Prophase

They'd say it's a phase.  If they even saw.

I see through the clouds, I'm near home.

I've been here, intracellularly here.

Not sick or gone.  Not gone, man.


I'm on a plane onto a new plane.

I turn my head and my seatmate is me.

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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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.

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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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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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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My Main Man

One of us was a sour apple

and then there was none

It's always dwindling, I'm

someone, with bird vision,

ear on the tracks

doing the head count

ready with the barber blade

an accountant cutting costs

taking a big bite out of life

that's how this show is going

to be run, or my name isn't

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Hegemony

 Who set this up that we're walking in the radiance of a Fall day

we, talking about it only in whispers, and then only when we're sure

they're in a good mood, catching a ballgame, eating a frank

 
or if we cuddle close to them to be unseen as not unlike,

some of us boutiquing at the shops, the same couture as them

the spitting junior image, same talk, same walk boulevardiers.

 

and why is it these same Mysterians came down came in

and made us slave to their digestion, our intestine -- just

relaxing fragmentarily to look clearly at ourselves, your eyes,

when busily a man in a camp and woman wide spread --

what's their intrigue, how did they get inside me, you, 

conspiring us to go along, play ball, play dead

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The Five

One normal way. In yellows and greys, in cheek-pinks and corneas moderated to a Carolina blue,the spirited hope of warm day time, loin love and the occasional aged whiskey -- 

that if it were just a matter of being alone, just a matter of self-solace -- this tenderness -- one would manage it like a watercolor, a paper sheet done within the breeze of half-an-hour, sun slapping the hand with its burn.

But then there's night to think of and the second self, impatient, ready for the baton of blood, 

the impetus to purge, to frizz the hair, dance around in nakedness, slap-happy deeds, to the i-don't-care, to the fuck-you, and its dualistic song of oh, oh, oh.

Why, my love, the birth of it!  That other, sequent life, das Kind, 

the leprechaun of a piece of yourself which calls your name in a cat yowl closing on a suckle, burping thrice before dozing into a body-warm swaddle.

Don't we gather here, my friends, open-hearted enough in our success to embarrass the look on each other's face, 

that there's a fraternity to acknowledge at the offramp where cold breath meets cardboard sign and one reaches for the limp bill stuffed in a pocket -- 

avoiding those central places where American men line-up and the bold and crazy women chart a circle of repugnance and you just cast them four odd coins that you scramble-for as you break into run to miss a witch's curse.

The other us, the fifth, we bring to that table, that table of one's own version of kosher, 

what's filled the heart like leftover canteen water, a secret, the slosh of worrying that it's just luck after all, 

that the salt taste is actually one of one's own tear-grieving and we bring in the chairs, vindicate the emptiness by inviting-in the whole world.

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Weather Man

Aren't all cities built on a terrace of carnage, shifted layers of earth between the pottery and dead language of a first and next

embers cooled and dusted over, pocked by the shepherd staves, pig-shit-on, and trammeled by the wolf packs

whole periods of neighborhood, of relatives by marriage, of bedsharers,

of work life vulnerable to forgetting, to being forgotten, to have been.

Straw beach hats found in a trunk: such are opportunities.  And thinking of them in this city, figments of snap memories, things that might have happened if they did,

several of the friends I've had would remark on this casual reverie, the sitting here at the fresh front staring with a caffeine blank, no doubt to passers-by

puncturing any thought -- if they were inclined to let it breathe -- that here's where the work gets done, where worlds are reimagined

the old transmitting sharpness to the young in the breach, at just the right point, time's beauty mark.

Well here's something, the drunk espresso fine enough for it, clean, and my mood is forward with the ships,

the boats conveying the visitor, idler, the family with a hand-held happy child,

espresso fine enough with a cinnamon dash and unintrusive jazz --

tentative about this, but try it:

On a day of surprise, on the first day of an injustice,

a perpetrator jerks into action, musters his 'crazy' and acts on the unthinkable, and a whole Rube Goldberg of a process sets off -- no hitch -- on its way

and what happens to us, in this City On The Hill, enraptured --

I say to you, do this:  amo amas, you know, catch the U.S. in a swoon, get caught-up in the hurricane, the unconditional love, hoping for the wind to veer.

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Post-Partum

Symbolism is no fake.  Things are not just 'things' in themselves, blunt stuff that has no fourth or fifth or sixth dimension -- measured in a mind's eye.

