Muse Doctor

The desk is filled with chronic papers always wanting to solve their own illness

The only depression I feel is the cleft where my male part goes, I am propulsion

The event horizon is breakfast: two eggs better than tits/a keyboard/a dream


I'm a burning ball of fire and feel mandated to 'get things done', therefore I scream


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The Judgment Of Paris

Over the chest-high cinderblock border wall the laundry line sags with tops and towels.


In this city yard relic with rural, decrepit boughs waist-heavy with tits of green limes

unbred women unrhythmically ill-choose words, convey nothing but craving and belch.


This is the watcher view.  In my hauteur, I am unwitnessed and splendid.


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The 7 Pack

The slot through which -- in late spring, 1958 -- the testicle sank to its current home on the left

gave way to a tear from abdominal crunch for a hernia bulge just above -- hint of a squid's head --

public hair.  Scallop shell and Venus rising.

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Street Musician

Someone tells her to seek the key of A

around and around the evening stays lit

it's a wonder there are tunes, most of space is silent

she seesaws her bow, her chin dips

the theater-goers catch her last chords

think of supper, marriage, of being alone

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So Here You Are

The skin has holes in it

it breathes like cotton

protects against all things

except the universe

has a word to say about that.

The universe has a fabric

it sweats outward

you can't hear it groan

for all the flowers

the summer has around you.

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Melancholia

The woman on the moon is being forced to the earth

she's brought with her, cheese curds in her breasts

her milky breasts dripping tears of her temper --

Gentle Ophelia, she of crazy hormones.

Why not end a world with a cosmic bang

why not go down with a stymied prince

a secret assassination first, R and G, the stab

through the arras, you, he, and a whole world, boom.

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The Leader H

Some have vision, architectural features caught

by the student lens

of an eye.  Walking the streets of a major place

like Chicago or Vienna.

A quick sketch of 'urban outdoors'

taking in a grassy knoll

a spot where grand things happen

and the spirit of history.

Like you or me, not needing the cachet

of a bohemian

of a prole let loose with grudges

letting the flick

letting the point of a pencil

mark the edges

of hard stone onto portfolio pad

just change a world

seen bitterly wrong because it angers you

subvocalizing first

building it all in short, sharp phrases

a voice of vinegar and piss.

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I, Jew

And thinking about all adult men,

some of them quite old, refraining from touching the text,

only using a godly pointer whose term I forget if I ever knew,

I'm sure they must have known, somewhere in Talmud,

the way to bless the sprinkler and the time of day to turn the water on.

And whether to call the play gear 'monkey bars'

since the relationship between primates and 

cylindrically-shaped objects get governed in certain ways.

To them, my ways must seem like Hunter Thompson's,

a man adrift in mistake.  And whether to turn on a fan

in a particular weather.  It's all so crazy and sacred.

And they write about me, in the interstices and prayers.

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Al Dente

I see you brushing your teeth

in the reflection off the glass-mounted print

of the John Singer Sargent scene

of an Italian fountain with bathing women.

I deny you don't travel.

Convenience Store

A living man, a cunning man

whose curiosity, dispassion --

the putative crime of gawking

surreptitiously from the aisle of plastic knives --

I wondered whether she,

clearly from Africa, was dragging her leg

because of a question put strongly

because of an impatience about something at stake.

You know, in the old days -- harried from the shtetl,

railed forth from formal schooling at Berlin -- 

they stood footsore in the camp dust, soon barbered

of their long locks afforded for the dolls of lucky girls.

And cunning men, tired of their passion

in the afterhours of exquisite music and talk

of the freeing-up of humankind,

connived efficiencies unthought-of regarding skin.

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The Fascist Cut

Who cares about who cares

writing it down is an act of arrogance is a virtue

someone must think, and it's me, and I'm quick and others follow

the scars of experience on a face called text

the whole point is action and the hell with them.

