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(desire)threadbare(Desires) Read Poem

-to S.

The light lay in shreds across the bed,
only your waking could make it whole;
resuming its costume of day, its role
which seems to overnight get ragged—
Fate latent as weights in theater
curtainhems, what soul is sewn here
to be rung down at last, divested
of these disguises.

But if we are
bared by such cloth as cries in this
lament for the sun's fragility,
would I dare now to shake you astir—
to drape over you my shadow, whose
myth-ex-machina remains all mine,
mine, and therefore torn from yours.

(end) Of Summer (1966) Read Poem

I'm tired of murdering children.

Once, long ago today, they wanted to live;
now I feel Vietnam the place
where rigor mortis is beginning to set-in upon me.

I force silence down the throats of mutes,
down the throats of mating-cries of animals who know they are extinct.

The chameleon's death-soliloquy is your voice's pulse;
your scorched forehead a constellation's suicide-note.

A phonograph needle plunges through long black hair,
and stone drips slowly into our veins.

The earth has been squandered by the meek.

And upsidedown in the earth a dead man walks upon my soles when I walk
A baby is crying.

In the swaddling-pages
a baby.

'Don't cry.

No Solomori's-sword can
divide you from the sky.

You are one.

Fly.

'
I'm tired, so tired.

I have sleep to do.

I have work to dream.

(poem) (Chicago) (The Were-Age) Read Poem

'My age, my beast!' - Osip Mandelstam
On the lips a taste of tolling we are blind
The light drifts like dust over faces
We wear masks on our genitals
You've heard of lighting cigarettes with banknotes we used to light ours with Jews
History is made of bricks you can't go through it
And bricks are made of bones and blood and
Bones and blood are made of little tiny circles that nothing can go through Except a piano with rabies
Blood gushes into, not from, our wounds
Vietnamese Cuban African bloods
Constellations of sperm upon our bodies
Drunk as dogs before our sons
The bearded foetus lines up at the evolution-trough
Swarmy bloods in the rabid piano
The air over Chicago is death's monogram
This is the Were-Age rushing past
Speed: 10,000 men per minute
This is the species bred of death
The manshriek of flesh
The lifeless sparks of flesh
Covering the deep drums of vision
O new era race-wars jugular-lightning
Dark glance bursting from the over-ripe future
Know we are not the smilelines of dreams
Nor the pores of the Invisible
Piano with rabies we are victorious over
The drum and the wind-chime
We bite back a voice that might have emerged
To tame these dead bodies aid wet ashes

2 Futilists Read Poem

Even if the mountain I climbed
Proved to be merely a duncecap It
was only on gaining its peak
That that knowledge reached me.

*
Is there a single inch--
one square millimeter
on the face of our planet
which some animal
human or otherwise
has not shit on?

Is there anywhere even a
pore's-worth of ground--
earth that has never
(not once in its eons)
been covered by what
golgotha of dung?

If such a place exists,
I want to go there
and stand there
at that site
in that spot, truly
and purely for an instant.

Advice From The Experts Read Poem

I lay down in the empty street and parked
My feet against the gutter's curb while from
The building above a bunch of gawkers perched
Along its ledges urged me don't, don't jump.

An Instructor's Dream Read Poem

Many decades after graduation
the students sneak back onto
the school-grounds at night
and within the pane-lit windows
catch me their teacher at the desk
or blackboard cradling a chalk:
someone has erased their youth,
and as they crouch closer to see
more it grows darker and quieter
than they have known in their lives,
the lesson never learned surrounds
them; why have they come?

Is
there any more to memorize now
at the end than there was then"
What is it they peer at through shades
of time to hear, X times X repeated,
my vain efforts to corner a room's
snickers?

Do they mock me?

Forever?

Out there my past has risen in
the eyes of all my former pupils but
I wonder if behind them others
younger and younger stretch away
to a world where dawn will never
ring its end, its commencement bell.

