Thoughts While Shopping

Two friends are having a rhombus
the edges have yet to be seen
or perceived beneath bellyfat;
she's given up chocolate, caffeine,

and traded all jostle for docile
at the first sight of ultrasound pics;
she fears her stomach colossal
and craves dill pickles and lemonade mix

but she can't get 'em herself; he has
to bring it, awoken out of cold slumber
and he lumbers downstairs to the kitchen,
his dreams disturbed and nighttime encumbered

while we all silently wonder about the photos,
about the kid's future appendages and hair --
noting the ultrasound shows neither
and wonder whether it's fair

or even whether l'il rhombie is his?
I mean, our friend's so paunchy, the fetus
geometric. Should he get a DNA test,
ask for her full sexual treatise . . .

and as we buy baby blue clothing
with big eyes and Japanese bunnies
we picture the oblique-angled gigolo
and whether our friend'll pay that support money.

Duet

It's a hospital: the way visitors talk about
anything but illness is the language we share,
talking about so-and-so's newest whoosit and
say-and-say's trip to wheelay. It is cowardly.
It is wholesome. It is the way people are

when just too much lies between the lines,
when each feels the stakes are too high,
too desperate to attempt to say what is in
our hearts, what crouches in the back
of our minds, waiting for the utterance

which will free it from its chain of longing
and solitude. Instead it continues: we watch
movies, talk music, and avoid those pregnant
pauses where nothing is said because we fear
everything could be.

On Love Amongst the Rice Fields

Those roads shrink to the size of minds,
their shoulders broken, their edges cracked and ridges raised,
and the cold kisses each imperfection.
Here rice fields lie burned in renewal
of once and future stalks.
Here arguments run in circles
around pained eyes and moaned looks.
Here the denizens set feet on tatami and shiver
without end for a love that might go on forever.
Here stances will soften, and compassion
creeps into locked hearts, all quiet-like
on cat-feet, and the past will fall away.

Some Love for Blake and Curry

Bay leaf, bay leaf floating bright
amidst the rueful onioned night
preserved in box and fridge and then
microwaved to heat again.

electionend

the anger we leave in floorpuddles we leave
to remind us of our settling hearts
while our running noses remind that sickness
still sits in the room, that the whispers
remain insistent with twice the to-dos
because now we believe in something
to come, with something to do instead of
daring fate, instead of walking under white
ladders and pacing down black
cats because bulletproof we weren't,
though committed we felt, nothing had changed

The Remains of Japan

Only after
the knife sliced hilt deep
into the side
of Inejiro Asanuma did
the bodyguards come,
refs throwing a flag
on retaliation but missing
the original crime,
not unlike bodyguards
on Jerry Springer.

Live the grainy transmission
showed a nation divided
in its politics and its people,
divided enough to want to fell
"the human locomotive" rather than
include him, felling a man
whose mother perished at birth,
whose father perished at 42.

The granite around Inejiro's grave
is warmed with green and bloom,
flora not normally associated
with a man who'd meet with Mao,
a man who'd stand up to the nation
that cratered the Earth.

And the seventeen-year old who
evaded the "bodyguards"? Let's
lump him in here too as someone
who'd die for a cause, a country.
Now I stroll Shibuya and
Harajuku and see a dress-up race
distracted by neon cell phone
yellow cab phantorgasmia, and wonder
about its focus, its root,
its future.

Last

The image of oxygen mask cloaking the wheeze
reappeared in dreams
and about this the grandson would wonder for ages,
at night sinking beneath grandmother's flannel sheets,
even cupping hand over mouth as he breathed
under three blankets, a comforter, an afghan
taken from the foot of the grandfather's empty bed.
The exercise felt like scarcity, like taking on water
but the boy would will himself to hold the pose, hold it,
hold it until lungs burned, til fear gripped. When
the plug was pulled the boy remembered grandpa held
for a good eight minutes; later the uncle would whisper:
every man has his limit. The words fell without
emotion, and the dark judgment stuck like the
linseed gleam in the ICU. Where would mine be,
the boy wondered, where would mine be?

Dogeza

Here comes some fun: got the hundred yen dust
pan with the bristle brush wires, scratching.

