Untitled

There are things carved in relief.

Like the skeletons of churches,
a sub-rosa apparatus beneath bone.
I am always drowning in marrow.

Decision tips an hourglass;
what was sand is smoke.

She got her first tattoo
in a shop on second street;
a kite that ribboned its tail
around her wrist.

Years later, a diner in Trent;
a backwash of Bakelite and teak.
She smoked clove cigarettes,
lips drawn in stichlines.

We questioned, teeth to skin,
reflections in a third eye;
images fell from an iris' edge-
impressions lost in the drift.

Borromean dropped a ring,
what was left was crossed.

Behind a heavy door,
a kite with a faded tail
identifies the wrist.

A man in a smock with sleeves
too short for his arms
traces its marbled flight;
beneath his palm he knows
every scar is a victory.

Love Is Relative

In my father's private closet,
scotch-taped to the inside door

(not tacked; tacks will mar the grain, John...)

was a picture of Rita Hayworth
all slink and smoke in that Gilda dress,

no straps and a poised Pall Mall,
cherry lipstick on its air-brushed filter

(I go to bed at night with her, son, but wake to your mother)

The picture was tattered, torn at the edges;
peeled down in a place or two like black satin gloves

it was signed at the bottom corner, in faded ink
that read 'To John...Love, Margarita'

(Close the closet, dear, I can't stand the excitement)

I asked my father once who signed that blue name
but it turned out to be 'just a girl from Brooklyn, kid'

who danced at the Palace Theater where he ushered
society couples to their seats for 10 cents an hour

(but now he is a faithful and obedient servant)

That picture hung there as long as I did, and longer;
it warmed him, it was the only thing that ever did and

when my father died, I found it folded neatly beneath
his unionsuits, in a drawer my mother never touched

(more women in the world than anything, else, son)

except insects. But what I want to know is

did it bother you?

Just So

I.

There are fine scars across my back
that belong to someone else; every now and then

when she turns from a mirror hung just so,
the lilt of her lip remembers a smile.

I speak to her once and again, sentences whole
and without sound; the deadfall of yesteryear.

We feel the push of breath in an answer,
what words are there tangle the distance in between.

II.

A mirror hung just so catches a thought of smile
and remembers the involuntary pull of muscle.

I taste the stir of conversation across my skin;
silence settles there in the cool drifts of its tone.

Hands climb a ladder of scars, hip to nape;
fingers trace each rung, draw questions in sweat.

A whist of words ravel in this separation of air;
echoes whisper one to another the burden of reply.

The Night

ends in layers
on her kitchen floor;
jackets, boots and kitten heels
form conclusions on stained tile.

I wasn't in her
apartment five minutes
before the phone rang; low talk
in another room that meant nothing.

Later, in bed, she explained
the call as a boyfriend, suspicious;
we both pretended that it might matter.
She was the first woman

to acknowledge the scars
laddered from my shoulder to my hip;
she walked her fingers down the raised
rungs without asking why.

On the bedside stand,
familar icons: Schnapps, seconal,
lamp with a pink ruffled shade.
Somewhere in the room, a cat growled

its disapproval. After, she slept-
on her side, a locked blade.
I sat on the edge, tried but couldn't
remember her name. The cat appeared,

wound between my feet,
its censure forgotten. I stroked its fur,
felt flesh shiver over bone.
"Your'e a good cat," I said. "A good cat."

Yardbird

When I was young,
my mother had a cat she called yardbird,
because, she said, the ripples his shanks
made as he strolled our street
reminded her of a night in Tunisia;
a place that waited for her most evenings
beneath a diamond wieghted with nickles,
under shades draped in faded red.

Bird would follow her there,
a slink of sinew and strut around shadow.
Sphinx-posed on her lap, she would offer him
dips in a glass of warm Dewars,
run rough hands through his black coat
and whisper "I would wear you like a skin,
heat-heavy in alleys and jazz dives, my tongue
tight for the taste of something more than this."

When he died, alone while the house slept,
she buried him by the back steps; his cool bones
left to dust themselves in a shoebox laced
with shots of scotch, shards of pressed wax.
She never went back to Tunisia; sat instead,
when the weather was good, on the last rise
of a low stoop, and watched the paper mill stacks
flick their soot tails against the smooth night sky.

Around The Night Kitchen

Mama got implants
the year the Sox traded that lousy southpaw,
because she wanted her audience of one
sorry son-of-a-bitchin' bricklayer to pay
more attention but it only made him tease-
he said they made her teeter worse
than those jade-colored juleps
she was constantly sipping because she thought
they were so couth, so uptown Savannah

but mama always did wear
her avarice on her pink velour sleeves;
even bought parquet-patterned linoleum
for our rented kitchen floor and when
the son-of-a-bitch caught that last caboose
to Birmingham one hot July night
she woke us all up; put Percy on the box-
slow-dragged us around the black and white,
her breath like mint against our upturned faces.

Five Days (A Compilation)

Prolouge:

A view from my flying jimmy.

Listen: hounds loose their run trill reveille behind the lines
of white pine and cedar and elm that guard my seclusion.

I pretend I'm dreaming-then I am-waltzing with Jane
barefoot and ballgowned through a wood: music howls
somewhere beyond the grey, somewhere in the black.
So I oversleep and wonder when I wake why my feet are ice.

I fly to work down backroads that turn suddenly
into streets miles from my driveway graveled and
tucked between menacing rows of black-hulled pecans:
they bear on the third year and I keep their fallen ancestors
packed naked in blue tupperware tubs stacked in my freezer.

The cockpit of my jimmy is strewn with dead coffee cups.
Jack-in-the-boxes lay discarded and dying on the floorboards
-similar slaughters of necessity-ketchup clotted to their sides.
Last month's cable bill flaps under the visor like a battleflag.

Tobacco whips by on the left and on the right so fast
each leaf on every stalk stands out in surreal base-relief.
I taste the sharp and bitter tang of suckering plants:
it reminds me of my father's pall malls and politics and
the smell of money seeded from blood.

Barn swallows rise-in lazy tourbillions-from the fields
their beaks and bellies full of yellow and green hornworms.

I wing past Buck's BBQ Pit (You Can't Beat Our Meat)-past
Lucy's Do-Lounge where the girls serve more than shots
-past Big Jim's Quick Mart: the stoner kid who pumps gas
raises a hand in reflex. I don't wave back in sympathetic apathy.

Most mornings I stop to kill coffee cups but today I'm late.

Tenant houses rush by on either side, their concrete blocks
painted with Kudzu and mildew: I think of abattoirs and
oubliettes and other inevitable exits. Children and dogs and
cheap molded toys from the plastic plant over in Elroy dot
the tiny dirt yards-little boys and little girls stand in stagnant
ditches chunking rocks at death while their mamas are inside
fucking the mailman or watching General Hospital on TV.

I see slideshow flashes of their faces and I hope I don't
have to come back out this way: scrape them up, heads
cracked open, futures frying on asphalt like so many eggs.

I pass the city limit sign-some of the holes are mine-ringed
in rust and canted to one side. Courthouse looms right,
county buildings lurch left and blocks ahead day meets night
where tracks split the city: segregation in iron ties old as time.

I pull into my lot-number six, section twelve-filled with cars
and trucks and bikes but I am the only flying jimmy.
Everything ticks: engine, watch, pulse-alpha papa charlie-
the people that mill outside my windshield tick with tension.

I want to turn the key, turn around, turn into my driveway
where squirrels sit stuffing my sweet meats in their jaws:
instead I clinch mine-name rank serial number-open the door
and step out.

Listen: animals sprung their cages snarl in angry unavoce
behind walls of brick and steel and glass that guard nothing.

