved and prized
thing. That I will keep track of it, of
The Goremans,
for the rest of my life.

The Lying Web Of Shadows

2008-11-17T09:32:00.002-05:00

A cat with no face appears in the window--and I’m on the third floor in here.
The houseplants are whimpering little blades
that chatter like prisoners.

She’s pregnant--belly full ‘a eyeless numbers.
She grooms her fur with her little jackknife of a tongue, and I tremble.

Can’t help but think this is a
threat of some sort, some implication
at my demise.

“I’ll call the fucking cops!” I shout.

Then

without much noise, a woman enters the room
and lets her clothes
slide off

like ice sheets melting into the Arctic.

“What on earth is it?” She asks.
“You look concerned.”

The Something

2008-11-07T14:48:00.001-05:00

The thought has a thing, and sun is a blinking eye
Coerced into the long stare at her children. Wind pauses
For reverence at our eulogy, as if anyone cares,
Which if brief, formal and boring.
Pigeons throw their voices like ventriloquists, a
Boy bounces one green grape infinitely.
This memory as thought as thing; the idea as
being a thing once
And only once;

A blind man rolls a cigarette and invents language.
What’s the difference? He’s been sold, but a useless slave.
He does not remember a motel outside Pittsburgh.

The dark cozies up to the dark there. Only our night continues.
In the night, there are not only pictures, but figures.
Not many nights but one after the other. A sequence of nights.
And imagined forms, and nostalgia.
Memory clips the wings of the ocean. A certain
Immaculateness brightens them, hurries us along to the water.

Brownish white, Egypt crawls out of the cave
With its body wrapped in sack-cloth.

The stars are merely pygmies.

Mercurial Darkness Society

2008-11-07T14:45:00.001-05:00

What
I heard then
when the rain struck

the leaf

blinked. When the
giraffe
child slid out,

opened her eye for the first time,

fanned
those lovely coveted

lashes. When my movement
loved its
movement’s clone

in the moonlight;

in you, asleep.

The stars
trembled
on the ceiling. They do
not

talk amongst themselves. They

do not tell

secrets—they have no secrets
left to tell.

Gamey Altitude

2008-11-03T09:18:00.002-05:00

This dining room is mouse bin dusty.
The staff’s a bunch of old egg-eyed buffoons
with yellow heads and chalk hands.
What would it take to get a glass of water in this dump?

I signal one of the geezers
and persuade him to pour me some.

When it comes out, instead of ice
there’s a couple teeth clinking
around in there.
Not human teeth—more like the molars of a tiger,
an ocelot, or some other of the large cat
family.

Of course, I’m none too happy. I curse the waiter
and his elderly mind. In response, he points at a nearby table.

At it, there is a sitting man. A traveling salesman, I’m told,
with rotted rubber shoes and sewn shut eyes. He’s deaf
the geezer tells me, and hands me a card.

“See you in the afterlife,” it says.

Night Of Abandoned Planets

2008-11-03T09:18:00.001-05:00

Big-headed, crying babies
of previous
nights haunting
worlds
of ice--once romantic
vistas.

I sit in a plain white chair and wait
in my father’s pajamas.

Wait for the object of my future
to arrive, roly poly,

in its ill-fitting summer suit. Wait

for the snarling animal to sniff my limbs and lick them clean.

I am

A

small, murdered eye in a box. Clothes
pins worked around
my various openings.

Someone, of course, invented me. But their
tracks have been thus covered well. And

the identity of this scientist is so distant, it

isn’t even there.

Pinochle Time

2008-11-03T09:16:00.000-05:00

It’s when you realize how basic you are.
How much you really need.
Bravery, yes, but also
sadness in all these little choices,
the trivialities.

When our minds are unnecessary, or simply unused.

In the pinochle time, the milk
drinking time.

In the waiting to fall asleep time.

In the breakfast, lunch and dinner time. Fruit
salad time. Time with no noise. Time with
ice and a straw.

Time waiting for test results.
Time that
reminds you it is there. The time in between

visits to cemeteries.

The time we spend catching our breath
at the tops of the stairs. Or removing nail polish,
or celebrating holidays
like Thanksgiving, and New Years.

The time we think we lost but never had.

Spent studying geology, dissecting a piglet, looking
through a telescope.

Mourning.
The time on a mountain. The time
of war, envy or jealousy. Of our treacherous

stabs at love. Whereas, most of us,
our love is so imperfect
it does more harm than good.

True Love

2008-09-22T16:26:00.000-04:00

One brushes the other’s teeth on a park bench.
She spits in the dirt and the man rolls a cigarette.
“I want McDonald’s, I want McDonald’s,” she repeats
and lights the cigarette he gives her.
And as he rolls his own, she combs his sideburn
with her nails. Pushes the hair behind his ear. The sun
remains aloof. And in the background,
a tree gets sawed to pieces. Fed,
roots and all, the trembling boughs, the creation
and the ends of us, to a machine that eats these kinds of things.

Ghosts In The Arboretum

2008-09-22T16:23:00.000-04:00

Half of you already gone but
this is where I stay. Fingering
each and every one of you as suspects.

Your souls amount to little more than
collections of cheap knick-knacks, carnival
fare. Party favors. The voices of crickets.

Stuff that I keep hidden

in a box and will secretly arrange
to have buried with me. Entombed like a Pharaoh.

And I will hold up
a mirror
to each and every trunk to see if it is real,
and if it is, you’ll be found out

as the sky rouges over
with embarrassment.

Parentage

2008-09-08T13:34:00.001-04:00

You built me from the inside out.

Everything
in me. My bones, my blood,
the pocket that stores my heart
Each resembling
something in you. Or in the ones that made you.

You also manufactured my tomb. Sank
your hands into the flesh of new time
and when you held them up
they were from then on guilty.
What a magnificent sendoff
you gave me.

The bone chief smokes his pipe and warms
his drink. My heart
I see it beating!

A genius of many lives. Many lives
longer
than mine will be. Longer
than I will ever muster.

What is this life you gave me?
Closed between the hands of some
giant.

It is every day
an insolvable universe
enfolding the silk-haired souls
of new human eyes.

Wandering in the jigsaw blue

With lightning hands and clamshell hearts

Our parents. They pressed us through the godly mold. Did they?
Cheesecloth of eternity.

And still when they look at us, we remind them
of nothing recognizable, nothing comforting or familiar

but themselves.

The Bathroom Light

2008-08-27T10:22:00.000-04:00

There is a light that can be seen
through the window in my bathroom
when the down the hall neighbor
turns hers on.
Each of our windows look out into
this shaft between apartments
with a skylight at the top. I don’t know what else
is in there. I don’t know who built it.
The glass is not clean. It’s textured
so all you see through there is light or darkness.
I’ve seen that light go on
many times in fact when I did not expect
a light to go on at all.
One night I wake up and the clock says
four thirty-four. I go to the kitchen for
a drink of water. The cat emerges from
somewhere unknown and greets me.
Stands in the orange
triangle of light from the refrigerator. She’s
as confused as I am as to why we’re up.
When I’m done, go back to the bedroom
and see my sleeping girlfriend
with one leg out and her mouth open.
I imagine her sleeping alone. I imagine
I do not exist anymore. Lower myself into
my now cold side of the bed. The ceiling fan
roars down at us like the blade of a guillotine.
The smoke alarm’s test light flashes
green as is expected. I replay the argument
we had about hotels. Rehearse it for a follow up.
In blows the night—strangely indifferent.
Cooler than the previous week. “Broke”
as they say about the heat. The room also
seems larger in the dark, a large purple box, which is
I’m not sure how it should be. Shouldn’t it be
smaller, cozier? The cat slinks under the bed.
We’ve got ants. Cold cuts in the car still.
I’ll have to throw them out. Saw a pigeon
get run over by a bicycle. It seemed almost impossible.
The man on the bike wearing a red
backwards baseball cap that simply read, “shit”
in white letters.

Thoughts in a Cafeteria

2008-08-22T09:10:00.000-04:00

I.

Maybe it’s that
the one
who does the killing
keeps you alive
in the
meantime.

A nurse. A glad, pale nurse
you never see again.

There is no killer
without that
killer
patting your heart
to keep it beating
in
the night; without
that killer waving hello or massaging
your troubled brain.
Blessing you
with
hands
made out of grass.

You are taught lessons
in the heat of summer. These
lessons
are like baths of
cool water:

On your lifespan, your
need to
love and be loved, how to spell it,
how
to hold on to it.

II.

Then there are the faces
in the glass
reading
books or magazines,
waiting on busses, pushing elevator
buttons
and strollers, damning
their own children for fictitious crimes.
Violent men and desperate women.
The lonely and
the
out-of-time.

There are the folks who read the paper
out loud to hear some
voice
of reason.

