the journalist's lament

musing is amusing,
punctuated by regular
practices: meals, walks,
more rigorous exercise.
But writing is all momentum
flailing into the unforgiving
changing the destination
by the path I hack,
the streams I follow,
the peaks I glimpse.
All habit becomes a stutter
of impulse and the necessity
to sit in front of it and do it.
The rhythm now is measured backwards
from the infanticide of deadline.
So meals lose their borders,
exercise is only exorcism
and the desk feeds needs
into the motherless maw
of words and their prison:
sentences.

The story

I am worried about the tomatoes.
Crisis licks his master's face.
Greed stoned wind
hollows her smile.
No memory

ensues. It's one
pitch after another.
The frozen trance.

The long day groans
flares of stubbornness.

The night seeds.

10/03

Of No Consequence

Usually the night fastens
onto my nerves, ushers me
into the whispers of waking dreams.
But not tonight.
My heart sinks in the acid
of wide awake despair.

The silence clicks like a clock.
Numbers and letters swirl
then stare in sharp final salute,
etched in joy, laughing
at the murderous irony.
My legs won't bear my weight
yet I am light, a thistly seed
blown by the wind
into the sea.
I am embarrassed
to still be alive.

9-01-03

Pittsburgh 1988

Pittsburgh, where your ancient anchormen are proud
of believing that nothing is new
Pittsburgh is working out your erotic life
while your parents are in the next room debating
how much to put in the collection basket
this Sunday while watching transsexuals solemnly
talk on Sally Jessie Raphael

Pittsburgh is a computerized scalpel wreathed
in the smoke of a million cigarettes

Pittsburgh even your rush hours are inferior,
people walk farther to catch a bus in New York
than some of your buses run between stops

Pittsburgh, that never met a quarterback it didn't hate
Pittsburgh, younger than springtime and older
than Miami Beach
Pittsburgh is the accountant who spills his soul
to the knarled waitress at the Gateway lunch counter
and when his wife asks him what's new
he says nothing

Pittsburgh where your artists look forward
to your stunned silence as a sign of approval
Pittsburgh where the worst curse is, "That's differnt."

Pittsburgh with the loudest voices and the least to say
Pittsburgh the last city in the civilized world
where the biggest drug problem is your young addicted
to chewing tobacco

Pittsburgh so sure you're no good
that you can't let anyone criticize you
Pittsburgh your dumb people are proud of it
and your smart people are paralyzed with their
feelings of inferiority
Pittsburgh where intelligence
is the sin of pride
and self-pity
is the pride of the city

Pittsburgh is the beauty of the Iron and Glass
Bank building on Carson Street, still standing
because there was no reason to
tear it down
Pittsburgh is staggering out of a neighborhood bar
and seeing the downtown skyline above
the roof of the five and ten
Pittsburgh is the beauty of the hills, savage
and soft, that nobody knows how
to talk about

Pittsburgh too honest to lie to job interviewers
like you're supposed to
Pittsburgh you didn't want your children
to study art and now your mills
are going to be museums, detached
aesthetics of a lost civilization
and its unconscious beauty

Pittsburgh with not enough middle class blacks
to support an NBA franchise
Pittsburgh no longer worth being on the hit list
for Russian missiles, so even after the apocalypse
you will still be the most livable city

Pittsburgh do you have kids just so you can
scream at them,
recapitulating your own denied pain
and killing them loudly
with your ugly song

Pittsburgh, afraid of your feelings and
justifiably so
Pittsburgh, is there light
at the end of your tunnels?
Pittsburgh, what's that signpost up ahead?
Pittsburgh, hiding from time in your shopping malls
Pittsburgh is the deer hunter who shoots
a drunken driver when he mistakes a Subaru
for a five point buck
Pittsburgh your innocence is infuriating
and the reason we need you
Pittsburgh where masculinity means
you have to hate cats
Pittsbugh your women spend thousands of dollars
on clothes and cosmetics, hairstyling and jewelry,
then blow the whole effect
with a nickel piece of chewing gum

Pittsburgh we are all frightened and so
we are all you
Pittsburgh so confused now but that's all right
-you were not so wonderful as you thought you were

