Once I surfed a swarm of bees
as they flew through peach trees,
a syncopating crash of apostrophes
among the plumpest promises
of flavor and life to come.
Today, I watched TV
same way I always did
when sick with the flu.
Gravity grabs the torso,
hugs my body down,
sailor lost to the sea,
careless nomad into sand,
daydreams gone for good,
as I crush the couch pillows
The only thing I have left
is my history, I guess.
Ballfield ridicule. The time
I got the shit kicked out of me
for flicking a cigarette into an alley.
Writing tech manuals for 37 years.
Ecstatic catapaults into the ether
launched off wine and bedsprings.
And my great, grand folly rests
on a back bedroom closet shelf,
my reverse of Shakespeare:
A prideful PTA President
mistakes a bartender
for a charter school guru,
and the fun ensues. No king,
no queens, but high word play,
collisions of meaning, mirrors,
mistakes. And so I proved failure,
maybe to glimpse the piper's path.
Or maybe playwrights are bacteria,
excreting bubbles of hope
like it was an element
on the periodic table.
Ah, well, it is time to disassemble.
Small wounds fail to heal.
My left ear can't hear right.
A leg throws itself out down stairs,
seizing upon a parade march
kind of style without permission.
And fatigue drapes the hours.
It is not enough
to have been young once.
We share a debt for being awake.
I didn't pay it.
Ghost Body
Stuck working on the mist
and turning it into words,
knitted fine chain mail perhaps,
static movie screen of water,
or an enveloping indecision,
when my ghost body rose up,
tattooed with the biggest fights
with two wives, lumpy scars
from the stabbing betrayals,
raised walnuts upon the skin
from all the times employers
shot me. Scarier still, muscle
turned to massive cable
from the strength needed
to llive this life. Survive.
And I was 8 feet tall!
Eyes of sunken beach fire pits--
ashes, charcoal and sparks--
lips firm and in control,
errant hint of a grin so
surprising to me, I wondered
who I was...this beast...
a conqueror? Me? How?
While flying around out there
is my ghost angel of who
I thought I could have been.
and turning it into words,
knitted fine chain mail perhaps,
static movie screen of water,
or an enveloping indecision,
when my ghost body rose up,
tattooed with the biggest fights
with two wives, lumpy scars
from the stabbing betrayals,
raised walnuts upon the skin
from all the times employers
shot me. Scarier still, muscle
turned to massive cable
from the strength needed
to llive this life. Survive.
And I was 8 feet tall!
Eyes of sunken beach fire pits--
ashes, charcoal and sparks--
lips firm and in control,
errant hint of a grin so
surprising to me, I wondered
who I was...this beast...
a conqueror? Me? How?
While flying around out there
is my ghost angel of who
I thought I could have been.
Hotel Man
Is it possible some men write in hotel rooms
just across from the city's convention center
because...well, let's forget because. Ask
how can it be a poem? Is it a Westin?
Men like that deserve whatever they get
unless they get a lot, then we distrust them
even more, and take their poem, shove it
out the door, just past the new USA Today
laying on the floor like an abandoned baby.
Or is it a Marriott? Should we listen less?
Hate them more? What crawling brings
them thus, to this, lines short enough
to look like something should be maybe
said, but no, Whitman wasn't anything
like this, nor Eliot, too fragile for well,
a peach...And God bless Ginsberg
for life with a jetpack, self-engineered,
fast and high, zoom zooming by and by
and by, queer enough to shake all the old
forests dry. And a VP wants to squeak?
Eek! From a Hilton or a Hyatt? Jeez!
Well, it's just that I can't sleep. Worse,
yet, I distrust those cocky enough
to doze off at will, at work, at ease,
at anytime they please. You know
sometimes people want to yell at me,
but it is not a thing, with paychecks big
as mine, and travel like some sort
of soft prison time...haven't met a soul
in 20 years of tin cans packed with people.
We were all never meant to be together.
Alone, implode. With others, explode.
Or, all the other way arounds, right?
I'm just saying, just saying, 15th floor,
eat the news in vagabond hunger
until the truth tastes less like grease
and more like a tangerine picked
when the sun rose in colors laughing
for someone too shy to take it.