Ancient Measures Read Poem

As much as someone could plow in one day
They called an acre;
As much as a person could die in one instant
A lifetime--

Another Hole For W.R Rodgers Read Poem

Speak like a singularity, a lack
residing deep inside every lock, just
past the point keys can jab: against all thrust
make safe-ensure your door's core is held back,
for reckless access to that pure center
quarks more quintessence than taking exits
from those pried voids whose secret quickly sates:
ubiquitous if Space presses Enter.

Which inadmissible sill still calls loud
with imagine: our skeleton keeping
each such portal neither open nor shut,
unhoused of that exclusive dustborne cloud
we breathe, though there must be something
it accumulates, accommodates: what?

Castration Envy #11 Read Poem

Tying the pimp in dreams to a lamppost
His tuxedo wet with wheedled kisses, can
I wake up sucking the footprints of toilets
In jails that glitter like crash-dived marquees.

A dog appears in call letters on my skin.

Twin worlds, who exchange threats via scoreboard
I rival this night, this fight to the death
With enough leftover, ooze for twosies yet.

Either even, I wish I could put on take off
My clothes without first saying to my cock
"Excuse me, is this yours," while the stars
The collected no-shows of eternity, rise.

Hey, remember the way painters gauge perspective?

Me, I cut the thumb off and throw it at stuff.

Cemetery Read Poem

Who whispers here is forgotten.

Saliva's emptiest fruit
adorns the stones,
words ripening your mouth
to a spoilation
of silence.

Who speaks here
reads a text that downloads
the screen of his fingernail,
through which nothing's visible
as glass is.

For the memorial
we must kneel
to pick each flower
from amongst its modifiers:
but to do that
one needs a hand bared
of all uses, of all trades:
as ours is not.

Christmas At The Orphanage Read Poem

But if they'd give us toys and twice the stuff most
parents splurge on the average kid, orphans, I submit, need more than enough;
in fact, stacks wrapped with our names nearly hid
the tree: these sparkling allotments yearly
guaranteed a lack of--what?

--family?

--
I knew exactly what it was I missed as we were lined up number rank and file:
to share my pals' tearing open their piles
meant sealing the self, the child that wanted
to scream at all You stole those gifts from me;
whose birthday is worth such words?

The wish-lists
they'd made us write out in May lay granted
against starred branches.

I said I'm sorry.

Compact Dusk Read Poem

Here at the height of the day night change
The color of the sky is uncertain,
The sky depending in which direction
One's eye strains, each of its swatches a strange
Hue which dies too soon and which makes this hour
Linger in the mind transient as a life,
Whose names once known remain another
Posied-up portrait on our palette knife.

Until even I wonder if one tint
Ever survives the harm of seeming unique
(Evening's intrigue, time's singularity.

)
Study for its trace, its placemap, I see
— Redundant as a stopsign in italic—
The face on which my profile leaves no print.

Dearth Demise Read Poem

Satiety help me I have inhabit
of this world.

Extant upon its designs
to be more aimlessly fluttering at
the window, to shadow all the patterns
it offers each sun.

In frames far as eye
I draw my words towards a juggler's shards
as if our fallings-down our deaths occurred
but did not involve a lot of colloquialized
arm movements, the body language throws.

Thus
the shape of your silence when it speaks me
is different than mine in saying you,
though both of them resemble that spasm hymned as
repose lifepause a happen of sorts the way
the horizon's a long way without meaning to.

Death Read Poem

Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.

They will place my hands like this.

It will look as though I am flying into myself.

Escape Plan Read Poem

I examine
my skin
searching for
the pore
with EXIT
over it

Excerpts From The Diary Of Damocles Read Poem

I don't dare speak too loudly,
some timbres could be fatal--
that string is not too strong
I think: and at times I have
to breathe.

Or maybe I fear
my paraphrastic exhalations
will spoil the oiled perfection
of its sleekness, will mist
over that brightness whose
needle sharp point compasses
my every stray.

I am as
edgy in my way as it--
as little-rippled, as subtle.

