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.
is what I meant when I said that sometimes
no matter where you are or who you are
with it seems you would be perfectly happy
on a world with one island surrounded by a big
purple ocean filled with really nice apartments.
“that george bush looks the same now don’t he?”
“same as he did when he was a kid. you know it’s him.”
“he’s a good old boy ain’t he?”
“better than the muslim we got now.”
I grew a bruise that purpled
into a tiny apocalypse
which I kept in my shirt pocket
and started going to fancy cocktail parties
Because of either infinity or
invisibility — the translation
is unclear — there's been a lot
of jelly crystals downloaded
recently around the world,
This started the apprehension, that a crafty
The Dr. irrigated Jule’s nose with ice water
and timid policy was getting rid of
and a syringe. She was panicky and screamed and
Because with every because
with every because
with every because
I felt the shame of it, the fault of it
You are a painting by Thomas Hart Benton with luxurious black hair and beautiful pale white skin
Someone in a white coat spots your dick,
so the world thinks you're gendered male,
which leads to you dressed in blue
and ends in a bang on a Baghdad street
that you don't hear before it hits you,
and create something mystical out of this mud
Dude says, “somebody just shot me in the head!
I can’t pay attention to that! YOU pay attention to that!”
So I crawl 150 feet to the next gas station
The last time I heard the word redemption was from a guy who then dropped a Springsteen impression in the Best Buy parking lot. Beyond, goldenrod, high tension wires. Vistas are temporarily unavailable.
We wanted to fire live ammunition.
We paid attention to the warning sighs,
the subliminal hisses in the midst
of concertos—indicators that some
of the electrodes had come loose again.
We have ceased to be
Ourselves
We go on being beings
Not selves or wholes
Wholes with holes in them
Turn up the voltage
and burn out the light bulbs.
Step off the pedestal
and conform to nothing.
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