i have to laugh at my prissy plastic christmas tree, forcibly strung
with strobing pink lights, saddled with frosty gingerbread men
and a bowtie of outgoing evergreen garland. i mean, what
would jesus do with such gaud, nuzzled in rank hay beds
with an audience of fetid sheep and crooked shepherds?

i am grateful you
didn't know the fissures
that seized our ancient kingdom

our two atop the marriage mount.

there were many reasons
for the fault, of course, many players
whispering at court, chipping the stone, but i have  

an imperceptible bias for these things

and flatteries of lesser pawns
that played on vanity and power and prowess—
the virulence kings—were nails and nail and nails

that cracked the stone on which we sat.

who knows what fossils can be made of shards of us?

an arid earth can suffer to gag
through the suffocation of its tenants,
flailing with torrential—cataclysmic—seismic
limbs at the cold-hand smothering by
a race in apathy.

though, let's not just yet, not yet
pull the bullets from our guns.

Before it occurred to me to break things—

Before, when purity was paramount to *** and
Words and duty and the drink—

Before, when academics wagged from ivory
Thrones to never mime the masters—

To be content with being only me—

To sit in wood and ruminate upon the thoughts of
White men, drunk and dead—

To raise revision for our mankind
In merely muted measures—

To be right-handed rogue, forever plying “please”—

Why then—then—

I was Halfman in a wholeman’s body,
A fish without its gills—

A flapping Fop of scaling incongruities
With gurgled protestations seldom bubbled up—

A wily Portraiter, blinded since his birth—

An agnostic Abbott soaking up a season’s sins
Outside of habit and the church—

A boisterous Beat, a bouncing drum, and gongs
With two left feet—

A Farmer without a *** or seed or farm
Or Nature much in mind.

But, my curious greenhorns on the other
Side of life, don’t heed that—no! no!

You’re free; the world is completely broken now.

"Have you ever noticed
how we are always climbing
but never getting
anywhere?

up glass-sheered avocations
and suits with bonus ties—

up **** with temperamental husbands
and secretaries with Monroe thighs—?"

It was a rhetorical question, uncannily rhymed, in the wake of
Collinses. But he didn't know that.

"We are always climbing on
what other backs have built:
the greedy gringos and their
brown-backed buey—

but i'm for Scotch and soda
anyway."

He poured out spirits like amphoras of sin.

"Oh, never mind the mess—
please, sit down.

What's that?

The mess of lives, I mean, or whatever
it is that greases the greenbacked highway
to the corner office coronation."

He knew the prodigal flames that lit the
corporate torch—the cirque
that stood in steel. He said as much:

"Oh what a monstrous architecture
of avarice! What a makeshift it is
and so much lost for all these stacks of
stuff. Sad."

I pointed to the happy pair of smiles in a
company frame. Levity interrupted.

"What's that now?

No, i've been married three times,
divorced a perfect three.

I know what you're thinking—"

And here, he laughed as he slurried his rusty brown transgressions with an index finger.

"—lucky man, he slipped the shackle
three times.

And sure, I'm dynamite by numbers
but ******* say I'm not all that nice."

"So anyway," awkwardly pivoting his grease to grin,

"you'll take the job then,
and I'll be commandeering your soul?" With a ****-******* smirk.

"It's a joke, of course—I can't just give you the job.
You'll have to show me you can climb—"

Starry-eyed empty ensued. It was enough to see
the rungs permutating above his head. Unclimbed.

"But we'll be in touch about opportunities—" he shook.
"You know—**** and stuff."

I didn't have the heart to tell him that I am, and always will be,
a homosexual.

cut quick—! quick!
unshackle, ship off, shuffle—
and if the Cuss crack some ten becrossed
what heaven have you?
cut—! amen, wha'cutting counts
the abacuses
of a

quake and halo'd curt
accountant named
in kneeling cerulean crib—
The Caucasus, the
Caliphate, the Croesus—

(you quack!—cut!—)

—ah, Christ.

how cordial the
way we hold doors
for heeled ladies
and the elderly

but never order them
a steak.

before the shutter of sentience
and we fall at the foot of the sun,
there are many risings.

let us not, then, shirk
our confession or our convalescence
in hoods of harrowing;

in consignments of death.

for crossèd ashes will surely
give rise the phoenix again
and most high flight.