There are those with their arms in slings
waiting alone
in
the dark to heal. With prescriptions,
essays on hell, the best way
to care
for an orchid. Listening
to tiny choruses
gracing
miniscule graves.

Ants in the cracks of diamonds,
cigarettes
in the hands of
unemployed
angels.

III.

Feed and wait.
Breathe in and wait to breathe out.
Marry and wait. Pray in
flea voices
over ten dollar breakfasts
and wait.

Moving down the line
with trays of grapefruit, oranges,
yogurt, breakfast pastries. The scent
of suspicion; they are
missing
in their own minds.

IV.

The executioner leans
on the lever.
He is a retired bookie
with an
owl heart and dysentery.

His own burial plot is wider
than ours.

Full of his nameless
predecessors. Their birthdays
are
our birthdays, their deaths
tell
the future in messages
of stones.

And there is no cure.
There is no cure for the body
you’ve been given. The
mind and spirit.

There is only the sun’s radiation as it bids you good morning,
the close hum of
decrepit
bones, the insignias
of
lost men. White-
faced, blue-eyed, whiskered
and
shaking
in front of the shaving
mirror.

Glowing partially in their own eyes, and partially
in a new time, a new fatherhood, new
action. We all have them,
every one of them
inside
of us more than halfway flickering.

Believing someone good was supposed to be waiting, that someone
took us from
our real homes. We must have been
kidnapped.

V.

The cemetery grows hair
in between the slabs. The cold beds.
Roots grow

into our cellars and
carry our bones
on
even deeper. Further

down. Disassemble

them and pound
them

underneath us,
underneath our land

like
joyous drums.

Calypso

2008-08-11T12:50:00.003-04:00

Happiness is the clown
that ate its head like a cantaloupe. Like a
piece of birthday cake.
Calypso dances like a shaman
on her island, brings down on you
the currents of love. The rain arrived
like a beaded curtain
with a skull upon it. A candle exiting
the room in yours past’s cupped
ghost-white hands.
A drowned comedian washes
up on shore. His jokes still
being told in sodden pockets.
There is an extinct sea animal
decomposing in my brain. Giving off
that putrid odor of wasted things.
A fisherman who thinks he’s made a fortune.
Holes in ships. Wives that have dissolved.
The lightning pulsing in some
faint message. Popping the miracle
of words into my brain. The water

snake uncoiling, writhing, spelling
it out.

Animals

2008-08-11T12:50:00.001-04:00

A colossal bird came
to life and now
feeds
the whale. Each
moment passing
some
bit of him breaking off.
Coming loose from my
descriptions. Drawers
of silver
spoons and knives. The
bloody sun
cooking its head.
Forbearance. With
balloons
tugging at our wrists

we
all have plans
to die.

Not just make it there
but
actually do it.
Celebrate with a small
gathering of wilted relatives,
plum pits, music and
the firing of a
pop gun.

Serves you right.
There must have been something
all this time
as life
coagulated at the joints.
As evil men walked through
evil time with pickaxes,
sunk them into
newly
finished graves, looking for
their mothers.

Near and far. In a
flatland called Medea. Her name
stitched
on maps. Sirens all night.
And the deep, macabre woof
of a dog

I’ve never seen. He brings
something to me in my sleep. Is it

the bone of my aunt Marnie?
Is it the bone she lost
when
she tumbled off
her bicycle?

The spotted moon coming out
from the rotted door.

Entangled and newborn out of the universe.

The aimless glow-faced animal
that prowls

the courtyard.

A Woman With No Gender

2008-08-11T12:42:00.000-04:00

She’s scattered about the dark like dreams
or shoes, like memories of her mother’s nylons.
Her diamonds and her mirrors. Powders
and blushes. The scissors she used to
cut out her womanness for the final time. How the
clock smiles at her at all hours, and she
smiles back. And the nameless idea:
A baby and a summer clamming on Long Island.
Birthday cards and cards wishing her well
on a speedy recovery. The letters she wrote too.
The many versions of her story which she whispered
in the blood filled grapefruit of night. Each doing some damage
to some presumption. The white heads
of dandelions. Potted basil and thyme. Washed dishes.

And her past and future combining to make a
pink cake.

Funny How A Crisis Is Born

2008-07-22T10:02:00.000-04:00

After what seems like months of nothing—
peace—
it enters the room like the eyeless head of a snail.
Something that has traveled a long way to reach you
and make its little torrential introduction
as we stand terror stricken upon the furniture.

Funny how the crisis moves within the house.
Almost invisible, but with the odor of buried, long
forgotten earth. Insisting to be remembered.
Opens its body and light comes out. Light of a different
fiction. Unfamiliar. Deranged. Where once
there was a wall, a stool, a refrigerator…a person.

Now there is this odd family of muted things, closely resembling
something good but changed in the most unsettling way.

Wedding Day

2008-07-18T09:17:00.000-04:00

It is the second time you’ve brought
me here.

This one story
church among the grove of deathly lemon trees.

Yes, it is my wedding day, and I am happy;

You are there in a bed. I see your feet first,
one shorter and slightly swollen than the other, no top sheet, all over you
a yellowness.

You

who sent a letter with just the inky imprint
of your tongue upon it

So what was I supposed to think?

How did they manage this? Revive you? Dig you up?

You breathe and move your head, eyes almost open

Hoping
you are not dead.

How long am I expected to consol you in your agony?

I swallow the little white tablet of fear
that you included in the package and go ahead, turn to my
new wife

and ask if she’d like to pick some;
pick some lemons from the trees on the hill.

What A Fly Might Tell Me About Years To Come

2008-07-17T09:20:00.002-04:00

It walks and beats itself against the window.
This is in the midst of a
heat wave in New England, late July.
Soon, banished by
itself to one corner into which those
eight to twelve lifeless eyes stare alone,
the microscopic dreamland.
His body a kite in the infinitesimal knife of a world;
this world with both greater, and more miniscule beasts.
The hair upon my arms crawls disapprovingly at its plight
as the hobos sing songs in the rain.
I touch my hands together and watch the water on the glass.
It cools them, cools the glass.
And I imagine them each
as hands of an older gentleman, and how an old man like that
might touch these same old hands together
while watching a pelican roost on a mossy pillar, while
the sea pitches, and the cool, white object of his
wife rests in her grave.
The fly flips. Six legs writhing. Convulses
directly off of my table; and my bones move
underneath my skin like secrets in the complexities of a lie.
And I think of them—

jaws, fingers, teeth.
All disconnected from their larger pieces, from the greater outline.
And how long that will be.

How much time will pass
between my death and my deterioration, when my thoughts have
dissolved entirely.
How faint will my soul be?
How distant the residues of this life upon
their yellowed surfaces.
How inconsequential my yearning
to keep it.
When that dirt, that time, that matter
has come apart. Slowly spread.

And settled.

Numb

2008-06-10T09:23:00.000-04:00

Irene woke me up and said she couldn’t feel her head.
It was numb, she said.
I asked if this was everywhere on her head
and she said no, it was only here,
gestured to the area between her eyes with
the thumb and index finger.

She said it feels like Novocaine. The heavy
minutes before Novacaine sets in.

We sat up in our bed for a few minutes. The
dark of our bed. Faintly
I could see dresses moving in the closet
pushed by the ceiling fan. I lay on my belly,
trying not to sleep. This was also when
I found out it was raining.

The cat must have known
because she was there on the bed in less
than a minute. I pushed her off, apologizing.
How are you? I said.
She said the feeling had traveled to her legs.
I’m scared. She said.
I asked if we should go to the emergency room.
She said no, let’s just wait here a while.
Then Irene didn’t talk. I touched her
bare back and hair. I touched her foot. Can
you feel that? I said.
She said I’m not sure.

The cat jumped back on the bed. Vines
touched the glass. Was it still raining? I could not tell. I
remembered what
you said about a premonition.
Something like, you’d die tragically, which meant
you’d die young. You just knew it.

Do you think I have MS? She asked and I
didn’t know what to say to that so I just said
I doubted it, the onset seemed too early.
What would I do
if I had to live in a wheelchair
was the question Irene asked me when we heard it:

The sound of an airplane, low, loud. Lasted
what seemed
like a matter of many minutes. We looked
up. The cat looked up. We all watched
the blank ceiling, the moving shadows of trees. Blades
of light.
Dresses still swaying slightly over there. All
the night happenings. Must
have changed the patterns, Irene said, due
to the weather and I agreed. They don’t
fly this close. Ever. Waited as the plane droned
gone. What would I do
if she died tragically, and young, I wondered.

Part of me thinks I’d be alone
for the rest of my life, as alone
as I could be.
Just rendering the useful seconds off of life
best I could, off of each day without her. Thinking
how Irene danced to most
every music, and danced well. A capable,
very capable woman.

The Sound

2008-06-10T09:22:00.000-04:00

As she moves somewhat
unconsciously
on her side of the bed. Under
the covers. Mouth open,
letting out the stale, noxious air
of a few years. A few bad memories.
Gotta do that every now and then...

