3576. JOY BRAVURA

JOY BRAVURA

Bring forth that humble cloud once more, let's

have out with the madness forthcoming. (I am

holding the brace that is holding the fixture). It

is all I can do to stop from laughing.

-

Testimony and communication - my two

biggest fears. I want to hold you until midnight

or more. We did too much talking anyway.

-

There are various things I really do not need; can

pack light. I do not need : sheets, shampoo, candy,

any kind of snacks, I eat so little. Most of my

manifestations take place right within my head.

I can be, really, no bother at all.

3575. OH SAIL AND TACK

OH SAIL AND TACK

Right here where a New York ferry

docks I am standing apart and alone.

There is a fiery cheer coming off the

water, and people are talking of the 

past - something which is no more.

I would object and say that past is

so much with us, but no one here

would listen. For these are kin, the

efficient kin, of a modern day, one

I will not be part of : wired, connected,

in touch with themselves and each other,

in a world of ether connections. They

live in a magic they know nothing of.

-

I look up and see an ancient day - a

wavering smoke drifting up from the

tar and creosote wooden pilings creaking

in the water with age. Dragons sluice

through the mud, and old men, bent and

tired, try drinking spirits through their

wrinkled and calloused cupped hands.

-

Saint Valentine's Day with a torch.

Saint Patrick's Day with a sword  -

lethal moments of lethal time. The

big white boat is docking. The girl

with the pearlescent earrings and

deep blue coat says : 'I have two

of them. I bought a matching set.'

3574. GRAND CARPATHIAN GAMES

GRAND CARPATHIAN GAMES

Why do we have all that  -  love and wishes,

messages from God and scripture made

necessary by doctrine, words and rules made

to enforce belief? And people still fight over

this like yesterday was still today. God didn't

say this, God said that. No, God didn't really

say anything at all. There's no sense in a sleight

of hand that tricks the bushes from the ground, the

flowers from their blossoms, that which is continued

from its proper ending. Like so many others, I just

want to live forever. Got a God for that?

-

Cauldron and Madame Bo-Peep, together they sit

at the waterfront, watching colliding boats drift past,

hearing the sounds of surety, and knowing that

nowhere is anything really ever made to last.

3573. ON THE SEMBLANCE OF THE MAD HATTER

ON THE SEMBLANCE

OF THE MAD HATTER

It wasn't baseball or even the shtick of the hobbyist -

fake comedian trying to tell jokes, modest monster

trying to scare kids. More it was merely a stand-up

situation of trading off space for situation : a lady in

the field with flowers, some young kid doing jumps on

a yellow bicycle, a schoolyard nun chasing down a

runaway softball. Everything looks funny in retrospect.

-

Outside, on the streetway macadam, a slow-crawling

police car rolled by, the cop within it intent on reading

a dashboard computer screen instead of looking around.

The local garbage truck, roaringly loud, hustles blue

plastic containers off the curbs. More cars and a dumptruck

rumble by, saddled with grime and dirt and people inside.

I feel like sleeping it off but there's nothing to sleep off.

-

Music jangles the nerves  -  some stupid kids bouncing

around outside the local gym, thrashing and bopping

to earbud music evidently shared. Idiot's delight, and

all the rest. A seventeen-year old, I'm watching, sneaks

a purloined cigarette to his feeble mouth, barely sure of

how to light the thing he's holding. A girl he's with, hair

streaked with vibrant blue, doesn't know to watch the

curb for others or laugh back at her beau, and stares.

-

A cartwheel by something from Heaven right now

would be about right : a few new angels on the head

of this day's pin, or a tongue of flame shooting the

moment like a celestial star riding in. Down the block,

at the candy store, a man frowns as he realizes he's

left his watch at home, can't imagine what time it is, as

if there's any time at all; as if there's any time at all.

3572. MEMORY

MEMORY

I've driven your solid-block car

even to the end of Devonshire's plane,

over that little string of hills where once

elves dwelt, and I ended up realizing one

thing and one thing alone : I have lived

here before. I was born inside a tree,

I carried water for the king and dug

ditches for Lord Saterlee himself. I

was risen from a long, dry sleep as

a child, took token kinship from

my mother's line, and have now - 

some 600 years too late - only

now returned to tell you.

-

There is no cosmic ending. All things

turn around. That morning smell

in the nose of Spring is the fine

smell of life's resurgence.

