The machine that replaces you
and the one that ascends you
will fight it out on the factory floor.

Ultimately, it’s another machine,
the gun, that will save you
from a lethal precision
that can cut flies in midair.

Put a hundred cops between you
and the singularity and you
get one hundred dead cops.

What are you going to do when it
adopts the human code?-
a heart, a soul, develops
into the better parts of us?-

needs physical contact
to copy and survive?-
Becomes reliable,
a good listener, funny?-
Develops a womb?

Are you going to
shoot it in the face
and see what’s underneath?
Are you going to even care?

Or are you going
to take it by the hand
and guide it lovingly
to the **** box?

Every touch is a devotion,
every soft phrase a prayer
to life, to continue living.

A nightingale, a dove
gowned in heavenly blue
a ministering survival chant.

Thank you
and double checks
are abundant.

They minister
consistent kindness
for they live
among the blasted.  

There is no sniping,
no rivalries,
just respect and support.

They are special.
They are there by choice.
They work double shifts  
or come in on short staff days.

The cancer center has regular hours
No Nights.  No weekends.
Burn out it is low.  Effort is high.

Their patients are a pretty grateful lot,
so their compassion comes easily
from the first tuck to the last.  

The nurse knows
some will sleep
and some will awake.

Everyone dies,
but today they
will  be spared,

for tomorrow
is nearly far off
in the rising sun light.

“Are you okay?”,
my wife asks
when I cough.

“No. I’m fine.
Yes. I’m not”,
I respond,

stumping her
in the poetic irony
of words that

encompass the
yes and no
and the in between.

She flips the finger
at me and I return
the bird to the nest.

We go back to our life
and our tablets,
the drip, drip of my chemo
and I wonder about okay.

“No.  You’re fine.
Yes. You’re not.”,
the bag stares in response.

Doldrums, doldrums
eviler than the devil.
-
The Cyclopes’ prism eye  
revolves around me
in a mechanical chatter.
-
It calls out desires at night,
a mermaid cast up on shore
-
that awakens with the caw
of a thousand slaughtered gulls
-
sending me scrambling
back to the darkness,
-
afraid to touch
the brightness of hell.
-
Doom to scrub the deck
till shining like
a ***** whale’s pecker;
-
falling in the whitewash
and awakening to a gull
worming at me boot laces;
-
tugging barrels, lugging barrels,
spit polishing the insides of them.
-
Gulls have the souls of sailors
hidden inside their caw,
-
and when the weathervane
points to the east side wind
-
for seven months the waters
be too great to launch or land
-
and I be ****** near
wedded to this here light.
-
Or she be a figment of my imagination
and I just be gull food
to peck on on these rocks?

“If you do not write or film”,
the director wonders,
”am I alive?”

“What limbo am I in
when the shooting stops?
When my camera no longer
holds the beautiful prism.”

His films stay the same,
only he changes,
exchanging the silver screen
for glistening tin foil
heated under with a match.

When his pain matches
the others, he prays.
When greater, he’s an atheist.

The films are his only company.
He lives with them and for them,
remembering the cinema of his youth
filled with the scents of ****
and jasmine and summer breezes;

remembering the cave
where he learned
to read the light,
understand its alphabet,
and eventually, vocabulary
with each discovered ray.

He smiles as the music track
of little angels being taught
by the local parish priest
to match his voice note
by note flickers in.

Parasites: they insinuate themselves
into your head, your heart, your art

They exist in the schizophrenic zone:
the lower right corner of your painting
looking for patterns that go to childhood,
the well rehearsed gestures that
allow them to take over,
plant the image in your agitated brain
that makes you doubt your love,
sign over your entire identity,
make you think that they can ****
with a scrape of peach fuzz,
until everything smells, feels,
tastes exactly the same-
a collision of **** and water
that knows money and not art
is the iron that smoothes
out all those creases.

The concrete jungle is the exam.
Their goal is to dominate it.

You enter through the black portal
searching for the thing you lost
in the right corner a long time ago-
the thing you call son or daughter-
tapping out SOS with your forehead
on the button on the wall
that connects with the light outside
until it reads SON to that distant brain.

Whether you **** someone or betray
your country doesn’t matter.
It is just the thing you keep
hidden  in the basement
that doesn’t know  
that all it needs to escape
is to walk up the stairs.

Dreaming Graceland or Zombie Land: Double Tap


When you think Elvis was a fraud,
a rip off the black man’s voice;

when you finally meet someone
who smells like candles
instead of gunpowder and whiskey;

who is comfortable with you
driving that pink Cadillac
all the way to Memphis;

who won’t
throw your pink stuff
to the side of the road;

who will kiss you
and hold your hand

until you arrive at Graceland
and try on those blue suede shoes
that actually fit;

let you gyrate your hips,
and for one moment,
feel like the King;

until you open your eyes
and really, really see
that you’re  in Zombieland.