My God,
it’s the only thing in the room.

Here we are. The ivy uncoils
from its winter fist
and seems to reach for us. Silently touches
the windows like long widow’s fingers.
There is no wind tonight. Not even
night birds. Or action
in the apartments above or below.
It really is quiet here. Quiet
like I don’t remember.
Not even traffic. Not even a
clock’s tick. Or the radiator clank. That’s
been long since turned off.
The boilers and machinery that bravely
keep us alive. Not even the sand
of dreams shifting in its bowl.
Or a dog’s collar shaking, or a banana
ripening to black. Not even that.
Not even the photos as they mutter
in their albums, or the dead as they mutter
in their graves. But
just now, the faded sound of her breathing
as she settles in, finally, to some peaceful
form of sleep. And I am alone, sitting
up in bed like a man in a hospital
waiting for the nurse to bring
breakfast at 6 AM.

The Smoke Alarm

2008-06-05T09:45:00.000-04:00

I was just starting to fry a porkchop when it went off.
I sprung into action. Calm, direct. Pushed the window open
far as it would go and got to fanning the thing with a dishtowel, as
I’d done before, as I’d seen done.

She was on the sofa watching television. Her white legs
folded over one another. Make
it stop, she said. Just then, the alarm in the bedroom
went off too. Two alarms blaring in discord, rarely
meeting.

I flew in waving the towel, leaving the first. It did not have
the desired effect I’m afraid.
There was an unmarked button on the device which I then pressed
mercilessly with my thumb.
Pushed till it was red. Did the same to the
alarm in the living room. Nothing. Tried pushing
in different sequences. Holding it. Double pushing it. She went
to pee. When she came out said, There’s
still smoke in here, covering her ears. What
Don’t you understand about this?
Get rid of it!

It was the day before she’d brought home her herbs.
Basil. Lavender. Mint. Thyme. Growing in pots
along the windowsill. Delicate green. She said we’d use them fresh
in whatever it was we cooked
from now on. We should start eating fresh things, she explained.
I swung the pan around, still crackling, to get water on it
and sure enough, knocked one pot to the floor.
Basil I think. It broke and spread, dirt and pieces
of the pot. The plant’s tiny roots.
She shook her head but didn’t look at me. Simply rose
up off the couch and approached the first alarm. Started
some waving of her own with a couch cushion. She waved and flapped
the cushion madly, almost with violence.
The alarms seemed to get louder.

I went to the bedroom and unscrewed the alarm from the ceiling.
It came off easily enough, but stayed attached by a few wires. I located
the battery slot. It did not slide open so I broke the plastic and
removed the battery. Still, the alarm persisted. The
battery in one hand, the loose alarm swinging there
out of the hole in the ceiling. How
was it possible? They must be attached, I said, somewhere above us.
Turn it off, she said again.
I then told her
I didn’t know how to turn it off but she said for me to figure it out.
The alarm looked like a human eye extracted from its socket,
still strung to nerve and muscle tissue. I was in a mind
to smash it. I searched for things to do it with. A shoe. The
iron. This somehow seemed less destructive than the two of us
going through this together. Maybe I’d cut the wire. Would it
electrocute me? Then we wouldn’t have a smoke alarm, and that
would not be good. She dropped the pillow on the floor
and said, I can’t take it anymore. She
retreated to the couch and folded up.

This comment stunned me. First
for its absurdity. Can’t take it. Then for its truth. I knew
what she meant. I
couldn’t take it anymore either. The sound. It seemed
possible that the smoke alarms would never stop
for us.
And we’d wait in there while they made us deaf and
crazy. We’d get into our bed with the smoke alarms
beeping like that, and we’d drift off into pained sleep hearing them,
first in wakefulness and then in queer dreams.
And either we wouldn’t wake up, or one of us
would be gone altogether when the other did. The
one waking, waking deranged. This appeared,
in my fresh desperation, an entirely plausible future.
A simple continuation.

I’m sorry, I said from the other room, about the basil.
That was never basil, she replied.
Through her hands, barely over the din.

Who Is It?

2008-06-03T12:01:00.000-04:00

Yes, the question seems reasonable
as I say it out loud to no one.
The radiator does not answer.
The cat does not answer. The half
eaten plate of food does not.
And the birds chirp. Reacting
to something inside that tells them to chirp.
And how am I different? With my
observations and speech and words of thought?
Who talks to me. Who tells me I’ve been
ordained as this. This entity. It is a rumor
that’s been passed down, person to person.
Human to human.
I sit back, delirious in the silence.
The sounds of neighbors who do not know
I listen. For that which I have endured derision.
The distilled state of quiet thinking. Where relatives,
some dead, suddenly appear
through the half moth-
eaten silk. In the newspaper, in the kitchen window.
I recall them and see. Introduce
myself. Walk forward looking at my own reflection
in a hand mirror.

The Mountain

2008-06-02T17:16:00.001-04:00

The purpose of the trip was to ski. But since I did not ski,
never have, I wasn’t going for that. I went for another
reason.
So when they went out for the day, I was on my own.
First I simply stood there and waited. Looked at their
shoes or the other things they’d left behind. The remnants
of breakfast in the sink. We’d just eaten eggs and toast
we’d found in the pantry of this house. I
listened to their sounds and voices dip into silence.
Out into the outside, the cars, the trees. We were
nearer to Canada.
It was a brilliant winter day. The sun
blasting in the windows off of the snow. I sat down
on the sofa. Got comfortable. Crossed my feet
over one another. Experienced some amount of time, I
don’t know how much. Occasionally, I’d see heads
of skiers glide past the windows. Adults, then just the
tops of the hats or hair of their children. Some sort of back path
through the trees. I’m going to do this all day, I told myself.
I made coffee, read a bit. Went into
all of the rooms of the house. Each bedroom, the bathrooms,
the room with the washing machine and dryer.
Returned to the living room. Then I stopped
trying to occupy myself altogether.
Waited for something to happen. Some sensation
that would inform my next move. This never
happens, I thought. This is never
allowed to happen. The basic act of listening
to one’s mind, moving at its natural pace. Unscheduled,
uninfluenced. Nowhere was that familiar sense
of planning. This and then that. Two hours for this. Followed
by one hour of something else. The imposition
of the things you’ve chosen to love. The dividing up
of great masses. The crisis of boredom. It didn’t exist
for me. I don’t even remember what I thought about,
if I reached any conclusions or clarity about anything. More so,
I remember the pleasure of doing it. Of relenting.
I realized I had to go to the bathroom.
I went in and did it. Turned off the light and emerged. Still,
no one was there. They were skiing, and I had peed.
I waited for something else. I decided to do it
in a wooden rocking chair near one of the windows.
Took my place and looked out. Saw the skiers closer
now. The pairs, families, in their skiing outfits. Gear I
knew nothing about. Didn’t really understand. One or two
went by alone. One without poles altogether. Gliding
along the path, the most obscure movements to steer, grace
in a body.
Eventually, I got hungry. There wasn’t anything
else in the kitchen so I had to leave.
Got in my car and drove down the mountain.
Went into town. There were two
gas stations and a general store. Once inside
the general store, I saw they had a food counter.
I sat down on a stool and ordered beef stew, along with
a ham and cheese sandwich. The beef stew was very
salty, but good. A woman in a hunting cap
made my sandwich very slowly, methodically.
I watched as two families of skiers
undressed themselves at their tables then ordered
huge breakfasts. Their faces red
and most of them fairly fat. Pancakes, eggs to order,
hash browns and so forth. They spoke with
French accents. The griddle full of their food. End to end.
I bought a piggy bank for my girlfriend, a six pack of beer
and left. Went back up the mountain. When I arrived, again,
the house was empty. It was as if I’d never left, or never
been there in the first place. The lamp
still on like I had left it. The bathroom door in the same position.
I closed the door and put the
beer in the refrigerator, save one. Sat in the rocking chair
and drank it. A few more skiers passed. It was getting a bit
darker then. But not too dark to ski. The trees were straight and
branchless. They did not move. I waited.
Finished the beer and allowed it to become
evening around me. Some time
around then they returned. They were tired
and damp. They took off their hats and their
hair stuck to their foreheads. They seemed very
happy, pleased with what they’d done. How they’d
spent the day. They claimed
it had been a good one for skiing. Ideal,
though I can’t say for sure what’s ideal. They asked me
what I’d done and I described it best I could, filling in some
spans of time that seemed impossibly long. I realized
as I spoke to them, as they filled in the living room and started
logs crackling in the fireplace, that I was both ready for them to be back
but also nowhere near ready.

Runners

2008-05-30T13:21:00.001-04:00

And finally, you ask out loud
as another one passes by you,
where, where
in the hell
are they going?

