197. ON GETEL'S SNOWY MOUNTAIN

ON GETEL'S SNOWY MOUNTAIN
We used to have to walk about three-quarters of a mile
up a densely forested, meandering path to get to my
father's old cabin in the woods. Getel's Mountain was
the name of the place - and it was the very first thing he
bought in 1946 when he got out of the war.
-
That's all he ever called it - 'the war' - but we always knew
what he meant for the rest of his life. He never left it -
the war, that is. To the cabin, he came and went at will.
He'd always say 'watch for the sappers within the trees' and
I never, at first, knew what he meant. I thought a 'sapper'
had something to do with the trees and their sap.
Turns out, actually, it was a word for military guys
who built fortifications in the woods or jungles -
heavily armed riflemen, bayoneteers,
warriors, killers, crazy nuts.
-
You always think of the sentimental best
when you think of a cabin in the woods -
wonderful hearth, fire at night, fresh water
out of buckets, a beautiful and snowy front view.
That's only true, I found out, on postcards and
birthday cards, or stuff like that. The reality
can be more like Hell, or at least that same,
everyday Hell lived elsewhere. Demons in the night,
Black bears ripping your arms off.
You really never leave any of that stuff behind.
-
My father's demons and ghosts came with him :
furious lashings with dead guys beaming back,
canvas body bags being dumped at sea,
kamikaze pilots in fiery planes bearing down.
He'd tell me all these things in his sleep -
me a little boy trying to figure him out,
him an old soldier now torn with doubt.

196. KELP

KELP
Keeping the stand by the green ocean border.
The waves slapping like mad, drumming the Earth
in some beatnik-bongo rhythm. I watch the sand
move itself around - eddies of water and clumps of
seaweed. 'The sand doesn't move itself anywhere.'
I hear my words in the air, just before they are blown
about and suffused with the roar - again - of surf
and sand and wind and shore. 'It doesn't move itself
anywhere, just gets tossed by everything else.'
-
Keeping the stand by the green ocean border.

195. DESPERATE CRINKLE (youth)

DESPERATE CRINKLE

(youth)
Flying like starlight straight through the zoom,
the recollection of some fascist dessert tones
the muscles like a strenuous program of workout
and sweat. I am sure you can remember this:
recalling the Scoutmaster with your campfire woes,
re-telling stories of violent deed to your 12-year old
brother in chains, reminiscing with the executioner about
those jobs well-done. It didn't always need to be this way.
-
Once we relaxed with tea, watching the children around
us practice their violins - that cat-screech of promise
halted by the premise of talent or skill. It was all like
Sunday, every day: first the breakfast, than the preacher,
then the dinner, then the teacher. The snowstorm that
piled up treacherous drifts just outside the cottage door.
The broken-brick path, passable no more.
-
We navigated most of the shoals that damn boat
brought us to. Those we didn't, we either skip over now
or simply don't recollect. From one angle, everything is
the same, every vice a virtue, every help a bane.
I really don't know how I did it.
I really don't know where I stand.

194. EVERYTHING IS BUT A DARE

EVERYTHING IS BUT A DARE
A hankering for pain itself can drive a poor man wild;
the forms and outlines of the distant sky - some
triumph of old, idle hands - seeking a conquest over
the quick moments of time. After all, is not
everything but a dare?
-
In the train station waiting room,
two infinitesimally indecorous men
were talking soccer - two fools with
Spanish tongues, demonstrating their
kicks and feints; as if an oh-so-solid world
could be represented by air.

193. MICHELANGELO'S BROAD YARD

MICHELANGELO'S

BROAD YARD

Some drunken pope or another, shouting 'Buonarroti,

you're only as good as your last marble cut in the eyes

of this age-old God! Your last chisel-strike! Your last

Pieta!' Then he threw down his soiled rag and wiped

out the chalice and cup. Michelangelo Buonarroti

replied: 'I am no Salazar, walking with a wound, holding

my side in pain or grimacing with blood. I know my meanings

and I know my marks.' And then he turned, and said: 'This

chisel, this chisel that cuts, it only cuts once.'

192. THE MENTAL FACTOR OF URUGUAY

THE MENTAL FACTOR OF URUGUAY
I'd like to see you dance some Tango with your
big fat feet - all pretzeled up like a Z on an outing.
It would be something to see, funny, a treat.
I remember that time beneath the elms when
we looked at your postcards of Montevideo or
that place nearby where you'd gone to school.
'A little nickel dormer made out of straw',
you'd called it once before. Your hands
were nearly trembling as you talked about
those days. Tears in your yellowed eyes
made me think of something that must
be wrong. It was really hard to take.
-
I walked you back, that night, to that
mysterious hostel where you were staying;
that skylit atrium where we kissed goodbye.

191. SERGEANT EYEPATCH

SERGEANT EYEPATCH
I told the guy that the only 'details' the
Devil's ever in are the details in the military.
Pedantic soldiers on foraging missions;
pickaxe and shovel, digging latrines, building
kitchens, supporting new bivouacs with lumber
and nail. That's a detail.
-
He snickered, and pulled back his drink -
taking it down in one big lunge.
'They only detail I got is my carbine,
and this pistol here in my belt.'
-
He was trying to make me understand something.
A message, one as usually without clarity as a
command to paint the Marshall's quarters red,
or redo the local whorehouse in corduroy.
All that sort of stuff good soldiers do
between wars : killing chickens,
stabbing the new foe in the eye.
Wiping out whole villages
where the 'enemy' may live...
a Devil in some detail,
perhaps.

190. AMNESIAC

AMNESIAC
Yesterday was fulfilled in the planning -
sunlight on the trailer, a rooftop glint seen
from afar, two men sparring on the open green.
The last pugilist I ever saw had just had his head
beat in - swollen eyes, bloodied mouth; he looked
like something the cat dragged in. Months later, I was
told, he entered a coma after a stroke. His brain was
shot, he couldn't remember a thing, and his mouth wouldn't
allow him to eat, just drool. It must have been pathetic.
Technical knock-out or not, he was done. Having entered
the ring, he never came out. His name was Boris something,
a big stupid oaf from Bulgaria. He went by the ring-name of
'Squeeze-Bull', and sometimes got six-hundred dollars to go
fifteen rounds, or try - what the hell. 'I didn't come to this America
for nothin' - he used to say - 'so I try make a living the best ways I
can be.' He had a wife and kid. Still around somewhere I guess.
Never entered the ring, neither one of them.
Just stayed outside, and watched.

189. ALL I WANT YOU TO KNOW

ALL WHAT I WANT YOU TO KNOW
I dreamed my grand piano, when I opened the top,
had mice and their nests all cluttered in the far back
corner; strewing the insides with straw and debris.
The quizzical mice just looked up at me as I played
all around them. Hammers flipping up and down,
the sound distorted somehow by the paper and waste.
I thought to vacuum out these insides, or clobber the
mice on their heads. But I figured none of it would work,
I liked the sound and, after all, really, why bother the
mice - so comfortable at home there that they
added somehow to my melody.

188. AND YES THEY'RE STEALING FROM ME AGAIN

AND YES THEY'RE STEALING

FROM ME AGAIN
The breadloaf crowd is back in arms: ranting about
Boston and bookstores or little-known sites on the
lower eastside. Unknown to them alone, I guess. That
old underground table they speak so highly of is
now filled with salt and mackarel, places to dine,
surreptitious moves and all those stars and starlets
each standing in a line with punched tickets to
their very own Hells. I surmise from the faces
that - no matter what - everyone's happy;
steering straight ahead, or at least
pretending to be.

187. PHILOSOPHY'S OLD MOON

PHILOSOPHY'S OLD MOON
I will be as endless as I thought I would be: ever and more.
Reading ancient tomes in the ancient language spit, behind
flickering candles of lights and shadows. Things move, and
I know that. Celestial caverns ignite with spark and fire, and I
am there, amidst them. The shimmering forms upon the wall,
as in Plato's cave - I watch their movements and sense their
actions, too fixated to dwell on judging and yet too judgemental
to watch. Abstruse as all these words are, so too is the Philosophy
of the Gods: she who answers with some wounded pride,
perhaps feigning, perhaps not. Some hidden deceit I'd never
assume. I hear the sounds of a lark or a falcon, or a robin
or a wren. Alas, I do not know such natural noises. They
rim my earlobes with doubt and anxiety, portending something,
shaking my mind. The natural world, enough here to frighten me,
stands steady in its prime fixture upon all that is real.
We know this, and we know that. Nothing more there is.