The woman of a couple she's dismayed since much of the space, the ample flat being let, is dressed in white, fashionable teeth-like bright

Clean and pure, the bounce of 'no' color, the heart of a child ready for impress of primary hue and crying out loud for only the good we have to offer

So her eyes downcast, her mouth covered-up, she's rushed back to the real estate car and even thinking why did I trust this why even come close to this monster place

Brought to the spotlit rooms where shadows shall come, where a clear glow hints an eventual dusk, its ghost, just half-a-tick, half-a-tock, away

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Ground Zero

At a late age, yet, with comfortable money, friends, why does he crack,what crazy does he find, why does he crime since no one thinks remotely

by what flash of nature determine himself as the doer of deed -- he, never predisposed, never disturbative, not known as a secretive, nor never alleged before

the mal salt airs do it, too much sun, his trendy hair trim and gizmo watch and a knowing nod at the bakery with just the right tune in his aging ear

the wind takes on a voice -- and it, the Devil's -- and when he dances into the street the morning of, in a wedding tux fit for a violation, his eyes glitter, Oxfords smartly click along the pave

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Hearken Beldam, Graceful Crone

Our Lady of the Salt Red Sangre

Our Woman Who's the Blue Señora

Wake our focus from its somber quiet

Solve our puzzles with your nimble fingers

Guide our vigil with your brilliant street lamps

Bless our business with your fluent say-so

Our Lady by the Gold Fenêtre

Our Duchess or the Prim Madonna

Glorify us past our daily problems

Plentify us in our meager holdings

Clarify us through our dented vision

Magnify us by our hopeful errors

Honored Goddess of the Fullest Breathing

Wisest Virgin with the Sun-Bright Candle

Navigate niches, penetrate wishes

God, godder, goddest Gal

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The Long Goodbye

Maybe you're 30 and it's America's 70s and you've got a place above Franklin in Hollywood and the place is next to a roomful of New Age girls practicing naked yoga.

Maybe you've got a 'Madison' sent to you from Mexico to pay for your expenses and to buy off your friendship and you wear a thin tie and black suit and smoke too much.

Maybe there's a mysterious, classy blonde heavily put-upon by her washed-up novelist drunkard husband and they have a doberman who dislikes your face, but the blonde cooks you chicken kiev and begs your help.

Maybe the cops distrust you and the mob does, too, and you lose your cat even though you go out at 3 a.m. to buy special food for it.

Maybe you've got access to the Malibu Colony and a classic car to drive to the border.

Maybe you've got the moral grit to 'resolve all issues' and the sun is on you and maybe it is a Hollywood ending to an episode that sums up your life.

Maybe that's what it's all about.

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Library Guy

With the enormity of holding keys, the anxiety of secret Sunday morning when no one ever comes the first hours

or late Monday when the sleep sets in on the studious and they clear out

that par-lit time the stacks have mass, get weight, hang heavy off a low-watt bulb

dead man- and spunky woman-names show on the spine, or in deep footnotes

stamping the place like a caught lover

me just being the sentry, acting the watch, my bowel holding a cosmos of ghosts, the knot of human mind I don't know my own

my walkabout a rendezvous with a fear that if I lie down I never rise, that there's only my walking then nothing

that the odd ideas smelling of thread and binding glue, they're the only real,

that, and the frontispiece of a dragon folded with a pencil note:  my home

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Feel The Power

Australia's Aboriginal Elder, Cedric.

How 'primitive' must a culture be, still to hold onto a human interplay with -- not the physical world?

Hopi Chief Dan Evemhema.  His spiritual compass has centered in North America, but tapped into mystery, too.

For 'contemporary', 'scientific', 'secular', 'modern', 'technological' mankind, though,

when did the last 'respected elder' live and die?

Sometime when common households held several generations.  

1940?

Let's check Wikipedia on this.

(photo:  Ted Szukalski)

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Street Saint, Saint Street

Attestation as to the ear-

witnessing of the heart's want.

Was as if i'd pulled a bunny out or flipped

a coin had landed on its edge as a naturist 

knowing a bird from a bat were a flutter in the belfry

weird and wild no plainer nor truer

was the angel talked from voices

vocal in my bowed-down head.

Sworn this day, as my maternal aunt

had a brother-in-law whose son was me.

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