On the floor dogeza style, hand circling
an orange mitt, scrubbing off every missed

glance, every misstep, every misspoken word
and every broken relationship. My back's in it

now and I'm sweating, sweeping clear the years
on a Saturday afternoon, preparing for move-out

day, steadying, readying to do what people
say they do when in truth everything stays

with you. By five the sun is down and I
in my slippers and cheap convenience store

tee settle down, crack open a Yebisu, listen
to the blackbirds chirp memories, drink in

the solitude of the newfound darkness.

Estudillo Blues

Why all these people?
Why now, when the past has to go,
does traffic on the Hayward Split
creep? I have left Oakland,
put the white crosses on
the hilltop in the rearview,
and now? The sun. In a five
o' clock blaze its corona
bursts from behind a cloud. I

think I am going to burst, think
the car's gonna pop, and I pull
over by the smorgasborg off the freeway,
pop the hood, hoses gone wilynily.
I walk around, spot something in the backseat.
A book? Shirt? Whatever. It can
be returned, without remorse,
minus forgiveness, and I won't
give a shit if I could just

not burn my oversized hand in the
undersized engine bay but heat that tat
on the ringfinger, but what's
it gonna look like when highway patrol
pulls up -- when John Law adjusts
his belt cinch and gets on the bullhorn
and watches a guy peer into the engine bay,
grit his teeth, press finger to hot
engine block til skin starts to sizzle?

o' clock repose

i am ashamed at the dust,
ashamed that words can say so much
yet give too little, and my insomniac
heart yearns to have its words
received so it can fall asleep

because blood doesn't care about spare
diet or desertions, just about
getting its heartfelt message
across the dam we build between one
another, and within ourselves

because in an age of telex and zeroes
and ones the heart feels that only
what passes from pulse to pulse
and lip to lip makes a group of given words
hang, dangling, patient, waiting, waiting ...

high definition

these days sport has too influence on much tee-vee
which sounds like a pound of flesh when it hits
your big screen
a place where honest no politician is
is no politician honest
in a place where
rhinoplasty is the magnificient entree
and the best book of 2008 howls in the night,
just a dog and his boy, all grown up?

Shit Luck

I've seen cries and outright lies but
the one I missed is the one that trapped me,

buggerfucked on cheap red wine where
not everyone there was just marking time.

How do you claim that you got played
to the one who for fun is the one that played you?

Some of the blame's got to wash on you (right?)
and with my shit luck it ain't gonna wash out.

Among the Reeds

In thinking about the spirit,
one must move beyond the water,
must step out of the daily eddies
and move toward the reeds
at the water's edge. Somewhere,
beyond the third or fourth clump
of reeds, is what gives us life,

huddled, clumped to itself
to the reeds
to everywhichthing
in way that could only
be traced if you noted
this part in every whole.

So what's lurking there
for you? My spirit guide has crystalline
eyes, is stunted by too much sun,
and stands still enough to trick
the water skimmers into thinking
he doesn't exist

as if spirit were a ghost,
an inconvenient phantom,
a gimmick from a sitcom
that played out while the writers
tried desperately to think
of "real ideas."

But watch the reeds flutter
from nothing you can grab,
see the skimmers curve and jive
without cause and you will know
my spirit's there, breathe
easily into everything that moves.

An Explanation

My first concert:

1986. Cal-Expo Ampitheater.
The Beastie Boys
opening for
Run-DMC.

Every concert since
has fallen short

because

only
"old school"
gets it:
the connection
to the fans
makes the music.

Why else would
you pick up
an instrument?

Why else would
you grab
a microphone

but to relate,

to find how
i am you
and
you are me?

A Vertiable Love For Hip-Hop Done Up In True Cheesy Rhyme

The break beats
make ya
move feets
put off
sweet heat
from tha
true streets

and bob your
chick head
unless ya
so dead
or got
no bread
preferring
pop instead.

In the burbs
nothing's
going on
but hip hop
salutes
the long gone
by riffin'
old songs

with new rhymes
an' dropped bass
that rattle
your place
jus' to give a
small taste
of someone
else's space

not a stage
but a mindset,
not rapping like you
dead yet
but enticin' ears
to not forget
words show life,
a hardcore duet

of commerce and heart.

The Utmost, Numero Uno Thing to Remember for Now and For All-Time

All an artist
has to do
is stay in the room.
It's not spiritual,
not Zen, unglorified
in every way. Just
stay in the room
and follow your art.

Not Fearing

I have seen hip replacements
and cataracts -- this isn't
the curtain of age people fear
to pull back.

Maybe it's the feeling of immobility,
the sense that your legs could go
at any time. And the thought
sparkles 'til you can't not look.