186. 41 TIMES AND GRAND CENTRAL

41 TIMES AND GRAND CENTRAL
Smokes the color of lapis lazuli, sauces in
red and brown. They seem to be eating
small marine creatures, and chutney by
the pound. I couldn't spend more than
a dollar myself, on something I'd never
realized or found.
-
This was - incredibly - the great train depot,
the only one here left. The other had been gutted
pillaged, raped and destroyed 50 years ago by dolts
who didn't care. Money-managers holding their dicks,
accountants managing nothing, construction men looking
for work, some other kind, with their hands. Jerk-offs all, no?
-
Now, by stinging contrast, they've let this one stay -
turning it instead into some infantile dining room
of sloppy eaters and piggish prunes : the disheveled
can contemplate the well-heeled while the wealthy
contemplate the grave - amidst soups and sandwiches,
chickens and wraps, fingers and ice-cream galore.
It's a sickening array of ghastly cuisine.
The sort of thing wars should clear up.
-
The men in the Oyster Bar were
somehow managing to play cards
while they ate and drank.
Their women looked on,
holding their drinks;
already in the tank,
they could only hope
that their train
came soon.

185. TO CELEBRATE

TO CELEBRATE
Forgiving eyes - those like yours -
often see the farthest horizons :
the distant things, the soils of Mars,
rapacious outcroppings of mountaintop
rock. Craggy and elongated fissures in the
heights of the mind. They shade the world.
-
Coming from yet another place, I realized
our contingency little mattered - that
whether we ever met or not in and of itself
bore little import to the marriage of two minds.
I was a baggage handler from Hell, compared to
your grace and beauty, ease and poise.
-
It's sometimes said that composure wears the
saddest face when happy. It's also said that
arms make the man. Neither of them ever made
much sense to me : too wispy, too slight,
playing tricks with meaning and words.
For just this one moment, I would
gladly take your hands and
celebrate something,
anything.

184. SO LITTLE AMISS

SO LITTLE AMISS
When the raven dropped out of the sky, tendentiously avoiding
its perfectly executed landing, it was - at that same moment -
that the daylight changed to a harshness of blinding snow.
Windows fogged over and noises were muffled.
In personal anguish of my own, along some tiny
Pennsylvania road, I watched a deer, struck by a car
and twisting about with two broken legs, slowly raise
its head and die. There was nothing anyone could do -
even that blowhard guy with the big red truck, lights and
tool box and all the rest, stopping in a fit to attend to
what had happened, didn't really have a clue.
-
Above us, in the sky, some broken half-moon wavered,
between that snowy sky and the wide open daylight blue;
passing itself alike between its own darkness or pale lumen.
It too knew not what to do. The entire world's parchment, it
seemed, had been newly scratched by what had just happened.

183. CHARLIE MINGUS IN MAKE-BELIEVE

Charlie Mingus in Make-Believe
Hanging from the rafters, slumming from the stars,
drinking drafts of whisky, driving 'round in cars....
-
I've told you everything - how I walked to Mississippi
with Scatman Crothers, how I discovered the means to
stitch a baseball's seams, how Bill Burroughs and I held up
that bank in Abilene. Intricate factors, all these things.
-
But I haven't got the patience to go on.
I haven't got the patience to go on.
-
In one section of the stadium they put all those who were
once prisoners. Prisoners of something, no matter what.
There was no room for anyone, or any thing, else -
as the place quickly filled up. 'We are, beneath this moon
and sun, prisoners of every sort : nightmare nickel-tenders,
black-eyed doctors, banshee'd singers of despair and doom,
hang-dog snoopsters of trespass and gloom.'
-
It seemed a lot like forever, the cake, the mitre,
the saw-box and the tooth. The cake, the mitre, the
saw-box and the tooth. But I haven't the patience to go on.
I haven't the patience to go on...

182. I CAUGHT THE BALL

I CAUGHT THE BALL
I caught the ball you threw, with one hand,
as gallantly as if I was a ringer - someone as bold
and beautiful as a Willy Mays or a Cecil Fielder.
Funny names, I always thought - as if a man, caught and
stretched between two poles, took on the attributes of
what he did by ascribing a quality to the name he wore.
Carlos May. Moose Skowren. Whomever.
I caught the ball - it is said - with 'elan'.
A word that sounds vaguely African in origin,
to me, though it's not. Ibex of the Mountain, at the
Baobab Tree. Get where I'm headed with this idea?
If you do, you can take it from me.

181. CONSTABLE KENT

CONSTABLE KENT
Good men come forward testing the mettle of the time
they are in : we watch a Robin Hood of the Mainline
giving lip service to his own habits of living. He can have the
moment, if that's what he wants. Those I know will not
begrudge him that. In essence, turn him loose.
-
I'll watch as this late-night Saterlee walks the bridge :
his open domain, his form of wailing, the chimera
which never leaves. Fancy-fingered gloves with a
skill for glad-handed hugs. A soldier just like the
minions want. 'Let's watch him again! See how he
fakes and turns, feints and sways!' Like a demarcated
basketball star running on the hoof, he's not labored,
not panting, always fresh. See how long a moment can last.
-
(Constable Kent is singing along - knowing the words
to every song. Outside the circle of friends who know
him, the sense of the day is 'it won't be long.')

180. TECHNICAL WIZARDRY

TECHNICAL WIZARDRY
Your technical wizardry won't fly my kite,
can't carry my tune, won't bring back the endings
nor repaint the room. So - after all that - I'll
still need to see what good it is.
-
Fleet fingers for me mean piano and key -
while for others I see the only keyboard they imagine
is a Qwerty note and all the rest - pounded stupid mundane;
letters like notes on a schoolchum's bathroom wall.
-
I'll only enter this forest once.
Like the labyrinth inside us,
you somehow can only exit
by the same way you entered.

179. SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE

SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE
Thrust from nothing but present in all,
and cantilevered as the lines, the rope, from
Heavens arc'd bell to Earth's darker Hell,
they step forth as one to proceed.
The clambering millions descend.
An arc-light from some street-welder's
dizzying fire, the length of steel reaches
all heights, and stops. Its precipice too
near the stars above, mankind's humble
servants come to an insolvent halt.
Beseeching nothing, they look up, reaching
for the entry or the portal to all that
brings them life. 'Come out!' the incessant cry
of the breathing : gabardine millionaires, men with
coaches and hats, fair ladies buxom with grace and
purpose. Up and down, they struggle. The subway's
incessant cry rumbles past and beneath - we hear the
roar and watch the rising crowds explore. Streetscapes.
Towers. Elevators. Stairways. Doors. Legal rites of
passage and purpose - and more. The fact that
Death itself has a ticket stops no one from going on,
or looking back. We are aware of this, and that - and so
much more. Let us not forget, 'midst the steam and
fury of industrial day, that little door which blocks our way -
the bolted entry to the other world and, somewhere along
the line, the flag of our living, to be unfurled - something
maybe to challenge the Gods themselves, or just a cloth
by which we are covered. Merely a cloth to cover us all.

178. BOETHIUS

BOETHIUS
(fools and tyrants)
Imagine a mouse somehow claiming authority over
all other mice...oh would you not laugh? And, when
you come right down to it, what are men anyway?
Relatively weak creatures, whom a fly or a mosquito
can kill with a bite, or a worm can debilitate, once within.
-
And what is the power of one man over another?
Words, actions, scaldings, death? I actually think
less than that occurs when poor Man tries to act
upon another - and even the most powerful are
as poor as a rat. And a tyrant can close no minds,
nor rule a thought - though he can try, it is his
own sword, in turn, that will belie his words.
-
The only thing worth less than the
body is a fortune - the reeking golds
and silvers of all evil men's dreams.

177. ORATIO

ORATIO
I offered my hands to the God of the Sun.
Blinking light crisscrossed the river; one
million salient points on the move together.
I'd known this all before, had seen it, had
walked it along. Not one to be outdone,
I tried making my way to the front,
yet everything else was in the way.
I lifted my eyes to Heaven, and
tried singing some hymn of praise.
I opened my mouth, but nothing
would come out. My paean to
Creation was over.
The God of the
Sun had left.

176. MY PANORAMIC WAITRESS

MY PANORAMIC WAITRESS
'I never ate here before.' I said that as I
was sitting down. She sidled up alongside me
and said - 'Makes no difference to me, I was
just waiting for you to come in.' As if we'd known
each other for ten years already. Her skin was just
waiting for touch. I could feel it in her eyes.
'You probably think I mean business,
but what this is is sport.'
-
Something bedazzled me with cool:
the pencil, the apron, the little clip-on tag.
'I could put this on ice if you want it.'
She said that, too, with her eyes;
'Here, try one of these, or order this,
with fries' - she pointed to something
on the table. 'I don't yet know what I'll
order for now, and you already have,
and I'll try your coffee on for size.
-
What I'd meant to say was this:
she'd already frozen my heart.
A solid-block of moment gone.
Everything came out wrong and
I wound up eating alone.
I didn't need any ice.