We all go grocery shopping on Saturday at 4pm, and that’s America for you, but do you have to buy the last demi-loaf of artisan rice flour sourdough and swoop in to get the only carton of organic, local, grass-fed, 2% milk that I like, then have the tenacity to take the final gold foil-wrapped bar of imported Belgian dark chocolate and, for that matter, give me a Christ-save-your-soul stare when I spend a good five minutes debating the respective virtues of KY and Astroglide?

Thank god, at least, America sells liquor with its bread and milk and ****.

i cannot try every flavor
of ice cream on every summer afternoon
when the restless sun stripes the
empty vinyl booths of the
dated 1960s parlor in
gauzy, burnt yellow.

but you ask anyway.
you always ask, wearing
that faded blue baseball cap
that has no place in your burnt-yellow 50s
and a sari velcroed too high up your torso.
you look like a colorful burrito, i laugh
so you don't hear.

"stop pretending," i want to say
between the vanilla and the
strawberry, because that's
all i ever have.

i never do, though. instead, you remind me
i get the vanilla on my Eddie Bauer sleeve every
time the sun spies
and the gauzy strips of afternoon
slide across my face.

"i like vanilla," i say, apropos of
nothing. you nod, i think, or else
you take another cream-starved lick of
your cone, stacked like a lego plaything
with vanilla, strawberry, and
vanilla again.

sometimes, but not every time, after ice cream
we walk the long oak-lined boulevard
that leads to the house. many of those
totems have stood for 100 years.

"good for you," i nod,
staring up at their petrified limbs and cagey leaves.
and with a vanilla moustage hugging my upper lip,
i thank the oaken giants for living 100 years
and never leaving.

UnHAND me—!
Said the Jebusite to the Jew
—or I'll take your Sabbath
and put a miter in your mouth.

remember to flower the
earth with your song, my
nana said as she was framing
her dying light in a 1950s
pair of yellowed spectacles on a
bed of barn wood and
cigarette ash.

gram, i said, coughing, i think you've
mixed your metaphors. you mean—

—dear, she hacked, i haven't
the time to fuss with it. you
figure it out.

Now—

she tapped another Camel light
on the splintered bed frame, flicking
the ash into her hand-stitched slippers.

—can you get me a beer?

it was the last cigarette-and-brew
we spent together.

It is fair to wonder what your name
was all about—

before it was attached to you.

The crisp sounds that round together in a
full-breath definition of head-to-soul-to-foot.

Surely, the world could not have been so rich before.

Say your name again and again and again
and with each refrain, remember who you are:

The mad morning hair and queer-as-you-breathe
sun-starter who rolls with little logic from the shower

to a dreamer-doctor-writer-lawyer-teacher-self.
A dawn of aspiration and a mother-father, too,

perhaps. A twinkle that inspires when you are
unaware, and friendly face that counts the happy

paces of so many years with friends of every bond.
An iconoclastic icon, no equal in the name.

Now turn your thoughts around as you paddle
through your days. For as star-lit as you are—

—principal among the constellations—

every soul you see today
is just as brilliant in their name.

I've often soured at the strangest season
in a yellow June;
for heir-apparent Fall's sublimest features
flower when the sun of Summer shades—

I, too, come alive in staves of October
whispers—then, with whiskey cupped—am peaked amid
the Autumn's auburn-stringèd
boughs.

i'd have you know i went to church today.
spread good cheer like a bull in the stock market.

—not the sort of church jesus would overturn, though.

no—there was too much peace; not enough wells; everyone
spouting his name with a big, blessed J.

for christ's sake, that hand-shaking ******* is not his bag.
and don't even get me started on wine

in a box.

If ever the dusk settles on dry bones
I'll drink my ***** for wine
And celebrate
The impotence.

mea maxima culpa:

i am so much 
like a breadbox born.

bowing over time, as things do get

stale, my cracks christening
unwitting loaves with light

already risen.

i hear the newer ones 

come with their own condiments

and an irredeemable crust.

the bread, I mean. 

