He knows what lies below.
This is where it all began: here
Beneath the bubbling sludge and ******* mud.
This is the home brew, the cocooning grounds.
His sturdy boots trudge through,
Hefting questions and glasses askew.
Somewhere to the side a fat swamp prince
Composes bog rhymes in ribbit meter.
Each squelching step sets a buzzing bunch
Of crystal dragons zipping away to
Slick peridot pontoons. A loon swoons
The expeditioner with a sobbing cry. He
Has said goodbye to reservations, to the
Long-dead preservation rights. He slogs through
The buzzing night. Yellow daggers clench
Between scaly steeltrap snappers and stones
With eyes blink in languid surprise, unnoticed.
He is lost, dying, unsure of his quest. He needs a
Cure. He knows it lies here, in the beginning place.
Their faces haunt his deathly guts and crush
His straining heart with need - need for the solution.
Need to survive, to prolong his life - alone!
So alone: the last. If only he could rest.
His nostrils quiver with the homesick stench
Of tails becoming legs and nipping lips sprouting
Sticky tongues. The answer, he is here for the
Only answer. Something below, below, down
In the dredges of history - in the slime of
Centuries, rotless and preserved. He will find it:
Some link, some closer thing he can revive
And test and rest as bedrock for his life.
A foot sticks in the overfriendly tar. No,
He will not pause. He has come too far.
In the birthing grime, some hungry memory wakes.
It knows what lies above, it thirsts to cease it.
It reaches, roils, pulls, rips with smelly squish-fingers -
Thirsting and thirsting to slake. It longs to reveal
To show, to make known to the traveler.
(All he has searched for is found here, it knows,
Organized and close. Held and safe below)
It reaches, grabs - thirsty - presses him into
A false step. A slip. A skritching clipboard
Of statistics curses in rustling indignance
As it flutters to the mud above a splattered head.
Science-frozen lungs fill with dread -
With life-giving peat. (It will show him) He ***** in
And burbles out a scream. (what he wants, show him)
This is where it begins, (this is his dream!) where it ends.
Now he knows what lies below. He lies - curled -
Quenched from growth. The eyes of unnoticed
Stones blink in surprise. Soaring swamp lyrics
Rise, a loon swoons with a sobbing cry.
He curls in peace and drifts alone
Now he knows what lies below.

Somewhere in a villa
In Barcelona,
There's a Spanish guitar
And a smile that glints in moonlight.

The music is flowing like
Gabriela's flamenco skirt
While she dances and flickers
And scorches the floor.

They're cooking something up
Next door, something full of
Pepper and smelling of spice.
Smoke rises into the sky,
A refugee of fire.

A little boy pads barefoot
By stucco walls and calls
Up for a taste of flame.
(Wishing all the same

That "Flame" was his name -
Or at least his color - like his brothers'.
They are hungry too,
Hungry to spark and burn and shine
And shame the still Silent.)

Somewhere near Barcelona,
A bull bellows and breaks
A rider,
For a while. But

The smoke still rises
(Refugee of fire.)
And climbs higher than clouds can dream,
And glides out and out past stars unseen.

Gabriela's folds still swing
To a speech spoken by stinging strings
(With a smile that gleams at the dark).

I was a dog once,
With a thick coat and
A sure bark. A safe bark.
I wanted to make my way
By the sides of humans.
I wanted to smell the
Shoes and feet and
Sidewalks and small
Animals of the world.

I was a dog once,
That am dead now,
With flat eyes and
A flat cage. A sharp cage.
I was named once,
That am now named
"Get 'im, get 'im"
Or called sometimes
Just a shout that
Bites me tight,
Tighter than any
Other once-dog's bite.

I was a dog once,
A loving pet.
I was loyal,
But loyal loses bets.
Now I am what
Teeth demand of me,
What voices demand of me.
I am irretrievable,
And I am hungry.

Do you remember that time
We played our homecoming show
On the field, muddy with marching,
With a rainbow arching over us?

Do you remember the kids there?
We invited them to play along,
And everybody got a little confused
About when to leave, and left early.

Do you remember hearing them cuss,
And suddenly we knew we were old,
That sometime in our sleep
We'd crossed sides and grown up?

You don't remember?
I guess you didn't see the rainbow,
Or feel the mud on your shoes.
I guess for you it was second nature.

You got tricked into working,
Tricked into missing the colors in the sky.
Childhood is behind you, and you didn't see it go.
You think you've still got innocence to spare.

You're old and gone now, though you're still here.

And now the good day has gone around
To somewhere near New Zealand,
(Which is all the better, for I hear they are in
Deep need of good days)
And the “goodnights” have come
And gone to bed with yawning lips,
And the empty loom is stocked with threads
To weave new dreams, good and bad.