175. RECOVER THIS DOCUMENT

RECOVER THIS DOCUMENT
My parents cannot hear me, for they have
entered another realm where the pleasures of eternity -
one would hope - have them marked for the rest of their time,
however that may be. I am left behind, as foolishly
confused, sometimes, as a sixth-grader in Biology;
learning the grades of cells and capillaries,
drawn down like an amoeba to the simplest state.
Every gestureless pantomime I make is misunderstood.
The Shinto priest at Mt. Fuji would not understand my
pleadings - I want to be found to have something of value.
The yellow-dog remnant of all that I've done
seems to outlive even the echoes of my lineage.
Grandma, grandpa, great uncle, aunt - each of
their addresses and postboxes are closed.
I cry in grief for nothing.
I cry for nothing at all.

174. LEARNING TO LIVE WITH YOUR CHILDREN

LEARNING TO LIVE

WITH YOUR CHILDREN
(an old afternoon)
You are experiencing life. You are walking the
three o'clock streets hand-in-hand with your child who
is coming from school. You are as wide-eyed as he is
as you scan the local horizon to notice things you
would have missed before - how the broad trees, bare in
Winter, droop across the street; how the white bark peels
and drops with the leaves, how the noise underfoot can
settle your mind. He points out the cars and seems to know
the names of different models. Whereas to you it's all a blur,
there's a rather fine distinction to be made. He is here, learning.
Winter sets in, with its late daylight early dusk.
-
There is so much expectation, as you pass and notice
neighbors' houses: the light left on in a window, the indoor
barking of a left-alone dog.. The postman, who nods, is
finishing another round. Is he as familiar with all this as
you are becoming? You wonder, but do not deign to ask.
Behind you, everyday, the rumble of that same, slow freight
train goes by. Where before you would not have noticed,
now you count and check the cars - Chessie, Western, B&O.
Distant names such as those certainly foreshorten still
another horizon. Moon travel should be as easy, you think,
as you notice the half-moon at bay, a'lit in the distant,
daytime sky. Is it rising, or falling, that moon? You wonder,
and make a note to check on it later in the night. For now,
it's just there. Such a wonderful fragment, you leave it be.
-
This is a certain, rich life - the vast, old white home on the
large corner lot; the twisting garage, with doors that no
longer fit closed; the debris, as an outdoor pantry, of a
recently-ended Fall and all of its supplies. The smell,
deep within the air, of wood-burning fires. The late blue
deepens. It is all approaching an evening in mid-December.

173. OUT RIDING

OUT RIDING
(Memory)
We are rolling through Southfields on the twist
of a breeze, like some overwrought dowser turning
a stick for water. In each direction we head, there is
another intention before us : the downturn of the
landscape, insufferable wetlands, or the
shacks along the old canal. Breezily, we'll
pass by them all. There's no telling what the
ending will be.
-
I can remember a hundred days like this before -
the treasure of rain on a brand new cap, the flat water,
jewelled with sunlight, or the low moan of that
distant small-craft airfield. By the wooden bridge
along the roadway, single-engine planes drone on,
overhead but very low, as if intent to amaze, or
snap the tops of the nearby trees.
-
It all amounts to something, I suppose -
a place we've been, an instance of something
long remembered, the knotted plane of
some life's old board. Like a memory
etched in cotton, it's hard to read and
harder to see - something somehow
there, but not.

172. SADLY SADISTIC

SADLY SADISTIC
Sadly sadistic, the doctor arrives bearing ill-will
and a valise - both of which he manages to throw down
on the bed. 'So much depends on the little red wheelbarrow',
I thought he said. There was too much noise to be sure, as,
outside the window, a kid was running around yelling 'Sam!'
at the top of his lungs. As I looked out, I saw a lone girl running
off, as if fleeing from something obscure, in another direction.
-
It was all such a confusing moment to me.
This family man - himself a father - the doctor,
had settled at the desk and was looking for
a particular pen. 'I like the fatter ones, with black ink;
any good sort of click-style is right.' Very peculiar
to be so specific about pens; well, maybe, I
thought to myself. He clicked on the TV, which
immediately aired a commercial about 'fibrous pain'.
-
'They get it all wrong' - he said - 'medicine and TV
certainly don't mix; you can't explain the workings of the
mind, or the body, in sixty-second soundbites.' I nodded
serenely, glad just to be hearing his voice. 'Is that the
Passaic outside your window?' I asked. 'I think it's always
been, but I've never been sure - funny isn't it how rivers
are never marked unless we see them on a map.' I
laughed a moment, trying hard to think of something to say.
-
(It went like that for the rest of the day).

171. MY AUGUST FACE

MY AUGUST FACE
It's not the time of year for heat; the pipes have been
cool for months, the Summer sky bristles with its own
torpid air. It's an August face, in another sort of heat
I must wear - sweat, sunburn, a white spot
where the wristwatch was. Funny, all that is.
-
In the same way once the roundness of the wheel
must have startled early man, I'm learning new
things by being - simply that. Once I factor
in the complications, it's all a pretty situation,
or maybe, bet. The odds are in my favor.
-
Outside, the sweaty crowd murmurs.
I watch them and imagine, in Winter,
all that breath steaming out of their
mouths into the cold, cold air.
Would they know the difference?
-
Scarves. Mufflers.
Bathing suits. Tumblers.
Water. Ice.
Ice. water.
-
The transformations of ordinary things.

170. DECOLLETAGE

DECOLLETAGE
Family lines, inside troopers,
nasty relatives, happy uncles.
The neighbors' kids, that beat-up car
always parked along the curb.
Sky-writing on high.
The simple sound of the garbage truck,
always the same, rumbling by.
The street-sweeper swish
with its trail of water.
The pealing of the bell at 8am,
the tower, the church, the lawn.
The shadows across the bell-tower,
the mimic of architecture in everyday life.
The gravel and stones abutting the tracks,
the people - at the station - awaiting a train.
The men in their suits. The girls in light jackets.
High boots. Open-back shoes. Briefcases. Hats.
Doors, and the squeak of old hinges.
Something afloat in the air : the birds,
twisting and turning in flocks -
with their sudden maneuvers like wind.
No one else watching, except the girl about
six feet away who also seems to be looking up
with nothing to say. The office building across
the way. Its face of solid glass. The memorial
marker for something - the site of an old house.
Evergreens. A silent darkness. The old
foundations and the stairway to the street.
It seems too narrow now to have ever been in use.
Dense underbrush and a layer of pine needles.
Behind it all, the high trees, the very high trees.
The silent, sobering woods; the path worn through
the center. The stream, and the pond. The new
greenery seeping, pushing out of the ground.
The birds, the animals, the air, the breeze.
The simplest swaying of the tallest trees.

169. TO BE ALIVE

TO BE ALIVE
(and to remain so)
There are, certainly, some magnificent moments :
as the night sky breaks, with yesterday's fat moon still in it;
the clover that never ends; the bee which endlessly seeks.
I may have witnessed my share already, but I'll stay in
place, for now, waiting - as the sunlight traces new the
orange sky and ripples of brightened gray clouds erupt in
light. Chances are I'll manage to remain; in no way
alleviated by right nor changed by wrong.
It is a simple semblance I stumble towards -
my place is here, in these earthen chords.
-
As a Summer's light bending its face to the
rippling stream, a frog entranced by its waiting,
or a turtle, on a log, absorbed by the sun, so too
do I my obsequies pay. This river can relieve me.
A genuflection on the forested floor -
a heart, within, pounding for more.

168. HACKED

HACKED
I want a haircut like a prisoner - some political
anarchic beast stuffed into a corner and shackled,
let out only to glimpse the light but barely.
Hair hacked and chopped like a gruesome truth
on trial. To be judged by a look.
-
The slivered strand, obscure and cut all
at wrong angles, in bad clumps. The face -
to be framed - is hedged and defamed by
this singular matter of cut. Hair, like
a prisoner, destroyed in a fury.
-
You should ask why?
For this is the modern day, is
my conscious reply. A day stuffed
with the pretense of pretty and style
and modicums of comfort varied and wild.
Random. An erstwhile change of sea
at each new opportunity.
-
I want hair like a prisoner :
cut and chopped and wild and...free?

167. SEMBLANCE BROTHERS CIRCUS RIDES IN

SEMBLANCE BROTHERS
CIRCUS RIDES IN
'No, no - nothing ever goes for nothing.'
The high-topped big-top rises every April
on the Canton town square.
Like a dream each time, the frizzy-haired
guy shows up with his papers, contract in
hand; going over this, going over that.
He reads, I swear, each sentence three times.
He reads it like he reads his life itself:
'This is the big time, boy, and you're sentenced
to die - see ain't no way out even if you try.
That's the point of this circus, crap and all,
when you come right down to it.'
-
Just then the game-horse whinnied,
and the elephants threw spit, and
Marnie, the high-wire girl,
fell right into my arms.

