Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Browsing Poem

A phone rings without remorse
from inside a purse tucked
under her arm,

It's a muted hysteria as it drones on,
screams among the cough drops
and used Kleenex,

Ring, chime, digital quotes of
pop tunes and classical clich�s
punch through the air,

Necks strain, eyes blur under the
incandescent light, everything has a price
but no one can sell anything,

She looks at the candle holders,
inspects the diamonds, her fingers
leave prints on the glass,

The phone continues to scream
it's medley of taunts and tones,
mix with the discreet jazz that plays all day,

Her head bobs up and down,
rhythmic, exact, a twitch
for an off beat,

The wires from her headset
goes taut and then relaxes with
each swerve and turn of her head,

Better tunes than what the
store pays for,

Yet the phone screams on and on
as she browses and bops to her
private distractions,

The sales floor is empty,
her prints are on
all the glass she laid a finger on."

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Pass the salt as you would
a hat that passes for a dollar
that keeps the doors open and
the floor swept,

In dangerous years
the salt of our tears
pass through our eyes
while white caps on waves
hear yet another cry for help
just beyond the turn of the coastline
and TV ariels

Saturday, September 4, 2004

Several shy poets rent a room

Who are these scribeshiding under the bedwith their notebooksand pens, coughing up balls of dust each time a floor board creaks underfootor a cat on the porch meows and scratches doors,looking for a family to move in with? Handwriting is a a trail of tears and terror under the singing springs,there are bills to pay,stamps to lick,a metaphor to ponderas fingers stroke pens to remember an address while cramped under a mattress ,

What shall we write about, oh yes,half a bird on the sill,a lone cup on the far table,ankles defacing the knot holes with unforgiving heels,but now, is the coast clear,is there anyone watching?

We leave them their food on white plates with clean silverware,paper napkins at best,and then leave room where we can hear all their furious scribbling about the truncated view proceed as if it were a race,the tips of pens and assorted quills tearing across pages of journals and the lines of otherwise blank pages,riots of images of strange sights,a world espied through mail slots and around the corners of doors left ajar,

We leave them their food and then leave,closing the door,and suddenly there is laughter up and down the hall,cartoon soundtracks, sound effects of things bouncing and springing from wall to wall,pies in the face,Splat!We walk awayand mind our own business because the rent check cleared and that's all that matters on day full of sunshine

Tuesday, August 31, 2004

page not found

not the voice that comes
from the steam
nor the tide that turns
at the drop of dime
into a newspaper machine.
not a name that fades in the ear
when you turn a corner
nor a name that comes through the
ear peace of your phone that
rings at the dinner hour.
not a lover who misses you
after all the years in jobs
on a far coast where time zones and
temperatures are closer and hotter
that the hotel sheets
are to the mattress where you stare
at the door to the hallway,
the shadows of feet passing in
the middle of the night,
you wonder what your lover
has too say,
not about this meal you're eating
or by what you're reading
but instead about how you're living
in this world when
nothing seems real enough to
count on as if life itself mattered,
i say all these things come back to us
always in the moments when
we're required to be
the selves we've always rehearsed in
mirrors, at home, imagining interviews
and interrogations,
i think of the way your lips grew puffy
the first time i made you cry,
the way your hand traced the words of
the book you were reading
before setting it down
to dress for openings, dinner,
where ever we might be going,
the masks cracks and falls to the floor
when some meaningless phrase is said
and suddenly, powerfully
it’s clenched fists in public places,
the world is removed just then and too loud as well,
it's all those things after all,
every last cough and bottle of beer we balanced
on the fire place, there's nothing i ever had
that i don't miss, you were everything
in front of me, passing by and gone
like a road sign that couldn’t be read.

Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Some things get said
that ruin the taste
of the tacos even
as they hit the roof
of my mouth,
and it's the same damn thing
like it was in the day
when ballparks were for
cheering the good guys,
the ones in the white uniforms

Thursday, August 12, 2004

at these prices

at these prices
you would expect
the bread to be
sliced by Christ himself,

under these ceilings
a heart might stop
in awe as the neck
cranes back for
a view of arches
detailed with angels
and their bosses
with nary a cobweb to
disturb their conference,

with names like these
on plates this ornate,
you aren't sure if your
about to eat a meal
or commit some crime
against decorum,

in a city whose ills
slip under the
short circuiting radar,
it's easy to dream
with eyes wide upon,
sitting straight up
in your chair
in amazing taverns
overlooking a Pacific Ocean
that is black
as secret ink when
there's no sun to shine
on the coast
that's been carved up
and built upon
and otherwise carted away
in trucks to landfills
where nothing grows
but resentments and
gun registration,

every newspaper sold
from corner machines
tells you what day this is,
every email asks you
to get thinner, richer,
bigger than lumberjacks in drag,

at these prices
who could afford
not to spend
a little more, scrape
some more shavings from
the credit card
and dampen the
scream
under the lamp
by the pier
on a night
when clouds and sunsets
riot in swirls that
make this city
tremble and quake
under the boots
you wore to work?

Sunday, July 11, 2004

Remote Control Dynamite

All these pieces of tape on index cards, getting shallow by degrees of heat,
dragged, smoked and fried to the numb where the brand name surrenders to the burn, crisp in their knowledge of magic candles that don’t blow out, rubber candy, remote control dynamite.

Sections of the body lend their pours for a sweat against poverty, but who could think of such things now?

Perhaps it’s being too dense against the sham of identity that we take objects that don’t return hellos and give them homes as though it’s the beginning of something beautiful

Back at ~home base, the slugger tightens his belt, gets mad at the ball, dreams of monies and hosannas and a confetti rain if he’d only hit his boss.

These leave only the inevitable: thrice the chance of unions coming apart, a management of soured excuses.

Big stick, small dick, that’s what he said.

To a pal who found repast in the silence ‘til he spoke up.

Why bring that up now? Sweet honey in the rock is a hard course to go.

Big talk, small wonders, he replied, you’ve denied the parenthesis of disease, imagined or real.

It catches with you, says TAG! you’re IT, the fruit of my labors.

Rubber necking with you was a big mistake, my thorax is on leave of its senses, who do I turn to?

Not you, or they, or anything or anyone remaining with a thirst.
Duty calls, and it’s the nature of things to expel the bottled vile.

Call me airmail, or call me anytime.
Little bits of glass cling to my brow.
Small animals make nests in my mistakes.

A package arrives in the mail. Lots of wires, a battery, a clock, something packed in aluminum: A send off to write home about.

Saturday, July 10, 2004

A great country we've always lived in

Days are full of empty bottles
through which shorelines are amber
on a coast of an always setting sun,

Nights are sirens on rocks
singing as they wash their hair
and cars pull the shoulder of the coastal road,

Where we lived was rugged
and full of trees that were thick like armored battalions
around the soft essential center which was warm
and worth fighting for,

Yes, this is a great country we've always lived in,
hidden in magazine photos and underlined pages
in books telling so many stories of balance,

There was always enough
money to go around
and it never rained or snowed
while we were awake

But our snapshots are full of snowball fights
and us as kids holding umbrellas
as we waited for the bus that took us to school,

Life is as we read it to be,
dust does not rise from
the dirt roads we lived on,
our stories stop in the middle
and we go back to the beginning
when maybe being here
with these tasks and worries
seemed at first to make sense,

Something has got to change.
nothing can change at all,

I take off my glasses
and talk to my dead parents,
I submit my ballot; I approve the whole slate,

Soon we'll have everything we've ever needed,
freedom from fear screams in the hall,
decades rolled back,
pleated dresses on house bound mothers,
fathers in black and white ties
in wide ties at the dinner table.



Friday, July 2, 2004

Fencing Lesson

A fence runs between
the houses whose rooms
are stacked with boxes of things
that collected over the decade,
ephemera of years that started
when love was love and duty
was a man in a tank watching
Aral mountain ranges on the
other side of a Cold War border,
hands ready for the pistol
and radio at his reach
lest any hoards tried
to dilute the United States of America
in storage,
I slept like a bone in
an airless vault.

But everything
was turned inside out
by the time I woke up,
the fence remains
but everything
I live next to is three stories high,
even TV antennas snatching images
from the sky are gone from my view,
chimneys are rare
as honesty at retirement parties,
satellite dishes sneak
the world to
my house of boxes.