Now I nestle in with pillows
And ice for one of my Icarus burns.
It is hard to express why the sun still
Shines in my chest, warms my shirts,
Smiles against my breast like a robin’s
Breast smiles gratefully back to the sun.

Today was a good day,
And tonight is good,
And the stars have not forgotten me,
Nor the moon turned her face away
In one of our play fights,
So I cannot help but fill with warmth,
Though our bright conductor has marched off.

I’m still humming yesterday’s song -
Which is like the call of a mockingbird,
A little bit borrowed, a bit absurd,
But after a long good day, I find
That I cannot say with my words
What is best expressed by birds.

I know you've always considered me
A mechanical man -
And I'll admit
I do my share of clicking and whirring
I do have my own processes -
Alien to you -

But I have all the same ones
Too, and a beating heart within my
Clank-clattering flesh.

I watch
You, like a camera, like a scanner
Searching for a price tag. Bar codes
Are simple.
I like simple, but you must
Not think me mechanical for it.

When you see me,
I adore it, but often you
See preconceived pictures and

I'm terrible at this, you know, dreadful.
I should stop, there's no way to say -
No way to show that I am more than -
You know, that I am eyes and skin
And marrow, but more too, more than
Even you -

Nevermind, nevermind.

There's no way you'd think I'm
Human: I can't even speak.
I just click quietly to myself and bend
Toward you slightly with an injured creak.

The language of poems is foreign:
Alien and elegant to my ears.
I cannot speak it, (not fluently)
But rather spit out phrases,
Turns, and words accumulated
Through the years. Those simple things
That please a dear friend
And come without calling.

Man is nature's child.
He is her firstborn, her best-
Loved. Man is in her good graces.
He doesn't know, he often surmises
That he is behind on the rent,
That he has over-spent his
Allowance. He does not see!
The purpose of man is to live;
The purpose of a giving tree is
To give. No coldness can take
Refuge in nature's heart, no
Spite can contort her lovely face.
The earth's an easy, forgiving place;
Made for men to live and love,
Made to house a lucky race.

It's my work.
It's a certified Personal
Original,
So why is my name marked
As a misspelling -
And why are you
Changing my wording?

Do you know why
I almost cannot write?
Every word is a window,
And every line a bright light inside;
The ending of a sentence
Is a lifting of the blinds:
Anyone can see in.

The ink on the page
(The actors on the stage
Of my mind) are arranged
According to my direction.
(I call action,
And only I.)
But my name is a misspelling
And you change the wording.

There’s an old saying
From some song
About a heart of gold
And a man who mined for it,

But I’ve always wondered
Whose chest he carved up
To get that golden heart,
Whose veins he tapped like maple trees
For the molten yellow blood,
Whose scabs he picked
For the coagulated ore.

I think I’d rather have the mine
Than the man who wrote that song.
Even dug out and hollowed it was still
The home of a 24 karat heart, a hard metal heart,
Precious for its softness.
Yes, even emptied I would want the mine
And the miner be ******.

When we came laughing back
From our romp in the waves
And our mothers beckoned
To the pink sand in the setting sun,
It followed us to shore.

It looked like us and smelled like us,
But spoke some other tongue.
We were loathe to trust It at once,
But the adults said “everyone gets a chance”
So we gave It one.

It wasn’t so bad to start,
It learned our language and told us
Things about the deep from whence It came,
But sometimes It burbled and choked,
And we didn’t let It play with us those days.

Then, one quiet morning,
While the birds were silent and nested,
The fog came rolling off the banks
Thicker and darker than ever before.
Our papas were late for work and
Cars crashed on the interstate.

Weeks went by and it didn’t dissipate.
People were frightened and worried.
Anxiousness colored actions and faces,
(But you couldn’t see faces in the fog anyway.)

It was like a flock of birds, what happened next.
Like a quiet flock, when one bird calls
And others take up the cry, and soon
The sky is full of wheeling, screaming gulls.

Old Jerry said, “That thing’s the reason
We’re stumbling around as blind as moles.”
Everyone knew what he meant.
Everyone made sure to show dissent,
But the cry whispered in their scared souls.
(It is hard to know that you are blind
And think that it is no one’s fault.)

For a month or so, nothing was done.
Maybe we shunned the thing a little more,
Maybe It took to playing out by the shore,
(Doing the devil’s work, some said)
But nothing happened. (We didn’t understand It,
So we were distant; we were afraid.)

Then, like all fear, we conquered It.
We drove It to the shore. (In a car, of course.)
And told It to go home. It refused.
It gurgled that It had been sent as some sort
Of ambassador. So, we did the only
Reasonable thing, and killed It.

The fog faded immediately, and we could see
(Rising out of the ocean with bright
Welcome banners affixed and all festooned
With streamers and balloons) several
Enormous ships. It must have liked us.
The End.