166. LISTINGS

LISTINGS
(Having never visited Tintern Abbey)
-
I have been left off so many lists that I
no longer regard them as essential for anything.
Like Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey, I sense that
something has passed : soothing light, quiet evenings,
open-ended assumptions about the goodness of life.
-
Someone stands next to a gateway, and high
above him the jagged rocks are carved as faces.
The shapes are angels, cherubs, tiny winged things.
Without a knowledge that they are there,
he goes about his clowning unawares.
-
A woman in green and white comes forward.
With a camera, she stands back a few feet, gazes up,
and - with an automatic focus - clicks. Her silence,
and the snapping whir of the camera, both amaze me.
They define a moment I cannot explain.
-
Four-hundred-year-old ruins.
Forty-five-year-old people.
A camera, less than five years developed.
What a picture this all should make....

165. AS THESE THINGS FALL JUST OUT OF REACH

AS THESE THINGS FALL
JUST OUT OF REACH
Anarchist Christ Jezebel Jeremiah Williamson Tate -
or any other name in the book you'd want to imagine.
I have no use for anything anymore. It's all falling away.
The timeless clouds which smoke the sky, the ending of days,
the soiled talk of those towering infernos. Even all that's
over now. They may have meant well, but everything failed.
-
The meadows were burned on Tuesday, and that place
where the cows once grazed has now been paved.
Houses filled with idiots and indigents now crowd
that country lane (where you and I, in love, had lain).
Anyone with anything worth taking away has already
been made bereft. There is no logic, except now in
the tinkling of those little Advent bells they sell for
five dollars and - I notice - the fat women buy like hell.
-
The fuckheads are eating soup with a knife and expecting
it all to pay. Their hammers AND chisels have been
pounded away - turned into flags and stars and stripes
and little wizened things that veterans salute - those old
military guys with their heads up their asses.
You can tell them by their outhouse passes.
-
It's as simple as that.
Like the consumption of rotted,
dead meat, eaten by a rat.

164. SIGHTING THE COBRA

SIGHTING THE COBRA
The Cobra has its own mystique.
It can't tell about it, but it knows.
If every legend knew something about
itself, how deep would legends go? We'd walk
the enormous edgings of land and sea together,
wishing for circumstance and possibility.
Probably, we'd get neither; but the happenstance
of luck would be there always. Too much to
happen to just light by a candle. We'd need more
brightness when things took off.
-
The Cobra has its own mystique.
It can't really do that dance it did before,
but certain forces pale next to a recoil, and
venom of course speaks its very own language.

163. LAZARUS

LAZARUS
Once I had a nowhere enrap't in a shroud I stood alone :
there existed nothing to engage me - the long dark
of the sanded cave and its silences notwithstanding.
And even if I spoke , no one would answer.
Until that moment (shortly thereafter) when from outside -
the lighter world - I heard a voice commanding me
exit. I simply rose up and walked. And exited.
The brightness - strong at first but then evened out -
brought back a flood of memories; oddly enervating,
things I thought I'd left behind - yet here they were again.
I was forced (and not by this alone) to conclude that Life
as known was but a cycle in a memory itself; my ways of
walking, I noticed, had not left me. Nor had my motor control -
lifting an arm, putting one foot before the other, understanding
my eyes and what I was seeing. Nothing louder than thankfulness
followed me; or was it some other form of strange regret?
I really did not know. I really could not tell.

162. WITNESS

WITNESS
What chance performs the apple tree,
desolate and wiry, sagged as it is
with torment and ruin? It has already
shed its joyous fruit and even its bugs
have left. The elapsed time encircles
its face with north and wintry wind.
Should there yet be faith for more to
come? Better things, balmier, and wiser,
with a fragrance worth repeating?
Standing in the shadow (of something)
here blessed, I cannot for myself attest -
for beauty, presence, aroma and fruit,
they each must speak - in their ways -
for themselves. I, alas, am but a witness.

161. CARMELITA BORANO MORANDI

CARMELITA BORANO MORANDI
(all those virgin births)
She broke water at two am. The baby was born
by three. Nothing sensational about that, I was told.
Virgin births and all the rest happen once or twice
every so often; especially in the Hispanic tradition.
I wasn't aware of that, actually. My last trip in
to Philadelphia, I'd scouted around the moraine
just to watch the Spanish girls pass - but there
weren't any left. They'd all gone away.
'Mostly they join the Army now,' Dr. Wedgewood
had said, 'they like being around all those boys
and they really like the benefits - money, pensions,
health and dental, and - let's not forget - the boys.
That's where most of these new virgin births occur.
Don't know, it sure beats me.' I'd figured a crusty
old doctor like he was should know more than that.
So I pressed. 'What makes them want that? And what
about the killing? And why aren't they just too small?'
My pictured image was of some five foot little girl
up to her neck in trouble. Bullets, boys and brawn.
Virgin births, my ass.

160. MAN THE MAKER

MAN THE MAKER

(I really should leave it at that)
However you figure it, a million years have passed
since the first rocks were formed. We've (since then)
chiseled hammers, broken stones, pulverized layers
of land. This round marble in my hand - basically a
child's joke, something to play with - does represent
something, no matter how foolish the representation.
Like cheap giveaways at any gaudy store, this
trinket bears the traces of Mankind's heavy work.
Ingenuity to enjoyment, in some swift fell swoop.
I notice now, thinking, as here I sit, that I've managed
to survive. My years, much diminished to those of
the marble, I figure will come to an end long long
before that marble's demise: I, turned to dust, and
it, turned to a crush. But after all, what is the ending
of anything - a quick jarring end to sudden boring
illusion; a finished frame to a portrait's intrusion.
-
I really should leave it at that.

159. ANOTHER JESUS

ANOTHER JESUS
To assail the generous forces amassed I wish to
address the crowds across from me - bleeding with
eyes and walking with sticks - all those people out there:
'Do you think we can heal!! Do you think we can find
a way out, a trail to deliverance!! These aren't, after all,
questions!! I am leading you forth!! Come away!!'
And then, below all that, as an undercurrent of
feeling, the mumbled words of hundreds rolled.
I myself knew not what they were saying.
A true 'Give us Barabbas!' moment.

158. AS WE WERE WAITING

AS WE WERE WAITING
This man was questioning gerunds -
what they were and how they meant.
Asking, he went on...'Catholic school...
couldn't pay attention...don't know the
rules...just go on.' Settling for a seeming
nothing, I replied in kind - something about
the mob of words, forcing declensions,
listening to voices. It did seem settled then;
awash in words as we were waiting.

157. '...THEN MAYBE WE CAN TALK...'

'...THEN MAYBE

WE CAN TALK...'

(the mark of Cain)
Magisterial presence and a remarkable bearing -
of a place on Earth, among rocks and soil and stone.
'It is a husbanding of Nature, nothing more.'
He said this to no one in particular. I wasn't
watching, though I heard. To acknowledge - in the
least way I could - I nodded a response. He
laughed and heartily replied (to nothing):
'Such nonsense, you see, is the bane of our time.
A million rabid people falling apart at the seams,
and saying 'God it was' who told them to be this way'
I sensed where he was going with that, as it all
gravitated towards a nothing - a great big hole,
a place where nothing was. 'Is the absence of presence,
oh kind sir, also the presence of absence?
If you answer me that, then maybe we can talk.'

156. LOVE

LOVE
Like a bird with a treasured idea,
the Arabic lady was feeding her husband -
in a gentle manner, as if in passing,
a forkful of chicken at a time.
She had the dressing in a little cup,
and dipped it first and moved along.
Fork by fork, slowly, they went on.
Then I noticed him feeding her;
in much the very same way, his
little seasoned meatballs and lettuce.
Almost one at a time, a piece of
this and a piece of that.

155. AWAITING THE DIN

AWAITING THE DIN
I was reading The Dangling Man on a
Tuesday eve - the light, though adequate,
was dim.
-
There were two very old men nearby -
sitting on library chairs, they neither
spoke, it seemed, nor cared. We may as
well have been riding to doom : a Titanic
or some other such vessel.
-
All was sedate. Out the window nearby, I
watched a train go by on its trestle.

154. A KIAE INAGA (a translation)

A KIAE INAGA
(a translation)
Five evasive maneuvers - for the straggling
man steadfast in trust and yearning. Forceful
in manner, and strong. All the sorts of things
an Old Testament Father would know. Like
stealing, adultery, and lamb-slaughter/sacrifice,
with the annihilation of Self thrown in.

