My Second Letter to Allen Ginsberg
Dear Allen,
Almost five years ago, I wrote you a letter, and in
That letter, I purged my drunkenly woeful cries
That seem so first-world now and naïve –
The things I grimed over with luxuries I didn’t
Realize that rubbed against my plump limbs
Like millions of felines poised at the
Tombs of pharaohs.

Oh, Allen, I’m so tired –
These politics, and poly ticks, so many ticks that
Annoy my tics. Allen! I smear your name so liberally
Against this paper like primer because the easiest way
To coerce someone into listening to you like
A mother
or predator
tugging or nibbling on your ear –
Swatches of velvet scalped from a ****’s coat
Are you and I talking to ourselves again?
Candid insanity : Smoky hesitance.

Dear Allen, I’m so tired –
Yes, I love wearing my ovaries on the outside like
Some Amazonian soapbox gem glistening from beneath
The iron boots of what the newspapers tell me while
I cough at them with the hurdled delicacies of alphabet soup.
Give vegetables a gender and call them onions, Allen.
Sullied scratch-hicks pinioned feet from slapping
Society’s last rung on the ladder.
Ignore the swerve of small-town eyes.
Scapulas, stirrups, pap smears, and cervical mucus – now do you know who we are?

That fingernail clipped too short, Allen. We’ve all got AIDs
And AIDs babies, haven’t you heard? Hemorrhaging from the political
****** and out – they haven’t reached the heart.  
Since when have old white men given a **** about some
13 year old’s birth control? I’m riding on the waves of the
Parachute game and I swear this abortion-issue is just a veil outside Tuskegee University
Being further shove over plaintive eyes, swollen and black.
Pay up and
shut up.

I still remember my first broken *****, Allen.
Can you tell me all about your first time?
The vasodilatation that made veins rub against skin,
Delirious brilliance : unfathomable electricity.
I made love during an LSD experience, Allen,
And I am not sorry. I see cosmic visions and
Manifest universal vibrations as if this entire world is
A dish reverberating with textiles and marbles, and
All are plundering the depths of the finished wine
Bottle roasting in the sink like Thanksgiving Turkey.
The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you.
The opening, between you and you, occupied,
zoned for an encounter,
given the histories of you and you—
And always, who is this you?
The start of you, each day,
a presence already—
Hey, you!

Ah, Allen, if you are not safe, then I am not safe.
And where is the safest place when that place
Must be someplace other than in the body?
Am I talking to myself again?
You are not sick, you are injured—
you ache for the rest of life.

Why is it that I have to explain to my students that
sometimes what I'm spouting is prescribed by a pedagogical pharmacy --
but all they want to know is "what do the symbols on the television mean?"
I am completely aghast against the ghosts of future goners --
I am legitimately licensed to speak, write, listen like some mothers --
I am constantly cajoling the complex creations blamed on burned-out educators --
I am following the flagrant, fired-up "*******"s tagging lockers --
Pay up and
shut up.

Yes, and it’s Hopeless. Allen.
Where did we get off leaping and bounding into
The dogpile for chump change jurisdiction, policing
The right and the left for inherent hypocrisies when
Poets are so frightful to turn that introspective judgment
Upon ourselves?
We didn’t see it coming and I heard the flies, Allen.
Mean crocodile tears. Flamingo mascara tracks
Up and down : up and down: bow – bow – bow – bow
Buoyant amongst the misguided ******* floating around
In the swirlpool of lackadaisical introspection.
What good is vague vocab within poetry?
Absolutely none.
Would you leave the porchlight on tonight?
Absolutely, baby.

Dear Allen, would you grow amongst the roots and dirt
At the knuckles of a slackjawed brush of Ever-Pondering Questions
Only to ask them time-and-time-and-time-and-time-again.
Or pinch your forehead with burrowed, furrowed concentration upon those
Feeble branches of progression towards something that recedes further
And further with as much promise as the loving hand
Attempts to guide a lover to the bed?

Allen, I wish to see this world feelingly through the vibrations of billions of bodies, rocking and sobbing, plotting and gnashing like the movement of a million snakes, like the curves collecting and riding the parachute-veil.

Ah, Allen! Say it ain’t so! Sanctified swerve town eyes.
And everything is melting while poets take the weather
Too personally
And all the Holden Caulfields of the world read all the
*******’s written on the walls and all the Invisible Men
Eat Yams and all the Zampanos are blind and blind
And blind and blind and blind and blind
Yet see as much as Gloucester, as much as Homer,
As much as Oedipus.

Oh, Allen, do you see this world feelingly
and wander around the desert?
Colored marbles vibrating on the curtailed parachute paradox.
Lamentation of a small town’s onion. Little do we know, Allen,
That what you cannot see, we cannot see, and we are bubbling
Over in the animal soup of the proud yet weary. I can see,
However, how the peeled back skulls of a million
Workboots and paystubs may never sully the burden
Of an existential angst in miniscule amounts.
Pay up and
shut up.  

My dearest Allen, there is always a question of how
The cigarettes became besmirched with wax to complement
What was once grass, and
What was once a garish night drenching doorknobs.
The night's yawn absorbs you as you lie down at the wrong angle
To the sun ready already to let go of your hand
As you stepped, quivering, on to
The shores of Lethe.

There's a private, invisible flock of comedians chanting soapbox knock-knocks in my parking lot
            Noisy, clang, boom thingy aloft and clipping the air around the slimy snow
And why does ajax keep butting its nose into everything I’ve got?
They’re all just boom-lost facades in a canonical, sly-faced rant.
So slanted, frankly, and poised toward a milder pace that the clang clipped the frosty branches beneath a drunken frat-house party.

Ah, the dandy-clang : native to the sandy graves and morose olive branches.
            But only on the night of the dandy-clang, candy dances
for the branches are not partial to missed solid caches
            of want and woe
            of tongue and toe
and seldom shaken beneath the overbearing heat of a white-faced predator
for times it was that here and now, because
the wind had bitten harder
What am I saying?
That if the dandy-clang came. And if it produced the branches of the dancing eve fame...
with but not together. The clouds up in the ether
that lake and earth should wither

Au(Or)al Tune
When (O)ppo(u)rtun(e)ity knocks –
            Ah, pour that tune into me
               n(O)t
just write or speak
            but
                        /zIg:zAg/
            gut--
                        --teral mut--
            --ter yarns
                        With
Mouth-churn--
--ing-beat-lick--          
                        --ings.