P.S.
They burned our city to the ground.
All our homes and yards, our dogs and our
Compact cars, they cracked up the interstate
And flooded the basements. All the silk ties burned up.
Then, at the end of their wrath,
Shaking with rage, they took one child -
Someone’s brother - down with them into the sea.

(The nights after were filled with the most
Mournful and terrifying songs
As though they knew what we had killed together
As though they had hoped for some other outcome
Though no other was possible.)

More than anything, I remember
The first blow that struck It. I remember
The sound it made, so surprised,
And that it didn’t even know to run away,
But merely stood there and floundered
And flapped like some kind of bird -

Like some bird that had dared to sing
Loud enough to attract a hunter’s sights.
It did not comprehend our decision.
It stood in place and let itself be burned,
(As we were later burned)
Right next to the sea.

Oh, Polaris, do you remember
Those days when we ran
Clothed in dew and the skin
Of great conquered beasts?
Do you remember our triumph
In the hello-waving grass
That night we were tickled by
Chaff - and calves licked our
Blood-filled cheeks? Do you
Remember, Polaris? You still
Have so much of the old heat.
Even today, when the freeze of
New memories strikes me, when
I'm snapped by the cold, I
Remember our old days. Oh
Polaris, warm my hands a moment.
You were always so sturdy;
Against your shoulder was the
Perfect resting place for cold
Skulls like mine. Of course,
Your fires often melt the ice
In my eyes. I never stay: I
Need the cold, need the new
Frigid day. Without the bitter
Wind, how could I love the
Steady warmth you hold, Polaris?

I am Merely
Walking the day out
On tired feet,
Merely smiling and laughing,
Merely a collection of
Bone, sinew, blood, flesh
And various small change.

I cannot rearrange myself,
For I am Merely
This or that.
Just a voice, just a pair of hands
Immutable and singular -
Just a pair of watchful eyes.

In my mind I am gold and silver,
But I met Midas beneath a still tree
On a patch of shining grass
And I was blinded.
He said to me,
"Merely skin and guts comprise us,
A pile of atoms, Merely,
And the dust we walk is only dust."

I could not believe as I was told.
Here lay the king who shone with golden glory
And unfolded such a hollow story
That it broke my heart
Merely beating.

I want to be under a
Sienna sky - some burnt-umber
Monstrosity, devoid of clouds,
Still and still moving over the
Acrimonious skyline of
Molten orange windows and
Hot dry concrete. I want the
Silent sound of the subway under
My feet, the rattle and shake -
The bass drum beat. I want a
Hundred saggy women and lean men
Shaking their fists at soda cans
To walk by me. Someone I can
Help, someone I understand;

What a terribly needy creature
Is man! How can the planet
Withstand it, this desire for
Windows of fire and walls of burnt umber?
How can it not shatter for want
Of sienna skies?

Man goes on his  mismatchmaking way
All befuddled and besillied
By the sullied streets trashseeded
And growing up skyscrapers
Like mammoth trees to eat up all the sun.

He wonders why the days get shorter,
Even the summersinging days get shorter;
And the sky gets duller all scraped clean
With clouds in the gutters hugging sparrows,
And crows learning every day to cross the street.

He walks his life away.
He wanders and wonders his life away -
Never reaching out of his compoundcomplex street,
Until some Eliot composes love poetry to him;
And even then he widewonders why.

One air-conditioned summer evening,
When the waking lamplights
Buzzed and sighed to life and
Yellowed the cooling stones
In the street beside our home,
You asked me a foolish question.
"Do we have a lasting relationship?"
No.
No, my love, we have nothing
Of the sort. No roses or chocolates
Or love-letters have ever outlasted
The final rasping, dusty cull that must
All mortal, fleeting things befall.
No whispered words, like golden
Birds on the morning wires can
Ever aspire to live beyond their
Breath. Each serenade fades with
Death. So shall our love,
When we go to worms, be gone.
But do not cry, my whispered love,
For though I cannot hold you past
The expiration of my arms,
You, too, will be the dullest dust:
Insensitive to my absent charms.

For years words have dropped
Down
Into my head,

Like rain on the spikes of a bromeliad,
Single splashes forming trails
And trails and trails
Trickling
Down
Around the bud,
To fling themselves into the dirt
To splash the roots.
Then slowly up the roots they go
Into the bud.

It soaks them in and soaks them in,
It is patient patient patient,
Waiting too long,
Until I think it'll never open -
And then it

Blooms.

Oh my darling, my prince
Of unworthy ventures,
Do not speak to me of love.

Do not speak to me
Of her claws and her venomous
Kisses. I do not care.
My ears are deaf to you
And your many death rattles.

Only, do not think I am
A glacier inside, that my
Cheerful face hides merciless
Ice. It is not so. Do not speak
To me of where you go
With her. Not because I don't care,
But because I already know.

