Poem – Dearth Demise

Satiety help me I have inhabit
of this world. Extant upon its designs
to be more aimlessly fluttering at
the window, to shadow all the patterns

it offers each sun. In frames far as eye
I draw my words towards a juggler’s shards
as if our fallings-down our deaths occurred
but did not involve a lot of colloquialized

arm movements, the body language throws. Thus
the shape of your silence when it speaks me
is different than mine in saying you,

though both of them resemble that spasm hymned as
repose lifepause a happen of sorts the way
the horizon’s a long way without meaning to.

Poem – The Patriots

at the edge of the city in
the garbage dump where the
trucks never stop unloading
a crazy congregation stumbles
from trashmound to trashheap
they smash their fists down on
whatever’s intact they tear
to bits the pitifew items
that have remained whole they
rip everything old clothes
papers cans bones to nothing
with their glazed teeth
the enlightened the faithful
every few meters one of them
falls and is torn to shreds by
the others at the edge of
the city where there’s a line
waiting to join

Poem – The Misunderstanding

I’m charmed yet chagrined by this misunderstanding–
As when, after a riot, my city’s smashed-in stores appear all
Boarded up, billboarded over, with ads for wind-insurance.
Similarly, swimmingly, I miss the point. You too?

And my misunderstanding doesn’t stop there, it grows–soon
I can’t see why that sudden influx of fugitives,
All the world’s escapees, rubbing themselves lasciviously against the
Berlin Wall.
They stick like placards to it. Like napalm. Like ads for–

And me, I haven’t even bought my biodegradable genitalia yet!
No. I was born slow, but picking up speed I run through
Our burnt-out streets, screaming, refusing to buy a house.
Finally, exasperated, the misunderstanding overtakes me, snatches
up

Handcuffs. So now here I am, found with all you others
Impatiently craning, in this queue that rumors out of sight up ahead
somewhere,
Clutching our cash eager to purchase whatever it is, nervous
As if bombs were about to practice land-reform upon our bodies,

Redistribution of eyes, toes, arms, here we stand. Then, some new
Age starts.

Poem – Face in the Window

I am a modest house, a house solely
notable for the fact I lived here once.
Its brass plaque depicts an oxygen eye
in which two pupils of hydrogen dance.

Downstairs is where I lit fires whose insights
with approach-velocity froze me, then
singed off into flame. This always happened when
I came close to a truth. Months passed. Years. Nights.

Shall I accommodate myself again,
a humble aquarium of lordly
thumbs, some fin de species? Of course each word

the blackout-moth mutters to my keyboard
shows the snowiest letter on this page is “I”—

Poem – Space

From the trees the leaves came down
until we joined hands with a wand
and that act enabled them
somehow then to reach the ground

where they scuttered round our feet
urging the latter to unite
with a baton as if that act
together with the hands can clasp

a dowsing-stick cut from the same
branch from which we launched
converging on gravity’s purge-point

at which point we merged to remove
all consonants from our star-maps.
The infinite consists of vowels alone.

Poem – Sleep

We brush the other, invisible moon.
Its caves come out and carry us inside.

Poem – Story of Or

To pose nakedness is
To refute it. A pose
Is a clothes. Like
Stanzaic arrangements of

The word which should
Ideally, be in pain against
Its w and its d. No slack
Is why such heaves of or

To denude itself could
Make us exude gold, yet when
Was that ever opposite enough

What scream or epigram
This sperm has come
To measure our mouths for.

Poem – Flashbacks

All it takes is Laura Riding’s riding-
crop across my butt, and I’m off:

Git-up horsie she cries astride me as
I crash sweetly onto the carpet.

Boredom what an esthetic,

cleansing the days-

I laud the vintage of my toothpick.
Small-husband to the floor,

my foot stoops in dance,

in courtship intervals.
Putting their clothes on afterwards

the lovers are surprised

at how empty

the buttonholes seem. 

Poem – Feeding The Sun

One day we notice that the sun
needs feeding. Immediately

a crash program begins: we fill rockets

with wheat, smoke-rings, razorblades, then, 

after long aiming

–they’re off. Hulls specially alloyed

so as not to melt before the stuff 

gets delivered we pour cattle rivers windmills,

aborigines etcet into the sun which

however, grows stubbornly

smaller, paler. Finally

of course we run out of things to feed the thing,

start shipping ourselves. By now

all the planets-moons-asteroids and

so on have been shoveled in though they’re

not doing much good it’s

still looking pretty weak, heck, nothing helps!

Now the last few of us left lift off.

The trip seems forever but then, touchdown.

Just before entering we wonder,

will we be enough. There’s

a last-second doubt in our minds: can we,

can this final sacrifice, our broughten crumb,

satiate

it–will a glutteral belch burst out then at last,–

and will that Big Burp be seen by far-off telescopes,

interpreted as a nova

by those other galaxies,

those further stars which have always seemed even more 

starving 

than ours? 

Poem – Goodbye

If you are still alive when you read this,
close your eyes. I am

under their lids, growing black. 

Poem – Compact Dusk

Here at the height of the day night change
The color of the sky is uncertain,

The sky depending in which direction

One’s eye strains, each of its swatches a strange 
Hue which dies too soon and which makes this hour

Linger in the mind transient as a life,

Whose names once known remain another

Posied-up portrait on our palette knife. 
Until even I wonder if one tint

Ever survives the harm of seeming unique

(Evening’s intrigue, time’s singularity.) 
Study for its trace, its placemap, I see

— Redundant as a stopsign in italic—

The face on which my profile leaves no print. 

Poem – Stress Therapy

Time, time, time, time, the clock
vaccinates us.

and then even that lacks

prophylaxis. 
Ticktock-pockmarked, stricken

by such strokes, we

get sick of prescriptions

which work solely 
on the body.