Half-grown seedling ([her]bal:e(X)ssen(10)ces)
                                    into sm(O)ke
adolescent (O)re worn from being p(o)(o)r—
                      it was nE(X)CESSary for:
battles
birds
beats
b(O)(O)ks
bottles
bucks
b(O)nes
boys
bei­ng(bad)


sm(O)ke-rings w(ear)y with surr(end)er      
      stripped
            v(O)wel
                    for
                       v(O)wel
thr(OU)gh the yawn: (O)nly
            “(O)h.”

             (O)h
              … foll(O)ws

                        the
You’re w(or)th-knowing-ONLY-(O)nce
            type of l(i)ke.
VERSE/VERSUS: the
You’re-w(or)th-knowing-AT:LEAST-(O)nce
            type of l(i)ke
VERSE/VERSUS:
                        for (u)s

it’s the worst type of verse
                        when it’s
            them:VERSUS:us
                     (verses)

likewise -- (O)r worse --
it should really be about//
      a bad in (u)s: Y(O)U:ME


(O)h after a
                        kn(O)ck
(O)h after a
                        t(u)ne:://
(end)-verse
for worse – it’s an
(end)-versus-us
                        type of verse.


(O)ppo(u)rtun(e)ity
            pouring
            ringing e(X)cesses
like
                     ear-worms to
                     hear words to
                     heat hearts.

Ah::rest that mouth-verse onto me.
            (restful//fluster)
Ah::rest that mouth
            (silent//listen)
soulless gall(O)w r(u)ng
lipless v(O)wel sl(u)ng
            like
ARTS::between::STARS
            then
VOICES RANT ON::into::CONVERSATION
            then
PAYMENT RECEIVED::yet::EVERY CENT       PAID ME

worst-verse:
           Y(O)u//like hanging
                        your dipTH(O)NGS
on (O)pportun(e)ity’s d(O)(O)r
            like
                        sm(O)ke-rings
            like
                        being(bad)
            like
                        Y(O)U:ME
            like
                        (O)h. n(O).

(end)-verse:
worst-verse:
            L(I)ttle.Kn(O)wn.V(O)wel::
            n(O)(O)se big for (u)s

            ALL.

Friend Rockstar,
            Listen, yield to a robust think-tank,
            earlobes skidding against wheat and grain.
Terrible story, yes, what happened to that little girl.
Sterile teddy nightgowns weeping in the squad car windows.
Teacher – Teacher, do you harken my yodels for grace?
            I’ve never been maternal.
            Put the game on. Abortion.
            That’s what I’m about.
            Grab a bra. Sling some weight.
            That’s what I’m about.
Some housefly wings on a weathered corn cob.
Some downhome, homegrown twang for those fancy, fussy britches.
            Muddy workboots. Sweat-soaked collars.
            That’s what I’m about.
Him done made me read, sir.
What sacraments did we write today?
            I can still remember my first broken bone.
            I can still remember my first broken *****.
                        That could be what this is all about.
Mary, Mary, you can be contrite,
            so knife – so critter – so laze – so stalked.
    Who fertilized your seeds? Who reared your sprouts?
            Cockle shells and silver bells, honey,
            can’t grow up
            to be pretty little maids all in a row.
Sterile teddy nightgowns – green bells in gaseous gardens.
Friend Rockstar, you may have to sleep.
This restless harbor is a shivering anecdote spilled from a belly,
            a vast, deep cavern with love notes written in milk.
Your fried, stern smile was a flaking fingernail adjacent to the crack in the flowerpot.
Some garden, I say.

The back up with
A crooked neck bent
   Towards Hell
While his lips tightened sternly
   as a Victorian urn.

His face barely recognizeable
   ever since the penny-doppler showered
A wandering click
   that skipped
      no birds on his fence.

In a glass paned massacre, forever fossilized
between childhood bullies and prom-night feel-ups,
there was a consciousness that feigned
once a week, cockled in creationism and the Eucharist.

His passions -- clam shells flanked by the ripping tide.
His intellect -- a solitary warble amid ***** blue notes.

What’s the difference between hate and love
When they are two sides of the same blade.

Sharpened brandished waving wildly in ghost columns
against the disfigured, burning-white face of abrasion.
Then,
march home with square, taut shoulders – slightly bony –
Body swelled and puffed with
the blood-red energy of something desperate to naked pairs
ramming themselves against each other in an effort to
release.
These colorless concepts, abstract words
that hang in the air the same as
smoke-rings – ghost columns.

Could it give You a religion;
a belief that there is some guiding force in the universe
binding the two of you together by
touch, smell, scratching, grinding --
And he and You quelled
each other’s pleading prayers within
the folds of each muscles
the steeple of each elbow,
the hollow of each throat.

Some spiritualists call this the Kundalini – feel this world through a material base
A Love religion – fixing body and body together
because it’s the one thing that seems to make sense in this crude moment
when the ashes settled to fossilize inside
His and Yours brains.

“My God. His chest, his belly,
the riding and the falling, the moans.
How he clung to me, how he struggled --
Life and death! Life and death!”

The circle of arms is the gateway
to some emotional dry-heave:
the swelling, purging, and crashing
of grief, rage, love, and comfort
those same abstract, colorless concepts
teetering on the edge of a beaten-down slave gospel.

We can give our vegetables a gender:
Female onions. Peel only when ripe then
ferment in a closed plastic bottle.
Color sensations that can only pass between illuminated palms on an
angry evening.
Shakespeare’s Gloucester could only see this world feelingly, woman:
How will you cope after being blinded by his tears?
And when the ream is spent, write a poem on the back.

