Our silence bangs against the heater.
He draws the blinds partly closed,
says he longs to bring Jerusalem here,
heart of his, held captive when
they banished him, forbade return.
grossly negligent armies
swept through the brain/cellophane
like shallow individualism
of fashion
but a good foamy piss ascends lung bursting mucus, but a small roll of snot ascends earwax, and so mucus is caught between not forefinger and thumb but piss and earwax and the more you produce the better for all manifest life.
Make a fresco of our blood,
an ocean of our tears,
make mountains of our bones,
and bogs of our bowels,
but who will know death in art,
We are flooded
to our necks. Like fishing bobbers
we are floating on our backs down what,
before the storm, was Maple Street.
This tense dream
the passengers on the rubber raft,
a few still afloat,
if they are lucky,
hold to tight, even while sinking
a hundred meters from shore.
together we'll hit historic route 66
to las vegas
like hunter thompson &
oscar acosta
we'll look for the american dream
in a taco
The time is noon
The world in flames
We talk
You listen
But tears cannot bring us together
In my childhood there were fathers to fear and nuclear war. Radiation. This was before children were given Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, so no wonder we felt hopeless in spite of the cans my grandparents kept in the basement.
I can muse on inequity and stereotypes
safe in the comfort of my paycheck
and business attire.
I can waltz by the cops in and around
the train station, wary but unafraid for my life.
They drove you to the stores
but didn’t let you park
They fattened you up on Coca-Cola
but didn’t let you in the bathroom
The billboards advertise
Aborted fetuses, vasectomies,
Christian fellowship
And the communist UN.
The cataclysm is about to begin;
there is nothing but the dragon
under dead Gaia’s skin.
It drills its gleaming eyetooth upwards
into bedrock,
splintering granite,
as a hot pick would splinter brittle ice.
we drove for three hours only to
find the building burned to the
ground when we got there
do you see the punchline?
we all bleed powerful nutrition
meat protein and oils
wipe clean the locker tarnish
even bleach can't linoleum unstain
I can't stop thinking about it
as I watch Dancing with the Stars
And if you can’t do, think you can’t do
anything, think again. Hold a piece of me
in your hand. Hold it in your hand
and place your hand over your heart.
See what you see. Do not close your eyes.
Recall the way I smell after rain.
UPS brown truck parked one wheel up on the sidewalk blinking its back
yellow lights where a movie theater used to be on the south side of
Market Street near Sixth Street
We like to swallow yesterday.
Time is a transitive verb.
Or a railroad. Speed bullet?
We might be rain in another country.
If we can do it.
If I am a victim of murder I might never notice.
It happens every day and to others
More or less deserving.
Why should we write this down if it happens
Every day in this life to anybody?
The gnomes are bored
with being enigmatic. Have
dumped the seasonally
changing menu &
its old world sensibilities—
Listen closely and you will hear the moans of the damned. Listen closely and you will hear animals singing the songs of the angels. Listen closely and you will hear the horizon approaching.
Whales, smaller now, approach the shore
to urge a creature
like the proto-bear that became the proto-whale
to adopt the life aquatic.
I thought that I was running but actually I was leaning, creeping at most, without direction, following instinct, reacting to what threatened me, to the strange and sudden difference which had come without forewarning
Rising rates, hot spots, piles of bodies and I suddenly feel like I am in that story I read as a girl - the end of the world and the woman writing her last words about how they all loved until the final minute. OK then. I will keep writing no matter what.
slier floe ,,
ra(w)mous bramble ,,
unblenched neap ,,
balloonish idiom ,,
aerial chuzzle ,,
And so
some dreams will merely be delayed a year,
some dreams will be realized ahead of schedule,
some dreams will be deferred, perhaps permanently,
I play the fox with Mad King George
with thrice sent hells to damn the gorge
with bottle rockets crotched inside
that one-man-show you all mile-highed
Compulsory education continues
nonstop, over eons, at the heart
of the genome. Failure is not
an option, but a resounding
scarcity of incidence and resilience.
they gowned only ink &
ink haunts their hands yet, never so tremulous &
literary as when cherubs're
smeared between'm,
& you, too-
Oceans boiling up bubbling disintegrating into
Large lakes of nucleic lava
Swathes of humanity displaced into oblivion
cause resilience is fertile, imbued to bursting
without braking, so much a skin can hold on its surface
waiting for the next waft or rivulet, where air and water
co-fervesce, no need to separate the crystals from the solution,
curdling is just one way: engage marry ferment and proliferate
libido badgers
dissemble their bleary hypotenuse
bangles
in conversational storage
The land, to their amazement, seemed to constantly rearrange itself in wild new patterns of rage and decay. On the border, they saw small brown children languishing in lockups. On city streets, they saw young black men in police chokeholds begging for breath.
face naked at a corona hoax party
in a negative pressure tent with some beautiful tests
in a bout of magical thinking by an open mass grave
no matter what
dear viewer
there must always be
a horse race
Yankees fight back
in late innings
And aren’t you and your friends undismayed, standing there,
nose-to-helmet, pressing back American History
and the cops, dressed-for-a riot, or a high school play.
Maybe you wished for just a little hollering and shoving,
(This isn’t a poem.
it’s a Scream, Scream, Scream.
Which now is a murderous trap
once that was his foremost impulse,
collapsed like laid
out playing cards.
1984, I think:
heroin was king,
crack was coming in.
A strange word called AIDS.
Soviet Union downfall hadn’t happened yet.
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