What have they agreed to I have not?
What have they settled on?

And this, your voice saying this, is probably
the funniest thing you’ll hear

all week.

Warm Laundry

2008-05-30T13:20:00.001-04:00

Sitting on the floor, sorting it.
In an apartment we’ve already been told
is no longer ours.
Her socks, her underwear, her
night things. All mixed in with mine.
My hands in it.
She sleeps in the other room. I can
hear her breathing, as all other sounds
one by one are eliminated. There’s half a
coconut cream pie in the fridge, I know that much.
I fold the items and put them in piles.
They don’t amount to much, really,
each garment. One particular pair,
turquoise, I turn over
and over to find
which end is up. The cat supervises
this. All this. The cat and the ants
that just moved in.

The little piles make me want to cry
I think, but there isn’t anything there
to cry with. No oil in the engine, no
no water to boil. But the sentiment is there, it’s a sad sight—
so small.

And then, for some reason, I remember
how as a kid
I used to scare myself imagining people
rising into view of my second story bedroom window.
Just floating out there. Smiling,
in the light of my room. And we’d look
at one another, and I’d make myself
continue to look
as my body became cold with fear.
And I went on to recall my many other terrible dreams,
the ones I could remember anyway, over the years, as I folded them
in halves, thirds, quarters. Packages
no bigger than my fist.

And they were still warm then, but
losing that fairly quickly.

Memory Of A Man Who Drank

2008-05-30T13:19:00.000-04:00

He used to break ice with a spoon.
Give it one, two, three
good whacks with the rounded side
before it shattered in
the brown
palm of his hand.

He’d put it in the glass. Add
vodka, olives and sometimes water.
The sound of the chipped
ice in the glass.

Still,
I think of it, the
breaking of ice in summer
on the screen porch, moths
at the light, sounds low in the close
wood. And every few nights, a
gunshot crack somewhere off, or a dog, or a siren
so distant it didn’t seem to come for you. I
think of it with the snapping
of dry wood in fire, in the
flap of hunting bats, in ice, in a
spoon, in vodka, or
in even hands.

Landfill

2008-05-22T09:24:00.000-04:00

It’s a matter of irrigation, they tell me,
that’s got the park all sawed up.

Trenches cut across the paths, the grass,
like massive crisscrossed stitches.

And in the trenches, seashells, white, while
we’re a good mile in here.

They filled this area long ago, our relatives
and non-relatives, the ones whose bones

are buried in the many cemeteries in and about town,
with mud from under water.

Oyster shells, clams, scallops, just a little dirty
that’s all; turning up toward me on my morning walk.

And they’ve been waiting throughout the years,
once full of eyeless, sexless things through

what series of human crises and
catastrophes, what wars, what hunger,

just to be unearthed
and turned over, under the sky for the first time.

I Know A Guy's In A Coma

2008-05-21T09:58:00.001-04:00

He’s the husband of a friend of my wife.
And well, one day he got a fever.
Two days later he’s in the hospital
in a coma
the doctors put him in.
Said they had to do it
to prevent another seizure like the one
made his wife call the paramedics in the first place.
And it’s difficult with someone like that, they said,
to wake him up at all.
It must happen slowly—sometimes a matter
of days just to let the body acclimate, like a
diver rising out of the depths of the sea
while avoiding the bends.
So he’s far away, asleep, and he’s been like this
for a couple of months.
In those months, his muscles atrophied
and his wife had to get a second job. Her father’s
this guy’s boss (the one in the coma)
at a liquor store he owns.
But he refused to give the wife
(his daughter)
the incapacitated man’s wages.
Instead, he would give her
and her children
food in the form of meals at his house
and just about anything else they needed
other than money itself.
Long as they come over, he says, to keep him
company. He’s a widower. He has trouble
with things like laundry. When he comes out of it,
she tells her father,
he’s not gonna be able to go right back to work.
That’s alright, says the father.
And she says, he’s not gonna be able to make up
the time’s lost, with you or anyone.
He might never be the same. The doctors say they
do not know.
That’s also alright, says the father.
He’s not gonna have anything, even if he’s not a vegetable.
We used up everything we saved.
The father says, I’ll take care of you. When
he’s ready to walk, he’s welcome back.
This talk went on a few more months
while the doctors tinkered with dosages
to deal with his newfangled epilepsy.
They’d do one, wait
while he came out of the coma, see how it worked.
Usually, he’d wake up then nearly kill himself
with a seizure. Well, they’d figure, that one didn’t work.
Put him back under and down he’d go.
When we went to see him he didn’t even look alive.
His muscles retained water so he had this
deathly bloated look about his face. His skin
was gray and waxy. His body
approximated a real version of himself
meanwhile you thought
you were looking into some queer nightmare of a person.
He likes hearing his friends talk to him, his wife told us.
He knows you’re here.
My wife consoled her as she cried.
I’d but met the man one time
around a bar pool table.
Now here he was,
in a coma wanting me to talk to him.
I said a few things, I don’t remember what.
How odd it is, I kept thinking, that this has
happened to this man.
What is it like for these people who get put into comas?
Who have no chance to cover their tracks, to consider
the past and the dark future, to attest to god
some good they’d done?
What was it like to skim barely
the highest, most inhospitable, incomprehensible
altitude of life, and hear the
goings on
of your life carried out, shepherded
by other folks as if through
the water and glass of a deep sea aquarium?
What will it be like
to wake up for him, if they ever wake him up
successfully, wake up
with some semblance of peace his body has finally allowed, and ask
those standing, waiting there, looking at you:
you did what?

He Doesn't Need That

2008-05-17T18:36:00.001-04:00

This was late November.
Hadn’t snowed in a while
but there was still some left
along the roads, beaten
and hardened into craggy slush.

I saw a blind man
with a backpack strapped on
start to cross the street. But first, he had to
cross the snow.

He took one step on the ice and slipped, fell forward.
He didn’t use his arms when he fell
so his face hit the ice directly. His cane
toppled with a kinkle and the glasses skipped
across the cold sidewalk. His backpack
came to rest on top of him.

Me and another guy helped him to his feet.
I gripped the flesh behind his elbow while the other guy
pushed from behind. He was heavy, the backpack was full.
“I’m alright,” he said, trying to smile.
He said his name was Tom. “Dumb ice,” Tom said.
There was blood coming from his nose
and was spreading in between his teeth.

A number of other people arrived.
One tried to replace his glasses, which were bent
with one lens loose. They placed these in his hand.
Another person put the cane into his second hand.
A third extracted
Kleenex from her handbag
and tried to stop the mess on his face.
The blood came out in lines like water.
She’d wipe it away and new blood would come out.
He was licking it, tasting the blood, and he must have tasted it
very well, I thought.
“You might need a stitch,” she said.
The blind man tilted his head back, and allowed
the Kleenex to rest, stuffed in his nose.
She produced a Band-Aid and put the
Band-Aid on the blood, secured it to his
cabbage cheeks.

Someone shook off his hat and placed it onto his
head. Adjusted it so it was straight.

Then a final person arrived and
held something out in front of the man’s
face. It was a mirror. A hand mirror.
She wanted him to see
what had happened to him, or how
bad it was or whether he was still bleeding.
This was her form of service.
He simply stayed tilted up though, looking
nowhere, trying to hear whatever he could
to make sense of what had happened to him.

“I’m alright,” he said again. “Thank you.”

“He’s blind,” the girl with the Kleenex said,
pushing the mirror away. “He doesn’t
need that.”

Sitting On A Bench In The Morning

2008-05-16T09:11:00.001-04:00

Whatever madness resides,
whatever paranoia, perversity,
boredom, ambition;

whatever private violence dwells
in people, there is still this
at least,
and not everything has been hollowed out.

The sun exists. It bleeds
daily
out of the sky for us, it crawls
over the buildings with its shadows.

The green plants push up against the old iron gates,
the animal brains fire in the animal heads...

Whatever loneliness or useless thoughts or
damage, or propaganda;
whatever little need coated in ideology;
whatever gods or non-gods;
whatever harsh or peaceful worship;
whatever distorted wishing or slow vanishing—
there is this.
There is this, still.

The sparrows and pigeons awake,
bathe in a black pool of our accumulation,
dry themselves
on the toasted steps to the fountain.
The fountain.

The beach, somewhere in Oregon
with its foggy features of black sand
and maybe a dog, or in Florida
the green waves depositing shells
prehistoric,
compounded with the eyes, teeth and limbs
of unknown, long extinct things.

In the Midwest the doves hoot, and a man
crouches at the flat grass of his own grave
and admires it.

I am somehow glad for the
population of ghosts inside of me.
As they gather
like dark birds gather, still with a
place to gather,

And have not been replaced by the same
no nothing
that has been conceived of, and is easy, and is easily imagined.