For eightteen days I beat these
thought welps back. I lost sight.
I moved by fingertips, by luck,
by feel. And now the only thing

I fear about getting old is if
my eyes can't see enough to be able
to pick bone slivers out of fish,
or not watching my child grow.

Got Loose

It wasn't dirty, nope,
just good and hard

in a backroom with blinds angled
to let moonlight splash across skin.

The motion left the bed creaking,
rocking, breaking, left friends

in the next room clapping, left
us floored in a tangle of limbs, laughing

as Brenda yelled "you're gonna
pay for that" over a song she had cranked

to level ten to unhear the biology groove
down the hall on mountain night

in sweat-sweetened June.

On Speed

Jeezus he cut that with baby formula
where's his kid? his kid's in the back
room, sleeping, there's a rail for you
on the kitchen table and your pupils
are pinwheel dots and oh yeah you'll
see the sunrise tomorrow and tomorrow
and forever the way you garden-hosed
that last gagger and turn the music
down, turn the music up, down, up,
man, I gotta go outside, out on the deck,
where my skin can breathe.

The First Good Time

Set aside the fact that I have
watched more dirty scat vids than
I can count. Ignore the fact
most of my voyeuristic wristing
came from countries
that lost world wars. What porn
don't tell you is that it ruins
you for reality. So drink,
so forget it all, so remember
what keeps a man up: a nostalgia
unruinable by callous and slo-mo
indiscretions.

So substitute this memory
in dark-lit slow-mo:
a mixing of lips with hips,
of one pair of lips
feeling a path to another,
of suckling the nape of neck
just to feel it there,
of hickeying inner thighs
just to taste it there.
Skin heats air, repels
the world, and yet the world
is in every movement . . .
movements I replay
in those moments when I need
to believe,
and I can still feel my fingers
slide up her breastbone
to feel the thumping
of a hummingbird heart.

What Words Do

Verbs show action unless spoken but not done.
To speak it leaves it at the gate;
a gate it must still walk through
with the veracity of the body -
else all is lost.

All praise ye action words: they frame
our thoughts, goad those of others,
punctuate resumes and CVs. They count
among their believers those who think
words equals deeds, just by utterance.

As I sit here, am I? Does the act
necessitate action? Does the shiver
of vocal cords incant action? Do I
mention that as I write these words,
I sit here, alone?

Derangement

Emotions go back years
like words on pages or
the smoothest gunslinger
you ever heard, leaving
you fearful, or worse,
a sucker who cannot create
a new republic because your
stuck on the first of everything:
the first o
or the first cash flow
or that time antennae
fingered your skin, out
in that back lot
the one day you were afraid
the day that stays so
run it back
republic new a create
or for full form and function:
etaerc a wen cilbuper
a moonwalk finished with a pirouette
that puts you back where you started.

Deep Kick

I'd seen her in a bathing suit, all tan lines
and tattoos but never undulated
never as her musculature slunk toward me,
her back arching, her thighs parting,
my fingers caressing the light switch
downward, downward, ever downward
and walking tongues spelled out the night
in strokes and licks and moans.

Go, she breathes,
hair in hands,
leave me nothing.

So release the hounds and lock hips in rhythm,
so push the pace until shivers pass way beyond
love then turn serpentine, swirl her yoni, flick
with cock and tongue 'til legs twitch free
from sockets and die supine. The room gasps.
The count: One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
Seven. Eight. And she makes good at nine, eyes
re-lit with purpose, mounting to unlight mine.

This Is Supposed To Be Sad

This is supposed to be sad,
supposed to dissipate like dewdrops past sun-up
but to find what you're supposed to find
and do what you need to no longer allures,
so this poem will hang
like bullets of rain without gravitas.
Your neighbor who delivers her kids
at eight each morning might like this feeling,
this bleaching of all emotion,
and pinstriped businessmen may even welcome
the grey skies that provide a ruse
for dress-up games and justifications
and a return to nine-to-fivery.

But this limbo is torture
it makes you want to
start again
start again
start again
to cry out in the night
like a moon-waxed wolf,
to howl a reaction to a slow first kiss.
It's a howl that will not let
DNA slip into mediocrity
and while the mother
stares dumbly at the radio's digital display,
while casual Friday becomes a victory
and the young go unattended to,
while lips untouch and are left nothing
there's no telling
which fate
is ultimately sadder.

