which came first,
the atom
or the adam?

Am I 6 thousand years
young?
Am I
a dinosaur?

9th grade philosophy.
Venn Diagrams
and the eggman.
There is no good,
nor bad,
there only is
what is.

Parched, thirsting for steel -
to be cleft wholly in twain
from scalp to guts,
dissolving the tension,
silencing the pull between the sides.

Fork the tongue that it may speak
at once both dialects of the soul,
that it may sing of lust and hunger
and yet pray to the divine;

Let one pupil be misplaced,
sunk like a star in inky night
to observe the cosmos and to feed
the side of the mind that wanders,
the half that deals in watery maybe,
so that the other lot of divvied brain
may savor the grit of the earth
with the remaining eye that beholds, here,
the freckles and the needles.

I am so much! Take but half.
Two of everything is one too many.
Name me once and for all an animal
or disentangle thought from flesh
and let the vapors in my lungs
mix their mists among the clouds.

Juniper trees cup the cemetery gate with
their verdant blue-speckled palms.
Grasshopper sentries chirp in the weeds
and the brush sends a whisper: disturbance.

A gravel path forks between rows of stone scripture
erected by heavy hands who beg me, remember
these dates and names, this last desperate breath
between a beating heart and a naked soul,
fumbling and frantic in the face of eternity.

***** plastic flowers shed their petals in the wind,
reassuring bones below that they have not been lost to time.
(Is it really for the dead that we leave the bouquet?
Why speak to the body when the soul has flown?)

I read the name of a man who died before I was born,
someone I could never know, and yet here I stood
pondering his legacy, studying its lines
like a cave-painted ancient code.

Hush, you fools! We sleep today,
dumb as locks and deaf as clay.
Does friction make you grit your teeth
or have you burned the fuse away?

I knocked upon your ribs one time -
how pure the echoes rang inside!
The brain has left to greet a guest
but will the mindless body thrive?

Do you know you moan at night?
Ghosts wear sheets over their eyes
against their skin, between their thighs -
In fits of white, be sanctified!

Do Thee Wed

“As the wedding day approached - June 14, 1938, Gertrude continued to confess her reluctance. Delmore’s apprehension expressed itself in fits of nausea and vomiting, and his mother announced that she wished she was dead.”

“When is the when is the --
(I’m going to be sick.)
“Now what is the how how how soon?”
(I’m going to be sick.)

Gertrude’s in her mumu, blonde hair in a mat,
setting flame to glossy pages of her bridal magazine.
Ashes fall to the carpet like distress flares, burning
mascara clumps on the pink **** rug.
She mumbles how soon,
how soon, how soon?

And my mom, she’s climbed up on roof
and begun to pace from end to end,
moaning like a *****, fanning herself with her hands.
Dad’s in the yard making a spectacle and -
Oh, I’m feeling sick again.

The beams bend like matchsticks
under mom’s panicked corpulence
as she nears the edge of the roof.
At the sight of her my father
slaps his hand over his heart
and sings, “Here comes the bride,
big, fat, and wide..”

I leave Gertrude babbling and rocking on the couch
(“I just don’t know now, darling, how how how soon?”)
and I slink in silence out the door.
Beyond my mother and father,
down the sidewalk out of sight,
I finally ***** on my shoes.

A thick flood of thought clogs
lemon teeth and pools, crude
and salty behind lost red eyes.
Gouge them hollow! Darken the moon.
Brittle moans like a swollen beehive
loom tall, fifty miles behind the lost craters.

Hugs from pigs in blue,
they dance and loll around the flames,
a funky dark against their luminous fire.
Proud and bogus (and probably ******),
bitter about foul books they never read,
statues made of fear in the groins of men.

Ruined: hurled into a crag,
torn and singing, trapped in loops -
No elbow room in black hole falls.
Snoring next to wives wrapped in shawls,
hugging her leather Buick seat,
praying to wake up gaunt and lithe.

They rise, mornings, clutching onto dreams
in which they fly through the cold gloom.
They scratch desperate screeds onto napkins,
bite squirming, disobedient tongues,
souls raw, chafing in their dank enclosures.
Animals! Bred to elect ourselves for slaughter.

In some abandoned shard of time
in Oregon, on a day soaked by slow mists
I’m in line to get into a punk show
when I meet Charlotte Ann.
With a fluttery tap on my shoulder
she grins, “Look, we've worn the same shoes!”

From the way her eyes lit when she spoke
I thought she’d stolen those plump bits of blue,
plucked them straight from the branches of heaven
and laughed when the gods shook their fists at the earth.
I knew I was right when they focused on me,
she said, “Have we met somewhere before?

We leave lipstick prints on her last cigarette
and blow milky-grey smoke from our noses.
She’d just dropped out of high school
and was learning to fly a plane, told me
“The only way to see the world
is from every direction at once.”

Her body and soul were the shifting wind
brimming with a red-blooded need for right now.
She tapped her foot and tugged her skirt,
and when we talked about music
she clapped and smiled, sighing
“Oh, to have ever seen Elvis!”

She calls the guard a chicken ****
when he asks to search her bag,
and by the time I make it inside
she’s a plume of smoke, wafting among the crowd
trailing behind her notes of apricot
and cotton after a rain.