Oh once! Once I believed
that humans shaped my pain
and fleet joys with a power
that was unfair.
Now, I stand still and feel
flocks of wild birds fly over me,
screaming and laughing
through the death of air
and things are all more clear.
Three Bodies
She looks down from her second floor
over the iron scrollwork of a balustrade
to the bed where an exhausted lover lies.
She watches his body in sleep
like a soothsayer, like her often-jailed grandma
would scry horse names in the Daily Racing Form.
The body of the muscled young man
ripples dazzling in sleep, but he reaches
into her absence violently. It’s war.
He has the twists of a bullfighter
and makes stabbing motions.
She thinks of her future and sees red,
a game where he waves an illusion
right in her face, slays her before many others.
Later, it’s Chris. Her body whispers out of bed
and floats upstairs to spy on his unconscious
form in the underworld of sleep. She sees
he stretches in yogic forms, otherworldly asanas.
He becomes a lotus, a crane, he bows
to nights too deep for any human presence.
She feels him fly out a window like a slip of paper
in the wind. She lets him go, drinks a glass of milk.
But Reza! What sweetness of death when she leaves
his freshly-journeyed body there. Milked by what dreams,
does he panic and become an unborn child
on the mattress where they have just made love?
He seems to blindly see her sharing the bed still,
he caresses the form of her absence. His hands
trace the void she left him. She has become
the Braille of absence. He whimpers himself awake,
and in that moment turns correctly and exactly
to the space above where she stares. His eyes
flash open and know where she is. He will
always be this way, she knows in a heat flash
of, weirdly, almost anger. She feels herself being pinned
like a butterfly. This one, this one, this one, this one…
Here
It’s really not a bad place to park your potatoes.
There is a mildly possessed postman, true.
You should probably hide behind the door
while he’s sorting your letters on the porch,
loudly reciting the names of Devils who plague his iPhone.
Deliver any wrongly received mail yourself
to avoid repeated invitations to duels or a blood vendetta
lasting many generations. Unless that’s your thing.
Supernatural events are largely confined
to the small laundromat at the end of town
and the Dollar Tree store with the horsey ride out front
built on an old govt. extraterrestrial burial ground.
In other words, the usual small town stuff.
The horsey ride is not, by the way, overrated.
We have a series of canals left over
from the abandoned cannon mill, and these are lovely
for those into Canada geese voyeurism
or magnet-fishing for antique cannon balls
bearing the faces of various forgotten generals
and suffragettes for women’s right to bear cannons.
We have the usual accommodations for lost tourists
who somehow end up here: the Animal Shelter
has a series of comfy mangers in the “Other Species” wing.
You will find the locals are not likely to make eye contact
unless you wake up with one tending the hay of your manger.
In that case, it is appropriate to tip, but wildly inappropriate
to comment on that shame mask with a long iron beak
he or she will probably be compulsorily wearing.
Local wildlife is charmingly various and rarely bellicose,
except for the imported squirrels, which finished off
the native species in a manner too grisly to relate here.
Don’t put too much stock in those news stories about our HOA
being wanted by the ICC. It’s really a silly little kerfuffle
stirred up by a bunch of busybodies with nothing better to do
than monitor private wars agreed to by all parties involved.
Hopefully I did a decent job of repping Ye Olde Village,
and here’s to hoping we will soon be neighbors…
or I can at least have the privilege of serving you
during your sojourn in our quietly magical kingdom
our local delicacy of thumbatouille geriatrica,
which is, I can assure you, as delicious as it sounds.