Pittsburgh, peaceful city, human city, let's build
on the basics
instead of just going back to them
Pittsburgh is a Lifeflite helicopter to a hospital
which will refuse to treat you because you have no insurance
Pittsburgh, world center for ugly white people, how long
has this convention been going on?
Pittsburgh is umbrellas with long fingernails,
and buffalo with wings
Pittsburgh, born under the sign of
If You're So Smart How Come
You Ain't Rich?
Pittsburgh slow to change,
but slow to turn on you.

devotions

The knot of attention is undone
by rampant sleeplessness
The curve of intent is fiddled
with, gone loopy, swooping
colors bounding and
bouncing off the sidewalk.
the chatter no longer crisp
as a self-evident smile
but dolloped in crustaceous wisps
knocking against my sidewalk table.

When does the beauty start, I wonder.
Can't waste this sunny afternoon
stolen from the IRS and other
landlords of my life. When does this day
get designed? can't we have
a deco border, a nouveau curlicue
edging through the high haze
and bus noise?

Just these radio station t-shirts,
old folks ambling in canary
and fuchsia sports coordinates,
junior high girls tanning
their winter white knees,
Doctors with their ties,
nurses with their grievances.

Shoe Inn, Foto Hut, Drawers,
Elegant Styles, Footers.
Babies dripping ice cream, cars
coughing poison, birds
on the captive trees.

At last a florescent green drink
bubbling on another table.
But it's not enough.
This day refuses to be defined
beyond the worn ordinariness,
the haze floating between the sun
and the leggy sidewalk,
the concrete amnesia.

1993

sovereigns

The wobble of time
as it speeds woefully
unaware of disappearing

into nightloads of dreams
the heavy lifting of sleep
and the squeaks of inconsequence
under the sun

I discover
a sovereign patience
saddle and bridle
on the flourishing porch

liquid invisible
as the pale colors flow
together, the sovereign fragrance
blankets
what I leave behind.

4/16/03

Notes

a good deal of comedy in the slide trombone's
transit through dense armpits of light
gradient stars, flashing like lemons
chortling down the steep cobblestone streets
of all seven volcanic hills

we left the church together.
you had no panic in your eyes-
I wondered why, but dismissed my doubts
and accompanied you for your year of shopping.

That was our first/last tour of Europe
strained as violin strings over pizza-like smiles,
we flew on boats, on beds, on planes
learning no new languages yet.
I bought a hat.

Now, seven years after
our last/first tour of Europe
I remember your grin
and your hungers.
what a greedy girl you were

and what a guilty boy was I
to have loved that moment
away from you and your amateur friends
bathed in the dream of my twilight
outside the restaurant, musical re-enactment
of a perfect cliché, brass echoing heroic light
of dusk, woman
with accordion,
not my heart,
a musical instrument.

12/1988

I dreamt that on the day I was to die
I was in South America,
passing a new subway kiosk,
where an agent of the government,
known to rule by fear and terror,
but trying to attract tourists
claimed patrons could get a trolley
all the way to New York City.

I strode by bravely, wearing a new white hat
but carrying its brim. I stopped
at an expensive and sinister café
and stood in line for chocolate
and Don Pedro brandy
but in the end did not buy.

On the sundrenched steps of the bookstore
next door, I read the house copy of Lorca.
The steps were crowded with men.
I was laughing as I read.
An old man, the owner, sat next to me.
Don't I know you? he asked.
I don't think so, I said. I was only here
a few times, many years ago when I was young
and thought I was a poet.
Were you? he asked.
No, I said. I was just a boy
undone by words.

6/25/03

Ears

The ears of hair roots in 1964.
The exhumed left ear of Van Gogh interviewed by the right.
he ears of the Bachinale, of Love Me Tender
at the drive-in at two a.m.
The ears of oil, listening in the Gulf of Tonkin.
The ears of Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Kim Agnew.
The ears of Mt. Tamalpais
cocked towards the Himalayas.
The various ears of God, if any.

The ears of slander and deceit.
The ears of elastic, bending time into the tentative image of sound.
The ears of "Scoop," the official magazine of Brighams Ice Cream,
a subsidiary of the Jewel Tea Company.
The ears of a boiled pitchpipe. The ears of solipsism and
the ears of repetition.
The ear of the sky blown by the nose of the wind.