After your limbs searched for each other after years gone, searched underneath the covers for a comforting hand that could save the loneliness from shaking your souls out of your bodies?
When limbs stretched forward to hold both bodies together,
the backbones that ****** you both pressed against the skin --
The very skin that ****** you, too.
That dream baby bearing the handprint of his ghost --
his skin on your skin on baby skin
Against undifferentiated dark, it may glow beneath the cradle’s mobile.
“Another illegitimate black baby.” Let’s call it Smoke and Mirrors for maybe just a second.
Don’t pay attention to the swerve of small-town eyes.
Then, we can see the light through the parenthesis.
Call it the ghost of his Love. The ghost of meat love. Delirious brilliance.

Ghost of mouth-on-the-screen-door Love.
The same taste of nickels, of iron, of blood --
Leave the porchlight on if you want him to find his way back.
Hang the water-filled jar from the tree to ward away the evil ghosts.
Light it, love it, leave it. Light it, love it, leave it.
Who’s going to guide the insect-feelers
to the light
on the nights
When words split, scatter, and sift
into labor-streaked pyramids between these fingers?

Now do you know where you are? We see a little farther now, a little farther still.
Staked in fury, can we recognize red ants on a red ant hill, now?
Shrouded in a glory-cloud, at least you knew you fit somewhere.

As Women, We know the gospel well. A little farther now and a little farther still.
The maddening dances around *** and Song – it is possible for the rest of Us to understand
and know how You’ve been bleeding.

The modern robots are all dead --
the metal ones rusted,
the human ones bled.


For courtesy's sake, we'll call it square --
A voicemail's ghost
in a tentative field.


Manner's are infants' wails hung out to dry --
a starving microphone
with tubes pinched shut.


A scared off circuit in surgical riptides --
Our favorite pastime
alive on the screen.

My personal déjà-vu-time memory-prompts that frame
The blurring patterns of today’s hubcap-wheels, spinning
Kaleidoscope flashbacks of bathtub playtime.

A gaggle of giggling girls babbling about
What used to matter : umbrella-popping chewing gum
With gallivanting jargon laced in crushes-hushed : boy-talk.  

Pillows : Comforters morphing, swarming like
Womb-entranced, half-cupped palms calmed
Palpitating mouths motoring off self-pitying rumble-grumbles.

How the clopping ball of opted-birr was a bent-mouth birdcall
Over-relished, over-zealous imploration : a round robin
Jumblemix of a jejune bombast for slap-sticked power.

By-and-by polysyllabic buds bloomed, baked, and wrinkled
Past-Gas’s long-gone jokes : those balmy snug-hugs guarding
Doltish vulgarity among the begrimed-glitch and old-grown-boring Jive.

With Body pretzled up, skins converged to form
            branches of rivers, mouth slack and frozen to
            a permanent scowl of delirium and manners-gone,
            as many swears dripped from those dry, cracked lips.

One of my mothers – gumshoed from the alley’s way of family.
“Get gumption, girlie, because everybody is full of ****!”

I remember that lullaby, “A tiny turned-up nose, two lips just like a rose. She sits upon my knee, she means to the world to me.”

I spy the scar on my pinky finger from her cigarette.

Could the King be witness in the Room?
Were those buttons of hollow wood over her eyelids?

Wrung of cries – we didn’t see that coming,
though we heard the flies.
And Age’s stumbling rattle through the hallway.

Do you know who I am?
Do you remember me?
Should the window washer come another day?
This stubborn sovereignty over what is reality – the root beneath the porch, the fog on the windshield.

Loosen the grip on this natural plane,
            Please --

Woman of my Childhood, harvester of my manners.
            Stand until the grown-ups sit.
            Look away and bow your neck.
                        This was called the boxing match between Industry verses Inferiority.

Not child through birth – no –
            but life spawned by those
            strung-high fists.

There’s finality in this phone-call.
I heard it happened an hour ago.
            Treading grievances and grimaces, picking through a flowerbed only to stroke the weeds.
            Lifting boxes of Lead from reality to the Bridge of Dreams.
                        Frankly, I stole the gumption from your knotted mouth and
                        still cannot cry.

In a splinter of reason – I cast out the fundamental jibes of sacred hope.
            That promise held between dog and owner during business hours.
            Except there can be no homecoming.

The sickest liquor on the alleyway fence.

I don’t write about my Dad or God so
I will write about how
Moses told all the Jews to slay a lamb, take the blood, and paint its blood around the doors
so that the Angel of Death may Passover the marked houses.

The story goes that Dad (or God) was
Wobbling down the street with heavy breathing like a deflated walrus washed on shore,
kneaded jowls bouncing beneath his jaw with each bouncing step,
Because he had to order special shoes for his diabetic feet.  
When he stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and collapsed beneath
The L train and curious stares blurred against a man’s fight to live.
Fiddling with either his rosaries or toolkit or pants or
Phone or newspaper or lungs or shoes or inhaler
And I’m sure they’ve seen him before,
But I’m sure this time it was different –
They would have a story to tell to their co-workers and loved ones
About their walk on the sidewalk by the hospital
Where an old man collapsed
And they would echo the words, “Count your blessings,”
But have no idea what that means.
He was dead for two minutes and had bleeding on the brain.

This is about more than just myself
And him
And the way he made me feel.
This is also about the man next door to him
And how I came to learn to never talk about my Father or God.

It is a Saturday morning with snow on the ground
And there is guilt frosted on my back
I have not moved in a few hours (perhaps years)
And there are tubes like translucent octopus straddling his mouth and mounting
His chest
As it rises – and breaks – rises – and breaks (so romantically)
With each second beep of the heart monitor.

In the general waiting room, some men and women arched in their seats with gleeful excitement
And balloons and footies for newborn babies
to deposit
Something hopeful and crisp into the umbilical residue.
So as to mask the horrors of what human health really is.
Staring at what is truly written as if the “I” myself
Is too special to suffer.