Day One.

Today I reached a milestone; no morphine. It's now been
almost 24 hours since my last hit, and it's got me a bit...well...
strange. A good friend I've never had the pleasure of meeting
suggested I try Ketamine as a weener for the opiate,
and for awhile, it worked. But it made me nervous.
I don't like nervous.
So I've just been backing it down and yesterday, 5 mg. Today,
zero. Considering that 6 months ago it was at least 60 mics a day,
I think I'm doing OK.

Circa 6 months ago

Day breaks
(how cliched is THAT)
over some North Carolina
backwater

mosquitoes dance
in pulsed pockets
above stagnant runs
that glimmer with rainbowed
slicks across the surface

and in the arc
of a dirty pane
(it looks out at an equally
dirty alley that leads
to some inconsequential river)
an 18 guage cath
will glimmer

as soon as it unsheaths
it's equally 18 guaged
needle

loaded
(HAHA! What a LOADED word)
with a loading dose-
best painkillers
deft fingers can cop
when no one is watching
where the latexed hand went

after the sting
is gone
comes the calm
that stays awhile
awhile
awhile
before going back home
with all its little perks
packed on its glass back

but there's always
more
more
more
where that came from-
it lurks and smiles
(make that GRINS,
it grins with metered teeth)
among versed and valium
(those paens of blessed slumber)
tossed in with toredal and
sucs...sucs rocks!
(I'll bet Calicoe knows what sucs is)

on such a permanent
level
maybe that's the level
I need
to
sink
to.

I find I miss the ritual almost as much as the calm. Drawing up
my morning fix, opening the alchohol prep, carefully swabbing
the spot on my thigh that has grown a little thick with scar tissue.
The thin needle resembles the probiscus of an insistent
mosquito, intent on the sting. I miss that sting, too.

I've been a junkie since 'Nam, where smack was so plentiful
it practically fell from every duffle.
It was a necessary thing, a thing to be done
so things could be done. Once the body becomes
aclimated to the opiate, the 'high' subsides and only that strange
and languid calm remains. It enabled you to wade through endless
days of mindless horror with blinders on. I was there four years,
and by the first 8 months it all seemed surreal;
a vampire flick where all the bloodsuckers
were named Charlie, wore black pajamas
and paper slippers...hello, Harold and Jim.

Harold and Jim.

The people who people my town wear paper shoes,
a lot like charlie did in days of yore, slipping
through fields of gore with barely a bone to rattle
their prescence; nothing to signify sound or fury and

it was just so today in the Piggly Wiggly;
10:30 of a bright blue Monday with a hand basket sporting
the latest in milk and brown eggs, at the end
of aisle 6 where they (they?) keep canned peaches,
behind attractive stacks of green and orange cans I hear

this:

"...only a nigger kid, who gives a rightous fuck? Held me up
for two hours because the little coon didn't have enough sense
to cross on the light; now I ask you, Jim, what's a law
abiding white man to do when the po-lice officer's a nigger

too?"

Never heard them come up the peach aisle, Jim and his
good buddy Harold (because it said so in neat red stitch
above the pocket of his blue chambrey workshirt) the paper
shoes that covered their approach looked a lot like Redwing
boots that I know Jim and Harold valued almost as much
as the 410's that surely hung against the back glass of their
F150 Fords and when they started noticing my not noticing

I moved on around the corner to aisle 8 (isn't that strange)
where all the things I'll never need like Pampers and Gerber
and Bottle (warmers?) are kept and through the open shelves
that line all the aisles in the neighborly Piggly Wiggly the
conversation continues and from behind strained bananas I hear

this:

"...that dyke who works for the Rescue squad that's who, some
of us went to the county meeting about those types picking up
our wives and such, having to touch 'em and all and sometimes
even taking off their clothes but it didn't do no good and now
I just take my women to town myself if they need hospital help..."

But I've picked up your wife, Jim, and your sister too, both
of them too drunk to have sense enough to not drive home and
if you knew what all they promised the nigger cops we called
if only they wouldn't tell you where they were or what they
had been doing, why, you would just SHIT Jim, I swear-

On those same paper feet two little old ladies who favored
my forgotten ma had sidled up beside me and I realized that
I was giggling to myself, probably looked like I was drunk myself
so I walked away to aisle 10 (?) and as I tried to look
oh-so-interested in pickled okra and sweet rind pickles
some kid without any paper shoes
(just keds with dirty laces) walked
right up and asked me straight-out in a too-loud little kid voice
why my hair was cut just like a boy's and why was I wearing
Dickies just like his dad's- dontcha know your'e a girl-
says he and I never heard his mama (paper shoes) come out of
nowhere to grab him up and whisk him off like I might be catching.

So I add a jar of those sweet rinds to my milk and eggs, find
myself seven aisles later standing in the checkout behind Jim
and Harold and their suitcase of after-work Schlitz, in front
of the ladies with their ensure and wild rice, and I looked
for the kid, but I guess his mama was busy somewhere in the back
teaching him not to talk to strangers with boy-hair
and I wondered if she remembered that it was me
who came to her assistance
the night her lawyer husband decided
that she might look better with bruises-
but then I decided we all must look alike with hats on.

All around me paper shoes shuffled and
Jim and Harold snickered and the older ladies
read the labels on their ensure
like it was the Sunday times; their lips drawn into tight lines.
Behind all those tight lips that never moved (except for Jim
and Harold's, who did'nt give a rightous fuck), I could hear
this and this and some more of this:

niggers and dykes and faggots- OH MY!

And I wondered if they could hear
what I was thinking above the silence of their paper shoes.

Circa 1973:

Two klics outside the port city, thick
underbrush hid clusters of olive clad kids,
bellies flat against slick earth
wet with mud and blood. Days here went

fast into night, and when dark came,
you prayed for light. Nights were bad,
you listened with strained ears through
a din of strange sounds, for sounds that

were stranger still. Most times, constant fear
kept you awake in apprehension, like the
mummy did in the fifth grade; trembling in
your G.I. Joe sleeping bag on Timmy McPherson's

living room floor. None of us knew scared like
that, but we all caught on real quick. Our
backyard battle plans and monster movie
anecdotes didn't apply in this show. By the

second night in the bush, we had all lost faith
in Hollywood. Somebody forgot to yell cut so
the stand-ins could take our places. It all
made you wonder what Audie was singing about.

Sometimes, you imagined that you smelled fish sauce,
heavy, oily; the sour odor of charlies with full
bellies. Ready to hunt all night on papered feet,
mute yellow draculas with a taste for cold blood.

Every now and then we got lucky, and the point man
would hear the low squeak of black silk bat wings
in time to thwart the midnight buffet. But most times
we weren't lucky, and some of us joined the army of
the undead; coming back to feast within the nightmares

of the rest of us. And we wondered what G.I. Joe
might do on a bad night in Haiphong, where the matinee
horrors were real, and none of us could find the
zippers down the backs of the monster suits.

At times I feel like what I write about this period of my life
is just so much cliched hack; a lot of it is old, some of it the new stuff of resurfaced memory. My partner at work, Henry, is constantly questioning my decision to become a trauma queen; says my life as a ditch doc was a poor life choice. He doesn't know that I need the adrenelin as much as I need the calm to face it. What an odd conundrum; a labryinth of my own design.

Mostly, it's days full of nothing special; parade after parade of the sick, the dying, the dead. You have to find a way to black out the faces; for me, it's morphine. I can wander through blood, guts, and puke all day without a flinch. It's only late at night, when I'm alone with myself that the black peels away and the faces float to the surface. But every once in awhile, in the bright light of day, something will come along and hit me behind the knees, make me lose my balance and when it comes, it lingers.