The ear of Picasso's fingers.
The ears of John the Baptist, Percival Goodman, Edmund Carpenter.
The ears of Mary Magdalen and Jacqueline Kennedy.
The catastrophic ears of A.T. & T.
The sighing ears of the president's commission on anything.
The ears of clocks.

The ears of Tanganyika.
The ear of the first anti-pollution valve planned for obsolescence.
The circumspect ears of beer cans filled with kool aid for a
movie made for television.
My lost third ear.

The burning ears of Mamie Eisenhower and General Westmoreland.
The ears of the caves that Paul Klee remembered.
The ears of oars, ores and ors, or either ear of each.
The ears of games. I imagine one of them is always bored.
The bored ears of Shakespeare's ghost.
The coy ear of the lame waterboy. The left ear's unqualified
opinion of the right.
The taxidermist's favorite teddybear's ear.
The light bulb's sneaky ear.
The first ear to demand an earlid.

A brick's ear in Galesburg, Illinois.
The ear for tragedy which must be returned
before it's too late.
The opaque ear of dawn. The insidious ear of draft boards.
The Cornish cartoonist's inky ear.

The round yellow ears of the meadow.
The thin black ear of the desert night.
The ears of a unicorn.
A photograph of Gregor Samsa's ears the night before.
Arthur Godfrey's freeze-dried ears.

The sad ears of the Appalachians. A fragment of Lake Erie's
ear is among her relics.
The protruding ears of archangels (This is how they are
identified in their earthly forms.)
The ear of the pig we refuse to do anything in.

The ear of the sea listening to the moon.
The astronaut's ear listening to himself on the radio.
The impregnable ear of money.
The ears of Viet Cong, a million dollar bounty for each set.

The temptations of warm ears on summer nights.
The sophomore's overstated ears.
The deaf ears of law and order.
The progressively insane ears of adaptation.
The ears of the exorcist.
My father's ears, deaf to mine.
My dream's ear, carefully watching my grandparents'
abandoned house.
The ears of energy. Look at them.
The ears of breasts listening for DDT. The ear of the Pill.
The ears of forests and closets and locations of other
sounds disputed by empiricists.

Midnight's trembling ear.
The ear once painted by Salvador Dali, still dripping and
still listening.
Going deaf are the ears of kids who listen to loud rock but
are mercifully unaffected by the decibels of city traffic, diesel trucks, bulldozers, teachers and jet planes.
The moronic ears of the sane.
The ears of onions clutching the earth.
My camera's ear when it has no film.
The candle's ear when the lights are on.
The parrot's ear when its learned all the words it wants to.
The ears of fossil bubblegum as it is unearthed by the first farmer
of the sixty-first century.
The ears of secretaries knees at noon, near the fountain
in Mellon Square, Pittsburgh.
The ears of red shifted quasars.
The ears of holographs.
The compulsive ears of earthquakes.
The dark ears of managers. The split ears of bishops.
The ears Beethoven would not trade for his eyes.
The positive ear of the south pole. The negative ear of the north.

The inundated ears of stomachs subjected to our incredible
American crud.
The dumb old ear. The happy new ear.
The watchful ears of porpoises.
The inscrutable ears of cockroaches.
The taxed ears.
The ears in the boardroom of American Motors when George
Romney first said, "Chevrolet."
The penultimate ear of James Joyce.
The ears of science fiction writers.
The ears of talk shows as they go to sleep.
The ears of beaches twisted with the sun's broken sidecar.
The bleeding ears of the moon.
The aching ears of subway pornographers.
The ears of trees.
The wise ears of urinals.

The ears of repossessed cars.
The ear of the national debt.
The city's inarticulate ear.
The Indian's ear, next to the earth's ear.
My lover's ear, who also speaks to me.

(1969-70)

moral clarity

warm sun, an unseen woman hums
the green plaza enacts the arcane
word: mellow

streets in America are reduced to thoughts
ears are pinned back like samovars
reefed moments oblige us to cringe
we’ve eaten all the candy
dust is settling

every summer the explosions come back
alighting on the forked spasm of foam
the rhythm of the silence waits
for this purple storm to pass
will that be us, or just our worst invention:
the idea of kings.