I Know A Few Things

2008-05-15T09:42:00.001-04:00

The scent of Chinatown.
Perfume or truck exhaust.
The flowers newly stuffed
into loose dirt.
The fruit in its window. Tree roots
at the point of entering the earth.
The waterman. The meter running.
Legs. Bare legs
coming out from new dresses.
All the different
kinds of dogs. It’s true—they do
look like their masters. Chasing a ball,
or simply sitting. A child in a pink jacket
that’s half the size of one, a person
half the size of a dog.
The sea in its sway in constant darkness.
How it does not open its eyes.

Then there are the things I do not know.
I have a feeling I will live to be 85.
I also have a feeling, same time,
that I’ll remember claiming that one day.

Following

2008-05-15T09:32:00.000-04:00

I go to the door, check the lock again.
Poke through the mail.
The city is quiet. It sleeps
under a blanket of conflict and doubt.
Observe a rectangle of faint light
on the kitchen tile, follow it to its source.
End up this time
at the window watching the moon.

The not knowing
of what’s coming is very present;
what can possibly be generated
out of this still air, the darkly
coiled ivy; what areas
can be circled, what inventions
are even possible.

Shell Full Of Stones

2008-05-13T16:52:00.001-04:00

Munificence is of the Sea
which you cannot explain, nor do,

Because it is too Big.

At first, seem quiet, the
continents dragging themselves along, their immense

Books of Wounds
like black stones ribboned in white

doodling on their own bandaged pages.

At first, a gray doubt. Like a dove, almost
not there; like an

elephant’s eyelid
opened

already, it comes.

Cobweb Encased Hands

2008-05-07T11:33:00.000-04:00

Something in it harkens to the hungry past
inside the thin skeleton of a shrew.

The sound of a plastic bag on the counter
pushed by the wind of a fan;

It is a ghost, a wing moving in the concentrated dark,
the dresses in the closet swaying in the dark
so dense you can feel it against your skin.

I put one hand out to find the wall.
Something God knows
scratches inside of the wall.

The chickadees will
wake up
when the cows wake up and the
misers
of mummified boardgames
make up their minds;

And when the larvae has been harvested,
their eyeless, mouthless, mindless
ends moving

in the infirmary, reaching for their parents.

Cold Coffee

2008-05-05T17:02:00.000-04:00

At noon
you are delirious, and you speak to the sea
in a language, like a dream

Language that you find romantic,
but she cannot understand. The next thoughts are automatic.

You imagine sex with her

as you sweep cat litter off of the floor. Pour water. Contemplate
the deadliness of a fan.
The knifed bread, the sounds of doors

Somewhere

opening and closing.

One dog’s low bark.

To the daylight in its forms like white bodies in the waves.
Figures in the green folds of waves…

Waking up
re-Waking up
each minute, it seems,

is an account of the day—

Testimonials typed out
by ghost stenographers in the john; secretive
ladies for whom

there is no room. No

opening,
no sequins or pearl.

Old Hands Hold Money, Children Roar At Birds

2008-05-03T09:25:00.001-04:00

Looking out at the great puppet show.

The dogs, dogs
of all kinds

chase balls.

The roots crawl out of the ground
and reach for us.

Birds skim the land
like
bombers.

This is the best part of living
well,

and this is pretty nice.

Some birds fly right through men
as you eat a sandwich in the sun.

Bicycles
ride without men or women, a whole

Armada

of dead bikes,

Honest-to-God, it’s day again.

The male pigeons waddle after the females, more
well-fed
than

most of the humans,

land on the peak of the fountain. It isn’t
that hard for them.

Should it be for us?

We grow corn and mustaches,
amass wealth, build houses,
aspire to love, operate on one another,
dismember our feelings,
wait silently in the bathtub

and contemplate cancer, and our
histories,

and our fear of pain.

When it arrives like a shark’s face

in the aquarium

We know it. We know it is an
apparition but we

cannot leave the room.

The Play

2008-05-02T11:27:00.001-04:00

a moth limps out of his cell like an afterthought.
he is to perform a little play for us, a
play based on our lives.

we let him do this, offer a respite from his
torture etcetera
so we might be entertained.

without our consent, he drops his trousers
and begins to dance. this isn’t supposed to happen, they think.

this is
an outrage.

cancel the orders for season tickets: this art is fake.
he found it folded in a shoebox next to
dead mother’s nightgown, the maps that led us
to father’s grave—one big joke. his props are
bones, his set is a pair of false teeth. we forgot the
way to our own memory.

lingering there in the lamplight
we are in trances.
the shape of the night is in lines and dots.
the origin of the drawing cannot be attributed to god.
fancy seamstresses have been hired to fool our
laffy-daffy souls.

the reflection of one dot in particular resembles a baby.
there’s one baby that we all know quite well, right?
what is this baby in the black dot? that is ourselves.
where do we find such white clothing? in the hexagon of earth.
when does the river turn back into the ocean? calamity junction.
the field was a maze of many colors. it was a lineup of our years
like criminals.

they were fairly obedient in their assembly.
do not turn them away or laugh at them, or deny them.
they appeared here for you, all in a row, so pay attention.
one could only lead to the other, and that one could only lead to the next.
there isn’t much mystery here.
the only mystery is in the moment of convergence. beyond that, what?
an idea is only possible with the previous idea,
like a person is only possible after many enfolding lifetimes.

a lapse in time forgot its naming. people provide the details.
jewels unfurl along the road.
they blast the brain with light.

remaining on stage, the quietness of his monologue
makes us sit forward in our chairs. our ears are little white dwarves.
the mass of the stars is measured in lives.
the chairs are shaped like circles. gallows may or may not be in the fly.
an usher in the shape of a mouth reminds us not to leave our seats quite yet.
the spotlight man, who is a head of a hair, pops it down. he’s in his
roost, the room of quiet deformity.

for the first time, we hear his jokes, though.
they refer to our secrets. they refer to everything that accumulates
like sewage in the clogged drain. but this is mostly unknown.
before we can hear the punchlines, down comes the curtain.

intermission is a time when we can mull about and pretend
it doesn’t matter.
some go to sleep.
some kill thyselves.
some remain in the bathroom or the coat closet for a number of years.

the moth’s understudy is a bear.
he is unconvincing.
his costume is nothing more than the clothes in my closet,
but also the clothes in the closet of another man,
and the clothes in the drawer of his wife. he is armed with a bowie knife
and a muted trombone.
everyone’s clothes on everyone’s bear, are everyone’s understudy
in everyone’s play.

the moth has entered the moon as his vanity.
he reminds himself that he is a terrible faceless creature with no memory.
he hears screaming from the house. also, music.
what is he supposed to do?
the backdoor is propped open with a garbage can.
the noose he tied is in the garbage can, along with his letters
and his lipstick.

with much regret, he feels his way out into the night.
he sees nothing but flying the color red yellow. jesus, he is limited.
his brain is limited, his body is limited, he wants nothing more
than to be completed by whoever started him.
out in the dark blue scene the mountain is wearing his face.
the evergreens are waving him into the cold grave of the ocean.
the reflection of the moon is smaller than the dot.
without eyelids, eyes are unnecessary.
the highway feels its way across the map.
the plains are sprouting with hair.
the winter isn’t over and neither is the summer.
in between perhaps there will be some melt. in between,
perhaps, there will be some reminders of his performance;
there will blow large scraps of paper bladed into shreds by the sun;
loose wind unties his wings from his shoulders;
there is no blood in his single vein;
the audience is tired and traumatized, but oh well,

they’re gone, and it’s not his problem anymore.

The grass grows without our permission

2008-04-30T12:21:00.001-04:00

I am inside each house that passes
somehow,

and my lineage is inside each house. Historically,
I am finite, in this zipped-up costume.

My grandfather sits at the upright
and has learned how to play.

My grandmother
warms

her own ashes in a saucepan by the fireplace.

She smiles like the dusty pages of a book.

Houseplants here represent time.

Four
cats are one grim reaper

and instead, discuss the next move in private.

Where I Travel To

2008-04-30T12:20:00.000-04:00

The cat disappeared into the dark—
this was his music, sad and ancient.

But smiling. Where on earth?
I fastened myself to the future with a set of pins.

Felt my way to the tomb. My family was waiting there.

The sounds were the brilliant beginnings
and ends of other sounds.

Buildings of sleep pushed up, and on the
other ends of the blowing streets, buildings of wakefulness.

This city and its sounds were dilemmas of thought.
Who worked them into these porous surfaces?

Butchers at their tables. Pathologists. Nuns.

Hearing. Slow canto.
The gleaming one piece of my eye.

Action then in the terrified room:
the storytelling old men of war, the harps.

The Grove of Graves Like Flowers

2008-04-30T12:19:00.000-04:00

I like looking at the other side—the side

that’s not
opposed

to death.

The side that accompanies us to the beach, and moves us
like marionettes. The side that

grows a new face every second,

tufts of grass like hair flowing to the water.