And, then, there is the man (stranger) with a smile
Too transparent against the masks bouncing robotically in the foreground
The man (stranger) –
he asked me if he was ready to
Make count with his major failures and major contradictions,
Thereby ready to vacate (physical) body (earth)  
up to the Lord. He spoke to me about The Lord as if I never knew him,
never knew his stripped promises of salt statues
never knew the bent knees and heads during Mass
stripped away the infallible memories of people
of people
who knew no better
yet checked each other
to thank him for their
chosen suffering.
never knew the responsive sweat dotting HELP along new mother’s brows
never knew the elegance of bliss/love during *******  
never knew the muddy feet of a wretched child clambering between belts.
never knew the frantic swerve of hurried fury from a coat’s hem.

my brother said he was going to
time how sporadic, chaotic, hypnotic
My three-year-old haunches switched up the stairs –
Animal-like, on all-fours,
swiveling from one grimy patch of
cement-splotched carpet patch to
the frozen barbecue-sauce colored tile at the front door to
another grimy-cement colored carpet patch to

the tacky, stuck-together carpet-hairs hardened by dish-soap calligraphy –
combed the S.O.S. message I crafted one hot, sticky June evening
after slapping the ***** of my feet into mud
then tracking pawprints through the kitchen door,
transcribing my help-yelps as Dad’s belt cracked –


Climbing then freezing at rage’s zenith,
His face contorted like gargoyle-wrinkles deepened with sweat
broken peals of thunder-skin splitting like a river’s delta through the house
Flooding pockets of silence then bursting with a child’s sniffs
since crying never helped me, anyway;
undeniable red-shame pooling split skin after each crack-smack
doubled back then cooled its buckle on his thumb.

With comfort, Aunt Joan assured me: “Love is
the second most mispriced of human goals.”
What’s First? “Liberty.”
So I’d lie amongst the dishsoap-doodles
     like Alice in the daisies
Limbs outstretched --
          like DaVinci’s Millenial Man
     or
           Jesus on the cross  
     or
           hopeless girl losing her virginity
     or
          Ma reaching towards the door lock
     or
          McMurphy post-lobotomy
     or
          Santiago dreaming of Lions on an African beach
     or
          fireworks blossoming against an emptied sky --
And trace the cracks in the ceiling with the blue veins on my arm,
like
       roads on a map;
I'd mouth the names of places I'd never seen/heard of but
       I would go in my mind –
The mountains I’d climb steady on all-fours, switching my haunches
As if Escape was the warm, fuzzy world only children would dream of -- then linger with their eyes shut to return there -- hidden beyond the garden of Love and Liberty –

No, sir,
        No, man,
        No, stranger,
                I never knew there was such a way.
-- how could I go undone?
He hogged the conversation – I hogged the facts
Everything I’m leaning toward is a cut in the conversation, sir. How could I go undone?
He asks me what his name is and I tell him, Ken. His name was Ken.(Or God.)
He asks why he is here and I tell him
You don’t need to know that. I don’t know why I am here. Why are any of us here?

He then prays for him and invites me to as well.
I tell him,
When you come undone, I come undone
We’ll all come undone in the end
We were doomed to die the moment we are born
So who will pray for you in the waiting room, sir?
No thank you, sir, I’m just fine, since who
Knows the way or what somebody says
All I know is that I can put you away. But, I will not.
So why don’t you sit your excited *** down?
If only he could understand the joke.
May the man learn the dead man’s float and seek solace in the cadence of Charon’s poling of his ferry.

What valor. What courage. You all turned out so well.
The leading man is dying.

Escape is the erased movement where the sinewy lights and colors behind dark eyelids stand steady long
after the first disturbance, then usher those that were hurt
into Charon's ferry
because anything feels better than everything that was taken.

There was a squandering ember that climbed her spinal chord
and lit the deteriorating birchwood on the peach-fuzzed tea lamps.

When those stairwells cramped and swelled with staggered liquid terraces
in the foundational pin-cushion that cradled family after family.

Woe begone chants that railed support beams moaning under elemental abuse.

A litter of ghost kittens coiling underfoot where the rug
used to yawn before the grandfather clock,
now senile and rotting with absent-minded tick-tocks.

Inside her streetcorner, the music was that
monkey hopping to street ***** blue notes on somber ropes.

The air thick with the regal, chunky vibe
of batting eyes, flirty sighs, and bourbon.

Between the buildings again...
embraced with the same warm feeling that
entrances your fingertips, lips, and ears when within a man's arms.

In this city, Love is those two birds on that same powerline
that bowed and ebbed with summer's sweet sigh.

Wherein without a mouthful of air,
He spoke of materialism with
a judge’s
            Merciless verdict.
His eyes so glazed yet passionate,
            He threw his thoughts to the ceiling,
Like rocks in a plastic bag,
            To see if it could make a bang
And his speeches are so angelic
Amongst the ignorant giggles
            And the frayed songs of yawns,
You really had to give him credit. For, you
See, he stares out at a whole different cosmic
Sect in a wanton orchestra
            Filled with red wallows of
            Flags and pride.
Scared jumbles strewn like flowers across this dying opinion-land,
He’s seen it all despite his accent.
He’s strummed cold and excited to be here.
His life is a rusting metal scrap
Tossed to the side of the masterpiece from whence it came.

He thinks that everybody must have been a spy…

No, wait, two quirks tossed in to
Hear the Man talk. It’s all a
Meandering walk from where
The toads squat.

He describes it as a war for the value of academic standards,
Which are now expiring before his eyes, and how we’re all
A bunch of rotting worms dying as we speak. The hope is
That the people from your life will be defeated by you,
Right? That’s how it goes in the war of everybody
Against everybody.  He desires to make all of life
Into a dream… but that would result in economic
Impediments.

Give him the $1 million, also known as “the cool mill.”
Everybody must have been a spy.

You couldn’t look for this logic
Beneath a rock
Or stuck in your lover’s hair.

He’s depressed because he is not asleep – he’s acutely aware.
He speaks like rapturous nuns,
  throwing themselves on to the cross
And begging me to ready the nails.