Brothers, sisters, preachers, sinners,
me multiplied by handguns, $100 bills,
mail-order scotch, golf legends, German
cars, Rilke, big-hipped women, yodeling
western-style, and a perfect black coffee.
just across from the city's convention center
because...well, let's forget because. Ask
how can it be a poem? Is it a Westin?
Men like that deserve whatever they get
unless they get a lot, then we distrust them
even more, and take their poem, shove it
out the door, just past the new USA Today
laying on the floor like an abandoned baby.
Or is it a Marriott? Should we listen less?
Hate them more? What crawling brings
them thus, to this, lines short enough
to look like something should be maybe
said, but no, Whitman wasn't anything
like this, nor Eliot, too fragile for well,
a peach...And God bless Ginsberg
for life with a jetpack, self-engineered,
fast and high, zoom zooming by and by
and by, queer enough to shake all the old
forests dry. And a VP wants to squeak?
Eek! From a Hilton or a Hyatt? Jeez!
Well, it's just that I can't sleep. Worse,
yet, I distrust those cocky enough
to doze off at will, at work, at ease,
at anytime they please. You know
sometimes people want to yell at me,
but it is not a thing, with paychecks big
as mine, and travel like some sort
of soft prison time...haven't met a soul
in 20 years of tin cans packed with people.
We were all never meant to be together.
Alone, implode. With others, explode.
Or, all the other way arounds, right?
I'm just saying, just saying, 15th floor,
eat the news in vagabond hunger
until the truth tastes less like grease
and more like a tangerine picked
when the sun rose in colors laughing
for someone too shy to take it.
Brothers, sisters, preachers, sinners,
me multiplied by handguns, $100 bills,
mail-order scotch, golf legends, German
cars, Rilke, big-hipped women, yodeling
western-style, and a perfect black coffee.
The Word Is "Tomorrow"
To watch a movie seems to me a form of rape,
as someone else's values gets coated in currency
and violence and the winner's circle of choices,
while fishes carry visions on their finned backs,
and assault me at night with the incomprehensible
foreigness of their mission, yet I know it's me,
my path, my old deer trail through the woods
to the glory. Sure, we only ever dream ourselves.
Still, it was in a movie theater they showed us all
a doctor's office vision of the beating embryo,
to a newly married couple, and I got it, the point,
the sledgehammer of what tomorrow means,
a single tomorrow beating in its new veins,
the one tomorrow that would last me years,
and how tomorrows only come in handfulls,
falling into our lives big as concrete pylons.
as someone else's values gets coated in currency
and violence and the winner's circle of choices,
while fishes carry visions on their finned backs,
and assault me at night with the incomprehensible
foreigness of their mission, yet I know it's me,
my path, my old deer trail through the woods
to the glory. Sure, we only ever dream ourselves.
Still, it was in a movie theater they showed us all
a doctor's office vision of the beating embryo,
to a newly married couple, and I got it, the point,
the sledgehammer of what tomorrow means,
a single tomorrow beating in its new veins,
the one tomorrow that would last me years,
and how tomorrows only come in handfulls,
falling into our lives big as concrete pylons.
Pilgrim
The farmer is a good man, so is his wife,
and the son who stays redeems us all,
as the choir finishes its Christmas song,
and yesterday's poems grind up with tar
and gravel to repave the same road
Keruoac and Cassaday burned down
in an old Merc on a night neither knew
late in life, or ever wrote to glory,
in an age our saints either farmed stoic
culture into corn, wheat and soybeans,
or escaped it in the rocket age, homegrown
horsepower way past bright Detroit births,
assembly lines for average, average,
average, while our heroes lived
beneath endless nights--some raised
on mornings, others on police sirens.
Now, I take charge, and announce all
is on the line, merchant life to sorcery,
dollars weighing everyone to waiting
graves, like rocks packed in the pockets
of a recent mafia hit. Delirium is doorway,
my dreamy friend. Go, go, go to free,
as it lays past movies, TV, digital screens,
and all the restaurants, big cars, catastrophic
homes. You want the news? It slides
inside your skin bag of essentially water,
and it shouldn't be memory, but it seems
like it is. You knew it all along, afraid
of any truth that makes no sense...
Revolt! The poor and the rich want
the same thing. Every word I type
is in this universe, inescapable,
but I think I may mountain lion out
of the streetlights, the empty porches,
the distance we so believed in
between here and stars, wives
and husbands, fiction and facts.