A sugar
factory, small, emitting sweet gusts.

A blackbird flies
through

the lines of a bridge. He is constant. I am not

as soccer players suffer in the hot field.

Night Gang

2008-04-29T09:57:00.001-04:00

The Siamese twins water my plant, and look at me
with their one heart beating, and their one stomach
churning dinner.

An Archangel
opens the fridge, eats a hard-boiled egg,
goes to sleep on my side of the bed, nuzzles my wife.

There are not many eyes and not many nights in the night,
and not many puppets in this night of eyes.

Who then
dances in there

like a little drum? I’ve been replaced by an
imposter.

Too Bad

2008-04-29T09:56:00.002-04:00

The sun is suffering from dementia.

Sad old broad.
We found her in the poorhouse, air-conditioning
on high, hiding her face because she could not
recognize it.

This was upsetting, of course, to all of us. We looked in the fridge for something
to eat.

Just onions hugging other onions.
We are accustomed to certain things.

Call the ambulance, she said.

The apples are crawling up the wall.

Guarini Speaks

2008-04-29T09:56:00.001-04:00

The prophet of insignificant
events—he speaks from inside of a shoehorn.

His
houseplant

has cracked a joke in the meantime,
a dead smile

upon his mother’s face, blooming original as
decay

as she responds, encouraging
shame for the subject matter.

There is a white
shrieking figure somewhere
in the painting.

He waxes on the comedy of a corkscrew, and still

the plant insists on dying,
the mother cries at the whitened mirror,

his speech is extracted from the
Earth

with forceps, a snail

sliding out
of the cloud

The Mime

2008-04-28T10:30:00.001-04:00

Slowly grows out of the wall,
completes his this and that figure, the
outline on the wall
paper
with a few movements of
white hands, shreds the surface,
his ghostly dimensions, demented figure
we see with a wider view,
a secretive vista

in the darkened theater
hall, most
moonlit, most encouraged

by his new emergence
and this new non-sound.

The Something

2008-04-28T10:29:00.001-04:00

The thought has a thing, sun thought of as blinking eye
Coerced into the long stare at her children. A wind pauses
For reverence at our eulogy, as if one cares, which if brief, formal and boring.
Pigeons throw their voices like ventriloquists, a
Boy bounces one green grape infinitely.
This memory as thought as thing; the idea as being a thing once
And only once;
A blind man rolls a cigarette and invents language.
What’s the difference? He’s been sold, but a useless slave.
He does not remember a motel outside Pittsburgh.

The dark cozies up to the dark there. Only our night continues.
In the night, there are not only pictures, but figures,
One immense head, not many nights but
One after the other,
One long night underneath the blanket
And imagined forms, and nostalgia.
Memory clips the wings of the ocean. A certain
Immaculateness brightens then, hurries us along to the water,
This moment into faded origins, houses built
Inside other houses, lives burned into newly exposed
Bone, and who buried them in their ornate mausoleums.

Brownish white, Egypt crawls out of the cave
With its body wrapped in sack-cloth.

The stars are pygmies. The trees and their brethren
My fathers.

Continuance

2008-04-28T10:28:00.000-04:00

The roof is quiet with non-human life.
It continues to pass forward among forward dimensions,
crossing nearly invisible panes.

I do not observe, but
am observed.

The stillness watched the stillness. Some
good

It was.

White and eerie sand dunes
heap

In my mind’s vision. Where are their plans?
What algorithms lead to their logic?

What choreographer compiled this map
of movement reminders?

The pyramids are there. Slaves on the Yangzte.
A baby cries in the portico of Greece. The rest are silent as
ceramic.

A flock of birds assembles in the blue horn of sky
completing the white triangle.

An afterthought of immense measure, I am,
bursts

almost invisibly fast at that moment,

And a population stands before me like mastodons
awaiting thaw.

Limitations

2008-04-24T09:34:00.000-04:00

A bird above the bridge in equal flight as the air, and my reason, flags
posing too as birds, and the sun as a bird.

And this, with just that,

just that with this
under it.

How does the curve of a pot fit in this world?

How does the movement from one point to another, a vine in the wind, water in a drain,

fit in our minds,

which are limited by the same things
that limit the earth,

and limit the bird,

and limit oxygen,
the periodic table of elements,
and the boundaries of a flame,
and limit history,
and Marie Antoinette’s beheading,
fission,
and the dinosaur walking the earth…

and, finally, limit my brain, to a view of this world
as a composition,

as it nods mindlessly, alone,

and extends to the
limited extend?

2008-04-23T09:52:00.002-04:00

Ceremony/Metaphor

2008-04-23T09:47:00.000-04:00

A great clock is sunken off the Gulf Coast
as a crowd of people applaud.
Children are lifted from their feet when the chains are
cut, then peek to catch a glimpse of the clock’s forehead
as the green lines of water swirl in.
It is now the home to a shoal of cadaver fish.

They serenade me with their humming
in the silver evening. The white bone of
moon is barely visible
miles up, and I am blindfolded while my
dim servants attend to me. I think of what my life
used to be; I can hear the earth breathing.
The time left over
is cracked and fondled in a parrot’s mouth

ingenious, a comedian. The seagull with a black head
dives for my family. Takes one of us.
Next week, they’ll sink a piano.

Prehistory

2008-04-22T09:27:00.000-04:00

Some fifty billion years ago
a fireball describes both my creation, and demise.

A bone knows secrets you cannot.
It laughs at the learned.

I ride the galloping beast into the nothingness that permeates time, throughout time--

Extinction’s on the prowl.

Mother waits in her terrible wedding gown.
Mother eats the flesh of your wife.
Mother, dare I say, you look beautiful

hunched their like Cronus.

Massive-whore. My mind’s fossil will remain buried, even if they draw it
some day
on the wall of a church.

A Drawing of the Day

2008-04-22T09:26:00.002-04:00

The hair that grows out of an old woman’s shoes,
bones and teeth taken root in the flower-potted soil,
movements of dogs that describe the universe, as they experience each to the end,

a
yellow flashing
bulb

in her eye
as she hugs the artificial sphere.

As she embraces her braindead husband.
As her children disappear into the noon brightness.
As pregnant mothers drowse in the blue bath.

I will sit in the sun and draw lines.

This is my heritage.
Lines made without justice to the making of lines.

The brown bird
that wasn’t there, the dry pool, seeds that look like maggots.

My brain is a repetitive organism like sound.

If my legs caught fire it would merely be a costume.

In the whole of everything, lines, each effulgent, each false
in that they represent some movement
toward me,

I appreciate and I accept.

Whoever invented it, whoever consecrated it

was free

Armies of Small Things

2008-04-22T09:26:00.001-04:00

They collect on the table before us.
We move them about like game pieces
yet we hurt them when we move them.
We crack them out of their soft shells and roast them in flame,
little larvae without eyes or wings.
Strip them nude and sketch their private parts.
The trees, this year, have released moths instead of seeds.
They are stillborn as they fall into the yard.
My building has grown a few strands of gray hair,
which must be cut with a blade no smaller than a sofa.
A chair counts seconds while sharpening a knife.
Mice descend upon the garden like flies
to the belly of a deceased swine.
Soup for supper. Peace in between.
Peace in between the nails in my wall.
Peace in between the feathers of a drunken angel.
Peace amongst the infantry.

Glowing like the ten eyes of a deep-sea fish.
White and blue, the silent blood of a newborn.
Take me upstairs and amputate my eyelids—I want to stay up for this show.

The Gladiolas Are Ringing

2008-04-15T07:56:00.002-04:00

As the vines climb the damp stone.
Mice dance with death.
The flowers rise to meet the mud and
The mud assembles to forms hands.
Maybe there will be more rain,
The snow remembers the snow.
The sun remembers the sun, its energy memory
And it’s in all of us.
Long lists of relatives are burned
In effigy.
Laugh at the orchestra of corpses,
The traveling circus of puppets.
It’s stopped in town, a healer grinning
Under his mustache.
Please do not disturb the sleeping hermit.
It is his work that interests us, his fortune,
His senses. They will save us from extinction,
At least that’s the hypothesis.
We have taken prisoners in the meantime. Hostages.
The medical trade is down to science.
Brains and feelings are basically one;
The Loch Ness Monster feeds on our young.
Computers spit daily hexes
On the still living. We are blanketed in numbers
Which sear our flesh. The stars retire to their bedrooms
Scissors in hand.
Survivors fight wars made out of tissue paper.
The sand is enamored with the sand, the frost
Hasn’t come in sixty years. We’re becoming accustomed
To the smiling faces of unrecognizable foes.
Roses bloom on the hearth, in the black wood.
Sea lions crown another man king, and then behead him.
Let’s raise the flags of our ancestors--
They mean something still in our moldy minds.
Pickled fruit shaped like our genitals,
The heads of grannies in jars, their eyes
swimming with wealth and the sublime. The man at his work,
Hammering new Bibles onto the surfaces of seeds.
A cat’s skeleton has been erected on the mantle,
The house a new museum.
Of course, its teeth replaced with diamonds.
More for us.
Lose your way in the topiary garden of time.
The trees resemble three generations of seers. The animals expect nothing and
get nothing. Spiny like the urchin, crabs, palm trees like exploded
firecrackers, fly away to Spain.

