Bluntly: I used to write, and now I don't. Due in part to my reminiscing, and perhaps a notion that I might take it up again--and due also to some demand--I have decided to release certain poems that were previously published, but never in print. I don't profess to be a poet, so take that grain (or two) of salt with you.
We shall call it.. Juvenilia:
Kissing in the Wind - A Perfect Face - American Architecture - Coney Island
I Will Watch the Lepers - It Is My Mouth Which Will Destroy You
Bedside Suicide Letters - Close My Eyes - At Night, She Turns
Fractal Hands - Meeting Spot Away From the Noise - Rapunzel
Recorded For My Daughter on Her First Birthday
Kissing in the Wind
This is the spasm before the touch,
Or a larynx stuck in the flaring void
Of stillborn heartbeats.
Before the West was known
It yawned my Eastern glow,
Multiplied by the eye of the fly
In a thousand flowing oceans.
And in their blow,
I am the drunkard before the liquor,
Tongue-stuck on the kiss
Of a bottleneck
Before the wind dies down.
A Perfect Face
While heaps generate beetles,
While the wolves hiss out rabbits,
While the sullen sip their vomit,
While a child returns to her old heroin habits,
A perfect face is born.
While babes give birth to mothers,
While twins seep into one flesh,
While I find photographs of myself
Strangled from the rafters with eloquence,
Science steps forward.
American Architecture
Whoever made America?
I'd speculate an intoxicated,
Bitter bastard with endless supplies
of brick, concrete, and alcohol.
And every which way he staggers,
Cutting faded letters into the withered--
Mountains of blood-rock or sodium-pitted sandrings,
Spitting awkward knowledge
Of the gothic, the classical,
The impoverished.
Naked and ashamed,
The now-crowded streets grow neon lights
To cover their bareness with nude women.
Everywhere the women flee,
But America, too, is everywhere.
They run until night in an American hotel,
Waken to an American morning
And American News,
Watch very American Asian cars rise to meet their breast.
The sun, too, is everywhere in America,
Falling into the streets
To be sheltered away in an ambulance.
Somewhere, though,
That old bitter creationist sucks America from the root,
Watching the noodle-boned broken body of a stripper
Disappear into the red-blue blur--
Shakes his head, and, having forgotten who he is or was,
Sighs, "America," and drinks again.
Coney Island
I'll meet you in the center of it all.
Coney Island, on the barbed wire
Tilt-o-whirl catching heads
Like trophies
For orgasmic sacrifices.
Dance naked with me around the purple fire
And the pink-blue halogen haze.
Tomorrow!--we bear child.
I'll cut off it's limbs, by damn,
To make it all fit.
II.
I've sent you a broken crab's leg
From this swelling shore of wars
And the buzzing fizz of cold.
The future has consumed everything,
Licked up the red carpet into its jaw.
And this is it. Flipped on our backs,
Turtles in the sun.
You've pushed the waves away.
And this is it.
I Will Watch the Lepers
I will be there
When the pastels burn
To smoldering charcoal;
When pale faces stretch
Out their veins shoulder-to-shoulder;
When the sky gods snag
On jagged star-tipped scrapers.
Oh, don't make me be there
When my formless child wanders
The sperm- and ovary-vats;
When the only windows lead
Eyes into more metal or cloth;
When we live thousand-year lives
Having learned one language.
But I will be there
Watching the rich lives build
Their amulet religions;
Watching children itch
And curl up with African death;
Watching the humanist engineer
Produce equal tones and form.
And I will wonder,
Are we truly too foolish
To find these ideals in our mind?;
Are we too dissimilar
For cascades of human faces?;
Will we ever return?--Moreover,
Were we ever not here?
Like lepers who refuse to shed,
We wander with a cure in amputation.
It It My Mouth Which Will Destroy You
I have walked beneath ten thousand leagues
Of boiling ejaculation to slap the fat face
Of spectacled Satan,
Come again with tainted body, germ-stained
And sick to lay in Arctic beds
With all sweat frozen into sheets of permafrost.
I should count to Nine,
Like months in labor with foul medicine
Curdling my stomach into faceless white monsters.
One.
Hands and hooves,
Crayons and tongues.
Five. A wet nest of dead bird breath.
Bottlenecks and a butcher's knife,
A meat with eyes bulged and paralyzed
on Nine incisions of weak flesh.
I have waited Ten more years.
My truth is stillborn.
I see your own eyes reaching from the pockets
Of my open Stigmata.
I see the formless bodies crawl from me,
Having drained their supply of bloodheat.
I am ice.
I cannot sustain my life,
Much less parade an exorcism throughout the crowds.
But I will not die amongst the icicles.
In them I see a solution, rings,
Wherein the center is absent the final phallic instrument.
This one is mine.
There is a seed to be buried in the head of your flesh,
And this time I will not dive
Again into the pit of bile towards Earth.
From where it began, it will end.
I will squeeze the poison through my own teeth.
Bedside Suicide Letters
Letter 1:
Whom may it concern?
I am being followed.
I have never owned a handgun.
I awoke this morning with a handgun
beneath my pillow.
I have never had a wife.
To the contrary,
I've never been in love.
Everytime I enter a new room,
A new woman appears
Talking as though she has known me
For years.
One of them wrote me a poem.
