Nights are cold in the canyons

Nights are cold in the canyons

Cross your arms when speaking
of your wives and their telephone calls
in the night, on the back porch,
sobs and crickets carrying on through
until sunlight comes over the garage,

Bless yourself again
for having a family
whose eyes saw you falling?
and whose arms caught
you and laid you in a bed
until another morning
came and the sun emerged
from behind
night and morning low clouds,

Give a man a quarter
for what he needs to drink,
nights are cold in the canyons
where you lost flashlights
and pocket change,

Stop speaking of
former loves
and open every window
and listen to noise
that does not come
from inside your cranium
buzzing like electric shorts
in an old house at the end of
an ugly, washed out street,

Kneel when BB King
plays his guitar
or someone reads
a Frank O’Hara poem
about being stunned
because the lights have changed
and the whole city waits for him
to cross the street
and have his breath taken away,

Play your harmonica
until your lips start to bleed
at which time you’ll be ready
to kiss all the invisible gifts
that makes this life worth sticking around for.

Poetry as Stiff Drink

Somewhere in space, the tempest of intellection vs. emotion in contemporary poetry ensues, participants more passionate than habitual losers at downbeat racetracks. No one walks away happy from these discussions, of course. Although common sense, the proper place for one or the other of those qualities lies in the middle, with a dominant tone depending on what is being composed, matters get sidetracked to issues that leave aesthetics behind and land somewhere in the swamp of Deeply Held Personal Beliefs. The outcome from that kind of morass, in the extreme, are crusades, jihads, and obsession with celebrity murder trials. Barry Goldensohn's poem "Reading Faust When Young" hasn't calmed me down, in any case. Sometimes it's harder to stay in the center of a discussion than on other occasions:

  Reading Faust When Young for David Mamet I remembers only the leap from the bridge into the turbulent river after knowledge, but not what special knowledge or what power ever came his way in the old story. I was young when I read it. Immortality meant art, and Faustus was never an artist. And as for girls, you didn't need the devil when you offered everything. What did he really need to know? What did she feel and could never say about the girl because she had no words for it? He had little to say to the Greats. Helen was a peep-show. And the stuff about his soul— well, that was religious and historical. Overreaching for me was natural. I wanted to know everything, to stay forever in school taking courses. God and the devil never figured in. With his snaky tail, the devil was too fanciful to explain the lines waiting for gas or a bullet and ditch and firebombs and carpet bombs and the icy rapture of ideologues shouting about who to kill and who to save. My fellow humans were real: their evil was sufficient. The sacred was love and art and the political dream. The world-drunk heart was what I took for the soul, which dulled the edge of Faustus' sacrifice, and god was never real enough to love or lose. ©2003 Barry Goldensohn

 All told, this is not a bad bit of remembering, though it seems a fanciful evocation of some delayed connecting of points whose effect, I think, ought to have less earth-shaking patios. There's a lot of throat-clearing harrummmmmphing going on in the lines as I read them where a slighter, more minuscule rhetoric could have prevailed. There's something to be said for distanced irony, the now-I-get-it school, but since the instances were fleeting, minor, gradients of perception building to a larger, if not earth riving sharpness, a voiceless swaggering in its couched self-loathing would fit the material better. It would seem a better idea if Goldensohn hadn't mentioned Faust or Jung at all but in the title, and instead placed us smack dab in the action of his past thinking, the incidents as he vividly recalls doing them in his earnest, youthful practice of applying his hormone-fused enthusiasms upon his world. The mention of the big names and their ideas, though nicely arranged and phrased, are too precious for me to take this as anything more than an occasional poem that would normally find its way to the bottom of a drawer: it fairly gloats with its knowingness, and the author sounds too close to thinking that his eventual lesson learned is something to glory in. 