6/10/03

Before the Tree

When talent breaks its last rewarded string
and grace released its furtive song
all the bells in tandem then will ring
and sandwiches revive us.
Onward, moth of ages!
ordinary plates
relinquish vertiginous portals
for the leaf is not to be
and the dream is on its knee
before the tree.

Here in the garden of undeclared saints
there are limits on the brooks you can withdraw.
As fast as reason eats the valley's sun,
our day is done.
The garden smells of paint.
No windows grow upon the thorny fruit
and shoots of lemon colored uniforms
drape over arbors of lost rumors.
There is no edge to it.
We hear voices when there's no one there.

Head crowned with solitude
seeing far, roots far below
entangled with the huddled distant others,
nourishing the accidental and unseen.
Who knows if your heart is joyous or bitter
or your gaze more intent than rambled
flooded inward or released to be born
of colored air?
We hear only a rhythmic converse
with the teeming wind.

When windows creep upon the failed fedora
and angels black the weary Diaspora
the fantasies collide us.
Inward, sudden thunder's beacon
cavity of mire
unleash the fluted planet
for the best is not to be
the irredentist forest flees
before the tree.

[irredentist: one who advocates the recovery of territory culturally or historically related to one's nation but now subject to a foreign govt. From Italian for "unredeemed".]

Oct/Nov 1998

tasked

your task eludes your grasp
and your return is uncalled for
your failures nip your heels
climb on your back, you think
no one can see them riding
but somehow they do.

easy as the imagination finds
you lose
and the grasp cannot connect
with the tempest in your shoes

this least of all is true
that the renewal is uncalled for
no, the grasp is meant to be
the first reason you try
to complete the evidence of the street

1998

Greetings
Instability is a crushing boor
except on certain Sundays
when the feet of nations walk blindly
in the mire of consequence, why
are we surprised when those supposed
entities, parties, forces, all the choirs
of power persist in doing what they know
we know is destroying them--it's the urchin
revolt writ large, bannered across the sky
o'er the squalling pit of composure.

I send you greetings, earthlings,
pitiable creatures who cannot even see
into the infrared or ultraviolet,
who no longer sense your own planet's
meridians of forces, who are blind at night
and cannot connect your inner worlds
with your perceptions of the outers.
You wonder that I speak English--we
have been monitoring your Star Trek--imagine
our surprise to find many alien languages
whispered in dark barrooms at the edges
of jungles and slums. We are still puzzled
by what you mumble about in churches
and the braying of your electronics hurts
our 33 1/3 ears. Nonetheless
the concubines of conscience inhibit
the pleadings of the grass.

We now return control of your set
game match, your conjunctions and
disturbances, your permutations and
inconveniences, to you,
who did not miss them.
This is what we wanted to know.
We will have no further contact
with your gray minds, your buzzing
fingers, dead skin.
Please arrange for our souvenir parkas,
Renoirs, partitas, late quartets
and ball point pens to be sent
to this address. Didn't you know
that you are a living time capsule
buried in this abandoned neighborhood?
Turn on your TV, and
think about it.

1/30/99

caught

what good is this man
with no mother
and no son
no father, no daughter
no grandchildren
left adrift
by the gods
and goddesses

caught
in an eddy
the old adventurer
working the sails
in a world without wind

will fate arrive
on a silver plate
or a wooden slab
a granite box
a cold blank stare
a flashing nightmare
a long starving fade

or will there yet arise
just wind enough
for one more
voyage--be
ready

5/03

endless

Endless young women in tee shirts with cigarettes
tiny breast and bright face
EYES of quick challenge-YOU:
the world of forms
to her, a representation---
a body, maybe;
endless young challenges in young eyes with tee shirts

thin arms, thin hair
leafed on sunned skin
challenge the BEAST
with a billion tendrils, a
million arms and eyes
and faces
to settle her challenge
in one poor weak man
who functions...