Like a poem about a dog, a cloud, an egg, and a she

one must shoot the dog, eat the egg, fly through a cloud of fucking her

and go high on a sunny place to head a regime.

You see, choice is for the weak.  We're here, just straight-off verbs.

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Warren Beatty For President

Warren should have thrown it in the ring, his hat.

Rubber chicken dinners and ten months we would have stuck it with him

July smelling of sunscreen, the campaign geared for the neighborly gusto

of good women, picnic melon, Mission figs, the local cheese and follow-up thank-yous.

I'd be a lieutenant in that corps, burnishing the leader's star

think how better we'd look, how pretty the city, how fresh the USA, what curvature the globe would spoon to, had he.

How fine-tuned a world that runs cinematically on time, cordially, but with a big stick

you need someone with panache, you need someone to explain it all that way.

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Problem Solver

It's like being buried in sand up to the neck,

sometimes, waking in a hot room with snow showers bulleting the outside baffles on the a.m. window after what could not be otherwise than a dream where you're choking

at the grip of a Brownshirt.

Who somebody let in in order to throw out

the bum and clean up the scum and erase the nugatory values, go back to the founded ones trying to be based on what we think ourselves in our blood we are.

Or is it an elegant Blackshirt, nicely shaved, as he, with humor, shuts the air.

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Art Song

Her voice in the chanson so that I'm in that evening orchard,

in that peach odor, at silk, the soft plush lipid layering, too,

the savory of her in my ear, body gone to mind,

the experience of her, the reason for her, clear

voiced in the chamber of the SUV, she, and me

embarking for Cythera, still living in the idyll

hearing the night fiddle of crickets from the fields.

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Celebrity

 

Young women with a list of long ambitions

pant and mug and snore and throw a lifetime

achievement for just twenty seconds more.

All those little people cast on a couch

a bevy in that human race race ready

for that closer, tight close-up.

The entire humanitarian film world, and

the Housewives of Wherever -- fame frames us

flashes in our face: Surprise!  I'm here and gone.




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Chow

The anthro prof, Jim Frazer, called it 'eating of the god', a strange appreciation, you'd think, for all that comes one's way

as when the mayor of a town would bake a man of dough -- an extra-large -- at harvest time

and break bits off for the farming folk to dip in the new wine decanted from old bottles

But now everyone knows each feeding place in France lays claim to good bread, and even the émigrés in the States serve hot loaf.

In fact, she and I know this place that's authentic here like a private home with Alsatian dog warming by the hearth, where

even though you call ahead you wait, full with a hungry sort in the anteroom and, poured around, complimentary Bordeaux blanc.

Once (if I may speak frank) by the power of their pork terrine we made love on a tiger rug out of Indochine.

I'd give it four stars on nothing more than the sweetbreads and the fact that our child was born

rollicking to the beat of the human heart as that beat goes on.

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The Internationale

Taking the words of the Japanese girl

who saw the 'lain fawring' --

Off a fine Kolinsky sable brush the noon drizzles

Pacific Washington

Studio glass walls and overhead brighten so that from its wool

all sky's created equal.

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A Garden Of Allah

An unanchored woman is far more precious than rubies, and

we awoke him from a deep bed sleep after making-out

propitiatory hand-over-fistful of money

to see the divorcée freshened by her love of travel

and the whiskey of his anecdotes about power avalanched us

putting our allegiance on 'On' by feel alone, charisma,

so she would dig for him, work hard for the victory his,

since everyone, all interested in November votes, looks to

this kind of sodality, this almost blood-brethrenship.

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Primary

Money's only paper and coin, smelling like hands,

lying inert on a sheet, not scampering like bed bugs

sometimes with a fan running why do people do favors

because they're people and they want to lie

down next to a thing that pretends to be better than

people and that's the lesson of a leader.

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The Effort

Small, small, small snowflake, small one

i needed special glasses and a tensor light.

Like a preemie, like the thing you have to keep alive

and they wondered why i spent an hour out there

in the cold on my knees not wanting it to disappear.

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