In the way a wounded man
May plead, "do not speak
Of bullets," I entreat you:
Do not speak of love to me.

A captain who sailed in a
Deadly gale and hears of
Stronger winds may give up
His beloved sea. A boy who
Falls from one snapped branch
Fears even fallen trees. Please.

Do not speak of love to me.

Shipwrecked on the shores of your body,
I have forgotten how to count the hours in days,
Or the weeks in years; I have forgotten how to speak.
I crawled across your skin - like sand
Shifting under the rolling waves -
Onto the hard ground where you lay
And kissed it, and made of it my shelter.
Now I know only the language of the wind
That blows from your mouth
As laughter makes it into a sky.
Now I know only the light of the sun
That my sight makes of your eyes.
Lonely would I be if I remembered others
But I rest on you now with nothing in my mind,
Only the lullaby of your waves
And the breeze of your laughter.

It is not a taste,
Not precisely,
My tongue running over my lips…
It is not a taste you have left,
For I taste only myself again,
But I taste now also
The absence of your lips.

It is not a sound you have left,
But the silence remembers your laugh,
And the floor recalls your feet,
Marking itself not with footprints
But with an absence of footprints:
The cold of my side remembering
Your warmth against it.

There stood Colossus gripping tightly
At his injured head and whimpering,
Hemorrhaged for centuries and crumbled
Down to the crying blocks below,
To the crying nation below.

There stood tragedy in her nightclothes,
Caught unaware and unprepared,
But still willing to give the boys a show.
There drifts the smoke and burned up men.
There falls the mighty God of Rhodes.

Hanging now is the thick dust that blinds,
Hanging now is Comedy’s tired head, weeping
From sadness and silence and the ****** dust.
In the roads, the people stand and scream,
In their homes, the people sit and mourn.

Televisions show the Colossus fall,
But the only sound is a news anchor, bawling.
The crushing concrete quenches some
Of the hungry fire, and unofficial officials
Dive into the carcass for survivors.

The Hudson washes down the morning
With debris; and somewhere far off
I am seven, looking at the walls,
Wondering why our class
Doesn’t get a TV.

Coming home drunk
(As I only rarely do)
One night, I heard a man
Talking to no one like a reliable friend,
Muttering about having his feelings hurt
And I knew who he was (or at least a kind of who:
Born with no opinions but strong opposition,
Always told, “Hey, you want a revolution?
Roll your own,” and laughed off,
Passed between people and ideas and loyalties
Like a stolen beer.)

I felt the need to be elsewhere, but the street
Dispassionately pressed him and me
Between two buildings.
I didn’t want to catch his eye,
But he caught mine,
I couldn’t look away from his face,
Twisting like he wanted to say
Something else, and then
There came a stillness.

I stared at him.
I’ll admit it, but
He was just so ragged and tough, like
A cardboard box
With bullets inside,
And okay, maybe I was a little scared.
(I was paralyzed, stuck in his eyes
Like the rooms of castles
Where no foot has tread,
Where ghosts sigh and whisper;
And outside there are signs
Saying “danger: do not climb
You will fall”)

Then something broke.
He looked away,
And whispered in a crumbling voice
“You are no one, I am alone,”
And then I knew he was.

You say "Do you love me?"
You want "yes,"
But not love. You say
"I love love love you
soooo much!~"
But not forever,
Not even for long.
Wrong is not in your
Vocabulary for self-reference
And I'm not about to teach you
That "love" is as small as
A bird
On a cold day and as quiet
As the space an ever-stretching
Universe can fill by the
End of "forever."

It gets in -
In the cracks,
In the holes,
But it doesn't flow.
It doesn't drain
When you split apart.
Love is not a girl who can
Wrap herself around a new boy
After a good cry. Love is a softer
Message than candy and flowers,
Less than hanging on him for
Hours and dressing up
To undress later.

"Love" isn't a texted
Proclamation of desire.
It's not what you want.
You want "yes" and
"Like" and "Tomorrow is fine,
Let's go at six."
You want what you have
To be enough.

I have enough without
Fooling myself,
I have enough without your
Kind of help,
Your brand of "love."

I haven’t got a heart of gold,
Gold is too soft and beautiful.
The world sinks its teeth into gold
And leaves a bite mark for every hungry mouth
And I haven’t enough surface area to accommodate them all.

I have a heart of silver.
Let the wolves bite into that,
Let it stick in their teeth.
They will not break the skin.
The don’t deserve to see my blood,

My silver dragon’s blood,
Running down my head and chest,
Dripping and pooling in the darkness,
Shining and reflective
Like a thousand little moons
And worlds made of moons.

No, let them trade in gold.
My heart is ugly enough to survive
And beautiful enough to live.
They will not steal my blood to spend,
The will let it pool and lie
As unattainable stars lay in the sky.