Look at me. I am wrong on a higher plane. The piece is overloaded with references and glancing mentions of religion and myth; the poet's voice aside, this poem reads like an abstract of a freshman's ill-crafted term paper. One may ask Isn't a lyric poem supposed to be about emotion? Yes, a lyric poem is the verbal equivalent of a musical evocation of intense feeling that defies the logic of words to express adequately. Thus, the looping chains of association, the constant comparisons of unlike things, including the sounds of the words creating euphony. Intense emotion colors the entire world, cast in all engrossing tints. The world to the perceiver makes a certain kind of sense, though the sense eludes them more often than not; there is even an element of paranoia that can come to play here, as in the notion that everything in the world, be it people, places, things, institutions, weather, are all somehow connected to the internal transformation. The irony alone isn't an emotion, but because it has something to do with an individual's perception, whether the poem's speaker or the reader, it can become a key determining factor in how hot emotion might boil or cool off, whatever the case may be. Irony concerns the incongruity between what is said and what actually is the case. Since a lyric poem operates on the transcendent level where emotion bypasses logical argument in pursuit of impossible language, capturing the inexpressible conflicts, disjunctions, distortions, and contradictions between myth and fact, action and deed are likely to happen as default conditions. They will ratchet up the energy a lyric swoon requires. I do think that my own work and explications regarding verse aim toward a Dionysian expansion. Still, unlike a host of others before me who pursued that expansion into sheer incomprehensibility --Kerouac, late John Ashbery, Pound, Language poets who never stopped being enamored of their ability to type non-sequiturs--I think the image, lines, and music need to be reined in, operate within strictures, Jazz is hardly a formless expulsion sans melodic infrastructure, since the quality of the best sets of spontaneous composition requires suitable composed materials to contextualize the extrapolation; the form of the melody being extrapolated upon gives shape to the musician's improvisations. There's a point in the kind of poetry I find appealing and the poets I think do interesting work where they have to acknowledge something a real subject set in the material world, the physical world, and that there is a need to link the most fanciful forays and high-flying linguistic maneuvering to real emotion, producing something at the end resembling whatever effect the writer thinks he's working for. It's a dialectical process, for want of another term, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Simply because something is transcendent about existence does not imply that it is illogical or incomprehensible. Exactly. I think there are many instances, occasions, events, emotions, all sorts of confounding affairs that are absolute without meaning as we understand based on the equation of binary oppositions, i.e., something that is not this must therefore be that. 

Still, I believe that there are ways of understanding that instances require an acute use of intuition and instinct.I am not opposed to intellection coming into works of emotional duration, but something needs to connect with the reader as a felt experience. Otherwise, it's a waste of time reading a work composed solely for the novelty of showing off what one remembers from undergraduate survey classes. don't mind, and even encourage a poet to intellectualize as they write their lines, but the issue is about proportions and ratio. Goldensohn's intellection is strained for the amount of memory he's actually working on; the epiphany is too slight for the evocation of top-heavy names like Faust. Faust, of course, could have been used effectively as a reference serving a satisfying conclusion, but the hand is heavy here when the name and its cache is played. Irony trumps everything, as the saying goes, but it can also kill everything that's going on in work, and the willingness to abstract compulsively here makes for a small work that is all over the map. It's an over-packed suitcase. 

 Stevens's strategies are better, in so far that his work is about the experience, at the moment, in the intelligence of a perceiver who is in witness to things that will not yield their essence in the metaphysical sense. Though not overtly emotional, Stevens crafts a supreme fiction he often spoke of to take the place of the secrets that are forever unknown, a dramatized system of perception that acknowledges the world as its own adequate symbol. Stevens was entering the world, and to have the world he experiences shape and forms his readings and writings; I think he wrote as a man who was in that legendary state of constant becoming. Goldensohn sounds lost at best, though I am sure he can write a decent poem. This isn't one of his better ones. Stevens believes in the adage that there ought to be "no ideas but in things..." (concisely phrased and explained by William Carlos Williams). Stevens, with compatriots Williams, Eliot, et al., were, in their varied ways, obsessed with making language a hard, malleable material no less than clay or steel, and they wanted to write and elaborate upon images that didn't obscure the fantastic qualities of the world their language was supposed to be writing about. Perception is a dominant concern for this generation of modernist poets. I believe Stevens followed the loose dictates brilliantly and developed a methodology of processing the world that could capture in it many of its amazing juxtapositions. What is amazing about Stevens' work is that he develops a philosophy of perceptual imagination from the world as it already is. 