153. NOT SO NICE AS ALL THAT

NOT SO NICE AS ALL THAT
Orange peels on the kitchen floor, where the
refrigerator throws its shade. The broken old table,
mended to dry, lilting towards its own bad side.
The shade tree, outside the window, is bare to the
suffering of the sky. A new day's light comes through.
-
I never know why we mean what we do.
Everything turns on its own axis, reinforcing
a sense of the lifeless or maybe dread. Even in
Summertime, when we open these doors and windows,
it's much the same no matter. Today, the mercury
reads 20, while on other days I've seen it hit 100.
That's a fairly normal range for any jagged life;
temperature, chance, ratio, percentages of things
all together - no difference, no matter.
-
How life is like the weather.
Even on the best of days, it's
not so nice as all that. And on the
worst, well, we all just bundle up and go on.

152. MEZODOMAIN

MEZODOMAIN
The bleak stalwarts deal with the bleak;
see how many glumly cross over that bridge.
Beneath their feet there are layered bones of
dinosaurs and the fossilized remains of things like
dreams and emanations : those powerful fogs of
other places we vaguely see as they are carried with us.
Not realizing intent, these dark connoisseurs of placement
and vantage point simply stare ahead - missing everything
peripheral to them. So does a certain form of history pass.
-
We are members of a dwindling club : things which die like the
light at evening, the sun at its daily parting, the 10am puddle
that is gone by 2. Mesmerizing laces entwine everything we
see - in the power to source us back to an origin, it has its
most brute strength and its moment of quick glory.
-
The inscription on that golden rock alongside the lake,
it reads : 'Everything that lives must die; all things
which die shall live again. So the ages decree.
Mankind can only acquiesce.'

151. WHAT DO YOU THINK IT IS THEN I SHOULD DO?

WHAT DO YOU THINK IT
IS THEN I SHOULD DO?
I want to accuse you of abandoning ideology, charting the
waves or turning your back on my presence. It's as if
I need to do something to validify our both existences.
That calendar-chart you keep is not enough.
Yes, I see, there are wings on the barn and the
chickens do not hatch, but it little matters, even
in agricultural terms, if we dilute the reality of the
truth or the truth itself - that's the sort of poor choice
we've left ourselves with. Yell all you wish at the very
top of your lungs...the sky is not falling and it never will.
-
It was a New Year's Eve when I passed your house, seeing
the broad lights lit up on your porch. The piano was still
in place, but I figured it must be chilly in there. I saw three or
four figures walking through, wine-glasses in hand. They
weren't you, yet they seemed ageless as well. Across the
roadway, in the harbor, some twisted party boat was
cruising by. Music blared and drunk people were singing
along the heavy railing (God forbid drunks should fall into
the frigid waters, I guess). They seemed oblivious to any
reality at all. The good life is like that, I'm told.
-
One solitary, very bright star was in the sky above.
It was almost reflected on the water, and seemed way too
low to be normal. I imagined seeing it reflected, as well,
in your eyes. I almost wanted to cry. For me, lame as ever,
another year had passed and - now, already full of regret -
another one was just beginning.

150. MY SYNOPSIS

MY SYNOPSIS
Could you have passed for something else, had they let you?
Like a black man in a yellow skin, I feel my supposed
whiteness, even now, letting me down. These
Earthlings, after all, only have a few colors of their own.
Their tall sky they claim as blue - while their deepest
space they insist is black. Their yellow sunlight then
turns to white and then orange as it sets. No one
ever explains that, either. Storm clouds, always dark
and foreboding, are omens of bad things to come;
yet their storms and rains bring flowers and scent.
How odd they must feel, if challenged by these things.
-
That Riddle of the Sphinx they always talk of,
it really tells me nothing. How many legs does
on really need to stand on? From eggs, they gather
food, while other eggs they allow to their fruition -
bringing further life. Life like this then multiplies more
life itself - food/life - in some self-sustaining elegy:
a slow song they all must learn, a melody that haunts
and lingers, a skippy tune tune they eventually all learn to sing.

149. A COURSE IN JUGGLING

A COURSE IN JUGGLING
'She pays you because she has to, and she's
busy all the time - I swear she can talk for hours;
it's just a natural thing for her' - I put down my
fork and went right to work responding : 'on the
other hand you might want to consider the arrangement
with time that we all make amongst each other
just to stay in place - like some scalding cloth laid
over our face, it's very painful at the same

time (we're told) it deep-cleans the pores.'
-
'This plane flew over the houses, I swear it
was low enough that I could see the pilot's bruises.
There was someone talking pictures from the window
on the same side - all I caught was the end of a lens.'
The guy saying that seemed outraged and - as if astonished -
just kept going on about 'invasions of privacy' and how
'no one's secure anymore, even in their houses and homes.'
I noted to myself how useless redundancy really is when
the initial argument or premise is so bad. If a bomb went
off, this is the same sort of guy who'd go on endlessly
about how there was no security and 'they' weren't
doing their job. It's a comfort thing, like Jello or
pudding, to these types of people.
-
No one wants to be there when their daughter is de-flowered.
In the same way, when truth and its consequences hit you
in the face, everyone takes refuge in some modest excuse.
'Life is so short, suicide is like shooting yourself in the head
while falling to the ground without a parachute.

You'll be there soon anyway, why bother....'

148. PLAYTIME ON THE EDGING

PLAYTIME ON THE EDGING
I fought the legends at the Mercantile Exchange;
they were shouting bananas for squash. As soon
as I entered, the room grew quiet - 'hey ain't you
the guy from the orchard, picking peppers every
week?' some sidekick yelled out and I nodded.
Just like something which had happened before.
-
I'd read sometime back that everything Yogi Berra had
ever said was unique and interesting, but I sensed
it couldn't be true. Where's the drama in 'ball 1 or 2?'
And anyway, it wasn't like he was a wise man or anything -
just a bum in a short striped suit denoting baseball.
-
When someone reaches the finish line, they usually try to stop.
It didn't seem to happen here - everyone stayed milling about.
I'd put on my jacket and already gone out (that curious
twist of time) and that had brought me to Bethlehem to
Nazareth - the Pennsylvania towns - wherein all
things were solid rot, tundreled folderol or
Christian prattle. Moravians, bums, and the
indigent, all mixed up together.
'Never a place like this should be.'
-
I went into the antiques store : two women selling
trinkets and an old retiree selling his collection
of old toy cars. 'This is my retirement now,
all what keeps me busy. I got two pensions
from Canada and Social Security coming
in each month. Nothing to do, this is
my retirement.' He started repeating
himself, telling me over and over
the origin of each of the toys.
-
Metal cars, rubber cars, plastic cars,
vinyl cars, repainted cars, original cars,
one-of-a-kind cars and mass-produced cars.
These were all only toys. Jeez, I wanted to flee.
-
Someone else had a huge framed portrait of Jesus.
They claimed a 'likeness' I never saw, and where
they got that idea from I never knew.
But I knew it was time to go.

147. THAT FICTITIOUS CADAVER

THAT FICTITIOUS CADAVER
I met the man from Zenith Point,
the one with two heads and two extra eyes.
He was pointing straightaway out, saying something
about reason and facts and possible endings.
There was nothing like him - it was said - in the
entire western world. A soldier of shellac, a martyr of
mosaics, a craftsman of dangerous duties and details.
-
At that recognition, I let it all be. I said nothing.
I nodded back and grimaced when I thought I
should. He had a wife named Lucy. She was shoeless
and often entered their shack from the complete other end.
I'd grown to like her over time - mostly because of her
smell and her potatoes. She played drums with the
Pond deLuc Banner band. Mostly at the Friday Night Socials
or at Doc's Soldiers' Hops. It was always fun to see her.
-
They had a tax man always chasing them. His name was
Antonio, but I simply called him Gramsci, like the Italian
patriot he never could be. He took it in good stride.
Screwdrivers, hammers and nails; buckets of cobbler's glue,
leather punches and twining mittens. I got to know all
these things just from reading the audit papers.
-
Over time, let's face it and let me admit to it,
I grew tired of the whole thing and just
walked away; glad as I was to be gone.

146. GWENDOLYN, THEY EAT IT UP

GWENDOLYN, THEY EAT IT UP
(the wide, open Sargasso/a pirate's life)

I too was waltzing Matilda, hopefully, I figured,
right off the same gangplank we'd come in on.
This masterful speaker, the Captain, was effusive
in his oaths and daring but totally ineffectual in
his results : men had already mutinied twice over;
those two, anyway, hanging by their necks from the
yard-arm. Some nasty birds of the sea had been here
already - once picking out their eyes and another time
pecking away at their faces. Someday very soon,
I figured, they pop the bloat and we'd all be sprayed
with their slop. So much to look forward to on the
wide open Sargasso.
-
I'd met her once before, in the seaside brothel near
Baltimore. Totally fucking lovely she was; little did
I know she was paid to conscript bastards like me to
a deadly pirate-life at sea. I'd fallen head over heels
for everything about her : her tits, her pussy, her wide
thriving hips and beautiful lips. It was over in an
instant; drugged and stupefied, I was taken away.
We all awoke at sea, days later.
-
'How could you have done this to me?' I asked her
lethargically (for it little-mattered now). 'I did it
for us, and I'd do it again - just as I do it for all other
men.' Whatever that meant, she tore off her dress
and sat on my face. Not a bad start to a bad life at sea.
The flowing, flowered dress, I noticed, was floating
towards the edge, wind blowing it along. Twenty minutes
later I (along with three other blokes) was done with her
as she was with us. Sated - in that proverbial way of
Paradise and the Ideal - everyone slept it off on the deck.
We awoke some time later, fearsome wind howling and a
straight falling rain : as only rain at sea can be.
She'd re-dressed herself and was sulking along, yet happily.
-
My life after that wasn't much.
When we did reach Portugal and Spain,
for her, I took the Lord Jesus' name and
Christianized myself (again). Every life, they say,
has a second act - and if this was to be mine, I'd be
sure to want it back by making good on every notion.
Salvation, like sex at sea, is all in the motion.
-
I later lived a very good life in all of Europe's ports.
As for her... she stayed by my side, as a good woman ought.