Inside this plastic orifice pulsates the vibrations of flies
Around the frontal lobe of the brain,
A honking trumpet of confusion and
Fake self-confidence,
            With that fake eyebrow raise of condescending question.
A drunk woman’s loop just spilling insecurities.
I remember when I was 18 years old
and so much more sure of myself
than I am now.
Now, my questioning analysis turns to stammering cindersm
My voice to quivering gibberish,
My spine to a trembling cane.
This is the age we were worried about,
Shaking coats off to try on new ones.
To be fearless again, a ****-talking hardass
With no reason to five a ****, no reason
To be ashamed of words I spit, the norms
I shatter, the growing genuine demeanor
I cherish.
My words leak off the page and down
The spinal column of answers,
Stacked and jacked for another gear change.
Green lime crime in a gray lipsticked
Lip-lock torn asunder in cheap talk.
I’ll stop apologizing for nature’s wrongs.
I’ll forsake the jumbled up mumbled mess
            That drooled down the spider fingers of
            Those lonely, lost days.
And for a coin, I’ll stake my life
On the candle that refused to burn
Because now the reason crests the waves of
Pedantic experience.
Made past the overly-viewed statistics.
The curves now drip away the
            Remnants of fabricated wool
            Into a bed of once exhausted syllables
            And frequented sobs.
Without a known ending, I’ll know this much:
            The insecurities are a bottomless chalice
            Full of the Catholic’s guilt
And the people you see around you
            Are warriors bred without Fathers.
Streamlined sick in a wonderbread coffeehouse,
These are the hours worth reckoning.

Crowded by the ceiling’s emptiness (the room sticky with whispers)
names carved into grimy tiles, final shadows
            of the footsteps now hugged in dust,
                        and the ashes dulled the slapping of
                        feet on the ladder’s last rung.

            Huddled in the sour dimness of his shadow
                        is where our parents hid the prayers
                        that went undelivered –
[cloistered, naïve faith off Jacob’s Ladder]

He asked me questions that pricked too deeply –
            that fingernail clipped too short --
            as the invading hand of ******* parted words and stammers
            to play shadow puppets with, what Plato called,
            “three times removed” from the Truth.
And when leaving the choir’s balcony,
one can find the thumbtack of feeling in which
the glass-saints sweat all the industrialized emotions onto one’s brow.
            Does it seem like suffering? Catholic’s suffering.
Giving room for error in your lapse in charity.

In elementary school, we left our classrooms --
            two-by-two like businessmen arguing on the sidewalk --
Every Tuesday at 2:10pm to the hidden alcove that the administration
            gave
            to us.
Mrs. Condon, a strictly fat woman, strictly speaking,
dressed in red vests
and constricting black slacks, with a white binder,
salted as the laughter left in her footprints, reproving us that
as the Gifted and Talented, we must exercise
those gifts and talents.

I wrote a 256-paged novel that bought me one year
of slacking off behind a wooden desk because I was
11 years old
and that fact bought a bulbous beet of conditioning into the
curriculum. Ms. Condon made me edit my peers’ essays, give them grades
when all I wanted to do was play four square.

As I perched on my stool in class, properly equipped with unforgiving,
admonishing, Catholic red pens to point out other
11 year old’s punctuation and proper word usage. Like a tie to a neck, I
fiddled in vernacular, phrases, and semantics
as I unconsciously stacked layers of social prejudice, thicker
than the walls between silent parents, between some students
and I.
Stacked as quaintly as words upon words – hand over hand.

Mrs. Condon, Mrs. CEO, Ms. Too-Good-For-This, Bourgeois vs. Proletariats, I am the Marquis.

Like hounds held by leashes, the others locked to rebel, then whimpered to trail back, tails in hand.

Gifted and groomed to stack one spurned cinder block on social mobility.

In a whirr of dandelions, dice, and tax breaks, I knew how it felt to remain aloft, aloof --
            Mrs. Condon rewarded me with the cherry Twizzler of my spine
            and patted my head like the lapdog that I had been.

Like dried leaves fluttering
                With trembling stems
From an earthly passage, She took
The high road when Winter called
                Her back to the elements,
                       Back to the spiritual vent that yawns with souls.

In her gentleness remained memory – legacy;
                A smirk – that fun, secretive thought
                                Whispering across bloodlines.
I could never know her as well as you --
That tight, heavy knot at the back of your throat.
That dull thud of a monotone ache perched in your gut.
That knowledge that she was two in the same:
                Throwing the bread and serving it, too –
                Spreading around discipline with comfort to follow.
She was The Maker; The One –
                Now faded to brooches, to photographs, to stories.

I felt the muscles in your arm tense (As mine
did, too)
I felt the surge of tears beckon the realities of grief
                Like the smoke curling ‘round the swinging censor
I know why you ignored the Holy Man; sermonizing
                Her Life as if she were familiar.
                His discourse as bitter, acrid tastes upon breathing morning.
                His fabricated familiarity – the pinching, twitching nerve between your neck and shoulder.

Holy Man -- Bone Man –
                We could proclaim the mysteries of Faith
                But She taught us the permanence of Love.
She knew more; what she taught was
                Tangible
                Alive
Her Lesson more forgiving than any Act of Contrition.
Her Body more sustaining than any wafer of Christ.

Two side of the same blade –
The Love she taught us taught us Grief as well.
When she followed the Holy Man out – the Bone Man -
                You, Her Son –
                You knew.
You flew out like a sin to forgiveness
And staked your devotion, character, and eternal Love
                Upon her dwelling.
                                One more tangible reckoning of her attendance here;
                                One more connection that grounded her presence on this plane.

We followed Her – We followed You
Blind to your seeded bond that will never grace any words on a page
Yet drawn to the Lesson she taught
                And the Lesson you maintain.
We followed you
                Like trails in water : molecules bound and devoting the leader we call Mother.

I frequently read my old poems and
feel my glass heart splinter with impatience
and demand why my muse escapes
my passions, and my talent must
sleep cold and lonely within the shadowy crescent
where an oil-fire’s tongues dare not lick.

Then, when face with banal, bittersweet
mimicry week after week, therein
braces a bothered stirring of flavorful
jumbles as aimless as houseflies bouncing
against the window blinds.

And, once again, my poems,
with their phoenix lifestyles, breathe brave
gulps with scarlet-robin-******* puffed
with gung-** vigor.
Where the poet’s rhythm takes on equestrian
expression along the staggered verses,
bequeathing shine to syllabic shine
and stealing pop from pursed, pronouncing lips.

Each doting word may kiss and nuzzle the
splinters that recognize a cut so rare
that this world’s physical balance would overturn
with no presence of such wondrous oddity.

Were you alive when the
bricks began to crumble
beneath our hand-held, picket line
across the parking lot in front of some
school that no one bothered to name?