 As for supreme fiction, well, it's Stevens' term, and it is a brilliant shorthand for his unique compositional practice. The work isn't about methodology and philosophy, it's about the world Stevens experiences as a human being and the ideas these experiences brought to him when he came to write about them.  Any good writer gets a set of ideas they work on throughout their careers as artists, and Stevens is no different. I don't call it blabbing, however, since I think his work grew deeper and more refined, and his voice became more refined and musical as he aged, all in the service of developing his subjects and the ideas they inspired. Eliot, Shakespeare, Whitman, Rilke, Goethe, O'Hara, Dickens; each developed a set of ideas they wrote about continuously, though hardly as a matter of adhering to some doctrine they were locked into. The result is work worth reading and digging into, though one makes allowances for individual preference.

Cooking pork chops yakking on the phone

There’s nothing for us here but
what the smoke leaves on the wallpaper
in the aftermath of the grease fire
that raged a minute too long,

All that remains of the fish tank
is broken glass and the pots
you through at it,

All I asked was whether you
borrowed a Penthouse
and lost it somewhere under
all that smelly laundry
that gets higher in the hallway,

You weren’t really hungry
is what you say now?
but I can already hear your stomach growling,

Remind me, please, to not
argue with you
about my porno and beer cans
when you’re cooking pork chops.
yakking on the phone,
tore up on speed.

Stellar Conditions

Stellar Conditions
Under west coast umbrellas
you rain on parades
that don't float your fleet
of boats whose hulls bulge
with your endlessly paired desires,
your presence lets the air of my tires
and calls my mother on the phone
to say that I've beena bad boy
with the lunch money
and the guest houseyonder back,
just beyond the golf course.

Why do I love you so much
that every day of
my fifty plus yearsis gone
like vapor escaping
a covered pot of boiling water,
my resume is shredded,
my works are undone,
every line in my faceand ache
in my bones means nothing
when I'm in the center of the street
or alone in the house
as you walk away,
a teen age boygassed
up on hormones
and jack rabbit guitar solos,
grinding my teethand yelling your name
from a hurt that
is deep and full
of colors turned inside out,

There are lines of menand womenup
and down each side of the main
street drenched from a constant rain,
ashen under lunar light
in the middle of the night when
all should be having dreams of their plans
for the next day's obligations,
but your negations change that,
fisher of men,
collector of women,seducer of secrets,
black scarab love,we glow under neon signs
for Budweiser and One Hour Photo,
muttering your nameas streetcars spark past on their rails,
we chant your nameas you open a magazinewhen the plane turns
over the ocean,we call your nameas
you order headphones for the in flight movie
that you'll watch under stellar conditionsas long as there is fuel
and credit cardsto cross the county line with.

A Fearful Tale

A Fearful Tale

Strange as the rain they didn’t predict I was there staring across the when the phone rang.
The phone was black as arrest warrant ink, a quality that was more ominous by the sound of the bell, which was shrill like the cry of man bobbing on the line where the sky meets the lake.
Mary turned her head from the mirror where she was watching herself undo a ribbon around her neck as I stood in the middle of the room, counting the rings with the tap of ay big left toe.
“Silly” she said, walking to the phone, two strands of ribbon blowing over her shoulder in what seemed like a wind, “your games amuse me, but really, someone might be trying to get through to us.”
She stopped just short of the n1.ght table the phone rested on and picked up the receiver from the cradle with an arch of the back and a swoop of the arm that seemed professional, very profess
The phone seemed to leap into her hand through attractions unspoken of in the city. though by some natural attraction, L paper clips soaring to the north and south poles of a horse—shoe magnet.
Mary said a few words, nodding, cradling the phone between her Mar and shoulder as she finished untying the knot around her neck.
The ribbon floated to the floor as Mary took the phone from her ear and pointed it my direction,
“It’s for you” she said, “it’s Andy
The walk across the room took along time.
“Hi Ted, this is Andy. I wanted to see if you’d gotten those poems I dropped off?”
His breathing was a gurgling, grating rustle of congestion and worse. The black holes of the receiver appeared to vibrate, pulse in time to his rasping. The receiver felt clammy felt clammy, and the wallpaper, which I hadn’t noticed before, was suddenly bright and screaming with reds, yellows, pinks, and punishes blacks. This was all wrong. My scalp felt as though my hairline had been stapled into position as a guard against a long and blustering wind from the desert.