Circa 1987:

"Edgecombe County unit 268 to Heritage ED on 340,
I need an MICN or physician to the mic, come back-"

-quick come back quick talk to me talk to me
hurry goddamnit hurry hurry hurry-

"This is Heritage, 268, physician standing by,
go ahead with your traffic"

"10-4, Heritage, wer'e en-route to your facility
with an approximately eight year old female-"

-six seven eight who knows there's no pubes
not even shadow only blood and blue and motherfucker
tach it out come on come on come on-

"-found in a field this AM, bound, gagged, patient does
show evidence of extensive trauma, numerous lacerations
and abrasions to the head and neck and-"

-fields narrow fields of napalm-charred children
limbs like struck matches raped first gutted second
dead but still running running running-

"-upper extremities show defensive wounds with left
shoulder dislocation, lower extremities present bilateral
femur fractures with the left compound in nature and-"

-butts they break legs and skulls with butts because
the sharp cracks make thier dicks hard bayonets only
make sibilant sounds machetes go whicka whicka whicka-

"-pelvis is unstable on side-to-side rock, abdomen shows
obvious distention with rigidity, genitals present evidence
of forced penetration with intestinal protrusion and-"

-the smell is wrong no kerosene no fish copper minus
sulpher ozone missing smoke make this fucker smoke
I'm losing pressure DRIVE goddamnit goddamnit-

"-B/P is 70/40 and falling, respirations at 6 per and
shallow, pupils equal but non-reactive and-"

-focus focus focus this ain't Dragon valley or Tam Ky or
even Phu Bai where Medi-vacs couldn't fly it's just
another day another dollar another kid another-

"-I have two 16 guage lines of LR going at WO rates,
tubation is precluded due to facial trauma however patient
has an oropharyengeal in place and is being bagged with
100% supplemental o2, patient showing junctional brady
on 12 leads and I have administered 5 of morphine and-"

-day in a field, narrow fields of dead men wearing their
gods on their faces but there are no gods is no god only
purple and silver and green and-

"-Heritage be advised we have a 9 minute ETA,
prepare for trauma code,
patient is bradying down to unnacceptable levels,
CPR begun due to age with one atropine push in
at this time come back-"

-sounds, sounds that lose rhythm and order become wails
become sobs and to cry is to realize and I won't I won't I-

"-10-4, 268, we copy your traffic, continue CPR and give
one Epi push, we are awaiting your arrival in room three;
see you in nine, Heritage is clear on 340."

But I've discovered that the mind is a powerful entity all by itself. When this episode in the day in the life of Blue, Paramedic-addict extrodinare occured, I clocked out early...
went home, gathered up my 22 and went out into the woods I live in and stayed there for two days, drawing beads on anything that moved. I killed 8 or 9 sqirrels and all memory of that little girl; she resurfaced three years later when I happened to be the medic on duty the night her mother died. I went home and spilled it out on a yellow legal pad admist a flurry of mescal shooters and sweat. Now I can't forget her, no matter how many squirrels I off in the pursuit of sanity.

Boy, I can RAMBLE, can't I? I started out at my keyboard, trying to shake off that nagging itch, that almighty yearning for my mosquito, and now here I am walking backwards again; only this time the colors have lost their primaries. I guess I need to stop before I bore the hell out of everyone who might be reading this long-winded trip down memory lane. But it was good in a self-searching way that I wasn't prepared for or aware of until my skin was already peeling away in painful strips, bloodless yet weeping-

I feel them fall, drifting in dry and dusty piles beneath my anonymous desk somewhere in a river town and I want to gather them up, stick them back to my naked self, shivering and unprotected,
weak and wanting.

My idle words bare me like a lover couldn't, like a confessor might
like a surgeon skilled at the craft; and voices scream from these opened wounds, voices with names that can't be counted, faces that won't be gone. Their tongues scrape my edges,dig furrows through the boneyards that carry my weight- and I stumble, I tire, I wonder will it always be the same.

Dismal rain feeds a restless mind. Before the world went red, I would watch it from the windows of my life; its sound as soothing as Coltrain on a weary night. Now it leaves me caught, a lightning bug in a sealed jar; it dampens my skin with an ill-defined apprehension, and on the chill of its breath rides the scent of fear. It distills geographies, turns dirt to mud. My temples hold its hum verbatim.

Today finds Dismal gray beneath a laden sky. She welcomes it, adds its wieght to her mire; continuance ensured. She has not changed; the passage of centuries add nothing but knots to cypress and take away nothing but legend. I am the one who cowers within my walls, trapped by a past I cannot forget, teased by a god I cannot forgive. A dead god, shopping for attention, selling tickets for bone and dust.

I want to put in a box those things that went different- a sturdy box made of what is left after the battle is done, before war becomes epitaph. But there is so little left, the box is just a ramshackle thing held together by spit and blood- and all that was turned is too heavy for its spit-licked sides to hold. Rain makes me drag it out, sends me on a mad search for reasons that were never there; and I know when Dismal has her fill and the sky becomes the slate-blue color of empty, I'll walk for miles in the company of water-shed ghosts.

They rise as the mist lifts, unnamed graves that surface and lay scattered across fresh-wet earth; the bones within clatter and clack against their crumbling lids.
I listen as the bones grow flesh, feel years shift their weight beneath my feet;
and I am in another place- a parrallel plane that mirrors my memory, reflects against my mind's eye, casts shadow without sun. Familiar voices whisper from
the other side of time; they ask how do I see my dreams behind closed eyes?

What about the other side? The difference between here and there is logistics; countless miles that separate then and now. Three times I went, three times I came back; decades since spent filling the void left by what I left behind. I count backwards, wait for bruises to fade. Yes, time passes; but not much changes. Memory is like water in my clenched fist; it runs out, heads to earth- everywhere, earth; the odor of turned ground.

And the distance is but the sharp crack of a branch-
a second of sound that blurs into the hard snap of butt against bone, blends
into the soft whicka whicka of machetes through razor grass, becomes the deafening silence of the lull between what was and what will always be. The soft kiss of moments turn today to yesterday, brush back years with lips so gentle the seduction is barely felt; a rape of will that has no defense.

Quick glints of mica shoot through underbrush and fall; instinct ducks my head, bends my knees low against an unseen aim. A rush of wing sends startled swallows upwards in a sudden spiral; in their shadow medivacs pitch and vie for space.
Somewhere behind me, hounds howl for their dinner, the wails desolate, forlorn-
and in their voices I see black-haired women kneeling in tank ruts, children
cradled to their chests like bundled sticks.

The difference is that, the distance is this; this that, that this. Now means sometimes and other times. Whatever it is that looks back is without longing, does not lose itself in the tremble and click of limbs caught in a heavy wind. Tangles of cypress root grip river rock like ribs grip lung, like I grip the visceral strings
that connect what was and what will never be. All night, the hounds will keen lament for the rain, and bullrushes, fragile as burnt matches, will break in the breeze.

The rain is back. It hammers the tin roof, tiny spears like bullets. I feel the muscle rise in my throat, a knot I try to drink clear. My fourth shot finds me here,
stiff in front of a ghost-blue screen. I write; etch words against white that have no meaning, make no sense. In a far corner, the dead pile up, get ripe where they lay; I can smell their insistence move from breath to breath.

The present is etherous, a documentary of spring in a jungle; olive-clad boys with terror on their faces search through thatch while I struggle to remember the alphabet doesn't string along a keyboard in sing-song harmony. I don't know where they went, wrapped in black and flown home in the cold bellies of planes. On my best nights, I pretend that none of them fell past my fingers on their journey there.