And love became duty
to remain on the border
of the bed
my limbs stayed in,
too late realizing that
the line of death was
my breath heavy with scotch and mouthwash
and pithy perfumes for the tongue
when all my speech became poetry
about duty and honor while she nodded and brushed her daughters' hair, she takes a loose strand
from her shoulder, she examines the end, the hair is split,
voiceless, she speaks

This where it ends,
I cannot breath,
there are fences running all over the world going somewhere
and all
we do is put the past away
in boxes until the corners of rooms
crowd me
and speaks to me in loops of your language
that's liquid and lost in attention to
details that are about why
you become invisible
even in bed,
which is more like a mining camp
than the place where
dreams slip across the darkness
when we've stopped talking, when our eyes are closed,
when our breathing should be the same,
not a race to the sunrise.

Everything is inside out
and I'm stupid enough
to believe that the man in the tank
loves the world even as bombs go off
around the limits of our fences,

But now I love a room
with high ceilings,
empty corners,
rooms big to swing
a cat by the tail,
where my voice rises high
and loud and rings against
the pipes and then dies
away like notes plunked
from a fine-tuned piano,
I love the discovery shoes,
sober talk, doors without locks,
windows left open
with every racket of car alarm
and leaf blower
and weekend carpenter
speaking to me in sounds
that bustle
in phonics that flash a language
that words trail
like a dog after its master
where back yards yield to one another
like lovers wearing blindfolds in abandoned parks
horrified that they might
be passing each other as
both their reaches miss their
objects of desire
and both of them walk sightless in the other direction,
around corners
and into busy traffic
before one, and then the other
takes off the blindfolds
to discover that they are
in a different city
than where they started the day,
every one is in another part of
the map, fenced in with invisible lines
that is the borders armies
make whole populations extinct for,
the world
might learn to do something
with fences that run up and down the
avenues and right into the living rooms
so that the couches and beds have
politics in every position you assume
running from stress, I say,

unwind my string
and kiss me, please,
you are a moon I want to have orbit me,
I am a gravity you cannot deny,
you make my fences sway in
your bluster and flower print dresses,
I regret fences I set up the day
you left town,

the last thing to be seen
were you on the other side of the fence
getting into your red Volvo
just before you drove away
with my heart in your trunk.

Sunday, June 27, 2004

Public Affairs Broadcast



I was in the living room with the TV on C—Span that afternoon, waiting for the Furies to visit, when one fly, and then two landed on the rim of my glass of orange juice. This must be it, I thought. On the screen was another panel discussion by some dais of experts summarizing what they hadn’t found out after years of drawing substantial salaries. The flies skirted around the rim, stopping occasionally to inspect a shred of orange pulp that had been congealing for an hour since I last touched the glass, and then skirting around again. One fly took flight abruptly, performing miracle circles and dives through the depressed haze of cigarette smoke, while the other remained on the room, seemingly entranced by the pulp. I looked at the screen again and listened to a man at the podium who looked to be in his fifties drone on in a voice that was as lifeless and dry as chapped lips pressed against sand paper. Balding, his fringe flowing over his ears and the collar of black shirt, his face oval shaped, his suit an orchestration of wrinkles and color blindness, I had him pegged: a soft boiled egg after a thrift—store binge. I scratched my nuts and then my scalp, thinking that I ought to take shower, as the smoke was no longer covering the body odor but now mingled with it after the while, creating an ambience that was double the funk. One fly remained on the glass rim inspecting the texture of the orange pulp while the other one was gone all together. I lit another cigarette and listened to the TV.

