From down a 1000 foot marble hall
I see you stand
In a room of crimson
You are white, a thousand years grand

And there is a story behind you
As there often is
It’s one that I do not buy
That you were in a noble court or a stately yard
All weathered attempts to keep your mystique alive

Me, I see you as a statue like any other
With curves of body and bust like Venus,
I’d crave in any lover

Yes, I have looked upon many stone
And alabaster faces before
Made by defenseless artists who stand alone
We gaze and just ignore,

That you were no doubt modeled
After someone once living
Someone with a real story
And a face more forgiving

And though you are stuck in a cold and stony
Shell for the rest of your days
From your marble casing I won’t break you away
I’m sure, deep down,
You’d rather stay

Never mind the best of us
I, I have seen the rest of us wander out into the desert parking lots, exodus from bars and rest stops with no sleep drunk behind wheels that take them no where in particular.
Bodies and minds prostituted in our highest universities. “Before I throw you out of my class may I ask you why you have such a sense of entitlement?”
We are all entitled to learn and to do it at no greater cost than our time and our blood and fears and ambition.

We have gone on too long to see men without women and men with out men. Men without *** because there is no revolution. The women are too busy texting while driving and they are now dead. Free love is as dead as communism and the act of necking at the drive in.

Men are turned boys again who live on couches in one room basements in basements in basements in cages. Just where they ought to be, youthful beasts, who wish to make more of their lives, wish to make anything at all.

I have worked shoulder to shoulder with those that do not want to work because it can’t even pay the bills. Why dig your own grave only to die trying to dig your way out?
And yet even to the lucky ones death never comes. There is no cold, only the burn of want, ever and always.

Perhaps money is a sickness far greater than those who suffer and sweat through swine flu and strep throat, have broken legs, loose bowls and AIDS. HA! For money won’t afford them the 300 hundred dollar lift in the ambulance. So even the dead are not dead, they are being ****** instead.

Then there are the zombies those that walk both day and night, rather, endless night, loyally addicted to a tin of tobacco or a real wicked pack. Forget what they tell you about health risk, at 7 bucks a pop tabbacy can’t feed your baby and winter is coming fast.

People have forgotten the elderly that walk the sides of the roads waiting for handicapped access to their graves. Perhaps it’s because the old has forgotten the young just as much. But lest we forget, I speak to you as a fountain of youth.

“Let them eat cake!” OR feast on handfuls of Slim Jims and pour me a tall, warm Pap’s Blue Ribbon because bread and eggs and water are for the Prince of Monte Carlo and food stamps are too passé, besides they aren’t even stamps anymore!

I want to cry for the many with broken hearts sewn together through strings of text messages and with the precession of a Nike sweat shop worker. The heart of the world is coming undone. Touch the next person you see before it’s too late.

Finally a word to the wise, more specifically the literate: My generation knows God is dead (we found his body in one of those soggy bar parking lots after a night of Quizzo) yet so is science (Discovery Channel is way boring nowadays). We are alone as a tree in Brooklyn.

In a building not concrete of origin
Near a forest we used to forage in

In the village we muck and wander
Towards the river over yonder

On the isle of sacred Avalon
There was new ground to tread upon

Amidst the brier, bog and heath
Among the thistle, needles and oak leaf

Round the timber fire we sang
Of lady luck’s mercy and lady love’s pain

We drank a drink of potent potables
Phrases spoken few of which notable

From the lambs leg we feasted
While the mystic death we cheated  

Nights never ending and those yet experienced  
We roam them on and on, ever-delirious

How rare it is that any collection of people
In any numbers
Should breathe as one

Perhaps a mother as she births
Her first
Or last born

Maybe when one saves a brother
As they fight back
To back in war

Sometimes, when man and woman
Make love for the first or last
Or 44th time

But these events and moments
Are rare unto themselves, not
Synonymous with a unified breath

But on this day, I saw
Two million people and then some
Breath in and out,

The sweet air of hope
In a cry of “YES”
An exclamation “ WE”

And in complete unity,
Harmony, and accord
They said “CAN”

And those in the dark
Who think they can not
We will band together

As a living memory
To the era of reconstruction,
To the new deal

For though we are the weak
The tired
And the meager

We have always welcomed those
And we will
Inherit the earth

We will go
From ashes,
To monuments

In these ways unlike any other
You have made me a bigot  

How can I trust someone
With your nose; broad as any stereotype
Your eyes; The color of over-circulated dollar bills
Your lips; billowing, plush, plumped like a fresh Challah
Over-flowing like your Manischewitz Wine.
Lying mouth
A liars mouth

You look like a lender
You look like a heathen

You are an Aryan Mother Mary

Your hair is blonde. No, it’s yellow. No, it is ***** blonde
***** blonde

Stop controlling my multimedia experience  
Mismanage the tasteless fruits of my love no longer

But who am I to hold your cultural tropes against you?
The way you hold my state of mind
Up to my eyes, only to make me see what it is you view

You are the jew. And I’m the one burning alive.

You interest me in the way
That death does,
In the way that strangers can,
In the way that complicated surgeries might

You perplex me deeply enough
That I write about you often,
That you break and build
Walls in my subconscious,
That you feel like a warm ghost in my arms

You demand my gaze that same way
A fine building will
Or an early-spring snow,
Or a doe in heat

You make me crave you
Like a steak,
Like spending money,
The way I crave attention

You bend me as
Light bends in an eclipse, subtle and yet undeniable,
I bend like the rules do
For the rich and bold

You call me to arms
Like revolution in the streets,
A revolution on the page,
A revolution through the speakers

You inspire me no less than a favorable sky to write
A new pair of shoes to walk
A great athletic feat to play

You fill a space like a home-made poster,
A sold out concert
A partner in crime riding shotgun

You have me searching for you
The way I search for
My mother,
My father,
My sister,
Julian.

You have me
You have all
You have me in the way
That up always has down

I do not know of WWI

Because I know not of drowning on land
But what hypocrisy it is to say I
Cannot speak on mustard gas
But I will design you a bomb
That kills for days if not
For always

Call that genius if you feel the need
To me it is the call to arms
Every man feels
It is the essential want to take to the sea
It is the secret urge to make
Another man bleed or change the way
He gets up in the morning