I used to live downwind of the slaughterhouse,
the one below the high bluff where the state pen towers,
commanding the best view of the marsh lands
and the stink ponds making lime outta ****
for the crops not meant for human consumption;
by the dry grass parks with the broken backboards
and the netless hoops that never slow a ball down.

I used to live downwind of the rendering plant
where the bubbling lard becomes aerosol
and the air reeks of freezerburn bacon and feces,
below the high bluff where the trustees cut grass
in the clean air not meant for the locals
mixing with the immigrants and loser folk
who have knots in their shoelaces that
press against bone when chasing a loose ball.

This town never grew up. Doesn't need to.
There's plenty of ground for the taking.
Plenty of farmers selling out to the downtown club
who cobble the streets in past time fashion,
netting big gains from the professional set
lining the smooth roads annexed to the east.

I used to live downwind of the closing in stink
of renewal, where the cheap rentals and struggle
stores with the marked-up Walmart brands
lining the shelves - expired but still edible -
bide their short time compressed and diced
up like leftovers for dogs.

But this is America. I don't live there anymore.
I got myself a cush gig with a padded ladder
to the top. Did everything I needed to do
for that sure climb out into a cleaner air,
only to find myself bruise-faced and reeling
when the profits didn't match the dream
and the ladders were sold for scrap.

To measure the weight of the soul,
Remove the mind and heart from the body,
Place them into the bowl of sky
or the basin of sea,
and Set the scale
to zero.

I welcome your minute manipulations
how your simple glance causes me to rise
from my oak chair and ruminations
to fill your cup that has no more than a drop
of cold black coffee.

Grateful for your routine manipulations
of a mind muddied by past resentments,
the always blue dreams that defy explanation,
forcing my hand to stroke your lounging legs
on the way to the kitchen.

Blessed by these familiar manipulations
for it is not you that provokes a willing servitude
it is that space where our nearing breaths conspire
to spin motes of dust and sloughed off skin
displaced by a kiss and a hot cup of coffee.

Down by the mud banks of Skunk Creek,
checking out the meniscus up the water strider's legs,
waiting for the bullheads to spit stones into a Roman mosaic,
hoping the undulating green algae would flow auburn
like the hair of Venus blown by the wild gawking turkeys
in the tall grass. But that's another museum.
That's a different day in the gallery
below the bur oak bowers
where the cottonwood seed floats on a breath
as if examining the probability of falling too soon
upon the water.

The demonstration of love don't need no permit
ain't gonna be no counter-demonstration
no cops no barricades no rubber bullets twitching
in the chamber for that one yahoo that sets the whole
**** thing alight. Love in the streets is a whispering
riot with small hand-written signs in a style of smiles
and gestures not to provoke but to invoke a species
of politic bent on the destruction of judgement
stopping traffic with small recognitions that the other
is none other than oneself in a similar skin.
The demonstration of love don't need no big flags
honking horns or locking horns or riot gear
to wade baton-wielding dispersions cuz
it already spread down the side roads
and the thin avenues are thick with it.

There's a brown leather sofa on the curb marked "free"
There's an '87 Jimmy with a flat tire and rusty fenders
down on Dows marked "runs $200 or best offer"

There's a new stop sign at the bottom of Center
that nobody's shot up yet. Sure as **** county
gonna be lurking around behind the daycare around five

That wanna be a cowboy that runs the Jesse
installed some slots a few years back, now he's selling *****
where the DVD's used to be.

I don't know his name, never did anyway,
but I bought a couple ugly Bics from him today
because nobody steals ugly lighters.

Seems like things are looking up at Splitrock
a lot of boats in the driveways. I always wanted
a boat. But I got a lay-off instead in '09.

Got a hunk of plaster, though.
Just clinging to the lathe above the coffee machine.
Gonna crack my head wide open one day.

Gonna crack my head open when I pour
when I pour that first cup on a grit-eye morning
on a grit-eye morning still dreaming of boats.

The day you called me ****** lover
was the afternoon of my dissent
from the back alley boys club
and rolled dungaree territories
marked off down where the long
lines of chain link bend right
where the churchyard intervenes
between us and the snowball stand.

You might think you whipped me tight
but my decision to include a new friend
that dipped jars in the crick for tadpoles
behind the brick young family roads
was mine to make and that black eye
and ****** nose to this very day
this very night remains.

