the undertakers’ polyester suits
couldn’t withstand the volume
of work and soon they too were dead,
perhaps of constant exposure to
despair as well as lack of food,
Keep it close
to the bone, boy.
Keep the blade busy.
You were never
going to be their darling
so what have you got to lose?
Sun cracked grass signals
the yellow haze of transition.
Pinon fire in a kiva stove
is a Southwest desert Fall
in the armpits of tradition
and passionate drumming.
When the buzz of mosquitoes is music,
lampblack is a painting on one’s wall.
When taps are stark, streets are lightless,
circuitous human trails at every trestle:
despite the doggerel of lonely
atoms, out of sync with
the unending Styrofoam
models from childhood
The artist says “I haven't drawn a stitch since;
I shake my fists at words and recall the rising din.”
The butcher says “I’ll grind it fine for you
if you stand over there and vote along this party line.”
Charlotte to Savannah. It smells like bad luck and sorrow plus a look of too much
crystal meth and DIY tattoos. 40 years
since I've taken greyhound.
your antic flesh comes back
a pistol loaf of bread
the door blows open
hair and leaves
by right a rite of passage
should be entered into
by one who has prepared
who understands the gravity
commitment and opportunity
Just look at your face so wasted playing a man so real, as real as charred skin in your hair can get. How far will you trudge down this never-ending path of enlightened servitude? Wade into the river to soothe your feet as many times as you’d like, but the ringworms keep burrowing.
her voice a specific
timeline of remembrance,
that of leading my still
young wanderings through
cancer and familiar cave,
The crashing of the English canon in Spanish Harlem
Resounds like cymbals in dissonant reverb:
The path out of poverty is strewn with dead white poets,
Whose diction students strive to emulate,
Josh wuz mind wandering
and waiting foa da bus
wen some ghostly figures
came walking around da corner
to stand behind him
as he sat on wun bench.
How do you know when it’s done? I admit the children
were wrecked but the sad man gave me reasons to remain—
the sex was sex, his blows weren’t all that harsh and he never
shot at me but once. It’s a gift, I guess, to know how to leave,
All right, Catherine of the wooden raft with wheels and, all right,
Cleo of the heavy carpet and its intrigue in court. Darkness is not
night falling over us mid day clouds roiling in, electricity,
unease. All right, the misuse of power, blood lusts and scars,
What can she mean, divested
of her nudity, why does she suggest
sleep
over
shadow?
ringo meets a girl-silhouette in a short black dress her legs are long, as alluring as throwing oneself into the thames to get over a bad life maybe the dress is what erases her having been called "tone-deaf" by george or web-handed by the south 5's drummer he suspects everything is distorted
The great Django Reinhardt wrote a song called "Nuage" - clouds - today there are no clouds - a pellucid sky, slight gold inscribed on the mountains and pure azure - a raven floats, the sun broad as in the poems of Whitman's "Song Of Myself"
The Stone Age in this age, the Flint, Michigan age.
Stone tools, cutting tools, edged blades
for removing flesh from a carcass. Smacked
against steel, spark, excite, to ignite
the old factories long smothered with vines,
If you're not any more interesting polluted
than you are pristine
then what's the point?
Into the silence of hunger and the roar of
automobiles, a single tiny drop of
gratitude falls unknown, unheard,
merging in the dust of the wry pavement.
crazy white boy from south central
and who showed you that
certainly not canvas back hogan
or another that returns only losses
from a lost country
Remember the time we split as an atom?
The Great Orange ball of flame
engulfed our notebooks, our laptops,
our blogs. We forgot they were incendiary
and what a shame it would be
if all locutions were here
to simply become dust or
possibly that is the intention
No dogs bark, no cats yowl, no pigeons
Murmur coos. My town that was lies before
Me, now a tearful city, a maze of wretched,
Windowed blocks shuttered. Midnight chimes,
Those shoulders
were never a shelter
but once my home
when he still played and loved
As the body was pulled from the hulk,
the arms and head broke away.
Only the boots attest to a human corpse.
“What is your name?”
asked the digital interviewer.
“Brahma,” the interviewee confidently responded,
expecting a flowery welcome and a spellbound band.
everybody is too busy reading each other's minds,
appearing hundreds of miles from their bodies and
refusing to decay after death; as it is, when you
think of me, I find that I, in turn, am thinking of you.
The swift banks of my memory
suppress drunken details. I hear
a dissertation embedded in the vases
of death, the abyss that rubs
my shortcomings on your chest
Voodoo dolls in
the age of social media
for the purpose of their
cowardly
spiritual genocide
Everyone sleeps but him.
A gaunt though alert face
turns this way, that way,
looking for someone
to tell his jokes to.
In the bask of computer light my boss
says watch for leaks in the room.
I know now what to pray for. Thunder
burps and rain’s radio static steadies
Mars shines in a crystal rain of meteor showers, comets stream
Through stellar fires that rage in a galactic night forever.
Walls laced with bullets crumble, stacks of burning tires barricade
Cities that are echoing with prayers ghosts recite forever.
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