“Well?” asked Andy, “Whattaya think of the poems”.
“Yer poetry sucks and yer mama dresses you funny, Andy…”
“I see…”
“Kerouac was a weenie and you gotta leave that shit alone”.
“Gotcha. What else?”
“You spell like a muthafuckah!”
“Oh yeah? Well, you suck”.
“Fair enough” I said, “Lunch tomorrow?”
“I’m there” said Andy, “My treat this time…”
“You’re on…”
“Fuck off. Later.”

And the phone went dead. And then the sun exploded.
In heaven I was seated on a café on a cloud over looking planet debris. Monkeys were at every table, tossing silver ware and plates across an endless expanse.

Waking up is hard to do

The depth of sleep
digs its nails into the wall
that separates you from
a planet that is awake
from the tallest peak to the
smallest crack in the concrete,
slumber pulls you deeper
into the lake where
nothing moves.

Waking up is hard to do.

You’re forever confused
about the change to leave
on the table after coffee,
and who’s smiling and why any
of it should matter.

There are so many time
I wanted to say
I love you ‘though
I didn’t sleep at all last night.

Lets just say that
the art of evasion
is the occasion to rise to
when the drinks get honest
and nothing else seemed to matter.

We shall find our places
and assume our positions
of surrender and on waking
shower and dress and comment
on the drive to work that
there seem to be more and more
mattresses tossed out of homes,
leaning against dumpsters
like working girls reclining
against streetlights and payphones.





1•

Talking about the weather

Talking about the weather

So little time left
in a day that's already done with
by the time the sun
rises in the East
over the warm water oceans,

Microphones and men
with expensive hair
scream into camera lenses
to where the world is dark again
and ready for strong drinks
and toasts to sorry bastards everywhere
they don't happen to be,
unless, of course,
the water in their drink
is brown from the tap
and reeks of limitless amounts
of DNA recombined and
recycled in every form fit
for a natural disaster,
it's then time to drop the drinks
and microphones and head for
high ground, the tops of buildings
that no longer seem so tall,

Bad news travels fast
with the best seats
on the plane
as cities full of lost citizens
ask their politicians
what just happened
when the storm clouds gathered
and squeezed out the light
that shone over the land,

Politicians scratching their
heads until their
fingernails are encrusted with
dandruff and blood
as they look up to the sky
with their mouths awed and gaping,
waiting for God to answer their
demands about
what just happened
all while it rains,
and they drown where they stand,
dumb as turkeys
around a rain barrel.

spin cycle

she was hours ahead of schedule
so she sat down while the clothes
did their spin cycle thing and in an instant
was in the backseat of a limousine
that moved up a long black avenue
to where the skyline became a spire
like hands pressed together in prayer
under lights of the night that makes the
windows of the soul fall sad expressions
down to where the holes in the street
are deep with where the rain
gathers in songs about closing time
as drinks stick to coasters on bars
burned with matches and gouged with
penknives where names are carved over names
called from payphones one checks
for returned coins as they walk with baskets
full of socks which she collects and mends
and sells between shifts at the Woolworths
where she stands at a register under a cardboard
poster of orphans with wide eyes who look as cute
as they starve themselves
to becomecreatures so beautifully
taut on their boney frame
that they cease to breathe
but now her watch beeps
just as a buzzer sounds
and clothes stop rotating
and all the dreaming stops
suddenly, suddenly,
hard like brakes
screaming in the distance
just as you drift into a sleep
that is now stolen from you.