Endless young functions in bright cigarettes
with leafy wives
clinging to the sides of
the world of illusion---
to her, a representation,
a body, maybe
endless young beasts in tiny breasts with
a thousand hairy tendrils
and eyes
and faces.

and if not with
this precision
the form is
as probable---the
many of the endless young girls
will slide from
insolence to certainty
settle perhaps forever holding
fashions of tee shirts
before eyes
and representations
of faces, maybe.

1971

Thunder and Lightning

The collapse of all visions
the air forced out of the storm
like thunder ignored, accommodated,
having long been explained
that the sky does not fall
fall
we've fallen
into this balanced step

uneasy compromise with
paralyzing intuitions
of the eye and bone
the lightning bright flash
gone before there
and then the crash

now we recognize without
seeing, reading the
shorthand of our familiar
landscapes, having lived here
so long. The flash
reminds, reassures, yet still
does not fully
illuminate.
We know everything
so we see nothing.

But the thunder is never quite
music
and the green edge of pain
is still the flesh of the whirling trees


5/1988

The Ancient Plaster Has Wise Cracks


Truth has high ceilings
though reality roils
in the shivering dark.

Craniums carry
candles of pretense
but feet err
in bleeding shouts.

Faith is the dream
before morning
till light becomes invisible
in the panic noon.

Kind universe to trace
our jaunty brush strokes
though the crash of mystery
satirizes the lines.

Time has slender fingers
but clocks measure only
the folly of souls.


Pittsburgh 1996

Menu

He is the bland wolf
see him come,
garish pleas, greedy tongue
into the restaurant.
This is his greeting card adventure.
All around him voices munch
on stony ears.
Look what he devours.
He questions you: why
do you hug your guilt
like a stolen teddy bear,
like your mother?
Eat with me.
Enjoy.

The bland wolf
eating pie
faced with a mistake.
This greeting card adventure
has no bite. The worst is
probable. Evenings here,
voices munch on stony ears.

1/1990

The March

You don't have enough brass here
for a whole band, they told me
urging felonies from my eyes
spurning words that stealth
inflicts, upon the marble
wounds. Freezing
he pleaded with the vanguard
but the mask that washes the night
went on spinning. Ballast
was denied again. No bond
of flash could echo the dyne
as we frayed, bleeding into flames.
I carried the region on my neck.
Our flowing feet made the standard music.

2000

On the Beach

On the beach you see
the beauty of broken things
worls
weathered form

the water runs in
the light runs out
while the small birds
follow

each tide wipes
sand hard and clear
brings new pieces

I finger the big
shell and the dry wood
birds head beak

and say to the sea
take me
take my heart

7-9-97

where to be/impressions of protest

When I talk about the war
I look for the answers
in the faces of young women.

I recount my memories of demonstrations
in blades of grass.

I stared at the yellow bricks
listened to the sounds of the woman showering
and voices in the smoky distance
talking war and antiwar.

I awakened in a field
of clock radios--
Mother of Exiles,
blood must make you kind.

I will hide.

1968

Night people

I figure the first poets
were night people
who entered the world in darkness
their day forever night

and so while others slept
they kept watch
against the rustle and glint
before it exploded
as roaring teeth
and they stayed alert to the
insidious slitherers
threatening sleep-stilled skin.

In their firelicked solitude they had sharp
thoughts.
As the cold early morning drifted in
they dreampt awake
and in the slow explosion of dawn
poems were born.

If they were singers
they had to sing to themselves
as the others slept.
They were hunters
who searched in the dark
for images.

In the light
as the others prepared to hunt
and gather
they were given to warm sunlit sleep.
Later, they would hear stories
of the day.

undated early 90s

Realms of Speed

Urgent as the close wall
odd in the ruined rain
we marched, greeted, sang
loved by clocks
arguing dreams, unfurling.

Hot sand of
burned light,
waves galloping and collapsing
their death shouts
the ragged rhythm of that place

but not these, honk honk.
Adapt, respond, be always
and everywhere
appropriate.

Give us not the drag of passion,
the sodden slowing tears,
the porous mud of rumination,
the obstacle of principle.
Beep beep. This kingdom
is a riot, where every agenda's
a king.

undated 90s

Roots

I put down my graceful roots
in the secretly famished land
where attendants eat my ear
and the sky has holes.

