The Slip

The intent of your poem is oppressive.
It urges flowering
in a psychotic framework.
The moon symbol clashes with the accordion
in the third line. Isn't the punch in the second stanza
a little too
on the nose?

You have no idea how many
poems about ectomorphs
crawl across my desk like panicking
corn flakes. Due to time constraints
we skip ahead in your life
to the inevitable failure.
Let us cavort
and entwine you at 90%
off the cover price.
Call this sour lemonade
but if Clint Eastwood gets
interested, we'll talk.

The window I used to have
is fogged with ignorant breath.
The day is muffled, the
night quivers and darts.
I haven't eaten since the last
time. Still, I'm taller than
you again.

3/2009

These Severed Words

These severed words
snapped by distinction

leak into whispers
of plaintive mist

revolving like a kettle
on the rim of emotion

where dreams bear grudges
and winds sweep clean

the vision of the deep
enclosure

the foreign blaze

2/09

Swirl

There she is in the darkness, slim legs
against the sea. I can't believe it
as I move quickly towards her,
a cold jolt reminds me it is impossible.
If this moment ever existed, it is past.
What was missed, is missed.
It's all mist now, swirling through dreams.
The day's measure of breath,
the forehead of the world feverish with time,
the diffident wait for the last chuckling
off of this mortal failure.
It's rain on the roof
splashing the morning.

3/09

This dream

Monumental grass,
placecards of wonder--
retreat in the vacuum
of snow
retreat
in the flavor of night

retreat in the style of shining retreat
in the stillness
of sudden sound

the mist leaking on the glowing
brick, the monumental grass

the murmurs of autumn
the whirling muscles of night

greet the new flame
with spangles of innocence
leave the ache behind

am I the last of my kind
who rode a trolley
who wore red wool,
who watched the lantern sway
until the chant began?

If the light smacking the air
spinning your mirror
were made of rooftops
and a questioning stare

behind the heaped bows,
the feathers would drip with inky blood

while feral adventurers sand the hull,
mumbling in neon.

Hammers bathe the dazed lobby
with scarred nerves.
If no one sleeps,
whose dream can this be?

I release you now
to your faint lesson
and the ranging rub

the words unheard
in the promised distance
and the waiting
to flower

the acts of night:
flamboyant silence
pretenses of hope
postscripts of yearning

bright darkness
vestigial song
last glance

5/27/07

Balloon Sandwich

I went over our conversation
with a fine-toothed gland.
It was a game of immovable stomachs.
I choose to remember the coffee
because a painting is the lie
that tells the truth.

Where are you now, my sweet
misunderstanding?
Standing in a vacuum cleaner
that moves from vacuum
to vacuum?

Why did we not grip that sandwich tighter
to give a little flavor
to the memory?
Why didn't we do it
again?

The quiet fills my head
like warm whispers ballooning.
Too bad I'm so
thin-skinned.

early 70s

Chiarscuro: The Days

The days succeed
as pulleys

carrying this
and that
across the fine
synaptic edge.

My skin is the fulcrum
of the sun and moon.
All day, in weariness,
I dodge the delicate missiles
not meant but meaning
to kill.

At night
my dreams
are massive retaliation.
They grow like mushrooms
on the bark of daylight.

I am sustained
by this ecology of dreams.
This other, this
daylight noise
is what I do

to launch my dreams like obsessive arrows
aimed at my destroyers:
those I hate
and those I love
alike.

1970s

The News

Institutional mayhem releases official fractures
unless the tide of forgiveness roguishly washes
through the light buried beneath
the fear of the world.

Then we need no longer parse the noise
as if it meant something. We will be free
to sponge the graphic estimates with
uncontaminated mystery.

Maybe the answer is turquoise.

6/07

Bettina’s Sestina

Ease of the saint in bartering wisdom,
the truant forager sleeps till midnight.
I wire the Pope about Sunday in the trees
where time leaps furtively into the ocean
scraping scars of winter, as the blind turn to day
and frail snow earns each divinity’s displeasure.

We stacked the weak until around midnight
not wishing to clock our candidate’s displeasure.
Without further concentration we spit into the ocean
and the ocean spits back, sliding us into the trees
where we consider cocoanuts of wisdom
flooding lithesome frameworks once a day.

Bettina my love, give it a shove, share your displeasure
let it creak softly by night or by day.
You can’t get by with the wizard’s chronic wisdom
unless the curl is restored in the starved mote of midnight
and the ladder withdraws from its suit of the ocean.
You’ll be eating for weeks in the thumbs of trees.

There is no dancing here to illuminate the day.
The edges of protection fade into the ocean
masked by scattered canticles of displeasure.
Sorrow fails the clever wounded, suspicious of wisdom.
They laugh like darkness lost in trees.
They have not heard Bettina’s sob unfurl at midnight.

Salt flails, trying to attract the eager evidence of trees.
The fish wouldn’t miss the crease in its wisdom
though it’s fashionable now to spray doubts by day.
While we serve at the king’s last known displeasure
Bettina arrives in her carriage near midnight
tearing down the forbidden easement to the ocean.