Our exhaustion-mumbled whispers
skipping across lips dropping to the street
that tapered ladders on gargantuan gadflies as the summer heat
etched the tear lines into mud tracks against
our ruddied faces.

Cohorts torn into flip stands
layered toward standing political sores --
tell me how to cross my t’s and fill in scantron circles before
the suits step over brown-bag lunches
to stretch the yawning yellow tape over the students’ lockers.

We were strung up the flag pole, almost posted as decapitated heads for the public.
The political analysts call this “The biggest school closing in decades.”

Under teeming hammer-strikes :
glasses shred to paper-splinters
before a young boy’s diploma
crying white chalk bricks
from university’s doors instead on to
prison yard orange jumpsuits.

Can we call this a school improvement project
or can we call this the Same Salem Witch Hunt
As unwashed teachers and students alike deck the sidewalks like
Either Christmas decorations on Michigan Avenue or
Inmates on the gallows platform

I’m completely unable to read the television marquee that told the neighborhood that City Hall was too stuffed with paperwork to defend the mothers and invisible fathers.

I’m completely unable to write out of respect for these children’s already-carved in stone pathway to the gutter, graveyard, and/or prisons.

In the first wink of dawn
We will all scatter
To our respective positions
Carved out in concrete before the
barricades fall
to flood the street.

Three nonconsecutive generations that can --
No -- Will – spit the timeless fairytale of that princess
Who never lost glass slippers -- or
Touched poisoned spindles -- or
Ate strangers’ apples -- or
Dealt with witches – and
We are that dry, plain Eucharist-wafer taste on your tongue
                That paralyzing cramp between your toes
                That still-alive, still-wiggling earthworm’s six separate, butchered body parts
We stole the words from journalists’ larynx,
His statistics, his inference, his prowess
His bias came hungry and ate the bread crumbs from our hands.
The name mother-bird doesn’t carry as much weight these days.
Collectively considered and individually squandered,
                We’re the nonsense jumbled-word search in your local Sunday paper.
                And you’ll have us whether you like or not with your large coffee and bagel.

My personal déjà-vu-time memory-prompts that frame
The blurring patterns of today’s hubcap-wheels, spinning
Kaleidoscope flashbacks of bathtub playtime.

A gaggle of giggling girls babbling about
What used to matter : umbrella-popping chewing gum
With gallivanting jargon laced in crushes-hushed : boy-talk.

Pillows : Comforters morphing, swarming like
Womb-entranced, half-cupped palms calmed
Palpitating mouths motoring off self-pitying rumble-grumbles.

How the clopping ball of opted-birr was a bent-mouth birdcall
Over-relished, over-zealous imploration : a round robin
Jumblemix of a jejune bombast for high-brow, White-men polemics

By-and-by polysyllabic buds bloomed, baked, and wrinkled
Past-Gas’s long-gone jokes : those balmy snug-hugs guarding
Based-vulgarity amongst the begrimed-teeth-******* and homegrown-Jive.

In the caste of what the fir trees denoted what should be or what should not be,
I clasped the fig twigs and watched them split as if to say that all must come to an end.
And in the end, who can the charred leaves blame if there should be tire rods and hubcaps strewn  
                               across the forest's floor?

After totaling the costs of what should not be,
the last mast of yesterday's trade boat could skiff along the shore,
with flag flailing like the playground children's hands.

Irrationality piquing: birds dip and dive like a boxer's fists made of shadow
from one powerline to the next.
Training for the changing, biting winds, watching the unconscious cars staring.

And the skiff oozing through the unmentionables littered in the creek : what will
become of him?

Lodged in stale, fossil bones -- floundered between the swingset and the droning, dusty traffic at 3 a.m.
Metamorphic scarabs stolen from the gusts and pants of too much play.
Basketballs stained with carrion, precarious gusto in the wake of money suckling and ripping alongside                            
        the skiff.

Cross here with two pennies.

Goaded by the solitary abandonment of the 1930's, the used ******'s mouth gaping open like hungry carp, dusty trails of light from the past lamplight hanging in the air

Birds measured up along the powerlines, moving mindlessly along with the flock
Bird drones, feathery spines
Birds perched along the playground.
Bird play so far as to say
        does this not look familiar?

Bobbing, weaving, slathered in cadence and involuntary muscle jerks.

First we were here
Then we were not.

The brandy just as common
With the daughters
Reassuringly following to feed
The right howled lark
Into worn times.
Carry the jean size that you wore in high school
Since the advantage is not forgotten:
Drifting footmen believed manners
Learn prettier face,
But lean into the interrupted light
of another
gun-shooting hurricane on the television.
Indolent raisings are the explanation;
The snort of adolescent judgment dreadfully happens,
And we couldn’t free the dog’s role
Into the
Gently
Busily
Sulkily
… Oh how you’ve been.

Too much of one worry is our buckled knees
dragging
the question to the fountain to make it drink. I’ll tell you the right
and proper Why I had to stifle
my cigarette break before my wrists broke
before my wet-eyed babbling witnessed your last constellation --
My last star
The star that bore the envelope between Doubts and Wisdom.
And Mourning -- that tossed bag on the vagabond's back.
I'll wait until the morning breaks.
I'll stake my flattery on the flyman's ****.
We'll wring that excuse "We were young"
until the dishrag shrivels moreso than
the letter on the fire.
Stick-figured promises -- know why you're here.

We encountered a white-tiled wall whose
            purity lingered behind earthly browns,
           salmon, grass, lavender acrylic paint. And this frozen scene chilled like hot breath on winter
            glass, soil-mixed dividing stories of young, smiley-touched
            girls whose hair was flaxen hills in
            the country and whose
            eyes were opalescent azures whose opalescence
            was truly the only sign of thought beyond a
            glassy grin.

Porcelain doll made of giggles and bubbles.

She fanned her fingers in a glorious sky and leaf peacock-feathered exuberance and pawed at the dry, gritty scene of a sailboat floundering towards a sunset.

She sees this world feelingly – one touch, two touch
Her smile is prayer-folded hands extending across her own little world
A prayer for this textured caricature of a little girl,
            a happy puppet stuck until dark,
            like the form the woman she’ll soon become
            with her child-like fingers spidering across the stories she hopes to [but never will] tell.