Invisible warning of green sucked
into blank fury
and tumbling blackness forever--
the black-hot eternity of hell

no one will speak well there
or battle back with colored clay,
checked ribbons and tablecloths,
wine with dinner.

In this universe of freely enterprising
explosions and hurtling fire
we are the ridiculous.

6/1986

It's the time

It's the time of
revision.
Yes, it is
at hand.

Your whole life,
what a phrase.
As wide as the earth
for anyone.

No dreams
of destruction destroy
the visions roundly noted.
Fragments of salvation,
literally.

It's the time
of revision, yes
it is at hand


7/1986

The Past

The past is a recessive gene
a hunk of algae in your head
that keeps dirtying up the pool of your life

The past is left-handed

The past has an eating disorder.
It eats disorder.
Several orders of disorder
at one sitting.

The past is the suit you got
without a fitting.

The past is a freight train at night
roaring through your temples.
The church bells of your past are ringing
for you and your various gals
and sundry mornings of reverence for
loveliness and confusion.

The past is a cataract
in the eye of the truth,
an emotional chip
on your front tooth.

The past is a limited toy
the fire engine of accomplishment
that's two inches high and breaks
it's plastic

The past is an iridescent dye
or the way your eye
looks to other people


If the present is names you can't remember
and faces you can't forget
the past is the opposite of that.

The past is a clean sweep
an onion eater
a world beater
a mad platter
on the lazy susan of your soul

The past exists to
give nostalgia
something to think about
to give art the life
of the artist's death
so the present can catch up
to the dubious future

the past is a cat in the hat
of Abraham Lincoln
Hitler's moustache
bleeding into Groucho's

the past masquerades as a series
of clichés
under the costume gleams the dagger!
you laugh, but the blade is sharp.
fortunately, the present
is an anesthetic.

The past is an aphrodisiac
you take the morning after.

1989

which it is

we come from these blessings, crashing to the floor.
As obvious as pinwheels with that extra rush of taxes.
Idiots revolt in the spark; the tree veers into the lapse
And we're aggregated to the aggrieved, according to
Portents in my sandwich spread. I've been standing here
On this virgin log for a quarter of the buzzard's lifetime
Eating forgiveness like it's going out of style which it is.
The worst thing the nuns did was give humility a bad name.
Earnings are down so you don't count. Arrivals bleed
Into departure faces, and franchise fortunes
Blot out the sun. Evenness is unevenly apportioned.
Light bounds over the pickup truck. Astonished stains
Collide in fragrant number. She's been here an hour already
And there's nothing to tell her. The stars with their gold backpacks
Are straining against the sky.


4/01

Unmanifesto

here I go again with one more
stubborn mumble, the endless
song of myself sung to
myself. The difference

between this cloaked dance
and mental illness is
finally no more than the actualization
of publication, or not.

Rubbing up against the air
the voices congeal in the shimmer of wood smoke
so quaint elsewhere, but here as common
as these ants crawling across offended
consciousness, eating attention and mood.

Fragrances die in the exhausted sinuses
that no long bother sounding any stuffy alarms
but just cope in disconsolate silence.

And so the sun, the forgotten soft air
and twenty minutes until the Lakers game.
I blame Paul Newman and his daughter
for making these infernal oreos,
crunchy chocolate, sweet whiteness
that I consume in guilt and anger at my
powerlessness. Simple projection, of course,
though fattening nonetheless.

Yes I remember
when every verse I committed was a manifesto,
a festival of manifesting, a manliness
of making and shouting. Now
my pen is inscribed with multicolored
repetitions of my dentist's name.
These lines may still be my revolt
against cringing, yet evidence also

of failed contact with the world
I used to announce I would renew.
I spin in the circle of blizzarding,
extracting abstractions from the din
in the pale effort to cope. Cope means

enough peace to last as long as a breath.
Crisis ensues, CNN will sing it into
inconsequence, we will all feel bored
and better. Trouble is spectacle,
other people are too real to see,
they're better on TV.
Canada Dry Ginger Ale.

I sing the body pathetic,
the fallacy of leaves.

2-26-02