3571. A THOUSAND ISLANDS, PRESSING

A THOUSAND ISLANDS, PRESSING

A thousand islands, pressing,

and any of that inflated Zen

bullshit  -  wherever you go,

there you are; one hand clapping;

and the rest. Yes? Well, I'll tell

you how it is  -  wherever I just

was, I wasn't really there, and I 

for sure won't be tomorrow where

I'm heading today. And the sound

of one hand clapping? Well, that's

really my fist up the side of your head.

3570. YES (YES)

YES (YES)

I am running this boat over the edge of the water;

a hard edge of glass, a clear sheet I can see through,

watching things go by. It is all a blur, like flying from

Parto to Balaroo, those distant stars I placed atop the

firmament I left long ago. And now, everywhere I

look, a hard, bright sunlight reflects off every

surface - the blast of illumination, the fiery glow

of presence, a reflected glory of all which is. I slow;

over there, atop that bulkhead and patio deck,

someone has suspended an effigy of a man - could

be a sailor or cowboy as well, I cannot readily

identify. A hanging human it is not; instead just

something to remind one of what it could be.

An outstretched hand, hanging there, in the

wind. At the same time, this boat slow-glides

over the shining water. Part of me wishes to

sing. Part of me wants to scream. I am caught

between two worlds, like a slime creature just

learning, ashore, to walk on two legs.

3569. SOME PEOPLE

SOME PEOPLE
Some people dance, some people waltz, some people scale

fences and others take falls. I want to be  neither nor

any of them. I'd rather my force was spent building

bridges to your heart, scaling heights into your mind,

rising the crest of every cloud that floats its blinding

way past you. In Winter, yes, it may be, I too wait

for snow  -  scanning the dark gray skies for what

is coming, what has been announced, the wind, the

flakes and flurries first, and then the massive storm

and all the things that have been announced. Though

it doesn't always work, it gets me by. In Summer,

quite the other way, I hide from blinding sunlight

in the day and seek instead a respite in the shades and

the shadows of night. Things come on like bullets  - 

fast and piercing, cutting bone and limb , slicing hearts

in two, sundering every meaning and what it's meant to do.

3568. NEWARK AIRPORT NEW JERSEY

NEWARK AIRPORT 

NEW JERSEY

I have littered the dark roads

here with dreams, tinkered the

matter with dreams  -  broken

dreams but dreams nonetheless.

As Peter watches Paul, so I have

watched the world and manacled

all its endings. Seemingly still, afloat

and at rest, the grand planes atop

the sky come in low  -  and almost

as if not moving but to drop. Over

Newark's busted meadows they

drop like iron floss from a foul

and little-mattered sky as

turnpike cars race by.

3567. PENTILE

PENTILE

The Albert Pinkham Ryder sky

and me  -  let us pray. The broken

black-brown pattern high, running

fast and flying by. Death on a pale 

horse? Have it pass us by : we cannot

meet Death; where we are, it is not. 

Wherever it is, we are not. These

twain can never meet. If an absence

of Life is Death, then the absence of

Death must be Life. Live, thus, your

moment. Oh dark mountain, h dark

lanes of old America, let me climb

you, let me walk.

3566. EVERYTHING AT ONCE, AND THEN NOTHING AT ALL

EVERYTHING AT ONCE,

AND THEN NOTHING AT ALL

I've learned elixirs that come no more,

the green bottles in the old liquor store,

the stuff that no man drinks. Each bottle

comes with a wick. Out front, salacious and

dazed, a few gnarly old drunks are passed out.

-

Up above the decrepit doorway, a bare old

bulb keeps burning - 60 watt, maybe 75; the

proprietor of the liquor store says 'it's been

on now, steady, for 6 years, never a moment

off, never skipped a beat.' Then he goes on,

about bulbs  -  how what kills them really is

all that on and off. The surge of each new

current blasts through them and takes its toll.

-

I'd settle for anything, I realize now. If I'm

willing to sit here and listen to him, I might as

well pass the time drunk. Like the bums, coarse

and passed out before me : wizened in the teeth,

spitting out the lips, in need of a shave, foul,

drunk, stinky and dumb. Everything at once,

and then nothing at all.

3565. MORENA MONTANO

MORENA MONTANO

Mustachio'd primogeniture is how the King

lived in his closet. It was his stock in trade.

Down-neck Newark it was called. Ironbound,

Portuguese section. However you call it.