If any other silver bleeder comes to claim me,
Let me be his and he mine.
If any blue-veined miner puts away his pick
And loves me without claim,
Let him be mine, I will not hurt him.

But if, God forbid, there is yet a man
Who bleeds gold and loves me for my blood,
I will love him to the reaches of my sky -
I will spend myself on him to the last cent -
For that is a claim that cannot be paid,
It is a love that would destroy me.

She folds her arms inside her robe
And decides to go to bed
For the tenth time.
She closes her eyes and sighs
And turns around,

But the tricky cooling night slides
Through her graying hair -
Whistles through.
It sings a song to keep her near,
Keep her crying.

She sits back down on the porch swing,
Feet in the air, tiny again.
She's afraid, but
She knows it isn't going anywhere.
She wonders why.

A melody from tomorrow breaks the clouds,
And she looks to the horizon.
The sun is rising;
A bird awakes and flies to the power lines.
The night is dying.

She muses to herself that, in the light,
The willows' weeping looks like
Content sighing.
The grass she cut down yesterday
Is still climbing.

Humming after a shower, the counter-
Melody rises from the TV screen.
My dripping eyes slide to the flowers
On page six of a magazine.

You used to smell like lilacs and
Mint - when you brushed your teeth.
In the cooling autumn, your summer
Scents are diligently haunting me.

A hundred years ago, or so,
You promised: "I won't let you go,"
But then one of us was bound to float
Away, someday.

A field of lilacs all in bloom
Are as charming as an empty room -
Without a bride, without a groom,
And slowly fading.

Folding the sad old news away,
I lay it on a tray and settle down.
How many strong men and pretty
Girls are up there where you hang around?

Chances are, it's multitudes,
Trillions more than crawl the earth,
And you don't need any sort of test
To tell me what each one is worth.

How many dances do you see
With women I could never be?
Does each, with a hand white like a lily,
Ask for your touch?

And how many girls do you deny
With passionate emerald eyes like mine?
How many are drunk on feral wine?
Probably none.

But then again, I won't begrudge
You the benefits of a resting place.
If you are where I think you are,
You bear immortal, eternal grace.

And it's loneliness, like a bad
Priest preaching the gospel wrong,
That sneaks into my throat tonight
And forces out a song.

A hundred years ago, or so -
You took my passionate emerald glow,
But how on earth could you ever know?
I cry when I see lilacs alone.

Before today I lived
Lukewarm and alone,
Softly sighing at broken bones
And bruised hopes.

Before today I was
The fallen horse
Screaming at legs
That wouldn't carry me.

Before now I drained slowly away
Like a punctured egg on Easter,
Until some smiling imbecile
Blew my guts out into a bowl
And that was that.

Before today I might have been better,
But I was not whole.

Hey, Achilles, what’s it like
To die from an arrow you didn’t see?
Hey, hey, happy stuttering Hercules
What’s it like to be mad and ****
The woman you love,
The children you love,
What’s it like to watch terror born
On the faces of helpless thousands
And be counted in those thousands
As defenseless? What’s it like,
Hercules, to be loved, to be a hero,
To be unstoppably strong and
Uncorrectable? (In the back of your head
There’s a voice) Pleading with
Wreckage in the making and
Begging your arms not to swing,
Your hands not to squeeze,
Your lungs to stop breathing
Long enough to faint and later wake
With sense and reason?
Do you ever want to die?
No, no. “Dying is for fools,” you say.

You are a legendary fool in paper armor,
Tilting at windmills and running from smiles;
You are happy, blind, and wounded
In the ruins of a diseased world.

My percussion teacher, fresh out of surgery:
Going down the line of kids at attention -
Checking the attention - my percussion teacher
In a wheelchair gliding down the line -
Fresh out of surgery - sliding down the line
Of kids at attention with heads bowed.
My percussion teacher with the aching back;

My percussion teacher, fresh out of surgery
(With the pill keeper on her keychain)
Wheeling down the line of insecure children -
Checking the attention - my percussion teacher
Calling "Chin up, chest out, back straight,"
(Fresh out of back surgery) going down the line,
"Don't lock your knees, be proud."

My percussion teacher weeks after surgery
With the back pain and the brave face,
At a Christmas parade
My percussion teacher gliding beside the drums
Chair whirring between beats, my teacher
Whispering, "roll step, back straight, chin up,
Be proud."

My teacher in her home at New Year's,
Recovered and childish, months after surgery
"Look, I'm taller now? Wanna see my scar?"
Yes I want to see it, yes of course - that scar,
That pride twisting pink across your chest, yes.
Yes, because your chin is up,
And your back is straight.

Let’s not go chasing ants today.
The grass is gone
And dirt won’t burn anyway.
Why not get to work with me
And let your memory go out to the yard to play?