Don't be knocking on techno's door
for a shot of stale whiskey and fond golden
shots of what we were when we weren't
and will never be. Yea, you posted
that pic of the back alley boys
shirtless, hairless, rolled dungarees
all smiling like jack rabbits on the run,

But it was Michael, Michael that showed
me how a tadpole becomes a frog.
It was Michael that rode the Comet
at Hershey with me, alone, because
we couldn't or wouldn't run
with the back alley boys who still
don't know what they've done.

If by justice you mean vengeance, I,
your honor, am not to be counted.

In all this well-pressed protocol,
In this stark polished hall of justice,

There is nothing to judge, no verdict
or debate beyond a reasonable doubt

That the condemned is condemned by agreement.
Are we to haggle over the price?

You **** through we thirty coughing "peers",
this pool of citizens chosen by lot to consider one thing,

One sentence, which any reasonable soul
would hope never to be compelled to entertain,

And in so doing, twelve of us will become complicit,
will mark the furtherance of abhorrent justice

with simple "ayes", for "nays" are not permitted, no lock
allowed for the twelve that truly become his peers.

Joy and similar discontents
break wheaten on the all-weather
radial steel-reinforced sidewall hum,
on the defog rasping for a service call;

Break on the near treeless plain
stitched loose to the sky with rivets
of silos and grain bins - clouds
dive porpoise behind the rise.

Joy and similar discontents
hang like flowers on a bleach
wood cross surviving another winter
to tread sobbing on the green ditch water.

Every X and Y coordinate of the plains
etched by gravel side-ways and field
entries too rutted and ragged
to suit the conglomerate need

or the tilt houses and stripped clapboard
banging against the thistle, milkweed
and swallowed dreams in the foxgrass,
with turkey buzzards circling thermal overhead.

But the crows plunge faster into red
fresh carrion sloughs of whitetail and ****
to breach at the presence of a larger scavenging -
and each bent marker tells its own tale.

Count the bullet holes and shotgun splatter
in the stops and yields when the road was empty,
when the night was dry, when the callous boys
had time on their hands instead of hog blood

and badger-eyed girls that left after graduation
for the starless haze, crowded parades,
sidewalk shops, umbrellas on the rain side
of things keeping each at arm's length.

But it was never about the city,
never about the glitz and pizzazz
of everything running baffled into gridlock;
less about the thick dumb flannel boys.

It was always about that low fog,
the night eyes in the beams, the manure, chaff
and split seams of the midwest furrows,
the haybales that bob like rafts over the horizon.

I am prone to tracing crosses
in near empty ashtrays.
I don't really know why,
but this behavior, perhaps
a tick of the mind to the finger
tips me into some grievous
absolution while slowly,
knowingly, killing myself
smooth, drag after drag.

But that, in itself,
is mere supposition.

Perhaps I seek direction
in an ashen compass,
ringed with bent
singed needles
piled at the edges
because not a single one
found true north.

But that, again,
is mere supposition.

Down,
in The Valley of Fires,
where three rivers converge,
a cross on a rock emerges,
scratched stone upon stone
by a hand more ancient than known
to pass unto me a pattern, hard-wired,
affixed in all our yearning - to seek
that single point - home.

But that, too, is mere supposition.

The ape of reason
wakes inside the primate house
throws **** at the glass
and the gawking apparitions
whose eyes align with his own reflection
but for a few seconds

waits for the one who knows
the one who carries the yellow bucket
stuffed with limp greens
sprung grain and stink meat
to spill the feast on the concrete slab
he calls a pedestal

scratches at lice
his only bedmates
small
irritating
but his own familiar feeders

calling dumb and barbarous
the macaque in the next cell over
calling loud the howlers
calling lewd the bonobos
calling brethren the chimpanzees
who wage war on the neighboring troop.

Blind slouched friar on a slow mule
that through ford and thicket sure-hooved
loafs on to a deaf peasant shack whose eyes
crackle afire in a sprectrum unseen to the seeing
and the friar feels the heat in his fingertips
reads the braille of himself in the scars
on the mumbling one's tools, hovel blunted,
dull, splintered hatchets and soft hammers
that never found a brick to stack against the wind.
The blind one in the deaf one finds
one full moment where a bread and a hot sip
of slack water postpones the ever-fording.

Longer rivers run to the sound
where the commerce plays out
its jangling game.

When once we were mountains,
no more than bare bluffs now,
each jutting a finger of mudflats
untrod and untouching for the tide
has turned once more, lifting the drift
and carrying our past verdant
intrepid days into the sea,
upon the waves, to be spat
onto another shore strange
with blunt shell, burnt pebbles,
and the neverminds of the locals.