Dismal is like that; a wet spring in another jungle, a place that has never heard of me or my abscence. I try for balance, some equal ground where the great Axis Mundi never slips her spokes and lets the green world turn red; but in the end, I'm not much different now from the girl who crawled through mud and guts, an aid-bag clutched in her hand. I still carry that bag, only now I walk instead of crawl and I don't bother to dodge the fire anymore.

My vision is a relentless understanding, no longer able to look away, obligated by depth and a yolk of light. In its field, a universe; an eye engulfed by the far-gone tides of what holds it there. I watch the cieling fan turn in my kitchen, I try to blink and can't. The whickering blades converge, intrude on each other in endless repitition. I sit in my chair, this necessity of skin, and strip myself to bone.

Day Two.

It's 2 AM here in dismal swamp, the bottom end of the second day of my idiotic cleansing process. It's been a real pisser most of the day. Off work with nothing but time on my hands and mosquitoes on my mind. I think it's only because I have removed my remaining vials that I haven't given in. I clearly didn't remember the nightmare of withdrawal, and I wish I had thought about it a while longer before making this impulsive leap towards a non-existent light. I itch.

I've itched all day; there are millions of ants (that's as close a thing as I can relate it to, having been stung by the fire ants that build condos in my back forty) beneath my skin trying to find a way out. It's maddening, nothing stops it and I keep thinking about what I know will. But I haven't caved, ladies and gents, not YET. I hate admitting defeat, even when it's a sure winner.

I went hunting. Packed a sandwhich and a legal pad or two (because I take them everywhere; yellow paper flutters about my house like giant moths) and cruised my land for a couple of hours or three. I have 72 acres of woods with a four room house (cabin, actually) planted in a small clearing in the middle. Today, it seemed like 72 feet. The more I walked the smaller those familiar tracts became. The squirrels were laughing at me; I couldn't draw a good bead on the broadside of a barn. They chittered in the tops of the Pines like gossiping women, tossed pine nuts from their roofs in obvious derision.

I went in a little deeper until I found a nice copse of magnolia; grand old things whose umbrella branches full of heavy, waxy leaves formed a dense wall at least 20 feet around. I dug out a pad and wrote...and wrote and wrote and wrote and none of it made any sense at all. Disconnected spurts of recall and regret. I thought about Calicoe and her saying that my writing was so much better on the ween...but it's not. It just isn't and then I thought about her question; what does Blue love most? The thinking on this quelled the itch, pushed it back a bit and after giving it a few minutes, I could tell her this:

I love the smell of Magnolia on the bloom. Sweet, thick; it's heady scent brings Jessie back from the dead on a waft of recollect so sudden it left gooseflesh in it's wake. Jessie was my first sexual experience. I was fourteen, she was a year older; beautiful in the way that young foals are...all long limbs and awkward grace. I didn't know I was gay then, it was a term still undefined in those days, but I knew I was different; the tone my mother employed when she called me a tomboy was my first dim clue.

Jessie went on to become the epitome of small-town girlhood; cheerleader, prom queen, tobacco rose in the fall parade...clap as the floats pass, dear; show some respect for the real girls.

Jessie caught pregnant in our senior year, and like all good southern girls who daddy's aren't white trash, she married the guy and had two more babies before she was thirty. Every now and then, I'll see her in town somewhere, her coltish legs grown thick at the ankles, her beautiful face now a ghost in the mirror.

Circa 1978:

It was summer
when I first tasted a girl-

and I can't stop remembering
bare feet on asphalt, hot;
sweat popping above our lips

as we walked through empty lots,
past houses that watched behind
pulled blinds and barking dogs,
beyond the school where the next year
we would not know ourselves.

You look like a boy, she said
(her daddy wouldn't let her out with boys)
and the smile that tilted her face
tugged all my muscles at once

I can't forget a junked Dodge
half-buried in the woods off Cypress street,
its inside smelling of burnt oil and smoke

and how she felt like wet suede stretched
across the seat; whispers salt-glazed-

our mouths like wind on open wounds.

I put Jessie away, and not wanting the itch back so soon, I kept thinking...thank you, Calicoe...my thoughts breaking apart, flying down different paths in search of elusive love. I never cared for the word itself; I find it overused and overwrought and the subject of countless tomes of bad poetry and Harlequin romances. Never been in love, either; at least not what I percieve love to be. I've been in lust, swam in infatuation until the waters grew cold, dipped my toe a couple of times in actual relationships. But those are not for me, the constant loner. I'm not an easy person to know, much less get along with...I have my ways and I'm set in them like stone.

The last woman that lived with me (and that was 15 years past) was named Billie. She was a real stunner; red hair and gray eyes and possessed of a fair amount of guile. She was great in bed, better in the kitchen and she didn't seem to mind that I spent most of my free time either in the woods with my (much beloved) hounds or scribbling furiously on all that yellow paper. The problems started with all these bottles of lotion and little tins of make-up she sat all over the countertops in my bathroom.

It took about three months of pantyhose hanging across my shower bar and lipstick love notes on my mirrors to realize the true meaning of the word MISTAKE. It took just a little longer to figure out that she loved my money way more than she professed to love me. It finally sunk into my perfume-fogged brain that snakes with pretty, colorful markings are still snakes. Billie was the last reptile that I didn't aim a 22 at.

Circa 1989:

"She walked in beauty like the night"
and all that bullshit.
If she had a name I can't recall it;
and it never mattered anyway,
all she ever wanted she got from me;
great head and greater circumstance.
All I ever wanted I got from her,
devotion, emotion, even a decent tear or two,
as long as my wallet fell open
whenever her whims got hungry;
and boy,could that bitch eat.
But it ended one cold November,
when I read somewhere
that if the greed outwieghed the need,
the harmonious balance of things
was interrupted.
So we came to an agreeable settlement,
she and I,
and she left before I killed her.

So, from all that rambling train of thought I can surmise that I love my privacy. I like being alone, I tolerate my own company well. I love bare bathroom countertops and naked shower rods. I love red-headed women and red-bone hounds. I love a good squirrel stew with lots of onions...Boy, Calicoe, youv'e really started a roll; and I thank you from the bottom of my barely-there heart. That itch stayed away for a good while, and as I thought a little longer on the subject of love and where to find it I discovered, buried under several layers of hard, blue slate; this:

I love the feel of the weights; the tension of muscle against bone.
It helps me to remember that certain pains bring perspective.

I love the dip at the base of a woman's spine,
and the way it curves inward if the stroke is just so.

I love Harlan Ellison and Jerzy Kosinski and James Dickey.

I love Lady Day and Sarah Vaughn and Gerry Mulligan.

I love Lenny Bruce

I love the smell of woodsmoke on winter nights, the way Silver Birch cups its leaves before a rain, and the graceful fall of spanish moss from the cypress trees along the river.

I love chocolate Necco Wafers. All the other colors suck like an electrolux.

But Calicoe, my friend, my hand-up, my unlikely Gibralter (Oh, how I wish I could meet you in the flesh!)...you were right. The thing I love most are those damned yellow legal pads. Without them, I would be a dead thing; a shell of bone and blood.

It's close to 4 AM now. The itch grows worse, the thinking done, the things I love lost beneath the rise of demons and dawn. Having held it so long in my hands, seen too often the set of its jaw, I think of death; the sweet release of poets and pawns.

Do not go gently.
Do NOT go gently...
Do not...

In the tick-down of days,
in barely an open and close of years,
I choose not to die, but to cheat death;

slow the wind of anatomy
that is no more than body,
take back from the gods what was never theirs.

To remain here forever,
a single voice in the silence of time,
a shadow above the soil of the dead.

I will not die denied,
next to an unknown madness,
but wait the birth of each mute hour,

and know the past was never better
than in small seconds.

