I posed
A hundred years while playing
Misfortune’s bitch
At the Bay House Theatre a lightning bolt hit us
Knocking out Time’s teeth
On a baby grand piano
I sat like a rat
Trapped in the limelight
I paused
To put on yr funny funny face
Before weeping like a man in a little girl-mask
I vomited doom
& danced like a harlequin
As I brought down the house
I dreamed I heard a sensible tale
I stole every line
& staged it at midnight
Off beat
In a manner of speaking
A fire caught fire in one little chair
My bed room got soaked
By the flood of your tears
I ate the heart of a live grenade
& all I remember is
How sensitive were the calla lilies
**
With my razor hand
I crumpled up a Budweiser beer can
The dregs at the bottom
Predicted a fracture
Of half-drunken images
I foresaw myself as an ember
A loose fiery speck turning to soot
Caught in the crook of a small distant branch
& all of us corpses dipping our heads
In submission
Almost religiously
Walked in & out of a bath of odd yellow light
Blinking: Caution! Caution! Caution!
A single crow mocking us: caw caw caw
Getting half the word out
**
The Thames appeared grey
Precipitously neutral
Faint & fading against a patter of commerce
Raunchy as the dead & dying tribes of shrill & screeching prep school girls
Marching down Fleet Street
**
Dear Miracle on Fleet Street,
I am taking your place
Yr leaden sentiment kills
My heart is a poem & a place
Beyond what is named
What is felt is all wrong
You must justify your version
You must walk without hesitating
Nothing is measured
I must always persuade you
To listen
Are you mad as a Hatter?
Are you normal as normal can be?
The whole world it seems
Is shattered / destroyed
A door opened only
At the mezzanine level
Of the great San Francisco fire
& earthquake of 1906
**
I am leaving
You alone
I no longer feel
Any empathy
For the tumult of the 20th Century
I am beginning
A new plot
Chock full
Of new twists
Better than
All my previous attempts
At gore
& redemption
The circles
Are plumper
More savory
Hallucinatory
Like hens
Force fed on
Growth hormones
& Iowa corn
**
A moment alone
Looking at
A long silent parrot fish
A feeling if you must
These are a new American subconsciousness
The cravings of a half life
Alien
& underground
The last thing anyone needs
Is a vibration
That’s only mostly human
**
As the last of the land came rising up
I latched
Down
Any tempo
Around me
**
This seemed
Like a paradise
At first—purely Calvinist & the Chipmunks
Were delicious
Cartoons
So we stopped
& got civilized—
A man named Sherman married a woman named Sarah
He opened a dry cleaning business
He died the next day
He was one who looked out
He was buried in winter
The very next day his dog ate a raven
He had such a year
He felt he could breathe
He died of a blood clot stuck in his brain
He could’ve been saved had he not eaten fat
Which he ate every day
A pearl
Was his handle
A prairie
Appeared
He got up
& he line danced
He loved
Terra Haute
In a huff
He gave way
He sorted
His feelings
His tears
Were like snow flakes
Like ice flows
That spiraled
They were
Joy
That was
Spring
& his poems
Were like persons
All laughter
Some bitter
**
My little pet crab cake
Got yanked off its leash
& ran off the road
Its words were so beautiful
It stood in a film
On aisle 9
It seemed a dangerous balloon
A gift for now
A pittance for later
Fat as a Fatty Arbuckle
Hazy & abstract as
Rothko’s post-war abstractions
Fat flat horizontal
A shimmer of color
For sale at the end
**
In the absence of the wiener cart man
I zip up my fly in the amber museum
Our jazz piano pointless as a village
With one mouth
Between ‘em
& dreaming of fire
& hollow as a hollow man
A strange wild horse still snorts like a fiend
In make-believe stables
In the nightmare of horse stalls
It kicks out at phantoms
& spits
Wanting out
Of this cockeyed world
Some of us are cherubim
Some of us are demons
Our bodies flung against
Rake of the railroad tracks
Like piano keys
One ivory
One ebony
Set adrift in a copse of slowly dying elms
Our eyes look up
& there on the bulletin board—the haggard but heavenly face
Of warlord LBJ
A face can be art
Or as sad as a cloud
But never a warped wooden frame
**
& this is how we live now—
Conniving with doubt
A curse on or lips
The clock we’ve become has been disassembled
Deconstructed by angels of pure undulation
The future applies itself
On a face without skin
We sit in our skeletons
Shivering & winsome
Aching in our kitchens
Why don’t we cry?