Prey to vapors, to sudden
icecap thaws, seismic
dicethrows, the world wires me,
I hex myself up to a pitch
of infinite finicky sensitiveness,
alert to every window opening
down in my castle's bowels,
every mousehole emergence.

A simple housefly--a moth
murders my rest when it
mistakes for light that glittering
blade in which every passing
glint is glassed--barometer
of my highest apprehension.

*
I know my fear is only a ploy,
a sticking point in the old
hairsplitting debate of the winds .

.

.

I the first split personality
divide into a Dam/an Ocles,
a mother and her myopic
son.

Or, since everything
is reversed in its mirroring
shaft, a Selcomad, mad and sulky.

Language does this to me.

It inverts my position: King
I am, but await my crown,
unmanned until it come down;
my kingdom lies in twain
to each, I am in half to all.

*
If only I could reach up, up,
and take it in my teeth,
suckle that penile projection,
cloister its unremitting hardness
in the sheath of my throat--
swordswallower who exalts
his posture with this adjunct
second spine, aligning gut with
palate, my groin with my height.

*
Male means to be in the crime
of things here, this frail planet
killed wide, maimed down.

Male means murder, rape and war.

Its indomitable will will not allow
approach.

All broach will fail.

It must fall on you or not at all.

*
Insane, isn't it?

History hangs
impregnable to the mind, eager
to halve your brain with rift,
intrusion and strife, the warrior's
dissonance.

No whole is hallowed,
no peace.

Don't let the humor of
this scene (when the phallus
falls the fears recede) attend
you away from its cruelty.

*
I stand here exposed to whose
justice, my crime my Y
chromosome.

That Y aims
his prick point down at me.

A dowsing wand that seeks
my artesian quench, my depths
of death.

His insistence
sustains me in steel, his encased
incursion covers my melt,
my metal.

Each day he rights me:
his richterscaled tremors are
my weather, my wherefore:
his gloss his gleam condemns
my fortunes, his ore loads my gold
with schist.

His soliloquy
interrupts mine at every word.

Linebreaks enforced by sword,
his poem sunders my rhythm.

All mine at last is made him.

His blade remembers my name .

.

.

Face In The Window Read Poem

I am a modest house, a house solely
notable for the fact I lived here once.

Its brass plaque depicts an oxygen eye
in which two pupils of hydrogen dance.

Downstairs is where I lit fires whose insights
with approach-velocity froze me, then
singed off into flame.

This always happened when
I came close to a truth.

Months passed.

Years.

Nights.

Shall I accommodate myself again,
a humble aquarium of lordly
thumbs, some fin de species?

Of course each word
the blackout-moth mutters to my keyboard
shows the snowiest letter on this page is “I”—
must I now plumb its one remaining pane?

Feeding The Sun Read Poem

One day we notice that the sun
needs feeding.

Immediately
a crash program begins: we fill rockets
with wheat, smoke-rings, razorblades, then,
after long aiming
--they're off.

Hulls specially alloyed
so as not to melt before the stuff
gets delivered we pour cattle rivers windmills,
aborigines etcet into the sun which
however, grows stubbornly
smaller, paler.

Finally
of course we run out of things to feed the thing,
start shipping ourselves.

By now
all the planets-moons-asteroids and
so on have been shoveled in though they're
not doing much good it's
still looking pretty weak, heck, nothing helps!
Now the last few of us left lift off.

The trip seems forever but then, touchdown.

Just before entering we wonder,
will we be enough.

There's
a last-second doubt in our minds: can we,
can this final sacrifice, our broughten crumb,
satiate
it--will a glutteral belch burst out then at last,--
and will that Big Burp be seen by far-off telescopes,
interpreted as a nova
by those other galaxies,
those further stars which have always seemed even more
starving
than ours?

Flashbacks Read Poem

All it takes is Laura Riding's riding-
crop across my butt, and I'm off:
Git-up horsie she cries astride me as
I crash sweetly onto the carpet.