145. WAYS TO LIFT THE UPENDING

WAYS TO LIFT THE UPENDING
Phoenix Gargantua, a name on the wall;
something as ancient as both myth and
archaeology too. What enormous gyrations
brought forth such a shudder? The flap of
your wings would change the wind or alter
the flow of time and event. Professionals have
parties in order to discuss such things over
canapes and cocktails. We, by contrast, have
our paltry stares and peerings. I myself, so
engaged, look for trackings on huge eggs, or
spottled larvae and parasites on your hide.
Amidst this wondrous silence, nothing is to
be found. I wander, instead, these museum rooms
looking for notes and markings along the walls -
anything to tell me where I'm at in contrast to these
other massive assumptions. In my own fevered
dreamings, I cannot unbelieve the Man who walked
with the Dinosaur - it's all that foreign and distant to me.
I want, in fact, to believe such things - my own mythmaking,

unmatched for charm, in the halls of this museum cairn.

144. THE VISIT TO THE MANNING CLINIC

THE VISIT TO THE

MANNING CLINIC
Not for the constabulary nor for those who weaken
are all these things left here. Like poor-willed
pioneers only reluctantly forging ahead into something
new, we notice how they examine what's before them:
something for mending, that iron for pressing, those
shears for the cloth to be cut with. Realizing that this
is, after all, a mental ward with a work-section
contingent, these inmates are soon kept busy.
-
'It keeps their minds at the ready, at least for those
who can, or for those who have minds left' - he said
that sadly and sheepishly, as if he knew already
it would be considered wrong to say.
But it was alright for me, as I understood
precisely what he meant.
-
It was all those blue shirts that gave it away.
Inmates, guards, patients, everyone almost
seemed alike. Bending and sorting, talking amidst
themselves or TO themselves, it seemed as if
some weirdly wired magical moment was set
to explode any second. I did all I could do to
look away, but the infracted expectation kept me
riveted to it all. I noticed the bare light bulbs at the
top of the concrete wall, with a dim light settling
out over the room. Dim-wits, dim-bulbs; I could
here those dumb jokes already about.
-
'Take a deep breath' I told myself, 'just
take a deep breath and go on.'

143. WOODEN BOATS

WOODEN BOATS
I am sad and this is pure. So what?
We are swimming together in a deep,
dark-blue sea; something like the Aegean
but not. The lithe wind, no fiend at all,
merely whispers along our faces.
There is nothing other than this we could
be doing, or should. The provided
shape of this day is ours alone.
-
Sometimes we are given givens -
assumptions we all must make,
achievements to which we all aspire.
It is like this today : a great sunlight
on the water, the smooth sound of sea
all around us, the clap-clap of wavelets on
wooden boats.

142. THE REAWAKENING

THE REAWAKENING
I entered sleep this day divorced from all things -
reading The Broken Tower in my dreaming and
assuming nothing but a human song within my ears.
I nodded this way and that, in a dark gray fuse,
the way those entering death are said to waver.
All was wordless, yet I drowned in these words.
-
There was far too much to take in :
activity furious a'boil, strange cauldrons
of steam and intention, wispy images
of ladies and gents a hundred years past.
The angled light sourced from some
celestial bright I was not entered on to see.
-
And then all sound was an echo reciting famed words...
'the bells, the bells, broke down their tower...
and so it was I entered the broken world...'
whereupon, like some lamb afire in the
presence of its Maker's stern flame,
I awoke once more to take my turn.

141. TIMESPHERE

TIMESPHERE
The wandering of the idle seems endless

like a lake filled with nothing but water, endless

unto its very bottom - which we never see.

Such evasions have no definitions and are

merely filled with matter in some other manifestation:

a fir tree, shaking in the wind and rain, or another

dose of sleet, slapping slanting on the face.

-

Above us, where the moon with some meaning

calls out to the tides, the uneven sky is black and

pocked with little stars. Something seems moving

in the air - a strong blackness roving hard.

-

I can refer to nothing - there is neither watch

nor clock to tell time by, nor sunlight to mark

the Heavens above. Would it were so, I would

definitely know the hour if not the minute - yet how

little in life truly depends on the time. Everything

just happens, and only later do we recall, sometimes vividly,

the exact hour and moment and minute and second.

By ersatz definition, this becomes our time.

-

We share space like a needle shares cloth:

we enter it, we pierce it, and we're out the other end.

140. THE STAR ATOP THE STAR

THE STAR ATOP THE STAR
Seasonal festivities - you know the kind -
mar the air. Soil the premises. Clutter
up, in fact, even the cemetery.
Those damned teddy bears, stars,
mangers and wreaths seem staggering,
and everywhere I look another peasant
has fallen to their knees. Suffice it to say -
an overdue life is ripe for the picking
and we are late, for the mourning has
already started (in spite of false joy).
-
What is it they all want?
Deliverance? Sustenance? Surety?
Salvation? They can have any of that,
really, for a pittance if they only try.
Yet, instead of the effort, they cavort
like children, infantile and stupid too,
before things which have no meaning
except a careening defeat and a genuflection
before cash and all its old fake promises.
-
If you look up, that star stretched across the
street in lights has another star far above it.
That other one is real, and distant,
but present nonetheless.
Find it, oh heedless one.

139. MORNING

MORNING
I have never washed the face of love
with anything like this before :
gold-splattered hyperbole or
silver-rimmed nettles excepted.
In either case, my hands would
be found holding something other
than what was meant.
-
You have become the juice for my source,
the sap for my tree, the elixir of a hundred
deviations from the norm. Whatever it all
is, I just let it be, and, in the knowing
you are near, find a way to compensate
for distance, for time and place.
-
If the distant skies are vain to show their
light by morning's fading darkness, I will
willingly cooperate in that deceit - the
half-moon still perches within the morning's
dark light, a darkness almost fading away
but present still...and then the new blue opens
into something new again.
-
Apparently too, it is all as simple
as breathing, or thinking a thought -

nothing doubtful, nothing measured.

138. WINTER SOLSTICE, 3am

WINTER SOLSTICE, 3am
Tip-tap the anti-social animal.
'They'd rather not be part of a crowd.'
Lane-trippers slip forward, gauging only
the space for themselves, as it's needed.
Wherever they veer, rubber gloves they wear.
It's like all of Chesire Town, or even Marmbaly,
had left its meadows intact and allowed things to grow;
to stay-put in place, or align to where they may.

-
It's a perpetual freedom of pure happiness and grace.
Lincoln Town is only a bit distant from Center City,
which in fact is near to the old historic center.
The grand old Second Bank Building,
now a colonial portrait gallery,
is filled with listless faces
on tired old canvas.

-
It is borne with a certain pride, I'd think,
this public display, the urge to preen
and to show. Unlike all of that,
I myself am so tired
I simply could die.

-
I've seen none of this since the Spring,
and then the late Summer, when
everything was beautiful and in bloom.
Sidewalk characters. Guys playing
guitars, singing folk-songs
while beautiful girls walked by.

-
Now it's a desolate world, and
I'm so tired I could die.