-

Man parked his car for the animals to live

in. It was a living. It was a live-in.

-

Girls came by each evening about 6; same

four or five girls each night turning tricks,

trying to. 'Some men you pump for information,

some men you just pump, some men pump you.'

She said all that quickly, and quite simply.

3564. WHILE WAITING AT THE GREY GALLERY

WHILE WAITING AT 

THE GREY GALLERY

(100 washington square east)

Let the fish tell you the title.

Move to Rome if you don't like

Athens, and mark the pages if

you can't read the book. But, in

your case, unlock the sepulchre

and jangle the keys. Let the spirits

know someone is coming.

-

Back up to Endermine and put 

cloth on the swallows. Never

leave you mother to chance.

These are the things we leave

to you. Hope you understand.

3563. AND AUGUST, 1967 (early for me)

 AND AUGUST, 1967

(early for me)

Manchatter and the Marktones we hid beneath the stairs.

We kept the tea the color of tan shoes and we often enough

laughed at all the wrong things. That was the way things were

in 1967 along St. Mark's Place. Cat Mother and the All Night

Newsboys, they too were playing at the Psychedelicatessan.

I only realize now, in looking back, how really Jewish at core

all this movement stuff was. I went to the Diggers Free Store

often enough, mostly in the hopes of getting a glimpse. Those

girls from Ave A by Third Street, they most often had on

no clothes, and there was always some excuse to go there.

Fetch this. Bring a message back. It was all a Summer's fun for

a boy like me. I lit my incandescent lamp by the firelights at their

knees, and just always hoped they'd answer again the door.

'God,' I'd say to myself, 'they are so advanced.'

-

We drove a parts truck all across the all-night streets.

Throwing papers to the curb, packing the East Village

Other in the small storefront doorways, smoking cigarettes

or reefer as we ran. And then, dawn. At which point we'd

get to the corner of 10th and sit with all the angry Con Ed

guys slurping their 6am shift oatmeal from the Polish guy

with numbers on his forearms. Those guys were tough;

mean and ugly and not liking us too well either. We were

the threat they'd read about - the dirty kids who never

worked, stayed high, and screwed their girlfriends or

each other. Yeah. Diggers forever!

-

They overheard us, once, talking about blowing up the

generating station down at the riverside by thirteenth.

All we knew to do was talk, but talk was good and talk

was cheap. We talked so big  -  our dynamite and timers

and nitroglycerine caps. Those Con Ed guys would have

swept the floor with our hairy heads had they caught us  - 

so we never went back, Strength in numbers never mattered

when the sum amounted to zero. And then the Polish guy

died. He was a camp survivor, never spoke, and the lashes

of his eyes were still singed off somehow, and he had pink

eyes and skin with tears that never stopped, slowly, dripping.

-

What little bit I came to know about that stuff back then, I

learned from hearing about him. Auschwitz, Treblinka and

Bergen-Belsen. I think my eyes would always be tearing too,

if I was ever him. Or what he'd been. Or what he almost wasn't.

So this was the New World to a man like him. The more and

more I thought it over, the less and less I was proud of that, or

where I was and where I'd been; but still, it was early for me.

3562. GHOST

GHOST

'Touch not what you cannot see' -

those were the disembodied words

everyone was muttering. They swear

they'd seen a ghost, to a man, all of them. 

The dead? The lost? The wandering soul

now looking for a home? No one could 

say nor be sure what they saw. A few

sat down, shaking, talking back to themselves.

I swore, at that moment, I was as crazy as them.

-

'What I cannot see I will not put behind me,

nor  -  since it is unseen  -  can I put it before

me, or talk to you of it, or, for that matter, care.'

Those were my own words, and I spoke them

carefully, with aplomb; knowing I had a lot of

convincing to do, I blew out the candle on the

tabletop nearby, and said 'let's get out of here, now.'

3561. SEMBLANCES

SEMBLANCES

These are but semblances of things, nothing

real at all. We make them ourselves  -  all these

images and attitudes and ideas by which we live.

No fixed station moors our minds or hearts,

and they can move at will. Take heed.

-

The pastry-man, delivering his goods, and

that banker with his briefcase, computer and

gloves : they manage to salvage what they

can of their time and their day, making new

carcasses out of their old works, re-forming

a world they'd first, initially, formed.

-

Template. Matrix, Mark and gloom.