Boredom what an esthetic,
cleansing the days-
I laud the vintage of my toothpick.

Small-husband to the floor,
my foot stoops in dance,
in courtship intervals.

Putting their clothes on afterwards
the lovers are surprised
at how empty
the buttonholes seem.

Fragments From The Beach Read Poem

(Nonasyllabics)
In retrospect the tragic nature
of sea is a taste wept too daily,
too depleted by freedom's rupture;
the eyes have other secrets to see
and deeper use for the detritus
within us: the bright effluvium
of ego dries up, mired as it is
in wealth, that remedial medium.

Blame it on fate, on beach memories--
pebble put in the pocket or shell
fragments; any memento carries
us as much as we it.

Time capsule
contains every evening's interval.

The ocean observes its own puddle.

Goodbye Read Poem

If you are still alive when you read this,
close your eyes.

I am
under their lids, growing black.

Hair Poem Read Poem

Hair is heaven's water flowing eerily over us
Often a woman drifts off down her long hair and is lost

Heritage Read Poem

“.

.

.

here thy generations endeth in accord.

”
I physically resemble my mother
And father and therefore must have been
Adopted, because on my TV screen
The role-children rarely share a feature
With either parent.

The fact they're actors
And I'm not is what makes me misbegot—
A matched world of monitors all 2-shot
The mirror daily where I pray these stars
Come: cancel everyone of us whose names
And clans have sundered human unity
Descend always among daughters or sons
To live still, beyond the Net's trivia games,
Till their faces cloned shape ours.

Family.

From android to ape, we'll be Thy reruns.

Ledgelife Read Poem

The taller the monument, the more impatient our luggage.

Look, look, a graveyard has fancy dirt.

Historians agree: this is the pebble which beaned Goliath.

Every billboard is theoretically as beautiful as what lies unseen behind it.

Mouth: the word's exit-wound.

It is impossible to run away face-to-face.

Shadow has closed the door out of you to you, but not to us.

The sign on the wall advises: Hide your gloves beneath your wings.

Even sculptors occasionally lean against statues.

Migrations?

! Fate?

! Life swears up at ledgelife.

All the sad tantamounts gather.

They want, they say, to errand our ways.

Please aim all kicks at the ground.

Address all blows to the air.

We are to be barely mentioned if at all in the moon's memoirs.

Lesson Read Poem

Our love has chosen its appropriate gesture
Which when viewed in the midst of all the gestures
It didn't choose seems almost insignificant.

The gesture our love has chosen is appropriate
We both agree not that we have any choice but
Amidst all those others does seem insignificant.

Is it incumbent on us thus to therefore obliterate
All of the gestures except this insignificant one
Chosen by our love for its own no doubt reasons.

It is up to us to obliterate all other gestures
Though they cluster round thick as presentations
Of war and sacrifice in a gradeschool classroom.

Use of our love's chosen gesture for the obliteration
Of all those foreign gestures is forbidden however
We must find something else to erase them with.

Our love has chosen its appropriate gesture
Which when viewed in the absence of all other gestures
Seems to spell the opposite of insignificant.

Lifeguard Clinging To A Steeple Read Poem

Why are all the survivors of the needle's eye
nude, as if their lifethread had disrobed
rather than sewn them.

Sans coat-fare,
we proceed it seems only to precede;
birth to burial, are not yet here.

But when did we first start embracing
the wakes of ourselves in each other rather
than each other?

As the fruit falls
to hiatus us, its bloom spoiled by last year's cores.

Or the sun whose portrait rots in our pores,
those sweatbeads blurred in closeup but clear afar--
that pointillist pap, that hybrid suicide.

The face carefully tattooed around love's wounds
does not itself look injured.