If we could word up the Ganges now,
is there holiness here? Or none.
Pilgrims walk these lines barefoot,
knowing there is nothing to steal.
They lead to the thin balloon wall
of our universe, and we believe
language shoves us through it.
Drum your fingers on the membrane,
taut as all of which we were so certain,
and announce the new! Ongongaroo!
and the son who stays redeems us all,
as the choir finishes its Christmas song,
and yesterday's poems grind up with tar
and gravel to repave the same road
Keruoac and Cassaday burned down
in an old Merc on a night neither knew
late in life, or ever wrote to glory,
in an age our saints either farmed stoic
culture into corn, wheat and soybeans,
or escaped it in the rocket age, homegrown
horsepower way past bright Detroit births,
assembly lines for average, average,
average, while our heroes lived
beneath endless nights--some raised
on mornings, others on police sirens.
Now, I take charge, and announce all
is on the line, merchant life to sorcery,
dollars weighing everyone to waiting
graves, like rocks packed in the pockets
of a recent mafia hit. Delirium is doorway,
my dreamy friend. Go, go, go to free,
as it lays past movies, TV, digital screens,
and all the restaurants, big cars, catastrophic
homes. You want the news? It slides
inside your skin bag of essentially water,
and it shouldn't be memory, but it seems
like it is. You knew it all along, afraid
of any truth that makes no sense...
Revolt! The poor and the rich want
the same thing. Every word I type
is in this universe, inescapable,
but I think I may mountain lion out
of the streetlights, the empty porches,
the distance we so believed in
between here and stars, wives
and husbands, fiction and facts.
If we could word up the Ganges now,
is there holiness here? Or none.
Pilgrims walk these lines barefoot,
knowing there is nothing to steal.
They lead to the thin balloon wall
of our universe, and we believe
language shoves us through it.
Drum your fingers on the membrane,
taut as all of which we were so certain,
and announce the new! Ongongaroo!
Giggle
An old man can't see the TV set,
not really, as there is no information
for the end of life, just noise, pictures
that move louder, crash harder.
All you can do is extend your hand,
and he smiles, if he can, if the meds
are right this hour, and sick rests.
He can't say more than, "Adios."
No one listens to what's learned.
Ego keep us ballroom strangers.
Coarsest treaties are the stuff
of 50th Anniversary parties,
with undercooked pasta, watery
red sauce, chewy chianti, and
speeches strategic in the holes.
No one can be saved, dearest,
and we all want so much...
our greatest glory is desire,
and most amazing virtue courage
in falling so far from wanted.
The last place to look is down
the spine, in the direction of soil,
until eternity takes us in the way
our friends first made us giggle.
He accepts your hand, recalls life
as it comes back in blood cells,
explosions of old brain video,
and hunches of what took place.
It's not memory, is it, that matters?
Something marches down his arm
to enter your fingers, electric ants.
You try to get your hand back,
but you're plugged into him,
as he eyes you as a victim
of knowledge, the last thing
anybody wants in this world.
Work, bad luck, such sadness,
good things, death, and love
of his late wife, his kids, nieces,
nephews, neighbors, crazy
friends, cars, pool, quarter slots
downtown just surrendered,
the moon in windows, over
telephone wires or pacing desert
travel like a flashlight, and one
Italian salumeria, Top of the Mark,
train trips, his own bed, root beer,
Kennedys, real books with purpose
and care and discipline and pain
and wonder and utter recklessness,
faces of all women, Orion, mountain
roads in that old Fiat Spider,
the first two beers of night,
and the end of it all that dowses
what happens in a failure of words.
Now, you know. All you get
is much too much. OK?
Ah, you're 35. You know it!
not really, as there is no information
for the end of life, just noise, pictures
that move louder, crash harder.
All you can do is extend your hand,
and he smiles, if he can, if the meds
are right this hour, and sick rests.
He can't say more than, "Adios."
No one listens to what's learned.
Ego keep us ballroom strangers.
Coarsest treaties are the stuff
of 50th Anniversary parties,
with undercooked pasta, watery
red sauce, chewy chianti, and
speeches strategic in the holes.
No one can be saved, dearest,
and we all want so much...
our greatest glory is desire,
and most amazing virtue courage
in falling so far from wanted.
The last place to look is down
the spine, in the direction of soil,
until eternity takes us in the way
our friends first made us giggle.