Blunt Instrument

Writing has but two parts:
what to put on the page
and what to leave out.

Functional

The weaker gender has always been masculine;
intent spread taut across leg and limb
so thick that form itself is lost.

Now the feminine is more than purty:
it has give -- not in that dickdreams way
but in artful curves from head to toe.

A pearl that'd be trapped between breasts
would roll right off a chest. And men don't mind,
since a pearl should've never been there.

You want to see the definition of cringe?
Go up to one of those manly men, the one
who is straight but works out at Gold's anyway,

benches three hundred, does squats,
'til veins spring from his forehead
and inform him of his beauty

not as if he were Adonis or penis
or anything but an after rainfall rainbow
in the eyes of a wide-eyed child.

Pearl

How the soft breath of the person
we love settles like a leaf
out of time with past and present and future,
a spun chronotope that lingers
beyond breath and body and life.
And what can you say that's gone
unsaid? We see what we want in the eyes
and lips and the image freezes.
You close your lids to that curve of chin,
the indentation of the hip you catch
as an outline beneath wool pulled tight,
the steam from the cup between
your hands warming, obscuring,
and forget you've known mornings
where you've woken alone, not lost
but unfound as birds chirp
innocence outside and you feel the beats
and pulses of your heart flutter
like mothwings as its valves go dry.
Now her ribcage rises and falls
to mark those pindrop seconds
and there is nothing else but
to match breath with her and remember
what it is you love.

Ire 'n' up

There ain't no such thing as desire
it's a something we make up
to explain away the fire
the something that kicks up
a biological pismire
sprung from a breakup
or a moment that expires
a causeway smashup
still too close to satire.

Hustler's Ache

The words unfurl like a late night wave
as the tender bumps the eight ball one inch short.
"Just like love," the tender says, and the hustler,
holding the broomstick he used as a snooker cue,
ashes into a plastic beer glass he brought
from the car.

The whole thing was disgusting really: driving from
town to town, from bar to bar, looking for marks.
The hustler'd never enter a place through the front,
leave his fedora on the dashboard and read
the room, the lids half drawn with eyes
underground.

It had been a good summer but he was tired:
nights of heels rubbing against boots he'd taken
off a guy in Amarillo, long nights of standing
leaning
waiting
arms folded
eyes most closed
knowing an opening would come.

He'd swung north after Texas,
his mattress padding the truckbed
as he wormed through the foothills
and crawled into the Sierras
for nights gone cold and snow come early.
As he centered his weight over the cue
ready to kiss the eight ball home
he thought of the stun in the eyes of the tender
the look on hatred leveled him in Amarillo
and the pan of vodka in the cab
that he'd soak his feet in to take away
the aches of the job.

Welcome Back Monday

Tomorrow someone will piller me with pleasantries
and inquire with convival levity "how was your weekend?"

It will be Monday, and I will feel greedy. Maybe I will reply
"I want last weekend back." Who knows . . . what if

honesty serpents into my throat and I say "putting me
closer to the end" with a smile that only undercuts

the grimness a little. Maybe give the whole moment
a twist. How about a wink to retort the

perfect Monday morning question.

dive

when someone with talent
turns from it as if to shield
their eyes from a too-brilliant sun
it is reminder,
a cry that when something puts you
on the floor what comes next
is a choice
and if someone stays down,
convinces their body the floor
feels good enough
and is comfortable enough
a little part of spirit
is severed from me
and the world

Eventide

Who knew we weren't together
arm in jaunty arm as we cut
a swath through a train station of people
like something out of an MGM musical?

In step and in time we guided each other
by hip and glance through a throng, a sea
shrunk to just you and I. It was assent,
the final moment when one mind would grip
a word and the other would pluck it.

Now the world's with us, its shadow too close,
too spectral, and those old moments flutter like paper wings,
dancing away from me even as my pen strains to put
them to paper.

Creation Rebels

The creation rebels roll notepads in t-shirt
sleeves and bounce to Fela Kuti in the gravel
lot, just mad dawgs in the midday producing
the kind of lunacy that draws police
and thieves and persecution.

The rebels jitter and twist, head bobbin'
not jobbin' or robbin'
but probin' the land they love for frog belly
softness 'cause they know dissent is a step
in gettin' what's got to go
to go.

Yeah, you read that right.

Yeah, it's possible to dress in no logo,
you pass, you prance, you secondhand it,
you grift the system to show it what it's missin'.

