Projecting

Quantum free sonics,
auspiciously surrounded,
suspiciously sounding as if
hooked on phonics worked for me
hounding me for answers
that didn’t just sound good
but fell off the tongue like drool
and the commentary: “you rool”
said the friend who was
by the way imaginary
and disobedient
always saying something
you heard before
but scantily clad in wisdom
you shook your head
to the rhythm of not knowing
not agreeing on the rools
the rhyme, or the reasons.

*

The door ajar
at the start of sleep
too tired to get up again
to close it -

like a last minute sale.

Too far away from snoring
the way you are currently

you decide on passing kernels through
the synaptic straw,

compactly soldiering the days thoughts
into sleep.

Go ahead, hurry into unconsciousness.

You are a sheep belly up on a fence

indecisively falling for a dream -

counting each leap
in quiet repetition,

each steep desecration of borders
& orders to keep going
in the direction of god

wherever that is.

Very Superstitious, Writings on the Wall

On the eve of Friday the thirteenth

fifty people fell from the sky burning

No, this is not a metaphor

The black voice recorder

was unable to capture the color

the roman candle in suburbia

the red white and blue of their burning

An American flag in the neighbors yard,

marked with soot,

furiously moved by the winds

of change.

*

Yes, we can

imagine ourselves there -

singled out by God

his huge immaterial hand

bitch slapping the whole lot of us into silence

but if you claim you’re free

of this wrath,

you tell me

are you brave?

Written in blood,

first class

like a constitution,

the name of a man’s mistress

on the back of the seat he melted to.

My Life

The shortness
of it
none of your concern
never having experienced or learned
of long hallways outside of your own self-isolation.
The tether of your claustrophobic probing of space,
a displaced regurgitation through darkness
out onto some veranda awesome only to you
the smooth Rhine between your toes Dionysus
frozen strawberries, line up all your poems
your beauty surrenders to the truth
imploding unlawful juries of faith and rhetoric
loosely judged & biased – broken like silence
beneath a gavel of berries, busted, burdened
into self-righteous wine.

Tell America

The deletion of the word “love”

from the body of poetics

precedes its own construction

as if animators drawing flesh on a skeleton

had misjudged the proper width

of a torso, heart to breast, abdomen

to waist – the proper length of a leg

encased in its own delusion of scale.

So, forced to erase what anomaly was

misrepresented there, they sketch new

boundaries hoping mistakes are masked

as mere shadows, where the aorta once was

some invisible gradient unspoken of,

taut with history. The capturing instead,

of the inept incalculability of college

ruled notebook paper predefining the chaos

being held in its space. The ordered flatness

of having nothing to say – a frightened or

contented face driven through and drawn past

incoherent strangleholds of silence -

a thought deterred from existence

not through its lack of clarity,

but interrupted by a kiss, misunderstood

by a touch, by a look, by a word

interjected for effect.

Sleep in, it’s a Holiday

Listen to the music

of thumping drums,

four invisible white Broncos

bruising the landscape flat

with snow-

Listen to the ploughs

pushing angels aside

the 3 legged north american reindeer

sabre rattling in the wind-chill

at night, for fire safety, a father

like some municipal clicking a pen,

shutting down the

metropolis of xmas lights flashing

in his living room.

When you went to bed last night

only the tv script and plastic personas

of late night talk shows shrouded

and scrolled their back to you

a teleprompted reality

you scarcely remembered

so you started

talking so you could see your breath.

Dear Stanza Clause,

Mario Lanza singing spaghetti and angels,

Tony Danza on pause, always on my paws,

I have many memories of you that I can remember,

the earliest of them involve wearing pajamas

myself, ear to the train track of nylon braids

getting smaller towards the center of a rug

my eyes flamboyant and unregulated by tax

thrown about by interest and attrition to light

to shapes, to being, born again in a moment

when one can believe in varying degrees, a logic

to cope w/ this forever fluctuating darkness

yet to be challenged by our waking

rolling over a soul mate to get to the lamp

hitting your knee or shin to stop the sad music

starting the day moving from blaring to flamboyant

one seemed always a boy at the beginning of sleep

a man after waking

his volumes living and dying

as he stumbles to get dressed,

voices murmuring like a seashell

a depressed and uncommitted sine wave,

circular like the infant ovals of space

in the center of a room.

Like your pupils when you lie to me.

Go ahead call me scrooge, I already gave you my soul

I’m done giving. Scroll up,

It’s all there again for you, just like you asked for.

i have no title

The slow hum of the water heater

inquiring a way down

into silence -

the muted scream of

the failing snowflakes outside,

the shiver of fleece

that keeps me warm momentarily

like the synaptic jerk of a thermostat

a pilot light warily wavers

like some ritual engulfed mayan queen

seducing the darkness.

I can’t sleep & neither can this storm.

Outside of Love

Or “Eros” as the buzzing neon sign read,

Candy was busy kicking

a loose piece of gravel from her stiletto

some stranger lit her cigarette

but they didn’t look each other in the eyes

she rode his lap inside

her drinks were free.

The stage music was muffled and exhalted

each time the front door opened and closed.

The night was somebody elses whisper.

Inside of Love

The parable of a parabola

forever approaching zero

I told you about the last time

I was in Toronto there to give

a book by bob Dylan to a friend

and pretend to be Artaud

as I listened to her memories

wrote about the street cars,

the rickshaws, the many people

little china, the old lady

with eyes like jade

abrogating my existence

in the parking lot, simply

cursing me for being there

across the street from old gargoyles,

sun scorched farmers

setting themselves on fire

for better government funding

Some girl who asked me to buy

a pack of cigarettes for her

I had no clue that there you were

across the street huddled

in some hooded sweatshirt or parka,

parking your car or something,

slow jogging surrounded in darkness

Warm halo like an angel, waiting

to save me three years later

in a room inhabited by the world,

the window open, our conversation,

lost like a fork at a dinner table

The wine sweet, our eyes

meeting for the first time all over again.

Searching for the Funny, Finding Nothing

Might as well lose yourself among the coupons

the obituaries aren’t ready yet,

throw yourself over there, next to the fireplace

where we throw old news, you aren’t even funny.

Look, a new edition is out, the headlines have changed

something hopeful, something scandalous -

three dollar ham sandwiches down the street

an arms race, all of us stretching out at the elbows

to better read the fine print, and soon realize

we never lost our jobs but we figured out how

our performance is being appraised by our readers

and, so here I stand, typical, lost in the typography

the geography of my mistakes lingering

somewhere behind me, the scar of fate

trying, struggling, wanting to be mapped out

pounced upon by some ponce de leon

of good comprehension, finding a way to it

coherently but seeing no treasure here nor there

and now the topography says I’m falling

and I cannot argue what the lines say.