Half the world has ceased to be

A Map of the World

Every piece of the puzzle
hasn’t found a fitting contour
eventually falls to the floor
as we make room for cups of coffee
and places to rest our elbows,

This map of the world has
holes in the cardboard ozone,
lakes where there should be
mountain ranges across the
severest edges of Asia,
gaping oceans of nothingness
where neither land nor sea
define the tides or the shape of
the wind blowing over flatlands
and highest peaks,

Quite a world, you would think,
coming into being without
all its parts present in the roll call,
and even the curved and islet shaved
bits finding peace as they are pressed
into place, forced to make nice
with border cuttings that make no sense
nor which force the wrong populations
into the same small area,

And even now things get worse
with desert, which comes on a tray
that’s set on the table, we make remove
our cups and saucers,
take away our magazines and ashtrays,
the tray is moved onto the table top,
and the puzzle moves forward, to the edge,
and by the time the first slice of pie is
served on a dish with small forks
wrapped daintily in thin paper napkins
half the puzzle goes over the table’s edge,
off into the brief outer space between
surface and floor, half the map of the world
has ceased to be,

Irregular bits of the former world
resting in dissociated shards
on the worn wooden floor,
and it’s not over yet,

Dear brother drops his
desert dish
and now
what used to be the
half of the planet
I dreamed about in a romance of travel
is completely, thoroughly
devastated
and covered in cake
and sticky, runny icing.

FORMERLY CONCERNED WITH HUNGR IN AMERICA

An outbreak of law and order,
cont'd on A-4, col. 3,
threatens livestock and poultry in
the middle of California,
precious things
wilting, withering,
dropping
     like
          zippers
on the cracked and caked floor of a
dead lake,
all without warning
as farmers, dry as basket straw,
wish they could muster a decent spit
for their cracked lips,
caked with
dried dust
hungry for water,
thirsty beyond repair.
mindless for a drink,
mindless as I am in front of this glass
on this table where
I sit
                                              STONED, daddy-Oh,
thinking that Muzak is the death of art and the reason to breathe or to go on eating
because it leeches the life from the simple chords
that made life
seem a chorus worth sitting through.

I 'm staring at the paper, the photographs and captions,
this
window to the world,
worried about cops at the end of the lunch counter feeding their faces with coffee and
cherry pie, I know they know something is horribly wrong with me,
they see me fight back insane
tears
for

all that dead cattle
that never made to
the bun.

The hills wash away

All of us
lucky sons of bitches
live on the hill tops
high over the fatal diseased
stew that the village has become,

And one of these days
it will stop raining,
the water will stop rising
and we'll be able to use
the roads down the hills again,

But in the mean time
we will gather our pots and pans
and not mourn over our terraces
that have collapsed with the onslaught
of water and wind
that howls and whistles through
loose joints in the wood.

New Orleans

New Orleans


Waters are black with
what this city used to be
before the levee broke
in those places,

And yet no sins are washed away
and every streetlight goes dark
as the lights go out in
the eyes of every face
staring up from the bottom of the pool,

Three coins in a fountain
and God blesses no one
who hasn’t a car with the gas
to drive to the high ground,

There’s nothing spicy
on the Latin menu,
this is not Holy Water
coming up the avenues
and rising to the pitch
of the wooden roofs,

It’s a jazz funeral,
it’s the worse
of all opening sentences,

It’s a little man
in a pilot’s costume
staring at the screen
wondering why every station
have the same pictures
of bodies floating
where a city used to be,
angry that his lips
are chapped from kissing
those photos of John Wayne.

radio waves

song is always
the saddest
when it reaches the
high note
on a chord
that is torture to try for,
bones ache
and the voice breaks,
the world shatters again
on the half hour
just before some smoky,
faceless voice
reads off the call letters
that lead up
to news at the top
and half past the hour,

it's a headline that
everyone knows
yet no one reads aloud,

"hearts broken at midnight",

"another boyfriend screams
at passing cars"

"girlfriends sob into sweaters
that defies weather on weeknights"

all the news as the
drums gallop forward
guitar solo cuts
through a room of
subdued colors
and rattles its separate notes
like jar full of bees
who can't wait 'til
they break free,


it's a song with s name
that has a buzz
no amount of drink
or smoke can whisk away
as if it were a stain
that would fade away
as the song fades out
on the endless
lapping choruses
on the rocks of
all expectation,

number one with a bullet
that makes each heart
that bleed into
every river of tears.