So the rebels poke antlers into flesh and smush jellybeans
onto gunracks and prance like there's no tomorrow.
This dance is all about now . . .

Recondite

The moon is a smudge.
The clock's hands fuzz.

It is Day Three of facade.
Making eye contact with voices.

But whats unknown scares less
than keep on keepin' on

so I lie, staring at students whose
visages have long gone indistinct,

nodding when their vocal cords vibrate
as any acknowledger should

even one doing what he should
hiding what he feels he should hide

from not the students but from himself

Rules for a Degenerative Retina

The gray fuzz eating your peripheral vision is a friend who deserves a Christian name and designer sunglasses.

Clean where people don't look.

Wear the absence of light like a Happy Meal crown.

Lie down in the middle of the dance floor.

Wear all black but have someone dress you.

When a gathering bores, play polycadenial rhythms the ol' fashioned way: fingernail to tooth.

Say yes to anything kinky.

Yorkshire Terriers to you are hurdles to sprinters.

Pray.

Avoid making anyone hurt; hope and expect to receive the same.

Do not eat fish in the hospital after surgery. Two words: small bones.

Sharpen the old images in your mind. Repaint them.

Never eat yogurt after twelve.

No nurse, sadly, ever services you like nurses do in Japanese porn.

After five immobilized days in the hospital, a whiff of fresh fries restores everything.

Find the good in everyone.

Love.

Hope for reprisal.

olive rollin'

The light bulb is our moon
and we writhe
bask in each other's skin
and bare teeth only to rescue
olives from the gin in the
martini glass.

The glint off the curve
matches your verve
as you roll the olive
down skin made cool
"That's okay baby,"
you coo, "I'll make it warm."

And the sway of the bulb,
the way you jail me
with sweet breath
frees me from the jails
in my head if only long enough
to free you just the same.

This ain't love, you see,
but it seems good enough to keep
the patrol cars from raiding
and us two from 'fraiding
me melting olives between teeth, and you,
aching while the night wavers.

So What You Chasing At 4 A.M., Anyway?

If you knew how long I've agonized over a line
would you heckle? Would you understand? The symptoms
come in the form of ashen
fingers, the slouch in my spine, the florid flush
of my face
all come courtesy of the
very
next
word.

Words have curves
and are only bitchy
if used poorly.

Maybe that last stanza's
telling me something.

So I go to the dictionary
cross out every fifth word
and replace
write words backwards
in French, in the characters
of the original Chinese
and the scrawl seems so nonsensically
gorgeous I know
undoubtedly
that, man, do I need sleep.

More telling than an athlete dying young;
a guy with a pen growing old.

luck, wheredya go

Leave the umbrella open.
It's raining indoors today.

niwrad

Finally, it surfaced with a crunch,
lunch that had been damned by its cubicle,
its vehicle, its ventricles beating so
beating so beating so richly the blood
and oxygen mingled the red and blue.
Next came the IV, mangled, crumpled, wrapped
around hands, cupped in the most docile of fingers,
an American medical prayer. After that the psalm,
a slow and steady heartbeat, an EKG, scrawled on charts,
white linens, and a steady refusal to do anything
but make dashes in boxes and mark the time.
This is what he said first: mark the time
in all of its crunched ventricled mingilation,
its glory, its refusal to yield a constant reminder
of our march from grave to cradle and back
into the sea.

Clyde's Cage

In the lowlands
on a farm held by rusted nails
my great-grandfather took boarders.
Most slept in a loft
above moos and clucks
under a luminous moon and the wink of stars.
Robert Clyde
was one such boarder.

Clyde was a highwayman, an obscure Scot philosopher,
and, after three pints, a pontificator.
There had been a pub, a fight, and a man
whose throat had been left cut.
Clyde felt pressed to leave and
could not pay what he owed.
My father felt a kinship with this man,
and accepted a poem in lieu of payment.

By thus the debt was paid.

For his part, my father thought the deal favorable.
Atop the poem a note, scrawled by rough-hewn hands,
"The man's writing encapsulates the target of all my pursuits."

If the constraints of the world we live
in can be seen as a cage, it is an apt metaphor
for the varying conditions of creatures
on our wee floating sphere.

An animal when placed in the cage will stomp;
he will pace and thrash, move willy nilly and howl
at whatever rests outside of his domicile. A spectator
might as well be the moon. The animal unrests,
never settles his thoughts enough to start to examine the cage.