He accepts your hand, recalls life
as it comes back in blood cells,
explosions of old brain video,
and hunches of what took place.
It's not memory, is it, that matters?
Something marches down his arm
to enter your fingers, electric ants.
You try to get your hand back,
but you're plugged into him,
as he eyes you as a victim
of knowledge, the last thing
anybody wants in this world.
Work, bad luck, such sadness,
good things, death, and love
of his late wife, his kids, nieces,
nephews, neighbors, crazy
friends, cars, pool, quarter slots
downtown just surrendered,
the moon in windows, over
telephone wires or pacing desert
travel like a flashlight, and one
Italian salumeria, Top of the Mark,
train trips, his own bed, root beer,
Kennedys, real books with purpose
and care and discipline and pain
and wonder and utter recklessness,
faces of all women, Orion, mountain
roads in that old Fiat Spider,
the first two beers of night,
and the end of it all that dowses
what happens in a failure of words.
Now, you know. All you get
is much too much. OK?
Ah, you're 35. You know it!
Collins Avenue, 3 a.m.
It's not a fog accidental
that glories round his feet
when he walks Collins Avenue
to the freeway overpass, dead
of night, impossible to see
without calling for the light
to come back and find this
man alone with just coyotes
aprowl for housecats, bunnies
and rats. Let us see him
for his gun sense of purpose,
his unfriendly way with time,
the kind of pyramid he'd build
if all the enslaved fell in line.
He hears one young woman
yell, shredded office docs
in her throat, holding 'love'
for one last shot, "Ain't
ever been a man like that!"
But it just makes hordes
of zombie lovers moan angry
at the sickly lack of faith,
wrecked in happy graves
on restless cemetery nights,
"Yes, yes, yes indeed, yes!"
Eternity--unsettled, sure--
clicks on the luck of who
one prays so hard to meet.
Work grinds up daylight hours
in pepper mill fashion until evening
finally falls in slow black specks.
He knows what everyone will say
next, the big blouse of being human
all pinned up shrunk shirt tight,
mannerisms reigned in chain mail
style--clank walk of rusted knights.
His quiet they take for other life
outside the office, as if he saves
himself for something big, big,
big as...flight? No one can dream
about each other more than half
hopes the worst won't happen yet.
"April is the coolest month,"
he kicks the meeting off, a test,
but no eyes alight, conversation
a meal of yesterday's leftovers.
He pictures everyone naked,
dancing out their own desires,
exuberant children of old sin,
and wonders about exodus
from here to all out there,
the way magicians free doves
from bright black Asian boxes
with sudden lifts of fingers.
While the rest of them sleep,
he'll walk tonight as if puzzles
unlocked with tired footsteps.
that glories round his feet
when he walks Collins Avenue
to the freeway overpass, dead
of night, impossible to see
without calling for the light
to come back and find this
man alone with just coyotes
aprowl for housecats, bunnies
and rats. Let us see him
for his gun sense of purpose,
his unfriendly way with time,
the kind of pyramid he'd build
if all the enslaved fell in line.
He hears one young woman
yell, shredded office docs
in her throat, holding 'love'
for one last shot, "Ain't
ever been a man like that!"
But it just makes hordes
of zombie lovers moan angry
at the sickly lack of faith,
wrecked in happy graves
on restless cemetery nights,
"Yes, yes, yes indeed, yes!"
Eternity--unsettled, sure--
clicks on the luck of who
one prays so hard to meet.
Work grinds up daylight hours
in pepper mill fashion until evening
finally falls in slow black specks.
He knows what everyone will say
next, the big blouse of being human
all pinned up shrunk shirt tight,
mannerisms reigned in chain mail
style--clank walk of rusted knights.
His quiet they take for other life
outside the office, as if he saves
himself for something big, big,
big as...flight? No one can dream
about each other more than half
hopes the worst won't happen yet.
"April is the coolest month,"
he kicks the meeting off, a test,
but no eyes alight, conversation
a meal of yesterday's leftovers.
He pictures everyone naked,
dancing out their own desires,
exuberant children of old sin,
and wonders about exodus
from here to all out there,
the way magicians free doves
from bright black Asian boxes
with sudden lifts of fingers.
While the rest of them sleep,
he'll walk tonight as if puzzles
unlocked with tired footsteps.
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