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?
where is the marriage muzzle when you need it most?
coast to coast nihilist in search of midnight missives
gypsy rings carved out of tree bark, don’t be sorry
for never being what your mother wanted, the ospreys
are here now, the hard part is over, thrown bored-eyed
From Clinton Community Garden
to South Street—I put up
revolutionary green propaganda:
SAVE THE GARDENS on fences.
Press flesh, spreading the word.
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.
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
the people arguing
and the people asleep on benches
and some saw it coming
and thought they could fix things or hide
maybe escape
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
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.
Invent and invent to make ourselves
guffaw, then we concocted a new
kind of government, a grief project,
Stevedore smarts
as exodoi tar
as sufficed ocean
named Eu(-)
gratis wolf fugue tacit poem, one
glebe rep udder burden won, Eros
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.
When people give poetry a bad name :
disjointed words from actions inane,
when people give poetry a bad name!
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
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.
After they’d had at the indigenous,
they set upon the endogenous.
They offered never-before-seen chemistry
with a will unbridled by consequences.
The world was wild, wicked, vile
And though complicit was he
In this cavalcade of carnage
He slumbered soundly on
Free of any guilt.
ready to entertain kidneys and liver,
that’s
our girl. some days
she goes by Sunny.
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.
if not for those children
playing war games
tearing off tentacles and petals
rehearsing explosions
memorizing marches
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
I shuffle the deck
and the world lays flat.
The bluer the sky the darker
astronomy becomes.
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.
a beautiful woman among the throngs
removed her dress and began to
march naked, cutting through the
thick crowd on the sidewalk like
a rapier, everyone moving aside
Upon the scrotum's fell evacuation
the musculature normally declines--
or so the common wisdom of our time
lets one (that would be me) anticipate.
But here I feel a pair of muscles thrive
on my castrated travel-partner's sides:
Admit the truth
open the window
goodbye to houses and hello to farms
this is the way things are
out in the world
Evil's another story, a story
whose orphan narrator is misery,
married to pain, son of suffering,
sibling of spleen. I have seen evil.
You have too, so you know there's
only one way to get rid of it.
I fake solemnity and self-negation, finish my meal.
Mosquito swarm about my face, sweat beads on
my brow. Emptiness was more fun to write about
before navigating the corridors of cancer wards, orderlies
Stop that crap! We built this country
And made it what it is, great again,
After losing the topnotch place
With our kindness and indulgence;
It is our country now, and our home!
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