Day Three.

I started the day with hands. The first thing I saw when waking, they seemed to glow in the half-light that slid through the blind slats...eerie ghost-hands that were seperate from the rest of everything, still and quiet on the red plaid comforter. They looked blue, like corpse hands.

I began to think of them as entities of their own, even though they behaved normally and went through the usual morning rituals just as they always did...they showered, brushed teeth, ran their cool fingers through my hair; they even selected the cracked mug with the faded smiley face when the coffee was ready. The cup barely shook; a minor miracle. Maybe they weren't my hands after all, because my hands were always trembling long before the coffee was done, and never failed to spill a fair amount across the table as I read yesterday's paper.

Yet on the surface of this strange morning, calm. A natural calm that came all alone (On little cat feet, ha ha) without the benefit of narcotics. Amazed at my new hands, I took off to work. They gripped the wheel with confidence, seemed to know the way just like my old hands...they even waved at Mrs. Campos when we passed the Shop 'N Save. She stared and didn't wave back; I don't think she recognized the hands.

Once at work, the hands revealed themselves as imposters. My partner Henry knew at once that they were replicants, a duo far different from my original pair. They were helpful...cleaned our rig, checked our equipment, turned our radio to country music; and this was the REAL betrayal, my true hands would have cut themselves off before performing that blasphemy. Henry kept looking at me sideways, but didn't say much. I think he was scared of the hands.

Our first call was a crackhead frequent flyer named Aaron. He called 911 at least twice a week, complaining of nausea, of vomiting, of explosive diarreah. We hated Aaron; he always puked in the rig, spit on the foor, shit on our clean sheets. The real hands would have accidentally hit him up side his pea-head with the O2 tank...but not these hands. These hands helped him to the rig, gave him an emesis basin, started an IV and pushed phenergan to ease his nausea; they even placed Aaron on the defib to access his heart rhythm. They seemed to actually care.
Aaron watched them do all of this with gaurded eyes, he flinched at each procedure. It was clear that even Aaron knew these hands were faux...he kept his eyes on them like a mouse keeps his eye on the snake. Henry was silent, but obviously siding with Aaron.

And that's how it went all day...the hands did it all. They attended every patient as if every patient was really in need of their expertise. They patted brows, pushed meds, administered painkillers like candy. They changed stretcher sheets, asissted the astounded nurses in the ER, filled out forms in a timely manner, never flipped one doctor the bird. They left the radio alone the whole shift. When our shift was over, they clocked out on time. They waved goodbye to Henry, to the Chief...they didn't wave back, either.

Then we were home, them and I. They opened the door, turned on the light, ran their fingers through my hair...and stopped. I could feel my scalp pulsing beneath, felt the blood pushing past the roots. The mirror by my bed showed a face that looked like me, hands trapped in a short tangle of black and gray...shaking. My hands, my true pair. I wondered where they had been, I knew where they were going. Opening a small drawer in the bedstand, they took up a leather pouch, took out a familiar friend; slender, sharp, 20 CC.

Somewhere in the dark, the replicants died.

Day Four.

A lot of my time is spent contemplating purpose, how it does or doesn't apply to my life. I never thought I had one, not really...for so many years now, the only issue has been survival; learning to wake successfully to another sorry dawn seemed purpose enough. Three tours worth of years before that were spent the same way; in that endless quest for survival. The only difference was the dawn...to wake to it then was a rush I have yet to equal; the particular and peculiar thrill of realizing that yes, you breathe on for a while lomger...no one is sweeping you into an anonymous rubber bag as the sun rises over mountains at once beautiful and deadly; their backs packed with their own purpose.

My days come and go like gray shifts of inconsequence, spills of time that run unnoticed into more of the same. Days spent as a mannequin of the self I once was; the shell is there but the turtle moved out long before Saigon fell...now the face that looks into mine from the peeled-back silver of passing mirrors is unfamiliar; and it is only recently that I find myself wondering where I went, what happened to that fearless girl who pretended not to care and did...when did the pretense become the fact?

I could blame it all on Nam, I suppose, as so many do...pile the great non-purpose on the dead heads of all those soldier-boys that poured their lives across the toes of my boots, spilled their thoughts into my waiting hands and lost any memory of those ladies who were lovely once. But to lay it on that lap would be a lie, because it was just a place, a span of miles I ran through when I was young, chased by tigers let loose from someone else' nightmare. Nam didn't mold me; I molded it...shaped it into a bullet that I would never chamber, never fire. That gun doesn't belong to me, the tigers that creep down it's barrel were never mine. Instead, I pulled from it a profession; skills I learned then I use now, the waiting hands are now replicants that act as if they give a damn when all they really give is time.

So I sit and I wonder, why do it? What purpose do I serve spending hour after hour trying to fix people who care even less than I? Most of them addicts, criminals, would-be suicides, drunks...very few runs turn out to be actual accidents or of a natural cause. And then I remember...who am I to judge, an addict myself? Dependent on Heroin as I ran those long ago miles; my own dragon set to fend off tigers. Then later, morphine; another dragon for another generation of nightmares...only this time, the guns are mine; their barrels sleek, disposable stainless steel. I seek the same calm they all do, it's just that my search is private, not left lying in the street or in some seedy by-the-hour room...the difference is really only one of logistics. It doesn't make me better, just better-off...I think my actual purpose all along has been to bury the details, throw everyone's dirt on my truth.

I try to remember why it was once worthwhile...why the effort mattered; why it might matter still. I recall faces, write down names, sort it out on paper as if the words are purpose enough. I think of an old man, dead ten years or more; but it's his wife that I still see, pacing the floors of my memory...countless shots of mescal and morphine won't wash away her face; so I write this:


They lived in a perpetual past,
three dim and heat-heavy rooms
encased them in the crumbling husk
of a brownstone on a forgotten side
of the city.

We ran suicide shifts down dead streets,
and some midnights found our pulsing
red and white outside their stoop,
spinning strobes slapping brick with
bright kisses.

He was the Phantom of the Opera,
she was his Christine. She would rush us in,
blue eyes wide in a thin plane.
Her scent reminded me of tabbouleh,
scallion sweet.

He was ancient, breath like smegma,
face like a leather mask. Cirrhosis ate
his body, drank his mind; accompanied by
strains of Wagner in unrelenting drones.

While we worked, she hovered-
frail wasp patting his brow, humming.
I saw her hug herself, fingers
dripping panic down her back
like slow sweat.

He was a wicked Raoul, hateful in his extremis.
He struck at her, called her a brainless zygote,
rotten whore. She gave him the radius
of her smile and crooned "Papa, papa,"
in dulcet tones.

We lifted him to the stretcher-
she cried when we strapped the belts
and clutched our sleeves in nervous desperation.
She made quiet, pleading noises
in a strange tongue.

They had been someone once;
he a producer of this, she an actress in that.
She had worn diaphanous gowns that clung
to her mons veneris, danced in hot abandon
for his pleasure.

We left her standing in the doorway on that
last night of our aquaintance, calling papa
in a pitiful litany that was at once beautiful
and sad.

Once out, put down on my blank sheets like the scattered rows in an untended cemetary, I find the ghosts remain. Face upon face, they bob the surface of my mind and break the black water pooled there with an uncomfortable ease. I think of dragons, of tigers chasing miles into decades; their purpose leaps from my pen, ink like blood across the page.

I entertain the demons that follow me from room to room. Vague shifts of space direct me here to here; they follow on the cat's feet of some other time poet my fogged mind cannot name. We have surely danced, them and I; they have led me, I have led them...we have chased each the other across spans of lost years. Now I pirouette alone, spin without brakes into varying shades of black; they seem content to watch. Sometimes, I notice the tightness in the air as they clap.