Unearth dinosaurs again and again.
An egg is everything.

The Rope

2008-04-12T09:39:00.001-04:00

The rope is a long story. If it grows, it grows
From the inside out. Unravels like opening hands.
One atom pushes the next atom
Out onto the stage. But that atom was, perhaps, birthed
By the last. And as it speaks in tongues
We hurry to paraphrase its contents,
Transcribe its long soliloquies of nonsense.
We bring it along on our walks,
But we only allow it to be one rope.
It finds its way through the field in yellow grasses,
The rocks that have found themselves deposited there,
The rust covered shells of farm equipment.
It enters the doorway between trees.
Its greetings form the entirety of the woods.
Romance twitches on the bed of stones.
Somehow sensual, the lumps and hardnesses
Are snaked with the story. We leave it there
And that is the best gift.

The rope is one end to another, but it is also
many ends. There are only two ends
when you hold it in your hands.

Births

2008-04-12T09:38:00.000-04:00

The earth is pushed in a rusty wheelchair.
The sun is suffering from dementia,
Hiding her face because she cannot understand it.
She was birthed in a dusty closet’s bucket,
Suckled by killers who invented this world.
Made blueprints on the backs of their lovers.
Outlined crosses with the ends of their fingers.
A blackbird cawing between your legs
Is, then, either my child or a dictator, or both.
The night is my twin who
Never was born,
And yet we took the same name.

Late Night Rumors

2008-04-11T18:05:00.001-04:00

The room is made of paper.
There’s nothing in the air but vinegar and
fall’s apples shrinking in the fridge
to deathly granny faces.

Sure, somewhere out there, there are windows with lights on in them.
Well, there were. They’re off now.
That was one year ago. One year ago today. Why did I think that was tonight?
A year is supposed to be something, I think.

It’s supposed to be a fossil, a nice fat eggplant peeping from the garden.
It’s supposed to be a buzzard with a scrap of flesh hanging from his lips;
carry the whole world like a tuft of cotton. Something a little vicious;
The earth rumbles so she does have to deal with quietness.

Claims to have her heart in
mind…
Claims to not be enamored
with wealth…
Claims to find real meaning
in the wind…
Claims that the circle
and the line are one thing…that
languages are equivilant…
that there are people
worth loving…
that the night is not
more persistent than day…

no one knows who were are.
Our faces are mixed up.
One picture hook hanging in the plaster.
The fish are frozen in their oceans.
The dancers are floating in freezing space.
Mostly everything is contained in the movement
of one loose vine in the wind.

I make a pact with an old man in a nightshirt, carrying a hammer.
I cannot live anymore, I tell him.
It is too delicate to feel.
It is too old, it is like mummy hair.
And if I find wisdom in a nectarine so be it.
I still have animal teeth.

Notes

2008-04-09T10:02:00.001-04:00

I left a note on your door
to tell you you were miserable.
Did you get it?
I went on to describe how I would
euthanize the milk in your refrigerator,
put your teeth in the electric chair, arrange
for the sea to be hanged.
Were you busy bathing in the dark?
You sexy little marionette.
Your cat had a parakeet in her mouth.
I count the toes
on this newly birthed night.

My suckling heart does not
believe in love.
Roses mate with elephants
and what’s born seems to
come out of the red curtain.
The turnip’s bashful soul
is acknowledged
by the president of bashful souls
and upon his grave, a heap
of gravel
in the shape of Samuel Becket’s head.

Halitosis Of A Dying Mind

2008-04-09T10:01:00.000-04:00

Castro wears fatigues in a Havana hospital. But then
he gets caught goosing nurses
and gets himself strapped down,
his grapefruit juice brought in a paper cup
adorned in deathly cala lilies.

I dream of cohabitating with the minerals inside great boulders
and what that must sound like, He tells her.
He’s gone mad. Give him another shot.

The broom remarks to the telephone, I haven’t bathed
in three days
and does that repulse you?
Is that too long?

I, for one, have gone underground with the bodies.
We clap for what we used to know. It’s deserving
of applause, at least we think so.

So, we’re here in the cellar of birds.
Underneath the palaces and the palm trees.
Stone cages fill time with laughter.
Quiet dosages are administered in
eyedroppers.

Night, the purple block, the beet
on a placemat with one white finger next door,
ring still around it, curse me again.
The big green eyes do not belong to my bride.

Bone eventually writes over bone,
the hieroglyph of nature is one symbol pressed into
the ore. Mushrooms sprout from my heart.
Mustache like a blackbird
very sharp against the blueness
of the Gulf Of Mexico, greenness, the way
flames engulf a grand piano, seashells are your eyes, and
a freckled hand passes over.

Containing The Number 1

2008-04-07T11:04:00.001-04:00

My own eyes in a flashlight
are a cat’s eyes, a plaything, jade of
Prometheus.

Pink light, orange light,
the light of ice that comes off in chunks,
winter’s hurting gives
clues
to the owl’s demise…

perhaps one day
the glow of fission
will reimburse us all…

Relates me to my memory,
two dances

that multiplied, split in half,
country thirds

like mated
corn

Late Night Rumors

2008-04-07T11:03:00.002-04:00

The room is made of paper.
There’s nothing in the air but vinegar and
fall’s apples shrinking in the fridge
to granny faces.

There are windows with lights on in them.
Well, there were.
But they’re off now.
That was one year ago. One year ago today that they were on.
A year is supposed to be something, I think.

It’s supposed to be a fossil, a nice fat eggplant you can eat.
It’s supposed to be a buzzard
with a scrap of flesh hanging from his lips;
carry the whole world like a tuft of cotton.
She rumbles so she does have to deal with quietness.

Claims to have her heart in
mind…
Claims to not be enamored
with wealth…
Claims to find real meaning
in the wind…
Claims that the circle
and the line are one thing…that
languages are equivilant…
that there are people
worth loving…
that the night is not
more persistent than day…

No one knows who were are.
Our faces are mixed up.
One picture hook hanging in the plaster.
The fish are frozen in their oceans.

I make a pact with an old man in a nightshirt, carrying a hammer.
I cannot live anymore, I tell him.
It is too delicate to feel.
It is too old, like mummy hair.
And if I find wisdom in a nectarine so be it.
I still have animal teeth.

The Doorway From One Dark Room Into Another Dark Room

2008-03-29T10:51:00.000-04:00

Who pushed the moon out on stage?
Who replaced my pillowcase with butcher paper?
The dust clumps rest quiet as coiled snakes.

I sit upright in my bed.
You can learn a lot by waiting in the dark;
about the antiquity of the dark, the agelessness of it.

Then I hear a sound like the shuffling of feathers.
A man walks by the door in a buzzard costume, head to toe,
dropping a few of the heavy black ones off his tail.

I’ll have to use the broom.

He doesn’t think I can see the blood underneath his fingernails, but I can.

The Garden

2008-03-26T10:37:00.001-04:00

There is an obese man
walks through, hands stuffed in pockets, steady
with his flat stare
as he pounds the earth with his flat eyes.

The overgrowth of this garden, which clings madly
to the wire fence
like a beast
clings to
pretty underwear,

weighs in him. His eyes are blue and sad,
his lips
like loose hunks of steak.

The stink of weeds is immense.
They’ve released their burps to the enigma
honeybees.

Of course, they cannot see. None of them—they
walk with tiny canes

and the man is illiterate and crass.

The idiot

will immerse himself
in this semi-brilliance of
flora.

Highway

2008-03-26T10:35:00.001-04:00

Witnessed a woman in white fur,
platinum blonde,
in the back seat of a
red car
blasting down the highway
turn herself inside out for us.
The halo must have swallowed the word, I thought; there was
tinsel on the rearview mirror, a snake in her undergarments

perhaps possessing

Time, consumed slowly and with
unhinged jaws

like an infant, or pygmy
hippo.

Madrigal

2008-03-26T10:34:00.001-04:00

The rain had its purple fingers at my temples
and was massaging me to sleep.
I am enveloped in the night like a chrysalis.
My dreams are the dreams of pupa.
This is the madrigal of Spring—thoughts that
are no bigger than a hairball in the bathtub,
half a cucumber
sweating out its last silver wishes
in the fridge…

The contents of an old drawer
provide clues to the death of the afternoon:
a book of stamps, a tooth, a bunch of
weeds…a hollow exoskeleton.