CAREER JERK

there is no one left to jump
this fence with not enough
upper body strength to
haul the boxesafter
I cut through the pad lock,all
that good shit just going southt
to people who have money,

so I got a real
job to rob,

I showed up in
my paper hatand a piece
under my shirt,said gimmee all that cashand

I was goneup the street
and around a corner and up againsome
flight of stairs to
a door at the end
of the flightwhere some clown
busted my actionabout sorry mofos
and traction winders,shit,
he grabbed my piece and my money
and popped me three times like a tattoo,
telegraph and the next thingI remember
was thinking here I goto
some dark monkey palacewhere there's
no money either.

House of Talk

There are many voices I have
for every moon rising on a mood
which splinters into issues about
the weather and everything under
the atmosphere of that's tense
as white knuckles grabbing
the edge of the kitchen counter,

I am fine and you are so lovely
in your gloves as you new that axe,
your eyes are the softest gaze I've
ever had laid upon me as you scan
my neck, imagining brilliant pencil
dashes that come to resemble
perforation marks, wear every tears
in your outstanding order of dead things,

You piss me off royal and it's all I can do
to stop my fist from flying with an intent
of it's own to make your chin meet knuckles
or have your head meet a boot heel,
all that remains of the sunset is blood red
and the flushed rage of a setting sun that
sets screaming mutely as it sets off to scorch
another side of the planet, it's a car I want
to steal and drive into western towns where
motels rest at the edge of the desert, whiskey
and cigarettes on the bed stand, a revolver
on the pillow, a full box of bullets,


I hope you forgive me and let me
go somewhere to die, just to don't hate
me as much you might be inclined to,
I want only the best in the name of the Savior
and interest rates are good, it was all for you
and yours, but I fucked up, I fucked up bad,
I am worthless as candy wrappers, gum
stuck to the light pole, you are happier without me
calling you up at three or four in the AM and hanging up before you could take a breath, don't
hate me, let leave, I'll find some place to die,


My mouth is dry and tired from
all this talking, and the earth turns
on it's celestial wires all the same
despite protests, the choruses of
denial and rants, the rooms of
this house are full of talk with every
personality saying a line affixed
to the walls, the dry wall, the electrical
lines that go out into the world,
I practice each tone, each attack
and apology, there are no mirrors
in the hallway, no glass in the windows,
wind blows amid hisses and whistles
through the cracks in the brick,
I am silent again, I am voiceless.

Cop Poem

Cop Poem

Police men have a way of
dividing the world in half
with every hour they walk
the beat or grind it as they drive,

It’s about who they will
or will not put in jail,

Whose nose is arched
like bridges spanning
skylines over grievous waters
or flat and elegant as a small  pocket
on streamlined suit,

It’s about where they can park
when there’s nothing but
trouble on the radio,
or where they have to
drive away from when
the street comes up short on
bricks that were there the day before
and ugliness was an old house
junkies live in and not
the crowd that gathers on the corners
and will not stop glaring
until the glares become sharp sticks,
iron pipes, broken bits,

It’s knowing where your backup is
and where the shortcuts  come out to

and just how far
a dollar will go
on Saturday night.

Snaking under the ri

Snaking under the river to Canada

there were three moons in the sky
in the middle of the day
when darkness fell before
pants did the same,

the world just seemed to spin
like a bicycle tire, spokes
blending in motion against
the racket made by a baseball card,
and I remember something like a smile
on my face as uncut grass and
candy bar wrappers caressed and
pelted my face,

sounds of boots walking over
gravel, coming up the drive way,
the flower bed in front of the porch
where Dad stood with his tie loosened,
hands in his pocket, laughing out loud,
Mom smoking cigarette after cigarette
until it killed her thirty years later,

the officer says
it was a party they raided
that was full of high school kids
drinking beer around the pool,
I was wrestling with a lawn chair
before collapsing
into a giggling puddle of useless water,

Dad keeps laughing
and Mom has a scotch
with her cigarette,
fretting on the porch
about the future and
every bottle I might open
until the end of days,

“give me a kiss” says Dad,
and they argue until
I fall back asleep on the couch,
sawing logs loud as air horns
in traffic tunnels snaking under
the river to Canada.