Minor Poem Read Poem

The only response
to a child's grave is
to lie down before it and play dead

Monopoly Read Poem

Finally the day dawned when a monopoly owned everything in the
world
So it went looking for its stockholders to celebrate
But they were all owned by it they were all dead they were
someplace
Their photographs hung in elevators which went up and down up and
down carrying nobody
Everyone else was in bed doing exercises to get in shape for noon
Hey the monopoly said let's uncork the World Trade Center and get
blotto
Silence
The monopoly scowled
All it wanted was a little good-fellowship, like you get in the
highrise apartment-buildings
Then the sky got awful dark
Gee
And everyone was in bed frantically doing those exercises that get us in
shape for death
Exercises known as "kissing" "fucking" "caressing"
Everyone was unaware that they had been bought
Or that the earth was about to sell them to the moon
For a little light

Obsolescent Read Poem

Bending over like this to get my hands empty
Rummaging through the white trashcans out back
Of the Patent Office I find a kind of peace
Here in this warm-lit alley where no one comes.

Even the rats too they know that nothing new
Is going to get pitched out now--no formula,
Not one blueprint will ever be found in these
Bright bins whose futures are huge, pristine.

Old alleymouth grabbags my attention at times
I see the world flash by out there, glow-glow as
The floors of decontamination chambers-
I go back to my dull, boring search, foraging
For the feel it gives me of the thing which has
Invented me: that void whose sole idea I was.

On A Drawing By Charles Tomlinson Read Poem

By a swath of inks the eye
thinks it sees solidities
which alter with the watercolor
way his brush washes its dye
in distance, though even this
finds a faraway fixed not
by the surveyor's plumb but
by the action of the thumb
delaying all the fingers meant
to draw out of the paper,
splashed dry.

The clean grain
catches what it should retain
if enough pressure pleasure
is applied to the stain to lie.

Note: Tomlinson is not only a distinctive poet, but a visual artist of repute.

His graphics grace the covers of many of his books.

This Homage attempts to imitate his verse style, or rather one of his verse styles.

Picture Read Poem

Meadow of matchsticks,
soon to be rekindled
by Spring the incendiary.

The exact flame of your blossoms
will ignite the passions
happily sapped by time--
Dripdrop their excess went
and now miners' hats
light up like love before
your vein, the frame of which
is there to depict the drift,
the waste when I painted
all the review copies
they sent me.

But those books
open to polar pages where you
and I weigh the ends of this
teeter totem down, you
at the head and nadir me;
where postmortem is
the aura of self-portrait,
its other half regained at last.

Poem Read Poem

At your light side trees shy
A kneeling enters them

Poem (After Your Death...) Read Poem

After your death,
Naomi, your hair will escape to become
a round animal, nameless.

Poem (As Your Light Side Trees Shy...) Read Poem
```
At your light side trees shy
A kneeling enters them
```

Poem (Chicago) Read Poem

'My age, my beast!' - Osip Mandelstam
On the lips a taste of tolling we are blind
The light drifts like dust over faces
We wear masks on our genitals
You've heard of lighting cigarettes with banknotes we used to light ours with Jews
History is made of bricks you can't go through it
And bricks are made of bones and blood and
Bones and blood are made of little tiny circles that nothing can go through
Except a piano with rabies
Blood gushes into, not from, our wounds
Vietnamese Cuban African bloods
Constellations of sperm upon our bodies
Drunk as dogs before our sons
The bearded foetus lines up at the evolution-trough
Swarmy bloods in the rabid piano
The air over Chicago is death's monogram
This is the Were-Age rushing past
Speed: 10,000 men per minute
This is the species bred of death
The manshriek of flesh
The lifeless sparks of flesh
Covering the deep drums of vision
O new era race-wars jugular-lightning
Dark glance bursting from the over-ripe future
Know we are not the smilelines of dreams
Nor the pores of the Invisible
Piano with rabies we are victorious over
The drum and the wind-chime
We bite back a voice that might have emerged
To tame these dead bodies aid wet ashes

Poem To Poetry Read Poem

Poetry,
you are an electric,
a magic, field--like the space
between a sleepwalker's outheld arms!

