I never perfected the art of taking
of claiming the merely found as mine
never felt the extensive satisfaction
of keeping all my finds
Vehement shakes and frowns,
points to his pad and pencil.
“Too sad” he writes . . . (to remember,
to be no longer able to play)
I remember Rene Otto Castillo. Because the lines and their sizes
are all there though we have made several attempts to erase
with all our might. A smell from the pot on a hearth is out there
from the window and everybody in the street breathes the beetroot
soup. It is launch. It is ethereal nose everybody wears all this noontide.
If only one could play them without the “tits and feathers.”
A profound unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life.
The other day a woman was pulled from the canal unconscious and not breathing. That’s when I realized I should have done something sooner – hanged myself from a ceiling hook or bitten down on the muzzle of a gun.
The children stay home from school
often now. Homework never complete.
They have grown silent. Whenever they
talk, it is said, they only speak about
colors missing from the rainbow.
This young man’s madness is sincere and intense.
Bargemen grind to dock their relics to the shore,
their rusty struggle is honest and intense.
Wanton winds,
take my broken songs
to the riverside
and let them drown.
I need room
for new songs of hope.
The 5 was much easier to write
The ampersand, less so
With nothing to wave your hand over
As if virtual nature quite interior
Overlaps
The neighborhood monkeys,
doused in kerosene,
Revolved around the tiny globules
Of loss and savagery
We didn’t know
about the stifling
box cars, the bullhooks.
We just kept
waving our light-up
plastic toys
of borrowed streets of silent
daughters voyaging toward
homes filled with dust and
detritus and grime lacking
wind eyes to air their there.
Snap your fingers and the dancing girls appear, it’s that simple.
Oh, they are dancing women. Now they are men.
Do you see what I mean. I have taken you over. You have become
a control freak. A control pervert. A wrong shoe on the right foot.
Stop and take your temperature; tie a rope around the
daunting cloud that insists of hovering above you before
sleep sets in and hunger knows no marrow.
you might be a break in the monotony
a saxophonist encouraging call and response
then you quit smoking for good
while I notice
in the middle of the night
a pair of scissors at my throat
Internet. Information. Rain pouring into
the glass cunt of my mind
Momma always said I told you so
before beating the glass
this is Oklahoma
this is frontierland
make it up as you go
the sharp procedure
the sharps injected
Let us pray for tar, hot & melting
against old rocks, chipped & broken
like our lives, robbed of innocence
& youthful zeal. Bodies neglected.
Aristocrats on annuities in drawing rooms
held bromances of the mire,
tempest glances by garment pulses
with breasts as powdered as the pines.
But a young teenager in a poor neighborhood
is writing poems about police patrolling
the streets and the fear that pervades them,
yet his verses are the wildflowers
trying to create a world from the inside out, without killing—
evolution a flip book of an unrepeatable story
unable to flip the pages of sequoia, brontosaurs
Come, tell us your story of romance.
If you only have a bad lover,
then a bad lover it is.
happy children’s voices
are laughing in the past.
Silence. Then somewhere a telephone
starts to ring and it rings
How is it possible the sky
Can shine across the river
Anymore, the heart beat
Purely as the distance from a grave?
no one ever asked you
how does it feel to be submerged
in the affection of an ordinary poet
ignoring the frigid wind, word’s breath draws fervor
your bubbles rising in the water are her answers
You poisoned sad with stoning veins,
I dream of you in morning street
With angry hair, with open teeth
And drinking meat in concrete shade.
until cops came with their shining blue
light and
we ran
into the backyard shadows--
his days no better,
the sunlight reflected off his reflecting skin,
blinding his eyes,
causing him to stumble
into stained-skinned strangers,
You're in Brooklyn, a place of cruelty
in your youth, a place of probity
in your dotage. You sit on a bench
vacated by Jamaican nannies
under which portly pigeons nuzzle
just an ostrich or a penguin
riding on a wing and a prayer,
wishing like Tinkerbell and pumping
to get the hell off the ground
and out of civilization’s gnarly way
A healer leans over a sleeping dragon
lays on hands large and webbed as frog’s paws,
arms turn into oily black eels.
We are tired of buildings.
and you can believe in god or
you can not believe
and in the end you die
and do you want an apology?
And so we burn, we drown,
we wave goodbye, eyes fixed
on stars and alligators,
on the last page of Hemingway,
on a swamp that teems
I look out the window at an old Victorian
hands trembling on the wheel
my daughter places her hand over mine
"You can tell me anything"
Wisdom presumably learned
from the stabbing death
of Kitty Genovese in 1964
and the neighbors who watched,
each waiting for the other to act.
When he's fed up with being invisible
and doesn’t want to be a vintage pic
he walks to the beach, plants feet in the sand
next to a tropical grape tree and waits.
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