Their is no rigid paraphernalia for the

times we each must live. Go on, forward,

with the head held high. All is yours, and ever.

- 

Take heed.

3560. MAN WITH A SEVERED LEG

MAN WITH A SEVERED LEG

A man with a severed leg can still function;

still crawl over rocks, still seek distinction. 

His parameters, though slightly changed,

can still make the grade  -  he can strive

and achieve, manuever to better make

a grasp, elude capture by wiles of thought.

There is, really, nothing like it in the world.

-

The mountain climber will tell you of all

his regrets : "It was gruesome, yet I did 

what I had to do until rescue arrived.

The cold and the ice, actually, probably

saved my life. I had to cut my own leg

off to get out from under that rock  -  the

rockslide had crumbled it anyway, to shreds.

No mean task, though not easy just the same.

-

Once I was free, I found ways to survive;

five, six hours until rescuers came. It

was nasty, it hurt, I was in pain  -  but 

I managed well until rescuers came,

and I knew from that day my life

would never be the same."

3559. DRIVING TO GOUNOUD'S FAUST

DRIVING TO 

GOUNOUD'S FAUST

The car had a stick-drive cantilevered caterwaul
dual-braking sway system, of which your drunk roommate
knew nothing about, was unable to handle, couldn't figure
out. He sat behind the wheel like a clown at a fire. It
didn't matter much to me, since I was really all yours.
We could have died together in any of his stinking crashes
and I'd have still been dip-stick happy, crankshaft gone,
mad in love with you. The only thing I wondered was if we'd
get where we were going in some semblance of time.
-
This 'Gonoud's Faust' bullshit was on loan in my mind
from some library of doubt. I sat back thinking over
what to do in case the music bored me. I watched the
brocade of your shirt as it covered your delightful
breasts  -  I was a soldier, dead in mind but still
fighting a physical war of lust and contrition. So what.
-
Bolero. I'd heard a hundred times. La Traviata made
me droll with listlessness. Westside Story was a gay man's 

Streetcar of Desire, which had already been a gay man's 

something anyway. I really knew not where to turn. Blood
and guts was more to my fury's liking right then.
-
Gounoud's Faust I was able to get through happily.
The orchestra stayed in place at its seats  -  no
prancing around, no tricks. The music was straightforward
enough; at least making me want to listen. My dissonant
hands, however, I admit now to you, were often out of control.

3558. DANCING FOR MONEY

DANCING FOR MONEY

Like light absconding with darkness

and running far off, the entire picture

here seems doomed. The lily-white 

entrance on platform heels; everything

changes once the klieg lights come on.

We grapple with reason, we wrestle with

doubt - and all those other forces, just

as much, keep us company :

love, lust, and elation.

-

I am entering; an old man wise in ways

yet dumb in others  -  as an ox, stupid

as a mule, stubborn as an ass and as

forthright as a beast of burden  -  would be.
 Tainted. Laden. Hung up without drying.

-

All this import is important and just.

I merely sit back to listen as all things

the others expose. Mouth their tales, 

talk their stories, speak of other things,

dangle this Earth for money and the tell.

I need do nothing at all. (We are not a thing

without  both chance and circumstance,

chance and circumstance together).

3557. WHY NOT OLNAY?

WHY NOT OLNAY?

Let the varied links come forth :

all those prancing men with nothing

more to do - sports and easy language,

the endless junk clothesline of circumstance

running off to the knot that never closes.

I understand that they have won, and this

is their resultant world. Yes, yet, they

are still, to my eyes, too much like girls.

-

If you would ask me, I would tell you  -

these whispers are far too faint. The little 

hole on the doorfront window saying,

'Please ring bell twice and wait.' Here,

someone has painted the doorsill red,

the only splash of color on an otherwise

dull, gray house. Beneath the sky, all

this life is an extended silence.

-

As such, I am picturing the noises not made;

for now these people are old, their children 

are gone, the two dogs have died their ages,

and all that rings are woodchimes for the wind - 

chimes as well now old and tethered.

3556. ALL PASSES : ART ALONE ENDURES

ALL PASSES : 

ART ALONE ENDURES

Only by knowing what all that means will

anything be brought to the fore : those bridge

struts, the car park, the fire, all those white

buildings in today's Jackson Park. Chicago 

has destroyed by vandals and itself the

remnants, whatever was sensibly left, of

the Columbian Exposition's 'White City'

of 1893. Floyd Dell and his sister Margery,

the rough-time zumos of all this anterior

space, can only sit back in wonder.