They don’t make we

breadboxes anymore.

My name is Arthur Ness and I'm a writer.
You may not of heard of me.
I'm not a good one.

Writer,
That is. You see, I've been trapped in this
Hotel room, room 56, for 18 days, and

i lost the key twice, burned myself
with the coffee maker
three times and

in the sauna downstairs—
well, you get the idea.
I'm not a good

writer.

now let's convene a table
about the best mamma-mug and idle
steak knives from a wedding never better severed
in m'acrimonious divorce. let's

chit-chat about the diaper pail of
politics and the **** that children under 2 have a
disgusting habit of bringing
to the fetid stir
of middle-somethings—

let's this and that, and on, and oh! you first!
and I can't agree more! and should we
have another pour?—yes, yes, yes, let's
do!—and hey, I have something
prescient to say...

—but why start now?
another pour, another kid, another pail,
another fetid downpour of adulting—
to hell with revelations on the lam.

between the peel of the 6am
iphone chimes and the arguing
with cold water and hot in the
cascade of a morning shower
it's hard to think what the
world means exactly when it says
in father-frowning stern:
you there!—yes, you!
isn't it time you were
successful?

...And kirchéglise(Notre) dame
   o u r l a d y m y l a d y
encyl-able, Pope or Pope or popedeux
and vindicate the waysteland
   My caska is openclosed!
(pews is pause is putride and prodigious)
Et tout-en commun?Gizerly pharaoh HA
lf gone.
Source-error of Oz
Ymandias
and dust, and dustinction

   god pull downwhich?

or fleurs-de-litigation.
Vini, vu/gesehen, conquered/konkeri?
And tot
And mort
and trunks gefallen.
Fantast-asy—I flail.
pause

S e m p i ternam.

skirting the rusty rose of a brooch
dangling on canvas bodice as she leans
tightly over me; the waves of wrinkles
on her be-bangled red hands pointing to the
wrong punctuation; this is dream-building
in the fifth grade; don't end the dream
too soon, she gruffs sing-song like
a prize-winning racoon; and still applauds
the bricklaying we so clumsily feign
for our castles in the sky; tho she, too,
dies of cancer in the last year; the tubes at the
very last weaving through the canvas;
something of a final stitch to the making
of a dream; and so i think all dreams in me
they die in darkness and still i wonder
what happens to the crenellated castle
walls i abandoned scores of years and
many As ago; and still we pat our doeeyes
on their infinitile heads and **** our
cynical shacks-by-the-forest-fires back
into our heads, begging beneath the
damp light of early-onset reverie: save
us, won't you, from the stiff stillborn of
dreams our generation lost to the fantasy
of getting what the saddest, dreamless
dollared dupes decree; oh be better yet for me,
my naive sums, and take your brick-laying;
your canvas sheen; your impossible, doubtless
dreams with broach and gnarl; with gruff and
soundless trill; your soulful self metastasized  
with every beat
to the happy grave.

Once, Jesus said, you are saved. But I wonder.
Save for later? Save, is in, extract the good parts?
Save like, save the best for last? Or maybe:
Good save! Because I was right on the cusp of
falling on my face with my foot in my mouth.

Save, perhaps, like save the future and all humanity?
Or like a goalie keeps a ball from sailing into a net. To save us
from the Damnable Score. Or no—save to fix later.
Like a broken-down truck with a cracked engine
you might, some day, get to.

No, no, none of that fits, I conclude as I pour out a
second cup of bitterly strong coffee when I should be
at church on Easter Sunday.

There’s nothing to save. And who would know better about
what worth saving than me? This, as I pour the undeniably
burned second cup of coffee down the drain.

Wordsworth bubbled in my cellophanate bath water
yesterday, at the candled hour.

whilst horse tails whinnied from Joshua Bell—
Tchaikovsky in brood, 1878.

Oh, but if I had thought to Bogart the whole affair, well,
I'd be a modern Michelangelo, a downright da Vinci—

a Dostoyevsky before the dawn—

propped between the cold **** and the hot,
wet behind the ears.