137. I TRIED TO START YOU BUT I COULDN'T REACH

I TRIED TO START YOU

BUT I COULDN'T REACH:

..(a farce)..
There was nothing going backwards but words
and the cage, and I'd already tired of that,
so I attempted putting you in the picture frame
by the random window but quickly realized you'd never fit.
And we had flowers in the flower pot and some orchids
by the window west - nomenclature had failed us
as I recall on the Twelfth of Never (it was once called) -
which is different from 'it once was called' in a conditional way -
and it ended up not mattering anyway because
the pilfered lampshade had come tumbling down
and the air-fighter-pilot with the message-jacketed lightning rod
had just started talking and the curtain rang with sound.
Lights, camera, action was all the rage;
while the astronaut in the diaper was the current image
of the newest art to be seen : five men in a red sedan,
three corner dogs in false tiaras barking with a smile,

(yes the dogs not the tiaras), and someone was

heard to say 'let's run to Jersey City',
while another person grimaced at all the bother -
for it's easier to ride anywhere like that than to run -
and Journal Square holds nothing anymore anyway,
any dollar store you want, any Aztec two-step mongoloid,
any Asian rip-rap food-frenzy mama
holding out her loins for all to see -
but they went anyway in a fifty-seven

Ford Fairlane of the sort never seen,

like some dental assistant's car
all pink and white - reminding me of gums or

bleeding gums anyway and breaking the
speed limit - always an impossibility in that heap -
though never an option still sounded like a good idea
or what's the turnpike for? And I watched from some
obscure hilltop nearby as they crested the Elizabeth
crescent and bent over Bayonne's hump to land right
there on Sip Avenue and come up to the city
from the bottom (legendary great idea); but the cymbals
were clashing or the symbols were crashing (I never

knew which), while the church on the hillside, ablaze

and afire, was burning its Mexican clergy (Jesu Maria Mon

Dieu and all the rest) Father Diego Carmellano Miranda

Lopez Diaz himself - clapping hands with the Devil,

singing songs in a trance while blessing
the bosoms of mothers and aunts,
put the crucifix down into Don Carlos' pants -
but it was ALWAYS like that in this Paradise

to come, this locus of the plain, this kingdom

of fun; and no one could speak

any faster than that -

whether for loss or for gain

or the Cardinal's red hat.

136. THE 'I HAVE NOTHING' CHURCH

THE 'I HAVE NOTHING' CHURCH
(whimsy too)
I was leaning on the railing of the
'I Have Nothing' church - a poor parish
on the very edge of Stuyvesant Village.
Package goods were piled high and thrown
about haphazardly - empty bottles of Night Train
Express and Thunderbird. The finest lubrications
for the embattled soul cheap money could buy.
Someone came up to me and nudged me aside,
saying 'I'm here to collect the glass bottles'.
I called him a hero and said 'God bless your soul;
there's material matter in Heaven too, if that's your
goal.'
-
He looked askance, but kept to his work.
I heard him mumble a prayer and an oath -
nearly at the same time from the very same mouth.
-
Sometimes we fiddle, each of us, while our
personal Rome burns...burns viciously and right
to the ground. We get up if we can, brush the ash off,
get back to our task, try to rebound.
Maybe that's the way of this life.
-
I tend to think an embattled, promiscuous
moment like this has a lesson to impart:
Don't judge a man by his cover,
don't put the horse before the cart,
don't judge a book by its clothing,
don't miss the emotion
within your heart.

135. WHEN LOOKING AT THE TARGET ONE SHOULD NEVER AIM

WHEN LOOKING AT THE TARGET
ONE SHOULD NEVER AIM
Or maybe it was the other way around.
I forget. It didn't matter anyway, since
the fellow next to me was already
shouldering a bazooka.
-
I've had a hundred or more times to
address the crowd. Though I never really
said a word, they all applauded loud
and acted as if they'd heard...something.
-
It was in the middle of a deep, dark woods -
a place such as Dante would know of -
that I heard a very loud
splash;
though there was no water
around for miles.
-
Like nothing at all.

134. WHEN THE COLDER

WHEN THE COLDER
When the colder outbreaks come, the
globe will be broken by them - backwards
running rivers of ice and blood, a convoluted
mix-up of what is cold and what is hot.
People will die in place and fall on the spot.
It will be like nothing seen before : ceilings,
collapsed and fallen, will break hard upon
people's heads - even office-workers will have
no dalliance with time, nor with each other.
The passage of things will simply stop : the
day the time the air the clock. Nothing like
citizenry, cooperation or even chivalry
will be left. In fact, the right hand
will steal from that left whatever
it can - but, alas, even with
stolen goods, there will
be nowhere to go,
and nowhere to
take them.

133. I'LL SLEEP WHERE I CHOOSE

I'LL SLEEP WHERE I CHOOSE
Under a rock in Central Park,
or on some clear park bench
with all the elbow room in the world.
In Philadelphia there's the
Cave of Kelpius, over along
the Wissahickon on a steep slant
running down towards the water -
two hundred years ago some
Christian-cultist ran his mob
of acolytes deep into that cave
to await the End; which never came.
Actually, in its own peculiar way,
it came for them as they're now
all gone. I wonder if they considered
their beliefs justified or just a crank
of fate. Living in a cave like that,
I imagine, has to wear one down.

132. WHERE WISHES ABOUND

WHERE WISHES ABOUND
I have tried everything:
playing the piano at 2am in a
creepy half-light thrown by wavering
candles in a dance of death,
sleeping upside down in a
seedy carpetbag suspended from
a wall, running at breakneck speed
along the very edge of some great canyon
or gorge. I really must say it's been fun enough,
but nothing has brought me a true satisfaction -
which, were it to exist, I realize now,
would have to include you.
By necessity there simply are
such things which must be given their
true and proper definitions for them
to (at the least) make any real sense:
a garland of angels;
a salt shaker with nothing
in it except salt.

131. ON CROSSING THE MISSISSIPPI

ON CROSSING THE MISSISSIPPI
I am crossing a bridge over the Mississippi -
'a soup of mud' as Dickens called it. That was then,
of course. Below my feet, somewhere the depths of
careening water dance and sluice around other things.
It is as it always should be : water, seeking its
own level, floats and fills, dices and darts, as if
it had a life of its own...which it does, quite actually.

-
We are helpless without it, and when it subsumes us
we are helpless too. Note the houses floating along
in the flood - tippling and toppling over and about,
they flip like simple toys - glassless windows, shaded
eaves and watery porches without their rockers.
Foundations, being useless adjuncts to nothing,
cannot anchor the real against the watery.

-
How odd all this is.
How distant from our 'usual'
definitions about how things are.
Bushes and reeds, big trees and weeds,
everything supple and green, lining the banks
and over-hanging the edges - each of them
will tell you (in their weird and effervescent language)
what a powerful force they live amidst; and how
that water feeds them, roils them, and - startlingly -
begs them for forgiveness before it tears them from
their ground and their place and their stand,
on their own 'more solid'
sea of land.

130. BAD DRIVES OUT GOOD

BAD DRIVES OUT GOOD

Whatever they shoe-horn in will fit,

whether wasted tower or storefront bit;

it wouldn't matter to anyone else - 'as long' -

the landlord will say - 'as I can generate some

income.' Well that's all fine for him.

-

It's the others, looming and lost, who bear the

brunt - tacky subdivided real-estate made

blind and slobbering with garish lights, bad

colors and poorly thought-out use and place.

-

There once was a city upon a hill - all light

and wisdom too - wherein the people, so

possessed of a general goodness, wanted

for nothing and did less than that. Idleness

was grace. Self-possession was the golden

mean. Nothing ugly or crass existed, nor was

let to be. Everything, so it seemed, was perfect.

-

And then someone let in the scourge.

Someone let in the urge : for pecuniary

propagation and momentary motivation.

In time all good things come to end,

it seems, as Bad - as it always does -

drives out Good.

129. FOR ONCE

FOR ONCE
For once, for once:
there ought to be a morning before,
not merely a morning after. There
should be time for regrets but no
regrets for time. There needs to be
something put before the horse
other than the cart to which we're
accustomed. And, after being led,
the horse should find something other
than water to drink.
-
['I've said all this before', the sodden
minister said 'but even when speaking
from the pulpit, no one listens to what
I say. Give me a minute, just give me
a minute...']
-
I heard a girl talking today - one to another,
her and a friend. I overheard her say, on the
train platform, while an interstate liner
whizzed by, 'I like this time of year, of course,
but isn't it amazing how the holidays all
morph together?' I'm not sure even of what
she meant, or of the time she referred to,
but she was pretty representative, I thought,

of just what people are today,
of just what people are.

128. IN THE MATTER OF SOMETHING OTHER THAN GOLD

IN THE MATTER OF SOMETHING
OTHER THAN GOLD
'Matchmaker matchmaker make me a match'
or whatever that line was I couldn't recall - it
managed nonetheless to tell me something
I should already have known : We mimic only
that which we desire.
-
Standing by the falls in Paterson, I understood
so quickly the meaning of 'worthlessness'.
Whichever wilderness this once was, it's been destroyed.
Jefferson, Hamilton, all those early idiots, with their
quaint visions of 'Cities of Industry' and 'Enlightened Men';
they were so full of shit it hurts to even think about it.
The waters have turned to crud, tar and macadam
scour the demolished landscape, little scrappy
Hispanic people hang on every corner.
-
It seems that the only things people want
- from dollar store to dollar whore -
are cheap and cheesy bargains where
something nice once was before...
like eating cornbread at the Bendix Diner,
or walking the Meadowlands as a scavenger
on the prowl; there's nothing left for 'quality'
and each cur now has its growl.
-
Some people grovel where they may, while others
travel to grovel where they want. It's the same,
really - sickly people in an oasis of
illusion; like foamy, yellowed water
barreling over Paterson Falls.