A man, however, can do more. He will measure the height
and width and length from shoulder to fingertip, and he will shake
the bars that hold him, not out of animalistic rage or frustration
but in an attempt to measure the give and take
of each shake,
or each pull,
or each thrust.
Rage gives way to calculation; he simply tries to find a way out.

The human being may go through all these steps or he may go through none.
In the most rare and amazing moments a human being will just sit, quite content
in the middle of space. And if you ask the man why he sits whereas the others
would not, he looks at you with such dispassion and with such confidence
that you feel ridiculous for proposing the question.

“The wind off the ocean,” he said, “is whipping my hair,
and the warm sand tickles as its grains slide between my toes.”
And, lo, as I watched the curls on his head did ruffle,
even though it were a windless day.

How Cannabis Could Save Your Life

The U.S. government has spent millions of tax dollars
to ban and prosecute and jurisdict an herb that
grows in the dirt. Meanwhile street folk have
empty bellies and my father's pension's being raided
by a broken state.

It's enough so make you want to spark a bowl.

Next thing you know you'll tell me there's a war on,
or two wars, or the banks'll collapse, or all three.

Load me another.

In the summer of my nineteeth year on this oval
the unhigh think is a circle I worked at a steakhouse.
I served steaks and shots to cowboys and trail riders,
fire crews and foundation layers, and the stray asshole.
You know, the ones who stride in on Free Line Dance Night
from San Francisco or Los Angeles or wherever the fuck
and waste a pocketful of quarters on the song
that epitomizes country for them, the song that proves
Payola and Radio are dry humping somewhere,
on a blanket of money out under the stars.
That summer, before Perry ripped it out of the jukebox,
"Achy Breaky Heart" was that song.

And in my nineteeth summer Perry's mother, the owner,
my boss, got sick. The fleet hooves of cancer ran her down
and it was all she could do to pick herself up.
after the chemo sessions in Reno for the first week
of each month. In fact, she couldn't. Cannabis did.
It did so well that Perry's mother walked in that bar
on the eighth, slowly, steadily, smiled, and said:

"I never want to hear that song again."

That's proof enough for me.

Under a Luzon Moon

So we live in the baranguay, in a two-story that shades
the cows in the midday sun, the walls of the house
the color of deepened sky,
the shine of it squeezing lemon into the eyes of men
in white languid drifts of cotton
who trudge home to corrugated tin walls and cinderblocks.

My shoulders slump. I examine cracks in the earth,
the ribs of cow who chew what's yellow, what's left of spring.

De-amplify. The farmers pool money, roll a karaoke machine,
roll truck speakers with wheels over the dirt, string six
frayed cords together and hand the consent
to me. I plug it in, grab a case of San Miguel, and shuffle over,
ducking under a single wooden beam there for mere decoration.

Re-amplify. The beers don't reach midnight. A stoop-shouldered
man -- the mayor, I am told -- reaches up and pats the middle
of my back. An auntie (maybe mine, maybe his, maybe everyone's)
whose leg twitters arrhythmically grasps the mic with shaking
quaking hands, wails "My Heart Will Go On," the lilt
of local tongue twisting the lyrics,
and the tin walls rust and buckle.

I stand tall under the peak of the roof,
the one place where I could stand tall
and gaze up through a slice in the V
where a country moon shines smart enough
to hide what it really thinks.

Stuck Page Hustler Blues

Sniffed garlic chopped raw, can't rid your smell from my nose
Burning fish in the pain, can't rid your smell from my nose
Just want to know how you scent from your tongue to your toes

There's an omen outside, a night coming down black
A dark omen outside, a night coming down black
Not a thousand cold showers can ease my sweet lack

Got candles and incense, they burn through the night
My possible housefires, they burn through the night
Yet when I return to my girl, she just isn't right

cause she's done stuck on yourself, so what can I do
the page is spuck shut, so what can I do
and what should I do pray I can't give it to you?

Desire

Got everything rationed, measured out to the last grain of rice
and the last drop of curry, loving metallic water from tap to lip,
going shut-in lights off black out air raid but it don't matter
you hear,
it just don't matter because I got ten yen pens that I swear smell
of peppermint or anything else eluding my coin supply and fields
and fields of blank white sheets to loose while sowing seeds
with the stroke of said ten yen pens -- amen.

because you asked, here's the pic

Beanie Man

Thousands died the day a silver
cylinder ripped into the buildingside
and considering the way the DC-10 finished its flight
the eerily Photoshopped snap is a voice
from the grave.