Then I turn the note-the page-the scene:
Don't try this at home, they echo in the shackles of

celebrity. A drowning horse has sounded better
than their confession of our normality.

i can't help but feeling i'm in the way somehow,
like a warm house brimming with tea time smiles,
the Early Gray fusion of a giggling family in sweaters
that must constantly get in the way
of the falling
snow.

I resolve to be better men
than the tripe what came before me—
the unheady scowls that mangled
a century of minds; the quivering mass
of un-courage before guns ungutted;
the tea-timing termagants whose
3 o'clock wails still curdle from
the greenbacked Gehry—

but ezra taught me better.
pull down thy vanity, he wagged
with two feet in the fire and one finger
through the sane:
again, i say, pull down.

Each morning, I wake before God has roused
The sun,
And that is just what we must do: To complete the busy-making-madness of a job. To compose the email, to manipulate the story, to rope the client, to extol the virtues of money and shore up the pillars of industry.

Though we sigh as we do: there is no shine in an empty inbox. Not that we ever see it—

Each day, we are gaveled:
More, and greater, and bigger, and best. Which is exactly what we do, but our wrangling and sending and crafting and praising of profit is never sufficient: More, and greater, and bigger, and bester than best.

In the sands of the sun, we are erecting Ozymandias.

—fired not by passions, not by growth, not by light, but by false engines: caffeine and fear and shame.

It is 7pm on a Tuesday and I hear the sun whisper, its orange lids closing: I have risen and shone another day. So have you. Now:

Rest.

The consequence of dreaming,
Between the blood-shot weekdays,
Is too dark to admit I’m afraid:

That there is a better lost in the status quo
Like a dryer sheet in a load of laundry;

That there is a possible lurking just out of reach
Like a jar of peanut butter stuck up on the highest shelf;

Or even—yes even—that a happiness can be caught
Like a chase after the bus that came two minutes early.

Oh, friend. I hate to disappoint you as you wade through coffee and the news in your bedroom slippers by the fire—

But the consequence of dreaming is dire.
And so we had best stick to the humdrum—
Never changing our habits or the channel again.

i'd say the #2 has etched its genius
on the pale, ruled stock for the last time—

(imagine when Paul said that, scribbling his
preach and practice between the lines at the foot of a fiery cross)

but the truth is, my work is ephemera;
the etch of a keyboard stroke imprints only

as long as the flaming feet of a
hurried conflagration.

There is war across the stream, I’ve read.
And corruption over the wall.

There is a dire need I’ve seen to feed
the hungry over there—

Perhaps we’ll find it, we Nation, within our purses
to bargain with such backwardness.

To push the inside-out-ness across the pond
and over the bridge to other places

where such sin belongs.

I voted for the men and women who
raked the evils to tomorrow and over there;

to the places that—beer in hand and
TV crackling—I cannot say I know very well (at all).

To the places so foreign even our shared humanity is
no more real than Landlord Mercy.

Still—something moans inside my conscience
like the grazing hum of locusts.

Even I know there are so many walls, so many streams,
so many lands to skip and souls to sour before

the round world brings the desperate
back to me.

webs
are hinged, locked, and strung—
with the world twitterpated rapt.
while i, you witness, cannot snag a verb—

and the prey, with her tease in akimbo
fluttering flirt, flies—
winked, and sought, but e'er—
uncaught.

I’ve always loved

The crane of green, of spiring atoms
Years in their making: the
Burdened, brittle backs of flowers in my garden.

These are the stems which are nothing but,
letting loose a leaf  here that wonders then
Wilts; slung, there, sullen, at the side.

I’ve always admired

The ribald crags, a matter of mid-life
Crises. Yet, all about its warted middle
A uniform purpose nonetheless rises:

Dewy petals ringing white in halos,
Their fearless figures spread wide upon the air:
Indeed, all the supple self naked to the whim of Nature.

I’ve always enjoyed their grace.

Except, there is one bowing low, shut upon itself
And gray. I wonder how it came to be that way,
Still haloed in its ashen regalness.