I wake up on a mattress that is a fossil.
It rose out of the bedrock.

Madame Mothheart has blackmailed me
into this.

The Bone Puzzle

2008-03-18T09:51:00.002-04:00

Curious.
Who put her together there?
I look down and marvel at my own
ape hands; my reflection in the mirror
is that of a carnival weight guesser. I’ve
aged almost sixty years.
I wonder how long I can exist like this.
As this. Requited for a one time
birth, a makeup drink,
pennies in the brown hands
of a man ordering pizza
as conquistadors in copper helmets
storm civilizations, establish ruins.
Someone finally will
envelope
Me. Yes. My pants will be pulled into the
ocean as I sleep.
The Words
will crowd around the light
like moths. The grove
of the dead will sing their anthem, and
What will happen
to the memories of rooms? Perhaps I’ll see them
as cells under a microscope, dyed brown, diamonds,
hexagons.
Houses?
My friends and family
will all be mannequins
wearing my clothes like costumes.

An Object Of Mass Entering A System

2008-03-18T09:50:00.001-04:00

When it’s down, I tell you, the blood is crooked in your veins.
You extract a strip of brown gauze from your mouth
and examine it. It contains
a sequence of disfigured letters—they first were born,
then taken away from you.

My feelings are like a blanched squid; only the black eyes peeping out
and a velvety fungus at attention on my soft palate.

Clothes in piles are underhanded
as they scheme against me. Same with the clock; it hands
me
phony money
made of rubber, quizzes me
on the numbers of slants on imposing light.

A jewelry box with tasseled key
waits in the remote corner. Out of it
comes
a miniature conductor
holding a bone wand.

His crew unloads at the foot of the mirror
as he taps at his tooth, the only hard part of him,

and gets us to attention.

Report On The President Of Mules

2008-03-15T11:28:00.001-04:00

Territorial pig. What have I done to deserve this treatment? I often confuse him with shadows. Stop it with your nuzzling of the clover, your canoodling
with spider web women.
The bow tie ‘round your pink throat is a fake; you bought it at a costume shop.

Who do I commiserate with
except a green horsefly I find sitting on the beach? His legs are crossed. He speaks in a low voice, grave, an accent—

the ocean pulled my friends in, he says,
and he is mournful. Now it’s laughing at him in green; the mollusks all sing fight songs;
the white old hair of the sea spreads like lightning;
the yellow feet of seagulls pace the black sand and demand food.

In the distance are the mountains. It is raining again. I don’t have an answer for him.

All this man can worry about is trespassing, he says. God, he’s down.

He’s got a dummy on his knee—you know that, right?--who delivers his speeches for him, and in the end,

how can you care for a creature like that?

Senator Of The Exhumed Guests

2008-03-15T11:27:00.000-04:00

Somewhere in this space-like city, in the dry, spiny grass
that winter did not
chew
his elements sing in unison. A choir of Carbon, Oxygen etcetera.

Or on his knees, he wishes he lived in the rainforest.

Under rotting wood, fraternizing with the centipedes and dung beetles.

Army ants haul crucifixes ‘cross his breakfast table.

This widower eats his banana and says his wife’s name, which makes him
vomit, and he is joined by the council of apes.

They look at him as they cross things off of lists.
Why are they crossing those things off of lists, he wonders. And why
are they looking at me while they cross them off?

The shadow has come across
and the words are gone, they tell him.
Tonight we eat a tiger’s head for dinner.

I drift to sleep and feel drunk thinking about him. He

never stops
eating. He

takes huge steps through the storm and halts it like a dog.

Horror Quiz

2008-03-13T22:53:00.001-04:00

This little deaf plant has shrunk. It’s more like a mushroom now. Shriveled
little womb

it contains a baby of brown smallness.

A dwarf comes out of a nearby door stirring soup with

What is that?

a stick? Or is that a rib, a spine with some teeth still left at one end?
She waves it at me

like she’s waving it at a Christ.

The sun is still up there; unshaded, hard, like a cyst
that haunts an organ.

Last

2008-03-07T09:36:00.001-05:00

She went over and covered the house with a blanket.

Inside, tulips grew out of the family.

One lamp

served as the grave marker

for her parents, a

gray

balloon served as the grave marker
for

the tulips.

Looking At It

2008-03-07T09:35:00.001-05:00

Solitude is shrunken like a white dwarf.

Collapse feels like hanging on.
The Universe

is visible in a set of drawers.

Watching A Cat Fall Asleep

2008-03-07T09:34:00.001-05:00

It was 8 in the morning.
The muted sun had risen, of course,
like a blanched sand dollar, just a white disc out there
in between the trees.
And I had my own brain in my lap.
I was soaping it, massaging it,
I didn’t want my wife to see that—my sad little brain
being washed underneath the covers. I hid him in there
for his own good, and mine.
He was a secret; I kept him quiet with the end of a swiss army knife.
Somewhere, a violin and trumpet
bowed to one another and took off their hats.
Their heads were bloody. They put the hats back on.

Her eyelids pinch shut like a clam breathing, then
pop open, then close again. What is it in her
cat brain that fires?

God, I’ve really made a mess in here.
I’ll have to mop the floor and disinfect;
The chickadees will be invited as pallbearers;
Don’t call my mother. She’ll be too upset
to move.

Dry Wood

2008-03-05T09:01:00.001-05:00

Can it either open or close, or both? Does it have hands?
Can it be both large and small, like my childhood
feverish vision? I held it in my mouth, whatever it was;
the sameness of both sizes. Closed hands on a rock, a
fly, one strip of grass.
Can its waves cross the desk and touch me?
My father glued it to a rock
along with a few seashells like little buttons,
looked at his watch in the wind.
In doing that, he opened it, and he closed it.
His hands occurred and then died, while
the ocean indifferently watched them
with its mustache and crew socks.
Back to etiquette.
Bow to the forehead of time, seagull, swinging
through the snow like a block on a rope.
The beach turned flat and regarded its people;
they were invisible and sat cross-legged like monks; they drank
glasses of milk like Stonehenge;
they prayed to the sand.
In their eyes, colors were flushed down the
toilets of their brains, remembering quietly the childhood
they had apart from themselves;
how often does a brain consent to something so outlandish?
It talks to the ax, it reiterates nonsense like facts, it kisses doom on the prick.
The forest on the outskirts stands upright and steady as a priest.
Clues received in the information of it all—cannot
possibly be read…
the glass rainbows, the prism interred.

The Ovation

2008-03-05T08:59:00.001-05:00

Still stuck
like a sheet thread on a nail, like
a quill,
like your eyeball in its socket,

an entire earth
with gloved hand at its throat…

Thunder crowds at the door; let’s applaud.
As long as it’s

trapped
it can’t go away.

Scared Of Mouse Turds

2008-02-27T09:25:00.000-05:00

My eyes don’t work anymore.
I stand at the front of miles of gods.
Their overalls are unkempt, they do not have jobs.
I search the desert ground like they search churches;
for ministers, for prognosticators, for
fools.
And when I sweep them up I
ask the word
will Wonder bread ever make a noxious poison?

The Pain Gallery

2008-02-27T09:22:00.000-05:00

They’ve opened it on the weekend for me.
Closed the blinds, put a slow dirge upon the speakers
as patients skulk in overgrown pajamas; a security guard
is made out of melting wax.
Outside, the lake is larger than it once was, it is a glacier
now
and it’s
tearing apart its white geometry.
Terrible junction of memory and sculpture.
An infant shark
squeezing its gills on a red bed with brass ends,
and a suit that suffocated its man.

It Occurred To Me

2008-02-21T14:09:00.001-05:00

Simic was following me.
He’d been to the pub and sat in my booth,
wore my pants, played darts with a tarot card reader
he’d married in New Mexico.

He had no face--just an old shoe there.
His scarf was wrapped around his shoe-head
and his glasses flew into my hand like a bird.

“What if you ran into yourself
on the street,” he said.“And thought
that they deserved
just a little bit of suffering?”

He was in a blue tuxedo; a frog in his pocket muttered the alphabet.

He goes on to tell me
how he’d been busy spooning poached pears
into my mother’s mouth:

(“She’s circling dimensia,” he said. “She talks to cremated things.”)

and how my father’d left his
teeth in a Tennessee courtroom.

How did he find them? I thought.
He makes all of the dandelions molt…

“Hocus pocus,” he says and inserts six or seven maraschino cherries
into his mouth. “Fly to the beach. You bite so sensually.”

Company

2008-02-17T11:52:00.001-05:00

Rain had turned the snow into
shrunken little nuns.
There was something waxy about the morning,
something akin to a pitcher of water at a wake.
We coasted along the river in a nest,
our feet in the cold wind,
and listened to our personal despot’s symphony
sing from his head which was a parakeet’s;
and the movement was about my mother
and yours. Birdbrain. He shut up when we reached
the bridge.