In the foreground the New York tourist
against the railing of the Trade Center:
a beanie covering a probably bald head,
the morning sun leaving half his face in shadow,
his shoulders strapped with touristy stuff,
all jacket and backpack and camera. It is comical.
Here's this guy on holiday from some part of the Upper
Midwest blinking into the morning light, into the lens,
the right half of his face in shade
as turbine and wing
creep in ever, ever closer.

And it prompts you to think of costs -- not the four-hundred
dollar Nikon or the backpack (Jansport?) that goes everywhere
he does but that beanie, the one he most likely
picked up by ducking into a shop on the myriad of streets
far below the railing, below the plane. It is an accessory
he overpaid for, a result of running his palm over his pate,
being amazed how September in this city could turn so cold.

And, in the bottom right corner, a reminder and a plea.
Zero nine one one. The numbers go a step too far,
moving the fake photo from "sick farce" to "disturbingly real."
Never mind how the camera survived. What scares me is the beanie.
Did it tumble to earth in those post-impact moments?
Could it have landed in girders in piles like Pick-Up Stix?
Or was it devoured by the flames?

Carousal

It is as if the wind
has undulated the winter
wheat of your hunger
and after
her car wheels down the drive
you coil in the bedsheets
for minutes that draw
into hours
before you shakey-leg
it to the kitchen
to boil water for tea.

My god her smell is on
your bedsheets,
and a smile bubbles
up from your ego
and you cannot focus:
the difference between Doric
and Ionic, what is?
you jumblethink, will the moon
scream into the earth
the way your syntax does
watching the packet of tea
dance like your mood as it
crests the surface and
mambos among the steam
and did I tell you -
oh . . . that . . . fucking . . . smell?

Steam dissipates. Mind cools.
Jeans cut rough against your thighs
and the road outside is silent -
maybe the climax was a release
for everyone - but the ensuing
quietude says lie. You seek
to preserve a moment
saveable as autumn leaves,
washable as bed sheets
or old car keys,
one ruinable as love.

Five Easy Pieces

Her hands berm and fissure like the earth
and as the tips of my grandmother's fingers
rip a wing
of chicken from the oven
I cannot imagine something
so fierce - not
a lionness, not a jackal,
not any animal of the savannah -
that could pull such smells
from a furnace
with such delicacy.
Was it the discolored apples
of your Depression youth?,
I wonder, or the respect
you have for this dust-bowl land?
This conflict plays out
in her fingers
as she grasps another hunk
and flinches
and peels it along the grain
and fingers grope and stretch
for another.

smell of money

To say a dollar tastes like the tin blood
of a mouthcut us too easy. No no, money
is all about smell. It's scent runs closer
to a stubborn patch in the air, a shock of
winter wheat on a forgotten plot. Certainly
a buck can ride up from a bag of fried chicken,
or billow like car exhaust in traffic, burning
your lungs and leaving you breathless. But don't
discount the fragrances money can't buy - like
lillies atop tradewinds, like blackberries on a
shimmering summer morn. If money has a native
scent, it is a tree, hanging from the rearview.
That's the best a dollar can do. The smell of
August pines, of dirt and grubs, of the wildflowers
in the meadow over the hill is beyond money's grasp;
a dollar cannot touch it. Oh, but money wants,
wants, burning like midnight neon as it tries.

the house on farnsworth

Purchased fifty years ago, the
house where my mother grew up
is still shield by waist-high
juniper. Now it is under the
flight plans of Oakland International;
once an hour the house quivers down
to its foundation. The dingy lace
curtains in the kitchen have been
replaced by frills and cotton and
splashes of cornflower blue. Grandma's
moaning fridge was unstuffed to make
room for a white shiny, showroom model.
No more bubbled-over oatmeal on the
rangetop; the last burnt rolls have been
pulled from the stove. Everything in the
kitchen, in fact, is the color of moonlight.
The house awaits a new tenant; it aches
for my grandmother to come home. Never has
something odorless held such a strong smell.

archetypes of beauty

What thrills are things a hand can't grasp
the things that roam beneath the lids
of eyes. The archetypes of beauty
stop consciousness, come to you in
traffic, fugues of wombs long gone
and songs that never were

What thrills are things you can't expect
the hounds that bay at moons you dream:
canyons purple
a sky curved blue
the feel of salt seas
the earth within you