A City Was Magic in Black and White Magazines

In a hurry and half dumbwith love, he walks through an alley,scratching his scalp,and whistles another country's anthem
in an age when TV headlines have itthat the sky never stops falling,He stops, sings a stanza in French, "My Cherie Amour", and skips mightily passed all the rear entrances and trash bins Simon and Garfunkel would have waxed and waned about in a language that made the obvious things in the city oppressive with meaning secreted among the rheumy lines of grime and gunk,
he laughs, thinks bunk, I need her armsand a good meal with amazing bread,
bottled water, baskets full of cheese, and thensomeone screams in the city,
a woman on a corner screams for life and more money
from whatever carpassed on a wet street, the night was filled
with screams and the hiss of tires slithering up back streets
and alleys that used to be short cuts in another decade
when a city was magic in black and white magazines,
there are many hours until the sun comes rises over the river,
light rays poking between the suspension cables
of sleeping bridges,days to go before something falls from the sky again
with all the heaviness assembled weight can bring on the length of the streets,
minutes away one of our own leaving the coil
that binds us as another joins the chorus,
too young in the first moments to hold sheet music
or know what we're attached to in these blurs that
come alive from their darkness and approach him in the dark,
he sings on,too late,he's asked"Where you from, "and he singstoo loudly to heara metallic clickand a bark of large dogs,he was expecting everyone to join in the chorusbecause love is all that matterswhen everyone knows the words,but instead the nightblackens all at once,a curtain drops,every line is unhingedas doors would bein a fast, devastatingheat coming acrossa flat Nevada desert,a city of jewelsburns high on amountain top,there is onlylight to follow,cordless , stringless musicat the end of corridor filled witha very white light.

Gatorade don't do it

Someone has to be the one
breaking the bad news over old bread,
catching us when there’s one arm in the coat
and chewing stale toast.
Seldom do you expect that
the length of the shadow
following you might possibly
be only one of many such shrouds,
all with names and families,
black or grey streaks falling across
sidewalks and brick fences,
each taking turns keeping you in line,
waiting your turn, motherfucker.
It’s getting so bad
that we’ll take a meeting
behind bars and resolve
that this is the year
we will throw away.

She said go deep

She said to “go deep”
as she handed me a football
which I dropped then
while I wondered out loud
how and why these goal posts
were erected in our store
to which she said
that she refused to
take her work home
but it was simply wonderful
to bring home life to the job.
As usual, I shrugged
and answered the
phone in my best
late night
broadcast
voice
and found myself
speaking to
a woman who had a book
with a yellow cover
that reminded
her of the dress she wore
seven decades ago
on her first communion,
in the spring,
when flowers bloomed
and relatives started sneezing.
She paused and
then hung up the phone,
and as I put my end down
a kid from the neighborhood
was at the counter
asking me the price
of every book and
pencil in sight
in between segments from
his gasping saga
of buying a tombstone for an
uncle who once got funny with him
in a closet
two holidays ago.
the kid laughed nervously, fast,
breathless, as I said,
and ran out the door
onto the cracked, pricey sidewalk.
My coworker
was doing drum solos
with number 2 pencils
along the glass shelves
that displayed the
heaviest books in the store,
she smiled and riffed,
pinged, rim shot her
way out of a tight
rhythmic problem,
the phone rang again,
she tells me to
get that,
but I get nothing at all
except a headache,
looking up from the counter
after I pick up the receiver,
some middle aged guy
in an MC 5 t-shirt
holding a mounted moose head
over the cash register,
a long stretch of Bullwinkle
waiting to be kissed,
it’s all I can do
not to look up
from the small holes
in the receiver,
it’s still three hours till lunch.