Self(The Poet PassÉ)portrait Read Poem

His task to watch an hourglass wash itself,
A ritual cleansing that leaves him bare,
Though no purification's new enough
To nullify the need for such labor--
Prior soon to repeat, platonic clone,
He should have practiced that horizon
Vocation, camouflage, opening his
Arms wide the better to hide.

But of course
If the flesh is fire, bones are the kindling:
Still there but aching to be unbelied
By the lover, unbellied as breaths held
Until all the minutes fall to the wrong
End of the hour and find his final
Efforts,ve faded, dated as (or like) a sundial.

Sleep Read Poem

We brush the other, invisible moon.

Its caves come out and carry us inside.

Sonnet Read Poem

The way the world is not
Astonished at you
It doesn't blink a leaf
When we step from the house
Leads me to think
That beauty is natural, unremarkable
And not to be spoken of
Except in the course of things
The course of singing and worksharing
The course of squeezes and neighbors
The course of you tying back your raving hair to go out
And the course of course of me
Astonished at you
The way the world is not

Space Read Poem

From the trees the leaves came down
until we joined hands with a wand
and that act enabled them
somehow then to reach the ground
where they scuttered round our feet
urging the latter to unite
with a baton as if that act
together with the hands can clasp
a dowsing-stick cut from the same
branch from which we launched
converging on gravity's purge-point
at which point we merged to remove
all consonants from our star-maps.

The infinite consists of vowels alone.

Story Of Or Read Poem

To pose nakedness is
To refute it.

A pose
Is a clothes.

Like
Stanzaic arrangements of
The word which should
Ideally, be in pain against
Its w and its d.

No slack
Is why such heaves of or
To denude itself could
Make us exude gold, yet when
Was that ever opposite enough
What scream or epigram
This sperm has come
To measure our mouths for.

Note: For 'or' to free itself from 'word,' it must strain ('heave') against the 'w' and the 'd' that enclose it.

If, via this strenuous (perhaps squeamish) process, the meaning of 'or' is transmuted from the English into the French as a sort of homage to the pseudonymous author of 'Story of O' (Histoire d'O), then, alchemically speaking, (or so an Aurealist might suggest) it will have risen from the pose of its measures to or-emerge as an else-gasm.

Stress Therapy Read Poem

Time, time, time, time, the clock
vaccinates us.

and then even that lacks
prophylaxis.

Ticktock-pockmarked, stricken
by such strokes, we
get sick of prescriptions
which work solely
on the body.

Systole diastole--
It is by its very
intermittency
that the heart knows
itself to be an I.

Tempestrousseau Read Poem

The clock is dressed in drag, I mean it wears
space instead of its own proper aspect
but if it wore
time
, would it disappear
isn't visibility an effect
of transvestism, that shield pastime whose
crosscasual aim unmasks the eye: must you
assume the costume of the other to
be here, to present the sense with an ess.

.

.

Narcissus saw his guise decked out all ruse,
but if there were none, what would our true clothes
consist of, our rig rags, our regalia—
Whose dapper element dons us: Einstein's
continuum—or Flaubert's condence
that, come the same, the Bovary c'est Moi?

The Enemy Read Poem

Like everyone I demand to be
Defended unto the death of
All who defend me, all the
World's people I command to
Roundabout me shield me, to
Fight off the enemy.

The
Theory is if they all stand
Banded together and wall me
Safe, there's no one left to
Be the enemy.

Unless I of
Course start attack, snap-
Ping and shattering my hands
On your invincible backs.

The Golden Age Read Poem

is thought to be a confession, won by endless
torture, but which our interrogators must
hate to record—all those old code names, dates,
the standard narrative of sandpaper
throats, even its remorse, fall ignored.

Far

away, a late (not lost) messenger stares,
struck by window bargains or is it the gift
of a sudden solicitude: is she going to
lift up her shadow’s weight, shift hers
onto it?

She knows who bears whom.

In

that momentary museum where memory occurs
more accrue of those torturers’ pincers than
lessened fingernails, eyes teased to a pulp,
we beg for closeups.