I find myself at my kitchen table, elbows set on an oilcloth that I must have purchased; I struggle to catch the memory of when. My oilcloth is singular in its ugliness, blocks of blue and white connected by tiny sunflowers that resemble flies cocooned in perfect symmetry within a square web. Burn marks track the path of the spider. I light a cigarette with my Zippo, its pewter body as battered as my own. The thumb wheel is loose; three strikes to fire and I wonder if the snipers are watching alongside my snickering demons. The itch between my shoulders has grown numb, a disabled target. I smell the bite of ozone, and beneath that, copper; always the copper, heavy and sweet.

The floor under my feet peels and fades; its pattern lost to countless steps. Once blue or rose or green, it now lays gray and dead across boards gone soft with rot. There's a hole to the left of my right foot, neither small or large and shaped like a grin, it yawns a welcome; the demons at my back nudge against my ear. I inch my toes through the smile, feel the air of the cellar below, cold, damp. I wonder if any corpses before me have found this hole, slid though it to rest at last nestled in rat shit and dirt. I try to force my foot past the limits of the hole; the edges give without complaint. I take a long drag and wait for the dark below to yank me in; the air clutches my ovation.

Dusk drawing from the blinds finds me on my knees with butter knife and bleeding fingers; splinters pile up on either side like dead soldiers. I think of foxholes and fire pits and the blackened maws of buried screams that have found breath beneath the give of my floorboards. The smile has widened into a laugh; its cool trill dries my efforts to salt. Behind me, whispers of applause pull past my shoulders and fall between my hands; I can hear it echo somewhere in the black.

Demons sleep by daylight. I wake with cheek pressed against a table leg, fingers sore and curled under my chin. For a moment, I can't remember; my eyes, sideways at floor level, pick out shards of wood, a settled haze of smoke, spatters of tacky blood. I smell dirt and damp and the sour odor of spoil; again I think of foxholes, I wonder where the sniper is perched. A ringing phone startles me to my feet, the steady thump thump of the Evacs melt into morning traffic that hums from the streets below my window. Shadows of sun shaft through my cracked blinds; the hole reveals itself...only a hole. Jagged at its edges, bigger, empty. I dump the ashtray over its lip; scatter my night cremations and watch as ash sifts into nothing.

Day Five.

Someone asked me today what 'Blue Tattoo' meant and why I chose it as a tag name. Well, for millions it means identification; stamped on wrists and forearms by some long-ago hatred. It's countless bad images and forgotten names forever etched onto skins by home-made artists; they fade and warp as time goes by. It's a book of poems by Lynn Lifshin...'The Blue Tattoo'. Pretty good ones, too. But for me, it's a cool image of a tattoo parlor that I found...I just like the sound of it. It's a start-over, a second chance, it's the wrinkle that my time can't forget. It's my own warp 'n fade, my personal two-step, my sideways shuffle. It's what my life FEELS like most days...a faded, homemade tattoo that isn't quite what it used to be; isn't the beautiful thing it looked like thirty years ago under bad flourescent lights. It's just a few crooked lines wrapped around a foolish idiom that no longer rings true.

But it's mine, and I love it, in the twisted way you love the scar you got in some bar fight back in the day; the way you love a bad toothache because it reminds you that you can still feel...even if it's only pain. I love it because it won't go away, it's as faithful as a whipped puppy. Every now and then I trace it's face with my finger and wonder where the cobalt went, wonder when the ink clouded into slate...was it the year mama died, or did it happen somewhere in Haiphong while I was busy looking for trip wires? Maybe it was a gradual thing, and I only noticed when someone pointed it out. Maybe it's MY identification, a symbol of self-hatred that I'm not qualified or ready to sort out, that I'm not ready to forget.

So I'll stay up late tonight and find tattoo flash on the net. I'll stare at all the skin art and prehaps pick out a new one to grace my falling flesh...something to remember me by. A vivid dust of color to cover my own faded shade of pale. It'll make me feel young again; bring back memories of when I didn't care and thought I never would. A celtic cross, a rose dagger, a sacred heart with my name across it's apex...or maybe just a zipper down my chest to remind me how easily some things open.

But I'll probably just get drunk, instead.

I read an interview recently where a good man said:
"Blue whacks hard, hits 'em where it hurts; but a little
of that can go a long way..." and of course it got me thinking,
sent me off on a backwards journey that went and came
such a long way that I wonder if I'll recognize the end when it nears.

I thought of my brother Eddie; 10 years older and dead
by 1970, hanging from the chandelier in my mother's great room
because he wanted to run off to Paris or some gay somewhere
to sling paint against curling canvas and that just wasn't done;
could'nt happen said dear old dad; it's a doctorate for you...

So there hung Eddie on a crisp May morning, sneakered feet
drawing lazy circles in shadows on the black and white parquet.
And I remember how my mother didn't scream; or cry or even
drop her bone cup but instead instructed (now there's a word)
the housekeeper to "send for the authorities, Helen", and
instruct (there it is again) them to come quietly, please.

When they cut Eddie down a crystal was somehow broken
in the process and as I watched the fine glass shimmer to the floor
I thought now there's beauty; such a beautiful irony...
Eddie has broken mother's chandelier but he'll never get to see
the distaste that bent her mouth downwards beyond the borders
allotted to his death. At dinner, my father remarked
on the high cost of a replacement. (not Eddie; the crystal)

So there it is; a little that went a long way.
Everytime I see wisteria I remember,
it blossomed early that year and framed
the windows of the great room where Eddie dangled in defiance...
I associate it's heavy, purple scent with that final up yours.
Soon after I ran away, joined the army...thus fucking my mother
and my father in the best three-way ever; I was supposed
to be a lawyer and carry on tradition in the time-honored manner.

All the years inbetween then and now lay markers for that
backwards journey; and today I find myself stumbling upon them,
fascinated that with each mile back the colors still remain vivid
and true; even if most of it is red and black. So along my
reverse search I look for blue, yellow, green, orange; bright bits
that I bury because the dark seems easiest to cover...
but looking down at the buckled road I find this:

A girl named Grace in 1973, just after Saigon fell, living
in a Charlotte loft decorated with prints of Dali and Pollack
that made you dizzy but she said they freed her mind, made
her think and she liked Brautigan because he understood love, she said; she read to me "The Wait' and later,
as we made love on a sprung sofa she cried
and called me by a name that wasn't
mine...I color her blue and sometimes when it rains so light
you can't see it I remember how her hair stuck to her cheeks
after the sweat was dry.

And this:

A man who said his name was Jerry gave me a ride one cold afternoon just outside of Chesterfield; and seeing I had no money and no motive took me to his apartment, fed me soup
and pimento cheese sandwiches that were very near how manna must have tasted. We talked for hours sitting at his kitchen table;
and at some point he showed me his collection of jazz wax
that had to be priceless and just before I left he played
Betty Roche and the Savoy Sultans...I can still hear the soul inflection of that voice. Color Jerry orange; and now whenever I eat pimento cheese I think of him and his 33's.

And This:

A small boy and his sister who found their way onto my property
not too long ago. Out with my squirrel gun, looking for snakes, I come upon the two of them sitting on the bank of the Tar river that borders my land on the north side. They never heard my approach, being apt at walking the woods line in near silence, but my red-bone Millie startled the shit out of them with a high-pitched howl that set my teeth on edge. They jumped as if shot, and the girl (probably all of sis or seven) screamed and then began to cry miserably. "Don't shoot us, mister", said the boy, who was not much older than the girl, "we was only digging nightcrawlers..." (I guess I looked like a mister in camoflauge; it made me smile) They calmed down when they saw I was no boogeyman, I gave them some of the kisses I always carry in one pocket or another and we spent a pleasant hour or so pulling worms out of the rich river earth and talking about things like why the river runs just one way and why coon dogs are always so skinny.
After they left, I sat awhile on the bank and thought of how
everything goes a long way, but none of it ever seems
to go on long enough. I'll color these two green, for growth...
maybe they'll come back; I'll remember to haul extra kisses.