Or, for that matter, how many more will
Slump before tomorrow, exchanging their halos
For a bit of rest.

Yes, I’ve always marveled at the uncanniness of flowers.

would there be any tenor to the world
were tomorrow i gone? vanished—
like some ethereal dotted eighth—from
one divine orchestral stave—into eternal hush.

there is our moment played—and should the maker
miss his mark—a flat, or too sharp for a natural—
the score proceeds unwitting—cradle of keys
whe’r sound or sour—and there is symphony regardless.

but if the conduct of those chords progress
until the maestro halts the score upon us—a
premeditated coda—a failed tune—a clumsy strum—
and that is how the world in me plays out—

would there be music in the world again
were tomorrow i gone?

When I was a boy, the castles of education
soared impossibly large: Brick-laid with Blake, mortared
with Marx, wound round-about with subsidized ivy, rooted
in the 17th century.

And me, just me, on two legs, from 1981.

The flickering incandescence of rebellion started in
these fortressed halls; ideas more snapped than volleyed, until
at the end of our emotional tether, we society on our pale legs,
we sure did fall to a gust of reason.  

Emotion pounded at the walls in every century; and minds, fortified with logic and stoney fact, beat back, beat down, beat away the
Crying, yelling minds. For tears do not make progress.

I was tender, careful, deferential in my youth—an idealist without ideas; merely the powder keg of emotion lurking somewhere beneath my epithelial smarts. Ready and willing to rain against the parapets of education with unsightly feeling.

And I stood, in my academic frock, at the feet of the great hall of learning. And I wondered if my legs could stand it.

Is it any wonder I was raised to be an intellectual?

when i was ordained a journalist,
a halfwit wisdom-speller with i's too often after e's,
they mounted a valediction for me:

"goodbye, you crucible of culture and the end," they pomped.
"we wish you joy on your carpetbagging beats,
the inciting sins you write your things about—

"the ways in which we fall.
and glory to you, the one who settles truth
by shivering quotes in darkness

and flickering candles in caves.
for what would be the world without you?"

a better place, I'm told; a feast of fiends without wits.
and likely more bourbon
to go around.

“yes, you can”
they say to we, the writers,

when we are clung to writing desks
and textbook conversations as school naughts—

boys and girls who churn with knowledge in a mad pitch for
the matter of the American dream.

And through it all, this sneaks between the lines:
That dreams and matters and states are smithed by words—

Words that mold the landscape
That plough the fields
That pave the streets
That breach the wild for mankind to explore.

Do you remember the lessons?

I still remember the wheelbarrow, glazed
with rainwater, beside the white chickens…

And I still search for the farmer who
brought them together, whose footsteps cured

the chronicle of white and black,
the chapters of women and men,
the tables of hungry and over-fed,
the acts of untold races and the mix of tribes—

the history of we.

“It is writing on which we walk,” our forebears croon—

“but be prepared not to earn enough
to buy a scrappy pair of shoes.”

now hear this! sing this! you constant Cade, you
choral breakneck in a single sum of man,
brackbreaking in the chaos-rinsing rite of ashed religion!—

choke now, for you used me. a tossing stave to ward off sins
of fratting simpletons and their unsyncopated singing.
—all sixteenths through roughshod roads of wrong-be-gone righteousness.

and why? because i vaped some trebled color to the gray.

oh! what is the
madness-misering measure of a middle-aged man
who through the din of dampened doing, of desperate
dancing on two left feet and wrinkled writhe of witlessness in the mid of being been should shuffle off and coil himself into a crimson cross?

you did it why? for friends and for the fissure,
some bald breach of banality beyond the stoic peach—
and for a frosty flame?

what waste of was you were, and still accomplished are;
that god-grappled greed should unhinge your soul's Sophia
and ever the future fraught.

there is not bracker brine than your bishops ex-cathedra,
for all the feast you fête, and friends you turn upon a spit;
you're hungry for a food that's never fed.

poor witless starving pitchless sum; your death is all my make into an angel, as you so quickly from this earth will shred
and songs adduced unto the celebration same.