News Flash:
                     Religious Science has created life!
                     With heat and pressure
                     and Sounds Sounds Sounds!

                     Watch their lead-boy
                     dance and sing
                     recordings placed in his
                                    chest
                   ­  by People Who Know.

                    Listen close
                    to his strictures about what
                    is abominable
                    you can hear their voices
                    in the crackling gray
                    noise:
                    
            ­        The buzzing of cieling fans
                     in offices far away, Oz
                     The humming chatter of
                     "The maid found a dove
                     drowned in the pool!"
                     "Oh, how unsanitary,
                      truely abominable."

                      You really should see
                       him dance
                       in the Starstudded Ballroom
                       where the wicked pace
                       in the side-halls
                       dreaming of childhood summers
                       at the lake
                       and kisses in the morning.

                       Holy Science has smithed life!
                       Holy bullets smelted a fine
                       man.
                       Wholy Holey Holy Bullets.

This is a recurring dream,
it slips into my veins
on the best and worst nights
warm and vibrating
lik blue jazz:

I am sitting in a tunnel, huddled
scared and staring, open--
into the hazel eyes of Sarah
the wandering angel of San Jose,
the cool Sunflower in my brain
as Peter Sarstedt fills
the blue-bricked walls
with, "Where do you go to,
My Lovely?"

Shaking my teeth
and ribs
like old blank dice,
lovely accordion sobs-
What vibrations!
Echoes and blue memories running into the dark.
I hear you Peter, She hears you
I must tell you that--

and when I wake
all that's left are the echoes
of my accordion heart
and the sounds of traffic
over the plucking
of red chords in street.

I was wandering
like the others when
Music!
rang out over our heads,
The Fiddler was benched
in the square--

with an instrument
strung: beautiful red
strings.
They were quivering
like tendons,
The Fiddler plucked
music from them,
from us--

Strangers danced about,
silly at first
and then slower
confused and close--

I remember the spinning,
the blind Fiddler grinning,
the red strings singing
their promises to us,
I was dancing
like the others

and in all of our loneliness
we danced our feet raw
to the tune
of The Fiddler's jig:
A Call To Threadbare Hearts

I heard you in the shower
something sad and slow

I fell madly and instantly,
and you didn't even know

This morning I watched you
stumble into the bus
like a drunken moth:
straw-headed, foggy,
jacket clinging to you
by one shoulder
like an ironic flag.
America has claimed you!
Just like Our Moon,
those ironic flags of liberty.

Chortling, choking
on nothing but your
immovable child-like
sadness. Leathery
wings sprawled, gaping,
stinking of whiskey and ****.
You were screaming
at a woman across the aisle
whose eyes also gaped,
who didn't see the revolution,
who feared her reflection in the
eyes of "Made In The USA".

Who is she? What form
have you given her?
The mother who soaped
your tongue with her bitter morals?
The sister who boiled her
life away on a spoon?
The lover who embraced your wounds
despite EVERYTHING
and then became one?

You were eating an apple
from your pocket,
"Red Delicious,
the MOST American fruit!"
It was mostly rotten, sweaty
brown core staring into me
like a terrible moth's eye.

I watched you until
my stop,
I'm sorry I don't know why.
When the bus-man shoo'ed you off
I heard you scream after me,
really howling.

I'm sorry I can't save you,
I'm a moth too.

I ran home this morning
and left all the lights on.

I am a snow-man/
a collection of
cold and beautiful
                                     c                c
                                            i              u                       a
                                                    r                m      t
                                                                          s                  n
                                                                                                       ces.

4 o'clock, saturday
Dread and Panic are holding hands in my chest:
An extraordinary case of the mean reds
watching the gray
from my kitchen window

the cars parked over cement fields
precisely 300 vehicles when full
the boy sitting on a gray bench waiting
with his baseball, shh! His gray father is shouting
at his gray phone, his gray wife finally called that number.
all gray.

      the sky here is almost always sleeping
a blanket of melting nimbus
the gulls slide inoffensively over the roofs
our courtyard grass trembles for them

the wind falls out of the bay
wind, the world traveler without a suitcase
I imagine it kicking up dust in exotic fields
only the rocks are gray there,
gray because they deserve to be.

the whole scene is quite extraordinary
A Run Of Wild Horses! Gall-lop-ing
gliding offensively, red and white and gold
shining sweaty and flying!
can you imagine?

--it's starting to rain and the boy is still sitting,
he's so gray now I can hardly see him
the wind still spills in from the bay down the road
where I can see them running from my window-

Mains whipping like flags of furious change
Hooves beating down the cement footpaths
The streetlamps are crumpling into heaps of flowers
Tails raging back and forth, metronomous passion chords

Fast, rapid gaining (Lover's Heartbeat)
-the boy is yet unaware
legs of inspiration fast approaching
-the cars twist into red willows over golden hope fields
Shh! His father, master of gray has been sacked! Tr-am-pled!
Now his body of flowers lay in the street!

Arrest. They have arrested.

Standing tall and silent like Liberty
they take the boy upon their shoulders,
an acrobatic wonder
and continue slowly across the grass
-it still trembles for them
and take flight, to the next courtyard
and then the next.

I'll never forget the grayness of his eyes
as he disappeared over the trees
who were once chimneys,
his mouth was stuffed
full of flowers.