Lying in Dark
Ice wind whips the house eaves grinds dreams
Thinking of the animals outside–
their utter innocence,
fanged or otherwise
My bones turn into a sort of gas
Thinking of the animals outside
Freezing to death
The prisons listening too
Cage to cage, sounds of wind sharpening
beautiful shivs of icicles
that hang clear art glass
Just past their reach, mocking
A stone deep in a brain
A warm hand squeezes a stone
Body in a bunk tries to crush it
Prison shyness
A cat goes into a blizzard outside the window
A prisoner watches her perfection
His bones turn into a sort of gas
He tries to put all this expanding in a letter
What to Miss of Home
the small broken things
too memoried to midden
smooth porcelain doorknobs that outlasted
skeletons in three different centuries
how moonlight of the sleepwalker’s feet
slowly thins the wooden floorboards
Stanza in Meditation for the Snow
Could it be
Could it be as if
Wanting wanting too much
Not watching wanting to be
Weather or not whether
We’re here
Should you have here have this this
Turning as you do the air
Nothing no one here willfully blunts
Falling wholly without
The branches of it tour of space reaching
Though a window through one
Elbows never will do
A sort of cupping a cup
How this thing can it ever be ever see
Ever see this something said
A landscape blanches and crouches
Catches in its sifting
The sun as white as you are
It can’t sieve the necessary
Falling wholly without
Who without means means so much
Snow prospers somehow
It is as as is
Somehow it can kind itself can be
The where of it somewhere better than
What was to open the counter
Wandering the pace it becomes better near
Nor bright in itself
Imagine the crisp drifts happening to
Something sunders something is under all
Which can’t come back ever
Or close the image or its sort of seizure
for charles bukowski
half the world
freezes
bombs pulverize
half the world
you wake
to kittens
and strippers
and slippers
maybe a stupor
of sunlight
the ape parts of you
sing something
into the fridge
the Great Love
has landed on you
like a butterfly
secretly conscious
who secretly consumes
flesh of the dead
(butterfly consciousness
must feed too)
but you don’t want to know
about the secret life
of butterflies
you spread the wings
of your dingy robe
you flit
lepidopterously
towards the nearest bit
of tragedy
that glows
The Button
Don’t ask me whether I would push the button. Do you know the one? You are transported to a time before time. A button rests on a table before you. If you push the button, creation will begin, time will unspool from nothingness. Everything that is going to happen will happen. Whether you choose to push the button might change from year to year, even moment to moment. Later, you know all about those born only to suffer horribly and die, that all will die, and that some will have no ledger of joy and peace to counterbalance their impending annihilation. Is it selfishness to exist? But there is so much existence without self or selves. But if you choose to turn away from the button and vaporize into nothingness yourself, know this. In that scenario, you could not have been there to choose whether or not to press the button. So the button exists on its own. The button is a trap. Pressing the button might seem to become a moral imperative. Even if it means some slim chance of some other being, or some other version of you, who might be able to somehow steal the power from the button. Monks sit high on a mountain, frozen in meditation, their bodies turned to stone. They are aware of the insidious power of the button. It is their entire lives. They wage a war that is silent in the mountain hall, that goes on for lifetimes. The button flickers but does not disappear.
Resting Place: December
Late night
take a walk with me
through this rambling cemetery
with the stone angels
watching over the graves of rotten people
the worst people
the richest worst people
who don’t deserve
such bodyguards now
when their rottenness is baked in forever
to local history
maybe they could have used the angels
when they were alive
to smite their heads
with their stone swords and wings
give them a decent bruising
the way they did to others
the poor schmucks they used
men, women and children
worked to death and fought fairness
unto their families like the curse
the rich all talk about on yachts
crucified amid highballs in country club hells
but they got away with it
no flaming sword met their greed
and their family name grew like mold
all over the city and its buildings
they kept that blood money
and bought these purebred kennel club angels
to remind you of that nauseating fact
still, at the back of the boneyard
it’s quiet it overlooks a bakery
that glows all night
though you can’t see the people inside
the smell of bread
comes drifting over and through
that place of the dead
and you think what an enormous thing
hunger is and how wonderful
the simple people who bake bread
the smell of that rising good thing
floats through the cemetery
where snow lies all over the dead
and they won’t rise like bread
and someday this will be a parking lot
where people run around screaming
what is life and why does it kill me
because eternity is getting shorter
every year
Why Poet, Why?
This accredited creature goes outside
in the middle of the night
and speaks a poem to the moon.
The poem is brand new and gooey,
like a chocolate chip cookie just out of the oven.
He feels he must workshop it in nature’s vision.
“O Moon,” he begins…
But the moon is not listening.
The owl with her winged bloodthirst hears
and her talons tighten. Human voices are vile.
The mouse about to be torn to strips
and fed to owlets like McNuggets hears the strange grunts
aimed at the moon, an orb which he could only see
if people were kind enough to make mice glasses.
Rabbits shiver. A coyote at the swimming pool.
Even the trees listen in the weird way they do.
The murderer holding a broken bottle
in trees nearby , he also listens and hears
the message he has been waiting to hear:
“Kill. Kill them. Kill them All!
Start with this gurgling thing, this moon man.”
The poet is beginning to feel very proud of himself.
The moon is beaming down, illuminating
this all-too-familiar drama about to happen,
as the madman creeps up behind the back
of this free poetry reading. The moon goes to bed
soon after. She has only ever cared for blood
in the night, and the countless bodies of water
where she can see herself reflected in her perfect
blankness. Her lovely pocked stoned face
like a Manson girl beaming in the night.
FICTIONESE 