But perhaps it is in our nature to weather,
to erode, to spill our alluvial fans
to any passing angler who'll listen,
perhaps the boulders we tumbled
to our own demise are no more,
no more than jagged or smooth grains,
packed, pounded, arranged
for the foot of a marveling toddler
on her first time at the shore.

wake
that one
eye may find
in your creped hip
in your rippled spine
in your slumber damp palm
in your night braided tresses
in your too hot for sleep dresses
on the floor with caresses and socks
reason to stand against time's august clocks

Hopeless is the hope
for a clean spring rain
the blush cheek of winter
the fall of the sane

The summer of once
is the trickle of soils
down the cliff of a ditch
down into our toils

Come all with a dream
down into the pits
where a ragged and spent
god wistfully sits

Confess to the deaf one
put coins in a palm
trench diggers care little
for us or our psalms

Monsanto now Bayer's verdict
drifts over the fields
marked as no spray zones
for the hardest of yields

These varied sustained with sweat
soils needn't a yellow crop duster
to spread sour poisons
on our fruits or our clustering

perhaps vain cabbages
to stifle the single ****
that reaches to sunlight
among mono-cropped seed

Once,
there was a sound called breathing,
called idling, called waiting
in your car for a "whatcha doing
next Saturday", for an "I'll call
you tomorrow", for an "I had a good time
tonight", for a paralyzing moment
of fear to end, for that should
I just say goodnight and go to end,
not knowing in the silence of our breathing
that all you wanted was a gentle goodnight kiss
before I darted from your car.

Short-timer finds time
on an afternoon bent
with wrestling weathers

winter and spring claw
at each others' throats
and uncertain maples
warily release their
saps

Short-timer finds time
on an afternoon wet-shod
in a gray rebel snow

defiant on the nether
side of everything
melting to a smirk
that'll linger 'til
June

Short-timer finds time
on an afternoon shorn
of the lost time spent
dawdling careering

A prairie skink on the edge
warming his stripes
on the granite palisade -
crystalline quartzite
redder than the short sun
amid the prickly pear
above the cling trees
and cliff swallows
swirling for the bugs
from spit mud hollows
twitter down where
the snapper lifts a
stone head from the
murk still water
below the falls
logs cans and tumble
down rocks and ******
dams until the blue
tale fades away.

Rocking on the third rail spark
and grinding on the steel wheel
taking a well arced curve on the El
winding its transit plan to the loop
passing second story flat dreams
and the messing about before
the office coffees are brewed
and the day begins as an abstract
smelting of glass concrete steel
and the eyes drift from a hand-holding
two, to the crochet hook fingers of the
night shift lady, to the suit and tie
guy with trading in his eyes,
to the bronze trumpet girl
sure footed, on point
below a new sky.

But the train bends down
for the subway
a spine bends for a dropped book
the train bends down
and yellowed signs cracked
at the corners flicker on
and ceiling lights flicker on
a fist tightens on a pole
and we look to our shoes
our papers, the news.
Eyes avoid eyes
and the sick blending
of massed perfume
perspires a choking distance.
A spent soda can rolls
the one last connection
from foot to foot
and each taps it away.

Small,
Still small.
The storm knows
As Nietszche knew,
the botched and bungled
fall. When the one great love
stalled with damp points and punch tires
stuck on the shoulder blinking out
flashers to no one in sight , the rise
behind - just wet exits and no beams bright.

Live!
Deliver!
Emit no on-time reviled evil.

No devil ere lived on.

Me 'r aw gawn a' fer dawn
'cept t'grizzle that passed them bowts on
'n Tangier boys t' young to take t' wooder

Tangier boys and twist knuckle fellers
Gather up t' cafe a'four
fer a soda widda woodermen's beans
'n downa docks a'foive a'clock
for castin' awff lines 'n dreams.
Fer pops gawn out t' bay n' t'oyster beds
over thin lip 'rizon no more t'seen.

Nuttin' but bikes, *****, slap jellies,
'n them ain't hard favored come-ere's
nigh as peas wandrin' the uppards
'til black chug zaust sounds riturn
from Chrisfiel', 'nuther day
jingin' in t'pockets, 'nuther shuck
pall ready fer spoiders  n' hoi wooder.

I stared the crowd down squinty,
always squinty,
a jaw tooth grinding, neck vein
throbbing squinty.