Systole diastole–

It is by its very 
intermittency

that the heart knows

itself to be an I. 

Poem – Monopoly

Finally the day dawned when a monopoly owned everything in theworld

So it went looking for its stockholders to celebrate

But they were all owned by it they were all dead they were

someplace

Their photographs hung in elevators which went up and down up and

down carrying nobody

Everyone else was in bed doing exercises to get in shape for noon

Hey the monopoly said let’s uncork the World Trade Center and get

blotto

Silence

The monopoly scowled

All it wanted was a little good-fellowship, like you get in the

highrise apartment-buildings

Then the sky got awful dark

Gee

And everyone was in bed frantically doing those exercises that get us in

shape for death

Exercises known as “kissing” “fucking” “caressing”

Everyone was unaware that they had been bought

Or that the earth was about to sell them to the moon

For a little light 

Poem – Heritage

“…here thy generations endeth in accord.” 
I physically resemble my mother

And father and therefore must have been

Adopted, because on my TV screen

The role-children rarely share a feature

With either parent. The fact they’re actors

And I’m not is what makes me misbegot—

A matched world of monitors all 2-shot

The mirror daily where I pray these stars 
Come: cancel everyone of us whose names

And clans have sundered human unity

Descend always among daughters or sons

To live still, beyond the Net’s trivia games,

Till their faces cloned shape ours. Family.

From android to ape, we’ll be Thy reruns. 

Poem – Sonnet

The way the world is not
Astonished at you

It doesn’t blink a leaf

When we step from the house

Leads me to think

That beauty is natural, unremarkable

And not to be spoken of

Except in the course of things

The course of singing and worksharing

The course of squeezes and neighbors

The course of you tying back your raving hair to go out

And the course of course of me

Astonished at you

The way the world is not 

Poem – Chicago

‘My age, my beast!’ – Osip Mandelstam 
On the lips a taste of tolling we are blind

The light drifts like dust over faces

We wear masks on our genitals

You’ve heard of lighting cigarettes with banknotes we used to light ours with Jews

History is made of bricks you can’t go through it

And bricks are made of bones and blood and

Bones and blood are made of little tiny circles that nothing can go through 

Except a piano with rabies

Blood gushes into, not from, our wounds

Vietnamese Cuban African bloods

Constellations of sperm upon our bodies

Drunk as dogs before our sons

The bearded foetus lines up at the evolution-trough

Swarmy bloods in the rabid piano

The air over Chicago is death’s monogram

This is the Were-Age rushing past

Speed: 10,000 men per minute

This is the species bred of death

The manshriek of flesh

The lifeless sparks of flesh
Covering the deep drums of vision

O new era race-wars jugular-lightning

Dark glance bursting from the over-ripe future

Know we are not the smilelines of dreams

Nor the pores of the Invisible

Piano with rabies we are victorious over

The drum and the wind-chime

We bite back a voice that might have emerged

To tame these dead bodies aid wet ashes 

Poem – Poem to Poetry

Poetry,
you are an electric,

a magic, field–like the space

between a sleepwalker’s outheld arms! 

Poem – Picture

Meadow of matchsticks,
soon to be rekindled

by Spring the incendiary.
The exact flame of your blossoms

will ignite the passions

happily sapped by time–
Dripdrop their excess went

and now miners’ hats

light up like love before
your vein, the frame of which

is there to depict the drift,

the waste when I painted
all the review copies

they sent me. But those books

open to polar pages where you
and I weigh the ends of this

teeter totem down, you

at the head and nadir me;
where postmortem is

the aura of self-portrait,

its other half regained at last. 

Poem – Cemetery

Who whispers here is forgotten.

Saliva’s emptiest fruit
adorns the stones,
words ripening your mouth
to a spoilation
of silence.

Who speaks here
reads a text that downloads
the screen of his fingernail,
through which nothing’s visible
as glass is.

For the memorial
we must kneel
to pick each flower
from amongst its modifiers:
but to do that
one needs a hand bared
of all uses, of all trades:
as ours is not.

Poem – The Golden Age

is thought to be a confession, won by endless
torture, but which our interrogators must
hate to record—all those old code names, dates,
the standard narrative of sandpaper
throats, even its remorse, fall ignored. Far

away, a late (not lost) messenger stares,
struck by window bargains or is it the gift
of a sudden solicitude: is she going to
lift up her shadow’s weight, shift hers
onto it? She knows who bears whom. In

that momentary museum where memory occurs
more accrue of those torturers’ pincers than
lessened fingernails, eyes teased to a pulp,
we beg for closeups. Ormolus, objets d’art!
A satyr drains an hourglass with one gulp.

Poem – Death

Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.
They will place my hands like this.
It will look as though I am flying into myself.

Poem – Feeding the Sun

One day we notice that the sun
needs feeding. Immediately
a crash program begins: we fill rockets
with wheat, smoke-rings, razorblades, then,
after long aiming
–they’re off. Hulls specially alloyed
so as not to melt before the stuff
gets delivered we pour cattle rivers windmills,
aborigines etcet into the sun which
however, grows stubbornly
smaller, paler. Finally
of course we run out of things to feed the thing,
start shipping ourselves. By now
all the planets-moons-asteroids and
so on have been shoveled in though they’re
not doing much good it’s
still looking pretty weak, heck, nothing helps!
Now the last few of us left lift off.
The trip seems forever but then, touchdown.
Just before entering we wonder,
will we be enough. There’s
a last-second doubt in our minds: can we,
can this final sacrifice, our broughten crumb,
satiate
it–will a glutteral belch burst out then at last,–
and will that Big Burp be seen by far-off telescopes,
interpreted as a nova
by those other galaxies,
those further stars which have always seemed even more
starving
than ours?