I'm still looking for yellow.

But on a clear day, You can see through sclera, past the color-wheel of iris, into the natural lens. If your'e quick enough, or good enough, you can watch bright fade to dull, see what was drift into what could have been. It's said that the last image percieved is reflected in the corneal eye; but that's bullshit. The only thing left is an eclipse too dim to cast back.

Like the shut of a door against a heated room, what remains is cold. I've watched more doors close than I care to count, seen so much of what could have been...now I wear that cold, an unseen insulation keeping heat at mind's length. To remember warmth is to recall faces, names, the end of every story. Cold is better; numb and hard. I need the feel of the shell.

Then today, a kid grabbed my arm. A hopeless kid with a hopeless wound, face-up in the middle of State street, the familiar aftermath of a common war. No fix here, no TV save. His eyes were green and deep; bending close, I watched frost rise in them like water...and through the fingers that circled my skin, I felt the heat slide away, felt the slam of the door. Hours later, I heard the click of the latch.

Isn't it funny how we return to the places where things happened, old soldiers drawn to land consecrated by battle and cross...just as I sit here tonight, swallowing warmth shot after shot. I remember faces, write down names, turn the pages of an unfinished book and wonder if the story ever really ends. I feel the air thicken, I know that what I've come to find has not dimmed, or waned away.

And in the back of my mind, nightstorms gather dust.

Epilouge:

Dismal sleeps.

The Dismal is quiet in that hour before dawn,
when the sun is not here or there but suspended;
a faint breath of light caught on the edge of nothing.

In that hour she sleeps, and tucked within her gnarled arms
sleep all that name her mother; otter and coon, bear and bobcat-
gray fox, red fox, white-tail deer; mink nestle their pelts
deep into moss beds spread like comfort along bank and bough.
Even the cottonmouth lie still beneath rock and log, copperheads
lie above; their night-damp skins shimmer like new pennies.

I alone am awake, but I am not awake alone.

In the Dismal silence ride the voices of time; they travel
years in a whisper, hiss at my ear in the low tones of the damned.
They speak with dead tongues, spin memory from dust and it settles-
kisses my sweat-wet cheeks and drapes my conciousness in webs of what was.
Outside my window, swamp bleeds into delta as night becomes day.

Listen:

Cicadas, slow to wake, rub their legs together and I hear clackers
popping through razor grass; my fists clinch, I wait for the dull thud
of claymores to follow the din. I can see foxfire blooms in the peat,
but my mind sees arc light through the trees; airbursts over Albany-

and the voices hiss "run, run..." I reach for an aid kit that's never there.

A Pileated woodpecker drills his perch and M-60's rattle my teeth
in mad minutes without end. Tracers fire above the ledge of my sill,
their red tails trail smoke like drifts of fog. Along the rim of reason,
concertinas trip with pings and snaps that nails my flesh to sheet.

The Dismal comes alive by degrees; her children wear paper shoes
that slide through brush and leaf with deadly ease. Squirrels rustle their nests,
warblers call for their mates, and somewhere inbetween the voices pull away-
threads of their goodbyes knit tight stitches down my spine.

Morning brings life. Otters slap the river in search of brim, they break surface
in pairs. Coons scuttle the deadfall in search of snakes, snakes take to the flats
in search of sun. Deer circle the cypress, stretch long and lovely necks
to prune moss from their canopies; black bears sing to their cubs.
My hounds edge their run on anxious feet, their hungry howls echo in the trees.
Somewhere in the swamp's heart, mink skirt my traps with skilled indifference-
their pelts stained moss green. When the wind is low I can hear them laugh.

And I am awake, alone.

Concert

Rachmaninoff winds reel-to-reel,
Opus 1, First Piano Concerto-
chords drip from atop my desk,
slide down its veneered cheeks
to pool in the pitch around my feet.

I sit, hands above a keyboard,
fingers poised to tap the notes-
precision strikes each letter
as though this balanced type
could arrange my words in unbound sheets

and bestow me the name composer.

Yellow Jacket Summer

I offer nothing save this want,
this tepid press into breathless flesh.

Damned hot days.
Blacktop blisters where dirt meets road,
dogs with slats in their sides pant,
watch the August air waver and dance;
an idle promenade with shadow and sun.

This season of strain
pains its way across our surface,
lays a path in rivel and rut.
Regret brings us to a vacant place;
faint thrusts erase words, crumble thought
to dust that cannot lift itself to scatter.

Promises culled from sweat
flitter by sill and frame, their sway
traces the fretwork of your face.
Catbirds simmer in cedars that stroke
dry fingers against the pane;
familiar ghosts bend toward the husk of sound.

A storm stirs, lightning robbed of voice
sheets through the close haze of day.
Yellow Jackets hum in paper nests,
their anger cools beneath juniper shade.
Somewhere in the thinning distance,
dogs slip away without goodbye.

We shed our skin, twine sticky and shorn
on sheets with roses faded down to pink;
count beats in our strained necks,
watch the rise of breath, catch its fall
in the hungry mouths of opened palms.
In this gloaming, I will see your smile.

Walk Away

The carpets are skin-thin,
threads lace the holes like stitches.
The sun recedes behind the wrong window,
and scars mar sinks in nicotined inches.

The rooms want to collapse
on the phantom inspirations of ladies
whose magnolia talc still hangs
in the brocade drapes and peeling silk.

I think about the coloreds here before us-
how one winter the foreman came,
whipped that buck Sampson until blood muddied clay
and how he was a tribal prince.

I can see this war, every war-
deconstruction and reconstruction blend
like the burning, the building of continents

and I watch people drift in boats, starve in holds,
continue from cells without bars, without keys-
their ashes silt rivers, their bones lay paths
for those who stumble after.

The earth tilts its head
and I am watching through the walls
as people roam the yard, on into the streets,
the cities, the world-

some are planting rows, blisters on their palms,
or stirring pots with peeled sticks or drinking
shine from brown jugs while they lean back to back
under elm, under oak, under pine-

I watch mothers who beat their children
and fathers who turn away; the brims of their hats
broken above their brows.

I hear lovers whispering and old men rocking
in cane-backed chairs that creak regret,
old women shelling peas, stripping corn,
pouring tomorrows into jars gone as cloudy as their eyes.

Young girls in pleated skirts cha cha to 45's,
and a cowboy rolls his own by an embered circle.
Boys in sailor suits wave from distant bows
while others kiss strangers beneath confetti storms-
victories caught on paper, on film, in concrete and stone.

"If I had me some sugar,
I could make us a fair cake-"
says the woman in the empty kitchen.
The faded sheers stir as if by breath.

Beyond the rooms, through the walls
and frame and rotting insulation-
past the yard and streets and cities
and fields and valleys and seas

are days that come and go without delineation;
shifts of gray to black marked only
by the ones who walk away.

Hush

My sister took piano
when she was twelve
and I was six.

On quiet mornings,
while the house slept
in silent seclusion,
she would float on muted feet
to an elderly upright
that stood in mother's parlor,
and practice Fur Elise
with hushed intensity.

I would sit still and small
in a faraway corner,
eating grapes off the wallpaper
in solemn contentment.