Gravity’s onion is peeled back by the ocean
where Bettina leases the imaginary trees.
Caves of inconsequence fade into midnight
but the placating minions live to nod another day.
Bettina, marine dwellers urge their displeasure
upon the rocks of your woeful whim of wisdom.

We stand upon the waters of wobbling wisdom
only to screech the measure for measure of day.
Bettina clutches yearnings in the curl of the trees.

Selena Sestina

Her version leapt upon the region singing
while the students in the planetarium wept.
There is no legion crawling here at the last
to rescue my misgivings from my fate.
Her elbows grazed the fortunate heart
and solved the noose around my fantasy.

No one's window reaches first to last
or conjures long rows of sanctioned fantasy.
If all the average ruins in the city wept
they would twist the noose around my heart.
Regard this tangent whirling toward your fate
which I unleash with quiet singing.

Her wrist caught the light that her skin wept
upon the fleece of graduated fate.
Did the flaring diadem dim panicked fantasy
or does the stream of pleading last
beyond the grip of minor fishes singing
along the edge of her porous heart?

The loss of affable reason took to heart
the grievance of the random singing,
but she could not help but cough at fate
for blaring out the most envious fantasy
as morning planted streams that wept
to catch the sunlight free at last.

There is no cure for the grip of fantasy
that grabs and tears at my vagrant heart
with grinning fatal noose of singing
of her eyes closing upon the tone that wept
as I pound red-headed leather on the last
and throw myself back on the future of our fate.

What song has tied the noose around my fate
and kept this famished memory for last?
Not even mine, but stretched across the heart
of generations, foreign stanzas singing
beyond the reach of fables or learned fantasy.
Did you hear the antic pilot deny he wept?

Her version's shaking changing phases fate
as it phases me, lost in the breath after breath of singing,
not yet choked by the noose that time has wept.

This dream will not be televised

Monumental grass,
placecards of wonder--

retreat in the vacuum of snow
retreat in the flavor of night
retreat in the style of shining
retreat in the stillness
of sudden sound

I'm telling you she loves verbs!
She knows three adjectives!
She's so great the elevator
can't stop at her floor
only her ceiling

it's the leaking mist on the brick
glow, where the monumental grass
smiles, the circulation of living glass
hair of the mother, father,
lover, child, cat, enigma

we will flood the baskets of crust,
the murmurs of autumn
the whirling muscles of night

register now for the
pale undershirt of dawn
greet the new flame
with spangles of innocence

leave the ache behind in
your other throat

no promise too viral
no stone too placid
no finger too hidden
no better dampness anywhere

one more word
come on one
more word just
another

I am the last of my kind
who rode a trolley
who swore with real wool
and paint, who watched the lantern
swaw until the chant began.

No one can see what I
have seen as if they care
as if the light smacking the air
spinning your mirror
were made of rooftops

and a questioning stare
that never leaves
and never returns
and is never there
but is always present
above and behind

the heaped bows
of the performing ships
honking their way into history
of your heart, of your
earnest nouns

and the feathers drip
with inky blood
while feral adventurers
sand the hull, mumbling
in neon. Hammers
bathe the dazed lobby
with scarred nerves.
If no one sleeps, whose
dream can this be?

Victory

We have seen your visions of platonic sluts
gurgling in the backwash of victory.
Stables of ermine corrugated peaceniks
verging on plumes, nailed to freezing
clear rain. The evidence is
formulaic. Worship from urgency
sells books and flares blood
but reality frags its irritants, bulging
with flu-like symptoms.

I think the reason for this is
evident. It creeps through
the version of fatality you
urge on the unrequited.

Idiotic flame-throwers on sale
and belabored grills flopping
on the shore. There was
no prison so clocked
as your agenda for the banished fame
of our weary and sincere.

Now that you eat wet forms of
tribulation and spit out the former
fuming reliance on fortune,
yes, you can exact the pallor of your
resentments and call them deep
sparkles of destiny but

the clinging clanging dancing plate
inside the wobbly body
flips through the glare with its
own long yawn
regardless. Regard
is for us. This is
where you truly fail.

12/04

hastening, the obligations

hastening, the obligations
furl, furrow the pinky
of fair Minerva, bathed
in fright. Edge

of leers, pounding
smooth with repeating

the bones of her hand
fit in your hand

near now, the burping drip
and corona of fuzz,
as she returns in her abrupt
pale orbit, humbly
awaiting worship.

Slipping the mousetrap
of identity, reedy
wind, you remember
the ocean. The ocean!
Just in time.
She can't get you now.

near normal


oh let the candle
handle the last
details

your knees will lock
as you don doublet
and whistle---

each bleak step ferments
the reminder,
eggs
on the rivals to your

green flame,
bundled
like so many back aches
in tribute to fur,

we walked,
arched
by penniless softwoods
unable to buy their freedom.

Black waves cut
knotted fingerprints,
leaving
our normal amazement.

1/05

Until Leaves

I see the gripes coming like silver whistles
Battling the flickering mist
Gene pools of aggravations, placards
Of grand flame
Until leaves planet the floor of nothing.

We cry like gulls on tragic garbage piles
Irritants to the sky and wheels
Subservient to tears unshed
With raised fists of mourning
And grief in the shadowed step
Towards glass.

9-00

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