Her dusty hands against the comforting tinge of a watermelon’s epicenter.
            So pink, so raw, so vulnerable with the valor of another brush’s turn.

To tear away the azure twinkling of
the mother-bird's heart beating
and replace it with Mother Nature's pet ant-eater
dipping his wind-nose from clouds to dirt
and ******* away the green -- leaving caked matte mud brown.

Fraggled cottage stones aloof
where chaos is the juggled glory flanking dust and soot
blanketing fluorescent fauna unbeknownst to the birds.

Right-lightning scars when you shut your eyes
against the shadow of a mocking storm, and
Fraggled thoughts soar with the cottage stones.
Frequent nightingales regail of June's monsoons
that gulped the quail's acquaintance with Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight.

My sense of silence is the unvisited dirt mound perched beyond the graves.

All my friends are tortoise-shelled Merlins stalking statues
with their walking canes at dusk while
I pad behind them on all fours
as the day breaks the clouds like wet tissue.
And, Garrett, you broke the picket line –
Once the spotlight’s beam with that grin wider than yours and mine’s minds’ intangible illusions – Now the rustle of an intermission between stage and applause.
Our afternoons were spent *******
nicotine out of burning daily afflictions
between raspy exasperations and half-laughing
declarations about how we couldn’t catch a break.

I would ask you why, but it’s not my place.
It’s not yours, either.

I’ll tell you The Why about me, Garrett. I’ll tell you the right
and proper Why I had to pause and stifle
my cigarette break before my wrists broke
                before my wet-eyed babbling witnessed your last wave’s exhalation on all our friends

The Why I was 40 when I saw the shady What If [the same
                that stalked you] linger round my mother. And
                I heard your exhalation of “Mama Kara” and
                I remembered how to act.
The Why I was 13 when I begged the ambiguous How Do I out of you
                when I felt lifeless and pale within UIC's Courtyard -- all of our eyes spread white and feverish.

We can never pay for it -- too much of one thing is
Our buckled knees dragging the question to the fountain to make it drink.
Garrett – although so distant, the brush you had on me is the echo of a “Yup” and an “I know, right?”  and "Yo, lemme get a square,"
that drowns out the reverberating sound
of grief-clapping palms,
and cries, of everyone’s “Why?”

In a Garage During a Storm
I am besmirched with arrogance,
Besmirched with rage,
Knowing that with every Red Neptune
succeeds rage,
That I would ever address you.
But I am that white spider that climbs to the
Top of the car’s antenna,
And with one cigarette puff drops
To the middle spine,
And with a second puff,
Drops to the coccyx.
And so, I see that
Modern airplane rise above the smog clouds
And feel humbled.
That white spider who saw through so many eyes
The leg-widths
and pulls
Of such a journey
Reflected in the metallic chrome
Of the slick monument pointing toward the sky
In such a reverential, altar-like hand
Brandished toward the stars
Now slipping away
Like the horizon that recedes at twilight.

In the schisms of light changes,
Between the honking horns of crying babies
And angry mothers,
The cars hunched in anticipation
Like the smoker’s tongue rolling
Against the teeth for that nicotine speed.
A starry-eyed woman blinked with no destination
In her husband’s Bentley.
The rumbling is the crunching grind of helmets
In a pigskin scrimmage.
I can barely stand the
            Stop-Go
            Inch-Worming
Of brake-lights.
Car’s trembling is the twitching squirrel
Panic-caught in a lightsocket.
Even if the slim traffic-conductor
That burns like plastic on the fire
Yields us through like a coaxing father,
Hollow eyes don’t yield the lethargic feet.
Remnants of the second millenium’s gas-scorn,
Our can-do attitudes goad our chariots to
            Hack
And
            Spit
Dust-Sludge in gridlocked gossip.

Were you alive when the
bricks began to crumble
beneath our hand-held, kiss
puppets?

Our mumbled whispers
that tapered ladders on gargantuan folds and slung-held
boy-grips.

Cohorts torn into flip stands
layered toward standing sores --
tell me how to cross rapid waters of social trends.

We were strung up the flag pole, almost posted as decapitated heads for the public.

Under teeming hammer-strikes :
glasses shred to paper-splinters
before a car crying white chalk bricks
onto saran-wrapped concrete.

There were antennas perched like speckled,
mangy feathers,
poised, reflecting defiance toward
the wool-ashed sky.

With dirt-trekked journey marks,
there were trees growing silver hair outside the grocery store --
and frown-marked women -- that skin-folded
war paint -- yelled at their daughters to pay attention.

Words are electric shocks;
Reviving
ghosts
of who you were.

My message seems too abrasive to send
Like handwritten ransom notes
With a geriatric hand,
Gnarled and pimpled with
                Weariness
                And experience.
Our war stories
Are cards thrown down at a poker table
So initially casual
Then troubling after the fact.

People spout perspectives;
Our inputs are faucets overflowing
With the chemicals that change the mix.
Each of us contribute to the compound of strife.
What I need – what I want
Is my own element,
                Thoughts pure of your life,
For you do not fully comprehend my experience.
My wuss-**** whines that resonate
As sure as a saxophone’s wail.

My jazz demeanor, burlesque figure
Only mask the pedigree of emotions

Beneath my wiggling hips, fluttering eyelashes.
Remember: this is a woman.
From smudges to sunlight to wind to aligned stars –
                The cracked liar’s smile never eludes me
                Just as the bite still scars my neck.

Marked, experienced, wrung out, aloof –
                Live for sin, looping exponentially.


The seagulls scavenging in
The grocery store parking lot,
We know them and hate them for it.
****, drink, yell, tip your way, son.
I’ll tap my cigarette, clamber into bed
[my motives are my motivation]
Deepstep, baby, deepstep:
                Come willing because I won’t.

I am the renegade impulsively flipping cards,
Smirking across the poker table
And yelling, “Checkmate”
For no good reason.
Scattered to the winds,
My nonsense is the very ground you have to tiptoe upon,
My sense is the word on the tip of your tongue that absconded.

I am not your maker for he’s my friend.
I am not your mother for she’s my servant.
I am not your lover for you’re my witness.