127. CANDELABRA

CANDELABRA
The great Gothic Cathedral
is dark at night - a sprawling
darkness worthy of black-coated
windows and stern stands in a
great void. Simply put, there is
no light. Not a glass reflects,
not a glimmer projects.
-
It is pretty much just as I like it.
The darkness reminds me of something,
but I'm unsure of what. Someplace
I have been? Someplace I've missed?
A sparkle or a candle-point could
disturb this darkness, yes, - but
my memory of this 'something' - no.
-
If all of Heaven's sky is like a candelabra :
light, fire, fury and fuse : then all of what I see
here in this darkness is, too, like some sort
of vivid awakening, a startling sight seen in
the absence of light. Paradoxical conundrum, yes,
but too the sort of quiet duality that measures
a life for the better. Off-season, a blossom in bloom.

126. ATTENUATED TO NUANCE

ATTENUATED TO NUANCE

Why am I partial to circular things while

linear logic drives me mad? Salvation

of the circumstance can only be found

in the roundabout fashions of random

thought and unsought conclusions.

As the mad be-bopper would once have

spoken : 'I'm hep to that; hope you're not jokin''.

And then - in a spree of mystifying and unsaddled

words - that man in the jazz loft would begin

playing his overloaded (circular) riffs while the

others joined in : Mr. Drummer high-hats to death

while the piano man accentuates each chord by an echo.

It's like that everywhere I go. The ribbon of

science unwrapped and pulled, torn in slices

from all stern and rational things. I want to bow

down at that building where they all once lived.

In my memory - the Mingus the Monk the Coltrane

and even, in his own enormous way, Kid Ory,

somewhere still playing today. Birdman took flight.

He's gone away.

125. MINE EYES HAVE SEEN THE GLORY...

MINE EYES HAVE SEEN THE GLORY....
You were discarded at the very first stop:
go-around again, get off the truck, leave no
trace behind. Just as bad philosophy bears all the
scars of fear and loathing, dread and harm, so too
are you kept like a memory of something now
needfully wrong - splendidly evil - frightfully bent.
We'll spend the next ten years just talking your name.
And then? Well, then the swallows come back to
Capistrano, then Captain Kidd returns his ships, and
Elmer Fudd learns how to calculate the astrophysical
odds of entering another cosmic dimension by walking
the escalator while Miles Davis plays in his mind.
....and if that ain't your 'Heaven', well then what is?

124. CHRISTIAN TUMORS

CHRISTIAN TUMORS
All that Christian caterwauling about
stars and times and lights and angels
really makes me laugh. Angels on the
head of a pin could do no better.
Had I believed we could rise from the
dead - in a most theatrical way - I'd
have surely seen that play by now. Some
Hebrew playwrite would have hit that
one already - live on Broadway, songs
and chains and chimes and names.
But, alas, slower than a Conestoga wagon
in a drama about going west, nothing's ever
changed about this story. 'Born in a manger,
died and was buried, rose - like Lazarus? -
in three days from the dead'. As I recall
that's all they've ever read.
Lines of them on a Christmas night;
trying to enter a church in the light
thrown by a silvery moon with a
sleigh full on ice - of toys and promises
and smiles and nice. If that's all it takes
to get me to Heaven - I'll meet you
tomorrow at the 7-11. We'll throw
down a brew and say a few prayers.
What happens after that...well really, who cares?

123. COWL

COWL
The cowl is the hood I
hide beneath. You'd never
find me there. I am the scowl
therein, without an 's' of course, and
as well-hidden and precise as anything
else can be - I suppose.

-
From beneath the endless imbroglio I stand up -
it covers me, in tatters, and coats my very being.
There's nothing very enticing about that. For years
dogs have been mangy and cats have distempered -
small veterinarial quirks eventually taken care of.
For me it's somewhat different. I regard mankind as
a curse delivered : malfeasance enamored of itself.
I shake hands with everyone I must. I nod back to
those I care for. I have a few. Minions and friends
are acquaintances with whom I spend time but
NOTHING, I've found, can GIVE me time back.
-
There's the deadly rub:
To say nothing and go on?
Or to make mention of the constant
loss, the constant leakage, the airstream
just slipping away? In either case, I am
what I am and doomed to be just that.

-

In spite of it all, I offer my hands

and my heart to anyone out there

who cares.

122. INNUNDATED BY CONSOLATION

INUNDATED BY CONSOLATION
The lines of steel run over the landscape
like wires and string - the rail cars simply
slide as they go rolling by. Windows within
people - lit at night - and people within the
windows : everyone taking a pose, striking a
stance. Newspapers. Magazines. Phones. Books.
-
The million things of a million things.
-
There is an outside world to this - one not taken by
distraction : endless armies of history and story, thoughts
provoked by thoughts. To those who know, it is a refuge
and a harbor too. A place for consolation. Within the
aimless hum of railroad and steel, every so often there
is a stop at a station unplanned, not known - a secret-status,
a stop along an undisclosed route. No schedule holds
this information. It begins in the heart, with its terminus,
a long and dusty stop, in the mind.

121. THE CLERICAL DIME

THE CLERICAL DIME
'Like being blown apart by wild animals'
(like 'makes no sense' and 'has no reason' -
what's he trying to say?). The meadowlark
with the ink-well tooling is soaring too
high for the sky : it's only trouble brewing.
-
How conscious are we of being aware?
Or isn't that 'how conscious are we of being
conscious'? Silly indecipherable things.
-
The man sits in a red velvet chair - a flip-seat
the kind the old movie houses had - maybe they still
do - I wouldn't know. He sits straight up tall as
the mast and stares straight ahead. It's actually
only a museum - where they show rocks and toads and
fossils and things. A few people come clogging in
with their kids and their baggage and their selves.
-
There's no thrill like a psychiatric thrill.
Punch in - tell your stuff - punch out and go.
Punch - that reminds me of Judy - is a concept
I never got right : is it the action or the result?
-
So, as you can see, I'm only in it for the moment.
Making a few mordant confessions about things
I once noticed. Going to Lourdes to get water.
Eating stale bread on the wharf.
Running into, of all people, an
old Ed Sullivan on his way
to the TV gas chambers.
'On Air' I think
were his very
last words.

120. ONCE THE HAMMERLOCK

ONCE THE HAMMERLOCK
Once the hammerlock drives to the skull,
fish begin fighting, lights go on and off,
everything is nutso in the brain. It wouldn't
matter if one was in a coma; it all would still be felt.
Some old wrestler was trying to tell these kids the
exploits of his youth. He'd lived in a trailer near the
street by my house; more or less out in the woods
where past the development ended. He lived like a
hermit; he and his son. The kid was about 11 same time
I was. We stayed close to each other, even while the father
went through his drunken rages - beating the walls,
yelling weird curses, screwing his neighbors, the Agolio
girls, or women, or whatever they were. It was love at first
sight, 'cept they all were blind. I said that once to the son.
We were sitting on a log by the pond in the woods. About maybe

thirty feet away, we could see all that was happening
inside through the window set right to our angle.
It was an education, to be sure. 'I think that's how kids
are made too', the son said in all earnestness to me.
I nodded yeah, and pretended I knew what he meant.
-
'It was love at first sight, 'cept they all were blind.'
He laughed pretty good at that.

119. THE SCIENTIFIC ARMADA

THE SCIENTIFIC ARMADA
'Henry can light the candles or he can go
straight to Hell - logic and all'. It was said with
a lilt, all that was, with a tongue that surpassed
everything else in its boldness and charm. I was
standing outside Patsy's wearing a hat that wouldn't fit.
Three men walked by brusquely, with something only they
knew hidden beneath their winter coats. This was a ghetto
of sorts; such sightings are commonplace.
-
I decided maybe I'd like a clue.
Patsy's made nothing but pizza and slabs,
so that wouldn't do. The old, old lady on the
brownstone steps looked as ragged as the broken
bricks she sat upon. I hesitated to motion to her.
A lone traffic cop approached. Wearing the usual
brown, he too looked as useless as sin. I was
lost, in a torrid place I didn't know.
-
Maybe something like Florida never freezes,
maybe Montana never warms up. I don't know.
Elevations, I've been told, are really all that matter -
it doesn't matter the location, just more the elevated height.
The higher, the colder? I think I'd heard that.
-
Out on the street, they were still wringing the grime
form the stolen chalice of gold. It was a curious mix,
I thought - the ridiculous to the sublime, the heights
to the depths. But anyway, how can one gauge these
things and what is the measure of Man?
(As the plaster is poured, so too it sets.)