Ormolus, objets d’art!
A satyr drains an hourglass with one gulp.

The Hunger Read Poem

If a path to the Gingerbread House
could be established by breaking crumbs
off its edifice and sprinkling them
so as to find what lies behind us
across the featureless fairytale
void of childhood: yet how very quick
that trick wears out when the story's track
takes hold, takes toll, a far-older trail
prevails, we're forced to give up this lost
cause; and the fact is that every last
morsel was gone long before the you
or I might totter our way back here
to try to dissuade all these other
Hansel-Gretels hollering in queue.

The Misunderstanding Read Poem

I'm charmed yet chagrined by this misunderstanding--
As when, after a riot, my city's smashed-in stores appear all
Boarded up, billboarded over, with ads for wind-insurance.

Similarly, swimmingly, I miss the point.

You too?

And my misunderstanding doesn't stop there, it grows--soon
I can't see why that sudden influx of fugitives,
All the world's escapees, rubbing themselves lasciviously against the
Berlin Wall.

They stick like placards to it.

Like napalm.

Like ads for--
And me, I haven't even bought my biodegradable genitalia yet!
No.

I was born slow, but picking up speed I run through
Our burnt-out streets, screaming, refusing to buy a house.

Finally, exasperated, the misunderstanding overtakes me, snatches
up
Handcuffs.

So now here I am, found with all you others
Impatiently craning, in this queue that rumors out of sight up ahead
somewhere,
Clutching our cash eager to purchase whatever it is, nervous
As if bombs were about to practice land-reform upon our bodies,
Redistribution of eyes, toes, arms, here we stand.

Then, some new
Age starts.

The Patriots Read Poem

at the edge of the city in
the garbagedump where the
trucks never stop unloading
a crazy congregation stumbles
from trashmound to trashheap
they smash their fists down on
whatever's intact they tear
to bits the pitifew items
that have remained whole they
rip everything old clothes
papers cans bones to nothing
with their glazed teeth
the enlightened the faithful
every few meters one of them
falls and is torn to shreds by
the others at the edge of
the city where there's a line
waiting to join

The Unsubscriber Read Poem

Like all children, you were a de facto
Member of the Flat Earth Society,
Believing nothing but what you could see
Or touch or whatever sense led act to
Fruition: mudpies made summer beneath
A tree whose measured shade endowed decrees
Between light and dark: such hierarchies
Gave you implicit, a sophistic faith--
(Fallacious fellowship!)"
Youth's adherents
Ignore the fact that most factions reject
Their lyric league (which only fools have stayed
Striplings of) and none condone its nonsense:
No-one loves that vain solipsistic sect
You'd never join, whose dues you've always paid.

To Ripley (Alien 1-4) Read Poem

Always your face like a space
(Destination: beautiful) ship
Empties its mote of closeup trace
Down screens that blink blank blip
Somewhere between countdown
And coma time is a line
Where waking centuries often
Drained against that measure we find
Our blood redshifts (direction: west)
Until film can clone one sun
With stars both whole and gone
Attending every sequel
We pray for an intent equal
To our interest

Weltende Variation # ? Read Poem

The CIA and the KGB exchange Christmas cards
A blade snaps in two during an autopsy
The bouquet Bluebeard gave his first date reblooms
Many protest the stoning of a guitar pick
Railroad trains drop off the bourgeois' pointy head
A martyr sticks a coffeecup out under a firehose
Moviestars make hyenas lick their spaceship
God's hand descends into a glove held steady by the police
At their reunion The New Faces recognize each other
A spoiled child sleeps inside a thermometer
A single misprint in a survival manual kills everyone
The peace night makes according to the world comes
Note: von Hoddis: author of 'the first Expressionist poem,' Weltende, published in 1910.

His poem has been aped innumerable times (Auden's 'The Fall of Rome,' for example), hence the questionmark in my title.

The Closet Read Poem

Here not long enough after the hospital happened
I find her closet lying empty and stop my play
And go in and crane up at three blackwire hangers
Which quiver, airy, released.