“Well, “ said the speaker., who was sweating huge globules from his lips, “I was going to address to the problem that Rock Criticism is no~ facing in light of recent advances in digital technology and the emergence of non-white cultures in a main-stream genre which, ironically, was the creation of a vital American subculture. These, among other developments in international popular culture, poses some interesting problems for a generation of mostly white and middle-aged and male rock critics ~who, unless they get with the program, stand to become the next generation of reactionary commentators who, strangely, will relinquish their claim of progressivism and in turn become protectors of aesthetic standards that, in the long view, never in fact existed. BUT--”
The speaker looked up at the audience, stared straight in the C-Span camera, and gave a grin that was roaming all over his doughy, chinless face. He picked up the pages of his prepared talk and flung them in the air. One hand grabbed the podium while the other wrapped; around the microphone as though it were a gun. The pages fluttered downward around him.
“-—BUT--” he continued, his voice louder and animated now, nearly slurred as his syllabics went free—lance, “BUT.. . I’ve been in the hotel bar since I ‘ye checked in this morning to consider the talk, and damn that bartender Jorge has a heavy hand on the pour, and I gotta tell ya I managed to stack a perfect pyramid of shot glasses, and I considered this thing here called rock criticism, and I’m pretty goddamned fucked-~ right now, and so I have preface all coming comments by saying that this a pretty fucking lame way to make a living, the other people who’re gonna talk are buncha Lit. Crit. drop outs who get their insights from a dime bag and a bong rather than a knowledge of The Unities, and frankly I think it sucks that I’m an assistant professor at Buffalo, NY junior college where the average humanities student LeRoi Nieman is too abstract and that a 7 and 7 is a mans’ drink. Whatta bunch of limp dicks! You guys are a bunch of fuckheads because you’re paying an asshole like me to tell you something. Have a drink, you fools. Hah! But on with the topic. Let’s see, let’s talk about niggers...”
At this point, the camera cut to the other panel members, who were sitting along a long, battered folding table that was draped with a white, coffee stained table cloth, three white males in grey business suits, carefully cut long hair, and wire framed glasses. While two of them remained shocked and ducked under the table, the third arose and walked of f the stage. The camera remained on the man at the podium, who was waving his arms as though signaling planes to land. He had stepped away from the podium, and was screaming at the audience.
“IT’ S NOT THE SAME! WHERE DID ALL THE POETS GO? WHERE IS THE SHAME. YOU ARE ALL FOOLS. I 'M FUCKED.... “


I grabbed the remote control and after flying through the channels, came across one of those half-hour advertisements for a questionable product that’s pathetically disguised as a talk show. I turned the sound of f and pulled my harmonica from my back pocket, but became frustrated when the middle notes of my brilliant improvisation came out sounded flat and atonal, a spike in the ear. I buried the harmonica under the middle cushion of the couch, and decided to get out of the house. I pushed the cocktail table out of my way, upsetting the orange juice glass. The fly was gone, though. He didn’t want to hear about niggers either. I was standing in the middle of the room.
“Okay, I give up” I said.
Then I sat on the couch again, picked up the remote control and turned the sound back on and watched this guy and that guy and that woman (who I imagined seducing) all take turns at the microphone talking their share of nonsense for hours and hours and hours.



Wednesday, June 23, 2004

Lost in a Swirl

Chuck was lost in a swirl of his own thoughts just as Alice came up to him at the bus stop.

"What are you thinking" she asked, her voice a brassy rasp. She placed the plastic bag she'd been carrying on the bench where Chuck sat, where it met the warped and over- painted wood with a wet , crackling rush of air.

"Oh, ya startled me" said Chuck. He rubbed the back of his neck and looked up at Alice, squinting to see her face. If he still had the glasses that got run over by the city bus a month ago, he wouldn't have to strain his eyes to see the droops and sags in her face, the
lines that looked like ravines seen from planes on implausibly clear days. He could tell she was smiling. When she frowned her face seemed darker, more a smear or stain in a cloth than the cheery cloud she usually seemed in his blurry world.

"Whatcha thinking" she asked again.

"Thinking about going downtown and getting me a few bucks for a pint of blood and then
getting a room at the Sattler to get out of the cold, ya know? They're gonna tear that thing down and put some condos or offices or some such nonsense, and I thought it'd be nice to spend a night in a room with a roof and windows that close and all, for old times sake."

He fell quiet, and after some minutes Alice spoke up.

"Mind if I tag along?"

"Nah. Let's get going then."

Chuck stood up and pushed the shopping cart he'd filled with everything he had and both of them moved up the main street, mindful of traffic, quiet as shadows as they moved toward the high rises, the tall buildings just over there, the towers of commerce.