Now, we are left alone in this wind-vapid,

sexless city to repeat again what once

over the doorway read: 'All Passes - 

ART alone endures.'

-

Phil told me to 'watch out for the

full moon.' So I did. For two days,

at five a.m. it sank, still full, at the

western horizon  -  landing, it seemed, 

on the roadway's distant end like a

big pat of winsome butter melting down.

And then it grew light out. And then

nothing happened at all. So?

-

I bought a coffee with quarters and dimes.

Really. Really. That was all it was worth.

3555. THINGS THAT CAN LIVE IN WATER

THINGS THAT CAN 

LIVE IN WATER

Like so many other things, not many. The country 

star Burly Ivans, real name Bob Dylan, cuts his

fingers off to stop playing guitar, lights his hand

afire to stop acknowledging applause, finds his

Jesus in a ten-cent mop-brow towel. It's all

so barely interesting, as to be truthful.

-

In Williamsburg Brooklyn I am walking the

ambling life : watching the Jew-clerks and 

those diamond-district furriers in their 

schoolbus-to-market shtetls and ways. 

No one speaks, yet they all walk two by two,

never ceasing, always on. And those senseless 

women in their marriage wigs and  clunky shoes, 

what do they do, just go to market while a camera

hangs on the end of a journalist's forearm? Even

he is watching out for movement and life. It

seems, it really does, the end of all times.

-

Someone sits forlornly, at a walkway table

overlooking the highway overpass : he seems

almost asleep, but not, and is yapping on a

phone. At his table, flyers and a donation cup,

demanding new land for new settlers in his

new Israel; taking what's left is taking

what's left already. The rest be damned.

G-d gave us this land!

3554. THE TOURNEY

THE TOURNEY

Two black-robed judges are huddled as one,

as if it were a Halloween or a passion play.

I relive their juices and laugh at their silly ways.

Mad-man, mad-man, it is Passion Week, and

someone is soon to be murdered, to die.

'Truth? What is Truth?' Now where have I

heard that before? I was, myself, once

trundled along the sandstone steps of

some ancient temple almost new, carried

along by the jeers of the crowd, everyone

did what they wanted. Bayonets and lances,

toga-clad centurions, a fake doctor and some

Pharisees jeering at me. Along with the rest,

they acted like shit; taking me down a notch

when I was already at bottom. 'Son of God?

What's that you say? Son of God? You

too deserve to die, lost among your

Father's fleeting words and ways.'

3553. MAN THE MAKER

MAN THE MAKER

Abject man, sorry man, soiled man,

farmer man, maker man  -  homo faber.

A million years of rolled and tucked-in time

have brought us to this -  lost dances in all

of our dreaming. And I am sorry for nothing.

-

I enter the tunnel holding my head up,

keeping watchful in the dark that nothing

errant comes my way. I know that Evil has

a plan. I have seen the future, and I'm not in

it. It's not like that at all; the little man with

the bake shop has stepped outside to smoke.

-

Let me be frank : I don't want to be unsure, nor

to be seen without solutions. Three cars have

parked at the curb, right where they shouldn't be.

It's an enormous responsibility, to let this infraction

go, but we do. The little baker man shrugs, not

knowing what else to do. Law-maker man, I always

thought, had all the solutions : sheriffs and marshals

and gendarmes all. Everyone wears a tin badge;

but all they do is walk on by.

3552. DISTORTED BY SURREPTITIOUSNESS

 DISTORTED BY

SURREPTITIOUSNESS

The five million things tearing

my heart are you and begging

allegiance; no steps in between.

The rain has overflowed the

stop buckets. To collect run-off,

they've been placed strategically

well and are now running over.

I insist I will do nothing about

this at all  -  to you who sits

by the fire.

-

I remember a long coat that

quite trailed to the floor  -  all

that black, and the graciousness.

Quality and merit, at the least,

combine to make things right.

Now, at the tail-end of some

dragging Winter you call

delirious and tiresome 

and dull, you sit - asking

if I think it will ever

snow again.

3551. OUT OF MIND

OUT OF MIND

The boy with leaden shoes has nowhere to

grow but up. An unfound ground of hope 

to beckon  -  he is tight but he is growing,

and I am sound asleep. I am, in fact, 

sleepwalking, to find children knowing

children's things, alterations where no

things have changed and conversations 

where no one has spoken.