I ****** the mike like a baseball
and spit the windscreen drenched
with naive codified lyric.

They took it all in.

The blender chewed them
to a fine puree of sweat,
bodies and stomped glasses.

And I eyed them squinty,
angry less at Reagan,
angry less at their sheepish
individuality, less
at proliferation or the grim
disparities of class or color -

more so at the soap
in my hair that gave me spine
and drooled stinging into my eyes.

When the eyes are denied a surety,
trepidation beats between cicada wings
and the snore song of leopard frogs,
loud though the singers are small.

For what or whom does the gray owl call,
perhaps, perhaps the end of us all.

We've built upon fire
mechanics of light unrelenting.
But night does fall - never rises -
and with it roars the unrepenting -
a shadow on the wall.

A floorboard creak,
a screendoor unhinged,
even a clock ticks louder
to the brave cowering ear,
counting indifferent
to the sum of our fears.

Back on the long stone jetty
a time when the smacks came in
splitting the tide with a daily haul -
marlin flags, yellow-fin flags,
shark flags and all on the riggers.

In come the seiners, longliners,
and skipjacks. The crabbers,
the Merry May, Mama's Revenge,
Rock Bottom Sally, all going
bayside with their wares and
worn bows.

Each in it's cutting and bobbing
joy, blows a horn for the jumping
jut-finger kids  - the day done
on the shore when the waves came a' roiling.

The jiggers in for the market docks
and a couple a bucks for the gap-toothed
waterman gathering legs on the rocks.

Two for a steak a' tuna
Five for a pound a' nurse
Blue Marlin not for sale, my boy,
it's for the record books.

Nothing more than wiper slap -
smear light on a ***** windshield,
starbusting streetlamps through
pitted glass sliding
greasy on the bridge:

Every billboard passed,
every sign every whine,
every slumped leaning
off ramp neighborhood,
a blurred jagged vision
of what it is, what it was,
what it might be,
gone.

Though some hazy refracted,
gray on gray beam,
from out there, back there,
through the pupil to the retina,
focused occipital,
turned again into a shape
that wasn't hers to begin with.

But there she is,
behind a salt-crust window,
half-eaten by the blinding slats,
a perfect, distorted slouch
in a booth of vinyl bygones
off exit eighty nine,
with a bucket of fries
on her hands,
while I spit by
on a wet highway
to who the hell knows where.

A proper stirfry
needs ten thousand bowls
of precise cuts

Some days smell like years
like the dinge of sprung sheetrock
when the rain came in
the cricket loose against the chimney
and the attic floorboards
expand with the frosts
of every winter spent in this house
insulated with cardboard and crates
ransacked from the floorplan
and catalogued renderings

And some days smell like years
like the blistex on your lips
when the rain came in
and we kissed this tired old place ours
and the attic floorboards
velvet pine underfoot
whispered tall rooms in this house
and the stuccoed walls spoke
of a lost craft revived
in your freshly washed hair

I can smell in your eyes
the brine of a ceiling
when once we dreamed
beyond the rafters
and collar ties
beyond the shingles
and the familiar maintenance
of our lives

Mrs. Ringenroth taught
us a sorta furrowed brow
squinty eye kinda readin'

Makes ya look intelligent
scannin' the horizon of a line
for them steepled ascenders
and dots like dead crows
stuck on a cloud.

The educated boy
don't move his lips.
The educated boy
gets hung up in the crease
closest to the spine
until the book slams shut.

It's that mouth-breathin'
lip-readin' boy
that looks to the sky
before turning the page.

The tabs are listening still
manila bent fat folders
past due bills and debt remitted
collected stuffed and sorted
in the freeze of a moment
when I wasn't a friend
when I defiled a trust
when I spent the last
thin dime of integrity
on a dust filed upstairs
with the titles  brittle
invoices and expired
warrantees.

The phone may ring
to renew the service
between me and you
and I'll drop the handle
into the cradle
of a familiar voice
without a word
without a thought
our crisp linen days
pushed away
while a rusting washer
screams another load
and a cabinet drawer
inches out a little bit more

If in digging
through grim archives
I unearth those callous
epithets of my youth
Find on a resin smeared page
the smoke of anger
and the greed
for a touch yielding
to my thick dumb hands

Read the hormones
like a book of days
a book of sorrows
a book of shadows

In a salubrious haze
I will come to know myself
my ways and wend the
crooked maps of the ill-spent
where X marks the spot
turn left at the willow
right at the stump
and realize
I survived myself
if only for a time.