Why do we wail?
We beg our brothers for money
For food
We beg them for mercy
For our children
Expecting none
For ourselves
But receive only a promise
A face that is twisted & carbuncled
We are laughed at
& ridiculed by the neighborhood urchins
Who turn off their scorn
And battle each other
Squabbling
Like the children they are
Over maps they have found
One word to settle disputes
The oldest of which is Meaning
& by this it is meant
A boy bringing chocolates
& daffodils to school on St Valentine’s Day
Useless in a sense
But prevalent
Nearer art & poetry
Than a thousand confiscated canvases
Than all the contraband volumes of verse
Locked away in the dark
Or burned on the square
In the gleam
Of an eye
We catch sight of the censor
& we are the censor
**
In the phone book
Is the answer to most
???questions
This was Kafka’s
Father’s
paternal contention
**
The remains of
Miles Davis
Though trumpets cut flowers in the 21st Century
Countries
Not faces
Are hawked by his trumpet
Make silence a downer
One is the Bronx
Where the hiss of a radiator
Is sending my love
A lobster
From clairvoyant Chicago
Circa the Jazz Age
& foolish with blood stains
Are love’s petty radio waves
A blue cow
Said someone in church
(Mistaking The Fauves
For the animal
De bruk)
A new music box
Enters an old social era
**
As though the west progressed
One belittling at a time
Of need
A single word
Begets a second
& writing
Is a crow
A Bishop’s miter becomes a tale
That is hidden
Sidestepped
Marginal for its skepticism
It falls
To one side
Muddy
With contagion
Forward march, said the one story pre-fab
& up the driveway we stormed
But holding our tongues
We shaved off
Our beards
Our beards of water
Our beards of nourishing peanut butter
A knife at our throats
At a low point of Lent
The ashes ran through us
**
Skunks slink among the seat cushions
Of the divans of our Greek inheritance
They lurch and they poke
Looking for coins
Rank crumbs bristle against skunk smiles
Their feasts are bits of stale potato chips
& Oreo crumbs
The birthing of the postmodern
Cinema / abattoir
Summons them to street corners
The nexus of whirling
Is the intersection of a boulevard
& a man with amnesia
As father is
A gutter
Is a beautiful skunk
But lacking speech
His eyes dim
& glitter
With animus
Impossible skunk
A deep sadness
Derides him
He writes out in long hand some difficult passage
A miniscule lyric
To be critiqued
& passed on
**
Our traffic school is French today
A psychological dream
Of a flute & French horn
It plays itself
As if by an If
Maybe a gull
Killed dead in mid-air
Still flaps
Its wings
Enter Monsieur Voyeur
At l’ecole despair
Where do all our little wrongs go?
**
I just gotta say…
Aloha, Hugh Hefner
Hello, Adolf Hitler
I started Prilosec today
I am young & featureless
& stuffed like a teddy bear
A haggard man
Handles the wheel
I have eaten my share of cranberry soap
Simon says…
What have you heard until now?
The history of the suffering of the foolish computer
Whose startling biography
Is no match for a human’s
The myth of the broken down dreamer
The deep-sleeping fat one
Whose deep-seated angst is a line dancing bear
His raptors’ repast is the song of a cricket
Whose soul is a suicide
I drift in & out of
The satisfying lines
& ghoulish notes
Of statistics
If this is all a mental Christmas experiment in love
I have only imagined I exist
As a colorful Chagall
In a void
Of skewed
& skewing
References
**
Volvo
The Magician’s boxy black girl friend
Is blocking access
To his view of the future
The old man can’t find
His prize possession