They appear to enjoy

Their new distance, cognizance born of the absence
Of anything else.

The closet has been cleaned out
Full-flush as surgeries where the hangers could be
Amiable scalpels though they just as well would be

Themselves, in basements, glovelessly scraping uteri
But, here, pure, transfigured heavenward, they’re
Birds, whose wingspans expand by excluding me.

Their
Range is enlarged by loss.

They’d leave buzzards

Measly as moths: and the hatshelf is even higher!—
As the sky over a prairie, an undotted desert where
Nothing can swoop sudden, crumple in secret.

I’ve fled
At ambush, tag, age: six, must I face this, can

I have my hide-and-seek hole back now please, the
Clothes, the thicket of shoes, where is it?

Only
The hangers are at home here.

Come heir to this
Rare element, fluent, their skeletal grace sings

Of the ease with which they let go the dress, slip,
Housecoat or blouse, so absolvingly.

Free, they fly
Trim, triangular, augurs leapt ahead from some geometric
God who soars stripped (of flesh, it is said): catnip

To a brat placated by model airplane kits kids
My size lack motorskills for, I wind up glue-scabbed,
Pawing goo-goo fingernails, glaze skins fun to peer in as
Frost-i-glass doors .

.

.

But the closet has no windows,

Opaque or sheer: I must shut my eyes, shrink within
To peep into this wall.

Soliciting sleep I’ll dream
Mother spilled and cold, unpillowed, the operating-
Table cracked to goad delivery: its stirrups slack,

Its forceps closed: by it I’ll see mobs of obstetrical
Personnel kneel proud, congratulatory, cooing
And oohing and hold the dead infant up to the dead
Woman’s face as if for approval, the prompted

Beholding, tears, a zoomshot kiss.

White-masked
Doctors and nurses patting each other on the back,
Which is how in the Old West a hangman, if
He was good, could gauge the heft of his intended .

.

.

Awake, the hangers are sharper, knife-’n’-slice, I jump
Helplessly to catch them to twist them clear,
Mis-shape them whole, sail them across the small air
Space of the closet.

I shall find room enough here

By excluding myself; by excluding myself, I’ll grow.

The Consolations of Sociobiology Read Poem

Those scars rooted me.

Stigmata stalagmite
I sat at a drive-in and watched the stars
Through a straw while the Coke in my lap went
Waterier and waterier.

For days on end or

Nights no end I crawled on all fours or in
My case no fours to worship you: Amoeba Behemoth.

—Then you explained your DNA calls for
Meaner genes than mine and since you are merely

So to speak its external expression etcet
Ergo among your lovers I’ll never be .

.

.

Ah that movie was so faraway the stars melting

Made my thighs icy.

I see: it’s not you
Who is not requiting me, it’s something in you
Over which you have no say says no to me.

Merry-No-Round Read Poem

The wooden horses
are tired of their courses

and plead from head to hoof
to be fed to a stove—

In leaping lunging flames
they’d rise again, flared manes

snapping like chains behind them.

The smoke would not blind them

as do these children’s hands:
beyond our cruel commands

the fire will free them then
as once the artisan when

out of the tree they
were nagged to this neigh.

Poem: Octopus floating . . . Read Poem

Octopus floating
in earth’s ink-ore core
whose arms extend
up here as trees
may your branches squirt
their black across
my pages please

Weltende Variation #I Read Poem

The CIA and the KGB exchange Christmas cards
A blade snaps in two during an autopsy
The bouquet Bluebeard gave his first date reblooms
Many protest the public stoning of a guitar pick

Railroad trains drop off the bourgeois’ pointy head
A martyr sticks a coffeecup out under a firehose
Moviestars make hyenas lick their spaceship
God’s hand descends into a glove held steady by the police

At their reunion The New Faces recognize each other
A spoiled child sleeps inside a thermometer
A single misprint in a survival manual kills everyone
The peace night makes according to the world comes