I remember only one stanza.
"Lick the newspaper white,
Car-crash red into tumor garden blue,
Tear a page
Salivate new wave ocean
Tide / Asphyxiate the babe
In the Manger."
I knew she didn't mean Jesus,
But sure enough he called,
message after message,
"I'm not hanging up this time."
Letter 2:
I have come to the conclusion.
Sometimes, lying in bed at night
My vision stretches beyond the city;
I see choppers whirling up dust,
Women weeping over ledges,
Rams locking horns with corridors,
Chariots emerging from elevators,
Earth draining into the breathing hole
Of some beached mammoth.
You know how there's a snap?
When the water's all drained,
It snaps. You know?
I wonder if we'll snap.
Or will we just swallow our faces,
Sleep in our stomachs
And live inverse lives with
There's things out of the corner of my eye.
Never anything there.
Never anything there.
Close My Eyes
Intercourse of sound;
mesmerized with words--
Mingling motes in dim gold,
fading sensibilities
and drawing the bridge.
Violins melodically weaving--
To be the swell of the eye,
the stroke of the hand;
Breathe atmosphere,
bleed dye of warm cloth.
The aurora of etched horizons
coming of vapor--
Laughter and light,
all these fantasies--
Close my eyes, love.
At Night, She Turns
Just beyond a bustling land,
There is a statue of a woman with copper eyes
And fire at her right hand;
Tourists climb her legs
Wrapped with wind-seared dress
To drop coins from a wrought mouth.
She stands brave and alone.
To even those who held
Her soft blue hand through new maps,
Stealing children under smoke
Into ships sunk under the weight of blood,
Whispering of the beautiful future,
She is an orphan without name.
Her neck measures waist-high.
In blackest night she turns
To civilization and its dimming cinders
Of entwined ambition and sacrifice,
Stone face pelted by the wilderness
And dampened on belief in the unseen.
In tears, she burns brighter.
Fractal Hands
Murder is a meticulous vice.
Partaking of the dead
is a poetic, skilled thing.
You cannot dig your own grave
in the shallow sand
and replace every grain--
It is better to draw names.
If we were but in a bar,
I'd sit beside the brute,
learn of his family, friends,
learn his means of meeting ends.
I'd burden my ears with his despairs
and suggest modest repairs
over the smoke of a tobacco pistol
and bereave.
If he were the born aristocrat
conceived in little membranes
of historical residue,
jewel-crowned and princely,
I would conceive
of a thousand skeleton cranes
with which to wander
through the desert rain.
But this is a barren, coral land;
a land of a teeth-licking lust,
blood, gum, and tongue-chewing lust.
This is a fractal hand
of five fingers for a lone liver,
a liver of life overrun.
He is a beggar
and I am the begot;
They are the same,
but this is neither the time nor the place
for the debate of an ethical case.
We are, we need,
we are the same,
We are the partakers of shallow names.
We dig one another's graves.
Meeting Spot Away From the Noise
There is a vulture far bigger than the Earth,
Stomach sagging through our cumulus sky
With weight of Jupiter's bearded, fleshy skull.
He has swallowed up Aries in one day
With neither passion nor pride.
He's left her armies to drift scorching
Into the sea, melting brown-blue like funeral pyres,
And greying up into hardened rock or relic.
This is reality -- not love or devotion,
But a clean coup d'etat. As usual.
Aristocrats' wives bang pots in the street
Passing poor panhandlers without a coin to spare.
It's quite a lot of noise; we'll meet
Where the ocean and canal are paired
To watch the remaining islands form.
There are vines to cut and limbs to kick
But with the softness of ocean spray
You say it's a good place to make love.
I just agree.
I only have half a day.
Rapunzel
Repunzel let down her snakes
They say. And this was the first
Sin.
But I recall every apple orchard,
Every sweet thing that was "good to eat"
As a ring.
And the snakes came,
Locked her up high,
Bruised her womb,
Tore through the wilderness.
Unable to climb down her
Own hair, Repunzel
Begs the open window for some
Prince Valiant. Some fucking
Rumplestiltskin to make a sour deal.
Prosperity for children,
Poverty either way.
The king and his monsters
Are in this together--
A share of the Dow Jones
For a place at the spindel.
An L. Ron Hubbard
for a mother in the cupboard.
The only thing Repunzel let down
Was her guard.
Recorded For My Daughter on Her First Birthday
Away to a candy cottage,
Slender walls of sugar cane flanked with
Juniper rows and rosemary flourish.
Every little girl is a princess,
Preachers are apples.
Caramel is the child in the casket,
Locked and growing outward, slow,
Wood expanding in delicate breaths.
Fairy tales would deny her, would have witches
To burn. They know who burns.
The arced marks of teeth come near it,
But vanish through wisdom's void:
--Without footsteps, without footprints,
Coddled without arms--
Recorded for my daughter on her first birthday,
A rickety black tape with a half-peeled label:
Details of what I have known--rewound,
Sealed up tight. And you shall not know where,
For now it holds what I would pray, could I,
That you avoid with a younger brown eye
Than mine . . . perhaps,
You will find it,
Right where I left off, or
Write.
And I would pray, could I,
That I taught you well--
Not in the fantastic,
But the sobering real,
And what could be real,
Could you be sober. |