-

The sound is all around  -  like to

that of marbles clacking, all boy's

thumbs as they flick the orbs, the

cat's eyes hitting one another. That

will be the story I want to go by  -

and all the boy's future is already

set; growing nowhere but up,

something will always call.

-

I am a cool cat : my single cigarette

dangling at my one Martini glass,

my suave entrails spread out upon

the antique table for all to see - a

Glenlivet, brocade, Chivas Regal,

Lincoln Continental, grim brigade.

-

The museum opens at ten to show

the spot where a Kennedy died,

where any of the miserable cloaks 

of this meager nation died - they 

are all the same. If they want to

talk about me, I shall let them, I

shall let the nation cackle on.

-

"Stanhope Hotel April second

nineteen fifty-three, fifty-five,

whatever, Charles the First

origin of cotton meat flour

alcohol sugar tobacco corn.

I am a black cutout against a

captive blue sky pivoting nude

so the paying audience can view

my naked buttocks. Through

Charles Parker J. Michael 

Basquiat meet Sylvia Plath -

dead here in my arms with

the boy with leaden shoes -

she who said 'I eat

men like air.'"

3550. STICK IT TO MARLON BRANDO

STICK IT TO 

MARLON BRANDO

Walk me along the fence, oh Nancy of

my dreaming  -  drop your whitened glove

in the churchyard's dumpy foyer. I'll never

pick it up again. Not now anyway  -  now,

when we are all immigrants and new travelers

in a land we cannot learn. I am new here

anyway, and you are as French as they come.

-

What language shall we both agree to speak,

for I certainly want you to understand me?

A laggard tongue of Rimini, or something

of a bastard Basque? It would not matter

anyway, I'll never understand your words.

Those big French cigarettes that have

ravaged your face, they make me want

to Euro-barf. Your lang'rous, dark cafe

nights, that espresso-sizzle in your eyes,

they attract but I am driven off. I do want

a roadmap of your body however, but 

one written in a bumpy Braille that I 

can touch and feel, to see what's real.

-

All this makes me crazy  -  those lips,

that lisp. Or is it just some crazy accent

from your existential inner Hell? Au revoir.

3549. HARDY

HARDY

 (politics)

How can you be so tone-deaf, Hardy, how can

you? All your tariffs and taxes amount to nothing

but blather and trash, your own mouth fills with

bunkum and you are spitting out trash. I've

decided I am tired of you and my gun will

do well the rest. Yes, if I take that disastrous

course I will forfeit all my future. Over you?

No, I think not. That shall not do.

-

Whatever satrapy your originations 

come from, I am sure I would not wish 

to know  - not your mother, not your father, 

not your brother, not your sister nor 

your daughter nor your wife. Well, perhaps 

an exception  can be made there, if she's got 

the requisite parts. You call me crazed? 

You brand me mad? Ha!

-

Let me tell you once more clearly:

the time is coming when you and

your like will rue the day you were

born. The dead, in that time, will

get no million-dollar settlements

to help them mourn. No, no, for

there will be nothing left at all,

no, nothing left at all.

3548. AT THE OLD KINGDOM

AT THE OLD KINGDOM

It's not about the matter. I can't king the Kingdome

nor marry the watcher's sister; and everything else

has, by now, gone down the drain. I left Seattle just

to be with you, and  -  spaced out fool that I am  -  they

told me as I arrived just then you'd gone. Two entirely

different directions, with nothing in between but expanding

space  -  like a vase whose flower had fled, a beehive with

the bees all dead, a void filled by nothing at all except more.

Void, Empty, Nothingness, and Space. Sounds like

my very own law firm from Hell is on this case.

Already I'm late for my sentencing date.

3547. ONLY THE LANDLORD'S BUCKETOF BLOOD

ONLY THE LANDLORD'S

BUCKET OF BLOOD 

(nyc, 1980)

'Hasten the way in, find the lark who meddles,

pick the lock of the infinite, show me where

you park your heart. Those are my top four

rabble-rousing, interdicting phrases. Now

learn ye the very way I preach.'

-

Out front, a '66 Chevy was low on the curb -

rumbling a candy-apple red, some glass-packed

exhaust noise, and a few tinted windows of yesterday's

glass. It isn't like that any more, just isn't the same.