Let’s stay away from the familiar doors
And antique halls
Whose windows open only to walls, anyway.
Let’s ditch the dollhouse unopened,
Still in the box.
You and I have business in the life-sized world.

Bin the old plastic flags,
Still furled in bags, let them go to the ground
In triangles over G.I. Joe caskets.
Stuff your red lunchbox with as many
Kens and Barbies as you can
And let’s bury them in someone else’s playpen.

We should burn that old forest down
Where we used to do magic,
So no one can cut down the trees
And make planks or papers -
Because it would be a ***** to find them,
(Not to mention climb them) but
I suppose you can’t go torching forests.

Still,
Chuck that cigarette in the bushes.
Maybe something will catch.

Are you any closer to God?
How far have you gotten?
Last I saw, you were throwing
Ink on paper to see what stuck.
Well? Had any luck? Oh, I see.
"Not as such." But I suppose
You still want your grants, yes?

Go on sticking needles into mice,
Just be sure to try the untried
Methods. A whiff of repetition
Oozes around this situation, and
I worry for your mind. Sometimes
I think you must be close to God:
Only good friends play hide-and-seek.

Now, you've tried looking up trees,
And behind and over and under things -
Inside bridges and beneath streams.
You've forgotten Him like a perfect dream,
Hazy and clouding your bright eyes.
His silhouette strikes as sharp and
Stinging as morphine's needle.

Mice do not know Daedalus, nor
Do they fear Minotaurs. They've no
Thread to follow home, so put
Them in your Labyrinth and see
How far they get. Know this:
I will pay from pity and cry when
You leave. I see Icarus in your eyes.

There’s no fear in the place
I’m going to be in a few years,
In the time it takes to tune a piano,
In the decades of a dog’s wagging tail.
There’s nothing scary there.

When I’m as many years older
As there are seconds in a lightyear,
Or sound waves in wallpaper,
I’ll still be ****-a-doodle-doing perfectly
Dandy in a yellow-spotted bouncy way.

When I’ve said and written as many
Words as there are to say on an afternoon,
And when my heart’s as old and big
As orange and gold, as great as
A slide whistle going up, up, up, then,

I’ll see what I saw when I was
The size of a bright laugh:
That all the world, in its infantile grace,
(Even the places nearly shaded from sight)
Is bursting with unexplainable light.

Of course I remember, silly dear,
I can't forget paralysis,
Laying half-in, half-out of death,
Hearing your words and
Feeling your breath,
You kept me there.

(And I was already
Death's ward, but you
Fought so hard
To keep me alive,
To bring me home,
And you were so brave)

Of course I remember, my lovely fool,
That I was stupid
With blood in my eyes,
And nearly wanted to die,
But you held me. Though I was so
Out of it all, floating above us both,
I remember you carried me
To a man with a bright cross on his chest.
Don't let me forget.

When I woke from the medicine
And there was your face, then
I could see something that had lived
In darkness, hidden from view
While we were side-by-side
In fields of ******. When your eyes
And cheeks were an honest pink
From tears, I knew who you were,
I knew you had been there, between
Me and death's fingers. You
Were the mightiest of all my gods.

Yes, sometimes I would prefer
Not to bring home the shellshocked
Lieutenant from the great battle of
Wal-mart; sometimes I would like
Not to be tackled out of the cashier's
Line of fire, but every time, I remember:
Your arms were the only thing I was sure existed,
Your voice radioing for air assistance.

The only thing I hate about those memories
Is that they are specters in your periphery,
And your every hour is a haunted one.
Forgive yourself (because I love you,
I need you too,
Be happy.) Please.

You welded me to life, you marvelous idiot.
I won't forget.

Ten seconds of tense
Perception remain to a dead man
When his head's been hacked
Off at the neck. I wonder,
Does he see (as he rolls away
From) his body, does he ponder the
Strangeness? Does he think
"That's me!" or does he not
Recognize those brainless parts:
Torso and legs, jittering arms suddenly
Without identity? More realistically,
Probably, he tries to scream
Without a throat, all thoughts of life
And death and hope choked out by
Ten seconds of tense pain.
It's difficult to not yet be dead
And wish to be alive again.

In the home fields, the children run
Shouting and leaping from a pile
Of fiery, spicy, single-file specks.
They wave chubby arms in
Gleeful fear and childish friendship
As worried mothers shuffle them away.

In faraway deserts, the children run
Towards familiar mounds, chanting
"Jaglavak, jaglavak, come and help!
The termite is eating our homes!
Little red brother, ride our thin shoulders,
Our fathers have sent us to fetch you."

I have been ill the way the sun is ill
In the black empty of nowhere
With a thousand fragments floating,
(Adoring in rings and ovals)
And no light but its own
Lonesick stare reflected from a thousand
Dull copying fragments; and it presumes
It is the loneliest of the universe's
Togetherlonely children.