This [whatever it is] is a syllable caught skipping on the record,
                                                         ­                                  And we’ll never know the rest of the word

Romantic wise man, starry-eyed traveler,
                  Quick with your heart
And words that trail a thought’s whisper
As a shadow’s lost ripples soften with journey,
The centralized passion blossoms in memory.
And the world will know that Love
To have the entire world spark ranks of leaves
In the universe that exists between Lovers.

One road examine, one pair exploring
                    With sun rays imminent,
To behold a lifetime in one bright glance,
Pregnant light in a fertile flourish of green population
Where cities stretch like lovers’ sleep
And princes’ reigns cascade from sleepy, drooping yawns.

An entire life, A flash of worlds
Experience flightily in a traveler’s sigh,
Who exhaled down cliffs and heights of Lover’s bonds,
And stared down the glare of
                                              That other universe
In the briefest clash between Lovers’ eyes.

Why do I smell cinnamon in the corner of the room?
We must begin this taxing slow-dance before my mother hears us.

My Cradle. Your Cradle.
            I felt your pulse spike before my back hit the wall.
            And we’re both young enough to say this can’t really mean anything.

The sea whisper’d me.
The staunch, scarlet statues.
The ringing phone in the glove compartment.
            No, I’ll take paper, instead. The renegade robots are all dead.

This flight. This grip.
            Talk to the scumbag rocker in the Primus hoodie.
            Did you spy the shoes on the power lines?
            Don’t worry – we’ll keep our arms at the level of our eyes.

We bumped into the roses in the closet.
A wasp could sting you then sting me.
Such is the burden of my position --
            An interpreter and a translator of the venom
            passed through a sting.
            The mail-sorter in the dead letter office.

Oh, hey --
            Could you stake your paw print on it?
I would take the slivers from this past year’s thigh.
Down a trickle, faceted deep within a pulled star’s root.
I’ll follow that root back to where it came – dig and pitch the grime from a catalyst’s pores.
Times slopes
and our teeth rattle with each somersaulting channel of memories.

When getting there is half the fun but nearly empty,
the wood nymphs cart-wheel halfway out their minds.
Their giggling gallops over pawn-shop rooftops
like a dogs' noses dipping to water.


We'll drink with grandeur gestures
poised in the warrior-ridden bell towers of sin and love
where we groaned like mules stomping
unnecessarily chipped, run-down steps.


Our cackled coughs ripened with jollied folk tales.
Our eyes starry in a tortoise-shelled puzzle of nostalgia.
Our whims were gently rocking swingsets under cloudy canopies
and no one skipped a beat on the journey.

A colleague told me how
“All poems are hate poems.”
And I battered this wondered
Clobbered up like mudpies flopping,
Topped, and tossing between
Palms. Qualms pulled apart,
Stretched, stringy like
Taffy, sticking tongue to teeth, why
We can barely spreak when
We touch upon love.

There is Love – and there is Hate – two sides of the same blade
That steams your blood –
Smoke signals to
Your loved ones that you – in one way or another –
Are still orange-warm.

In this forgiving House of Blue Light – singing of malefic effigies:
Christ Light. Water light.
Trickled dirt along the corridors, wood-swollen, too.

Grab the safety handles of Hate – embrace them, know them, love them.
Hate is the pause between heartbeats that exhales the light in your veins.

Sewn, stitched above the bubbling scare,
Where children learned the world’s ways
And soldiers accepted their dismal fates.
Where one white shoulder moves from East to North,
And the two quivering fools never split –
                Their cousin never wagged incessantly like he does at parties,
He hid behind the wall like a yellow beetle, fearing the house owners may come home.
Yet what to utter in such circumstances
Where the belly falls
                And the arms divide to point at the planets.
This, now, is the end of syllables and rapture,
Intelligence and effort,
                The sacred voice that shattered mirrors
Now frozen forever in guilty shakes.
Frankly, I never possessed the stomach.
Pacifism is the hot blood rising from groin to punch the stomach
And the dry sand that erodes the throat.
And anger – that chained, wild dog thrashing, snapping its teeth with the dead sound of a slap.
And pride – the hands entwined in the chains, forming shadowed figures against the fire.
                I see myself no higher than him.
Submerged in the afterthoughts of the silent battle,
Our cocky speeches dictated in private
Now seem like pillaged playgrounds.

Nevertheless –
Time is the hands wearing away,
And unleashing the beast with fire on its tongue.

Watch it all build then fall to bubble
like boiled water within our coffee bathtub playtime
with a gaggle of giggling girls.

Our curiosity's peak was the movement
of blankets morphing to our will --
imagination trailing tall grasses on hills and valleys.

So soft, malleable, fresh
our patterns consistent to our instant thoughts
dripping like ooze from a grand golden time table
that swirled and breathed in time with athritic joints.

To catch breath, to hold it solid in your throat
and savor that crisp existences -- what makes itself known.

Wasted, spun, absolutely gone to drizzle,
my sense of silence is the smothering white pillows
morphing to the mouths of yawning trash cans
under microscopic statues.

Since the body carries ashes,
We can agree on a minute full of silence.
The nightmare that crosses over:
            Now one foot in, one foot out
            And the jealousy’s already set in.
Two foul swoops, one kiss alive
And arms already divide in surrender.

That was the first mistake,
A moment most secure in mind,
                                    In thought,
                                    In heart
Behind a barricade of trembling worlds,
            A shaking utterance of a misspoken exchange.

I mean, what do you say?

            What can you say
            without giving it away?


Into the Broken and Want.
Unto the thought between
            the Memory and the Hopeful.

I saved it all for this.
            When I turn from stars to lights
            and I want sights that behold
            a white light that the purest of
            innocence could not see.
I waited for all this.
And the rest could not stir before the stares could not blink.

The symmetry of a child’s song is the summer’s last fire.
And on this wire is a sorrow’s flaked choke.
Passion’s thread through a needle’s eye
where we sat on a rock beneath the
            olive branch to listen to
            the beard of wisdom.

The adrenaline like a hyper fly’s flight,
and those two birds crossed on the same powerline
            could feel the Earth tremble
            when our minds could not.
It was all in time, I know.

I rustled the trees
and the child did know it was time to leave.
This plundered sigh – a harvested verse ripped from the Truth.