A prison, a handful of sparrows flying while I drink a
cup of coffee at the cafe.
Who has forgotten? Who has spoken to a youth who
will save a life?
Our friend Jeffrey has traveled to many cities: Cucamonga. Bentonville. Portsmouth. Providence. In each city he has gotten on his knees. He has prayed to the local god or goddess. In Newark he spoke to Sarah Vaughn in a cocktail lounge and to Allen Ginsberg floating high above the Jewish cemetery next to the traffic jam. Getting the okay from Allen and Sarah, he renamed the airport so we can fly into Allen Ginsberg. Then he flew into Louis Armstrong and learned how to second line.
mercurial license of body a
float inside the door your
outer ear fainter than a dis
tant boat clouded in as
h fingered lid chews
Faces pause for fluttering flag: Anthem rises.
Hands over hearts we hymn that old war song.
Then a player drops a knee: Thread-jacks the script-
ed playbook scene, hacks the broadcast dream.
Held dear for one,
horsefeathers for another.
Both, valid and worthy.
Each as credible as the other.
Each day older, a smolder in this spent body,
I wonder at my anger, this wish to stab somebody.
She burned corsets, stockings and tasty fetish gear as she waited for her climaxes. Just passing time. Just passing time. They misunderstood her experiments for an elastic insanity.
the people arguing
and the people asleep on benches
and some saw it coming
and thought they could fix things or hide
maybe escape
Fuck the rich. They are the assholes of power.
An asshole is an asshole and not a sword.
Their tight grip on our destiny is dissolving.
Going for glory ain’t as easy
as it used to be, back when
Evel Kneivel broke his bones
for you, thrilling your hides
with goosepimples of death
From Clinton Community Garden
to South Street—I put up
revolutionary green propaganda:
SAVE THE GARDENS on fences.
Press flesh, spreading the word.
as the cloud that seemed out of focus separates into a couple
thousand gulls hiding their yellow beaks under a wing,
constantly spiraling without a visual center,
knowing waters not a mirror
Invent and invent to make ourselves
guffaw, then we concocted a new
kind of government, a grief project,
How she decants herself, abandoning the priests’ pressing: the whirl of soft yellow petals opening leaves me breathless, form refusing limit. I clip the spent blossoms with shears, collecting their orange hips in an enameled bowl. All the stories are old, syllabaries of lauds told.
I am honestly more interested in the vivid life of the
village than in the erotic sculpture – at a certain
point however, in a hotel room, my hair catches fire.
Stevedore smarts
as exodoi tar
as sufficed ocean
named Eu(-)
gratis wolf fugue tacit poem, one
glebe rep udder burden won, Eros
When people give poetry a bad name :
disjointed words from actions inane,
when people give poetry a bad name!
The world was wild, wicked, vile
And though complicit was he
In this cavalcade of carnage
He slumbered soundly on
Free of any guilt.
After they’d had at the indigenous,
they set upon the endogenous.
They offered never-before-seen chemistry
with a will unbridled by consequences.
I was picturing the perfect hammock as an antidote to the mercurial endowment of the speaker’s eyes that skittered toward targets of greed. I saw firm feeling held between strong trees.
ready to entertain kidneys and liver,
that’s
our girl. some days
she goes by Sunny.
Diego trudged over and stood still below
the boy, now the king of that hill.
Diego began to make faces for the boy.
And the boy became giddy, so much lighter.
Even forgetful, perhaps.
sam wanted to know why i’d bitten
the hands off of all of my action figures
so that they couldn’t hold lightsabers and guns
if not for those children
playing war games
tearing off tentacles and petals
rehearsing explosions
memorizing marches
I shuffle the deck
and the world lays flat.
The bluer the sky the darker
astronomy becomes.
Channel Five flashes footage of my house
The newscaster’s tone not quite as condemning
as the word NIMBYs he keeps repeating
Referring to us who object to the bill
that wrote a half-way house for recovering drug addicts
Tomorrow Pasternak dies
in Peredelkino, where on his grave
we spent our youth
reciting "August,"
surrounded by quiet men in dark suits ––
they almost liked the lines.
a big black savage dog
is chained to the axle
of a rusty Ford
in the overgrown front lawn
of a dilapidated house
You need to know; you cannot condescend.
Reciprocity delineates
the limits you can test. Remove the mask.
Make yourself what love obliterates.
Recall with startling clarity,
the hue of a private tattoo.
I almost spelled your name again,
fingers tracing foreign flesh.
Your mother performed
Absence so you do not know
Limits to desire
Whenever you face the loss
Of dolphins a void hammers
The messenger burned out and crashed.
Once a quick-silver bullet
Screaming into the sky,
“Listen to me! I have so much to tell you!”
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