I have been ill the way chalk is ill
On the blackboard staring out at
Uncomprehending faces, and then
In one let'smoveon wipe
Cleared from existence;
And some did not finish their notes.

I am ill with the grandiose
Ill-used illness, swirling my tongue
Against my own abscesses
And crying oh God it hurts
When they might have healed
But for my own foolish
Probing painful wanting.

Hey kid,
Are you tired yet?
I want to go home.

I'm bored.

Let me know when you've finished
Working your fingers ******
With practice and promises and hope
And it still isn't coming.

We'll do lunch,
And you can tell me
How your day went.

Somewhere in the star-brightened space -
An impossible depth away from green -
A hungry traveler ghosts between
Appetite and appetite, and place and place.

Out in the unfreezing lowest of degrees,
Some behemoth of infinite impunity
And infinitesimal size - a unity
In one point - eats, and hungers, and agrees

That, once, matter mattered more than a maw
Gaping impossibly small and wide.
(Better nature has collapsed inside,
And galaxies are cleaved as with a saw

In a Carpenter's hand.) However, simplicity
Is a muted charm in a bottomless pit.
When pressure's wake is a woodshop kit,
Survivors owe nothing to serendipity.

Something scaly is biting me.
Cursed and worthless,
Under the surface,
It’s been gnawing for eternity.
Killed and killing,
Self-fulfilling.

And you say
If I’d only speak up,
But I lost my voice.
And you know
I’m hurting on the outside,
Inside there’s just void.
I don’t know how to
Be anything but
Quiet.

These days,
Something’s running away -
Something I had a grip on
In my childhood.
Tomorrow,
Something will come again -
Something belonging to a friend -
And then leave me
Too soon.

Something iron is biting me,
Over the clouds,
Unheard and loud.
It’s been chewing on uncertainty,
Shaken and shaking,
Unmistakable.

And you whisper
If I’d only speak up,
If I’d open my mouth,
But you should know by now:
Leave it open
The flies get in,
Buzzing and silent,
Impure and violent.
They leave me unsure.

These days,
Someone’s breaking up
On the radio,
On the internet.
My fingers wrap around
Yellow hair -
It isn’t fair -
I don’t know how to be
Anything but
Quiet.

I don’t know how to be
A breaker of silence.
I’ll go to sleep;
Wake me up
When the conversation’s
Started again.
I’ll take a nap;
Wake me up
When the world’s not
Listening.

Something’s clawing me
In my shoulder blades;
Someone’s calling me,
But the burden is heavy:
Can’t set it down, I can’t
Pick it up again.
Sorry, my friend
You’ll just have to wait.

One of these summer-drenched days
I'm gonna think up a new world,
Pack up my thoughts,
And take up residence in a dream.

I'll choose a place where
Words are like water,
Women are like daggers,
And men cling tighter than spanish moss.

There I'll settle, beneath cobblestones,
Forever tinkering away in my mind:
Greasing the gears to make the dream
Smooth, like a river stone.

Her silver watch glints at me
So smugly, and cherry red bracelets
Shake from the proximity to
Those hands. Hands that move
Like jack rabbits on hot
Asphalt, like bubbles popping
In grease: she's snapping those
Sticks up and down, in and out.
Wrists and fingers are all the
Rhythm and rhyme I need.
She keeps time effortlessly.
The snap, the tap, the beat
Deep-seated in her soul, the music
Buzzing in her unhearing ears
Swallows me whole. I'm just
A shell caught in the tide
Of her swells and the trough
Bottoms out when she
Stops, slamming her hand to make the
Steel rim POP. Like a witch-
Doctor she casts a spell and
Though now she is gone,
I am bound still.

Almost all of the photographers I've met
Think love is born from beauty, and
To that end that press
Some model's laughing face
Onto another model's handsome shoulder
Money falls against money
In those pictures.

Most photographers I know
Think peace is the only thing
Worth showing anyone -
A snapshot of hills
With maybe a leaning tree
Or a brook running down the valley -
Green against green in a sick world.

But there is one picture-taker
Who goes the world over in search of love
And finds it in huts and jails and scummy apartments,
Who sees that true peace is a falsehood
And a dream to be achieved
Only long after he is gone;
Only when his pictures become scenes
For wealthy and untroubled eyes
And his whisper is taken up as song.

Oh, these women
In their heels and mini-skirts
With their painted youth dripping from their faces;

Oh, these fruits of the city,
These sumptuous, soft, plump, self-destroying
Women that need devouring -

God, can't you help them?
You made them this way,
Hung them in your garden
From Eve's forbidden tree,
Gave them sweet juice and lust to be consumed;
Only to plant the seeds of knowledge
In the dumb beast who eats them.

Oh these damning fruits of the city,
Who bring forth generations of saccharine poison
By nature of their trade,

Oh, these women
In their heels and skirts,
They were born to be condemned.