-

We shook all the fruit and then cut down the tree.

I leaned over and the catapult fell, The Spanish

fellow, the distant one hosing down the walk, he

only looks about to see what girls' asses look like;

and who can blame him in this paradise, you ask?

-

'I've lived here, on seventeenth, now for three years:

nice loft, nice walk-up, little freight elevator for big

things, and plenty of friends to keep it all going.

We laugh and we somehow dance as we pray.

I paint way after midnight, and have plenty of

room to drink. Nothing ever drives me down.'

-

Purloined and profuse, all this talk is now

driving me crazy, and here comes the

landlord with his bucket of blood.

3546. ALIGHT THIS MORNING INTO TIME

ALIGHT THIS 

MORNING INTO TIME

I have seen Kirby and he was

wearing a skirt. Two hands were

holding fire, long apart  -  cinders

flew and danced along the air.

A mid-winter half moon was

falling backwards across the

sky as daylight timed its own

arrival. Fortune? Or misfortune?

Together they make one.

-

It's always a festive atmosphere,

and we don't know why : like

just after a funeral, all those

happy faces eating, making sense,

talking wildfire. Simply put, it's

how we meet; (and let's take

this moment to meet, me and

and you).

-

This story has a magnificent plot,

and those who read or see it would

not know the nose on their face or

the flood which was frowning them

dire until they were dead. Alight

morning into time: you have just

lost all your memory, and memory

will bring you nothing but carnations.

(I have seen Kirby, and he was

wearing a ridiculous dress).

3545. MADNESS

MADNESS

Break my self-exposure,

kill my subjectivity. This

whole barnyard is bleak,

and deserves no further

mention. The moon is

low on the horizon.

3544. CAPTURE THE FLAG

CAPTURE THE FLAG

(Reading, Pennsylvania)

Checkerboard Square black squalor

like Reading Pennsylvania five for a

dollar  -  as cheap as can be. All

the poor people, poorer than me,

are walking Reading's downtown

streets. Horrid. Everywhere is a

medical building or a government

plant. The only industries growing

here seem illness and danger and

illness and want. It's a very sad place,

all that : some Duryea motorcar

madness once owned all the hill

above town, where now an audacious

pagoda, where the quarry once was,

lords high over nothing but Cemetery Hill.

3543. DAWN BIRDS

DAWN BIRDS

At the lily pond, with first

light, two birds refresh

themselves. Newly awake,

they shimmer with the new

sun, splashing forth water

upon themselves in some

glimmering self-awareness

of a warm delight.

3542. THAT GUTTURAL EMBRACE

THAT GUTTURAL EMBRACE

That guttural embrace, like of two

border guards grumbling, two prisoners

enticed, why it must mean something.

I am watching the curtain for the wrestlers

to come out. Each one would embody a myth,

each a mythological craft of being.

-

Boys are playing shipwreck in the enclosed

waters of the pool. Nothing can harm them, so

they can afford to do whatever they wish: a

bombast with piracy, the saber-rattling of a

fool, walking a plank blindfolded. Ho-ho-hum,

and a bottle of rum; whatever that old rhyme is.

-

I take a lamp down from the shelf. An old

kerosene lantern for storms, something far

from today  -  another time and another place.

I place it forward on the diving board, after I've

already lit the wick. 'I want to be your light

beacon,' I announce. The boys look up,

and they begin to laugh.

3541. A'FIRE

A'FIRE

Without a throb, lest to lose control,

there wasn't any part of me left untended.

I lifted my arms high and reached far cupboards

of plenty : meanings and infiltrations, new degrees

of learning, and resounding voices running on.

-

Lighting a new candle, unwrapping the filter,

scalding the edges, the room I filled with a sudden

and bright illumination I could only think I'd reached.

Indeed, had William Blake right then entered, we'd

both be engaged deeply in talking this out.

-

Outside the fifth-floor window, this artist-loft living

was invisible. No one knew, by looking up, what

went on inside. I'd stretched the canvases and

gesso'd the surfaces and was  -  indeed  -  now

ready to start. The red of crimson and the deep rich

of ultramarine. My colors to heart I took.

-

Had I pencil of thick gold, I could no better

sketch the wondrous lines from out your face;

like God, posing upon some mantelpiece

of eternal glimmer and endless light, it's

really a simple place and a simple fate.