When I took my words to
The permission man, he was
Less than enthused. “No, no,”
He said, “these won’t do. They’re
Robotic and archaic - and this one’s
Overused.” “Well pardon me, sir,
But all I have are these. You see,
My pen is a keyboard, and I have
Backspaced all the previous drafts.”
But he just frowned and turned away
And told me to return some other day.

Pair of mad eyes under imposing brows;
Staring me down white and blue,
(And I can see the muscles in his neck
Straining under the power of his voice.)

Staring me down and singing
Three thousand hundred million ideas
Into my head with one defiant expression.

Two mad-wide eyes blue and white,
Mouth working ‘round words like
Projectiles aimed at my heart -
Striking down the walls Misunderstanding built
Over years and years and

His hands wrapped around the guitar
Years and years
So perfectly, striking it so lovingly -
Music staring into him staring into me
And me staring back.

Baggy pants hang from skinny hips
And jingling chains mince words
With chattering feet.

His sweat quests down, down,
To be nearer to those ankles,
Those toes, and those soles that
Stomp and slide and scrape
The soon-to-be-polished stage.

With heavy-swinging momentum, his breath
Flings itself towards the crowd:
An offering of more than
Sound; more than dancing feet.

They accept the gift and rise with shouts.
Weighted with praise, they return his breath
From fourteen hundred mouths.
He can only bend,
Perch his hands on quivering knees,
And drink in the euphoria of his first
Standing ovation.

"My Pen is a Keyboard"
Was a ditty I did
When I was a kid
Feeling out the corners of my mind,
But there is a boy -
His Keyboard is a Pen -
And now I prefer to feel out the corners
Of his.

Sometimes he is Neruda:
He writes the saddest lines;
And sometimes Frost:
Penning a the sun on the back of the deer
As it splashes through grass dew;
Sometimes Eliot trudging through
The damp streets and
Sloughing off the day onto paper...

Sometimes Millay -
I think sometimes Millay -
I hope -
Forswearing death
And clinging to love, though
It rests on the point of
The second hand of God's clock -

But I am there.

And so long as I am there he is there
Writing his poetry without words
To be read without sight.
So long as he is there I am there
To be a reader with closed eyes,
And feel the corners of his tired mind;

And to say:
Love, it won't always be night.
We are here and I will sing you hope
As long as I can. It will be alright.
Love, it won't always be night.

Poetry is like electricity,
But without a switch,
And stronger;
Like lightning.
It strikes you, and suddenly
You're a pianist;
You can speak Swahili;
The color green tastes like
Starfruit (only you've never had it
So all you can think
Is, "Man, this forest is delicious!")

Poetry is a zap from nowhere.
It makes your hair stand on end;
It makes you half afraid and
Half eager. You start flying
Kites with keys and fixing the satellite
In storms because it's awful for
A second, but then
You're never the same.

I know.
I've been struck so many times
And each time, I've traded
Gibberish for English,
Sight for insight,
Words for love,
And love for words again.
I have heard voices bellowing
And crying
And laughing.
I have seen smoke and sunlight
And smelled sulfur and
Tasted honey and salt.

Maybe I am not "smart,"
Always leaping into danger,
But I can't think of a better way to die
Than  to be struck by poetry.

Cars are flung out over the black
Shining obsidian of the bay,
And the bridge is invisible under their invisible tires.
They fly like little search lights
Illuminating this patch of road and then that one,
With chunks of diamond dispensing white
Beneath the hood, and two red red eyes
Glaring from beside the trunk -
As though the past, soundless and distant,
Is somehow at fault for their little flight
Between the sky and the reflected night.

I do not know if it was the guarding beam
Of a lighthouse, roving 'cross my prow,
Or the glimmer of a mermaid's eye,
Or just the glancing of moonlight.

I do not know what flashed in the night
As I tended my nets blindly,
Only that for a moment I saw
Something all enmeshed and shining,
And it broke free.

I do not think I could've caught it
Or kept it even if I did
(It was too precious to sell or eat).

Still I will stay and tend my nets
Where silver fish are known to leap
And vanish. If it was a lighthouse beam
I shall know soon when it comes around -
A mermaid I should know by the sound
Of song (which I do not percieve),

And if it was the uncatchable moonlight
Winking at my swaying ship
Then I will sit and watch it dance for me -
Always reaching and just out of reach  -
Until necessity nags me back onto the beach.

I will return each night to fish and gaze,
Envious of the water so kissed with light
And the insensate sands that glimmer
White, stupidly unaware of sight.

Yet it is not my place to say what sand should think,
Nor water, nor fish, nor the imploring moon.
I cannot touch the improbably distant stars,
But I will stand with my hands stretched up
As far as they can go, even if it is futile.

Perhaps one will reach down.