Mindfuck

In the dream
you are naked, pallid
on pale sheet, powerless
and sleep-dead and something's

come to grieve;
sprung from a hitch
beneath your breath,
it winds, insistent shroud-

pressure forces
your thighs, parts a passage
to other worlds and resistance
sticks in your throat

stops the shriek
and then it speaks, says
what you want to hear in your
own voice, slides familar arms

about your waist
and they were never so tight,
never so wrong and you
close your eyes-

feel a need
a greedy suckle at your neck
and you think of high school,
of backseats and blow jobs

and now it thrusts,
presses fear into flame and
you smell cigarettes and popcorn
and your daddy's after shave-

a slick tongue
wraps with yours and pulls,
sucks out secrets like a lover
never did and at once

you taste your
first cock and your first Jack
and every flavor you had forgotten
fills your mouth until regret

spills down your chin
and still it pushes,
strokes that shatter your spine,
nail flesh to fantasy and

now you know,
this is how you want it,
this is how it should have been;
relentless, revered,

rushing up
from the dead spot like revelation-
it splits your seared throat
and you scream

the great primal howl
fuck me, fuck me like it never
meant anything and so it does;
snaking under your skin,

piercing your bones
and it licks the inside of your mind,
feeds on what lies hidden
eats questions you could never ask

and spits the answers
behind your eyes; they gather
in the corners, muddy puddles of doubt
and disregard and when you wake

you'll rub them
and wonder why you can't remember
what it is you can't forget.

A Series Of Janes

I.

Once Upon A Time

Just middle class Jane,
a little on the upperside
of an old story, hanging
by her french tips from
the high end of daddy's
pedestal, she slips and

chips a perfect tooth on
the silent slide down an
ivory prick, pedicured toes
pointed towards pale
redemption. Finding her
feet on shattered streets,

far below the way above,
daddy's princess splits the
past, present now in another
place. She chews her nails,
paints them silver to cover
the scars. Wears a jagged

smile slapped on by secret
hands that itches her dreams
while she sleeps, sips slow gin
from coke cans and strips at
a juke joint on sixty-third to
pay the rent, pay the piper.

And after, she walks home,
counting stars in the way above,
flirting with the man in the moon.

II.

Part-Time Feeds The Kitty

She racks nine-ball
mornings at Bobby's Blue Tip;
just another strip bar,
just another street-
current pit in a series of stops
and she's got a loft,
top of the stairs,
over the stage-
where she shakes tit nights
on the ten to four;
shimmies for the jimmies
in business suits-
they buy rounds in applause,
light cigarettes and check
their reflections on the backs of zippos
always the same faces,
always the same song-
and in the morning
she'll rack balls,
while the old men match each other
drink for shot;
they move lips that never speak,
their silence reminds her of home.

III.

Full-Time Pays The Rent

The graveyard shift rocks
at Master Jack's Porno Emporium,
a blocked concrete coffin that
bleeds florescent sun through
cracks in the green glass front.
Tongues of it lick the sidewalk,
cold trails that shine them in
after dark settles.

Vacuous vampires on a senseless
search for something to suckle,
they flutter the aisles; aimless bats
with track marks and dirty nails
that chitter against the shelves.
Freaks and loners, fags and heads,
even the worn whores with their
nobody's businessmen- they all
see the light and remember warmth.

A blue-black babe with a tit tag
that reads JANE in red letters works
the cash box. She has a vicious pink
scar that puckers her face
from eyebrow to chin. It dances
when she talks, a lurid hoochie-coochie
in sync with her words. But she plays
those suckers like a sideshow susie,

selling hard anal to dykes, straight
to the packers and anything to the Priest
who left his collar in the vestry.
They stare at the floor while she rings
them out, scared to look up and see
the stunner she must have been before
somebody pulled the sharp end of mean
past her smile.

When she hands me my change,
the scar starts to dance,
a slow strip across a scarred counter.
It always follows me home,
waltzing with my silhouette through the streets.

IV.

Down-Time Cleans The Shell

Past a shadowed eye stands
Jane, one-legged. Foot propped
on porcelain ledge, muscles tight
along knuckled curve. She proffers
a spread like a tangled wound,
defiled flesh fills a bone cup.
Hands flutter in ritual circles
beneath the arc, they pull and twist

and now the scourge begins-
cold fingers bury themselves,
beaks of carrion birds at a living thing,
gaining strength on what's left behind.
Lather builds thick; gathers
where skin becomes savage,
secret eater of the dead.

Memory hangs heavy,
falls to spatter on broken tile,
spat wads of rage and reverence.
Jane shifts ruined eyes over a dark shoulder,
black stare of a baleful goddess.
The scar that splits her face burns,
spills fire across an ancient altar-
ignites the feast of continuance.

Dance

Loretta wears an Angela Davis sphere
picked to perfection atop a broad skull,
colored insolence-orange to compliment
her red-bone tone and the white boys love it-
or so they say when they say something at all
to a picayune yeller waiting table for tips;

she saves three months strong to buy
suede kitten heels and a rayon fluted skirt-
fine as anything the white gals sport
down at the legionnaire's hall on Saturday nights,
kicking ankles and hems to black-balled beats;
but she can't go where she can't go so

she dances to echos in the outside lot
while old men pass bottles on benches nailed to brick-
they blink like Lazarus as she bumps and grinds,
their laughter cracks across the gravel
like cartridges jacked into waiting breeches,
cold as a cocking trigger.

This Is How We Do It

We should lie down,
stripped on the floor
of your father's study;
except for our little girl panties,
which we pull aside at the crotches
with deliberate fingers,
our tongues at search
in slow circles of motion-

because this is how we do it;
this is what he sees
when he closes his eyes
and plays at sleep
behind us in his lazy-boy,
while we sit hip to hip,
lip to ear in front of laugh-in;
arms about our waists
like the oldest of friends-

our nipples like rocks
beneath his twitching lids.

After Gods, The Floods

In the hour that I first knew
Jesus built new and improved voids
to measure his levels of devotion,
I called him and we got high
in ways our bodies couldn’t atone.
A portent pressed so close
to the backs of our eyes
all we could see spilled out,
trickled down to our toes buried
in saw-grass swaying like prayer-fans
stapled to popsicle sticks.

I made him black coffee before noon,
Jamaican Blue Mountain, 8.95 a pound
at the strip mall on South Avenue.
His upper lip tried not to crimp,
his hands tried not to shake and I smiled

because my days are cherry days,
mostly. He called me apathetic,
said I drank through a war and slept
through a revolution once.
I know it must be true, I know there was one
because when I wake up after drinking
it feels the same as when I don’t.
He said that he wakes up every morning
and throbs and sometimes, so do I;
but I know they are not the same aches,
so when he said that I set my face
and pretended to look empathetic

when all I really want is winter-
the time back spent in an unfinished attic
with Rachel, our lips ringed with her mother's
kosher salt and drinking margaritas;
our grace unlaced, a white flag shaped
like a pillowcase defining our surrender,
our silhouettes blushed behind the pulled shade.

Return

Going back
Duluth’s dull skyline
draws out of view;
I follow other nomads,
trailing patterns but not
as the crow flies-
roads loom up, rushes of recollect
pocked and scarred as the blacktop.

Remember in seventy-three
how we came this way,
racing a phone call, retreads flapping
on your piece-of-shit Nova;
Sissy picked us up
at that one-pump station
broke-down and busted a day short
of Birmingham and remember
how she cried when she saw us-
then drove every mile back
mute as the familiar ghosts slapping
our staring faces through the windshield

Can you see us
standing scrubbed and shiny-necked,
pulling at our clip-on ties
beneath the arc of an elm;
that one whose trunk sissy painted white
the year the termites swarmed-

remember how we spent whole days
scraping dirt hard-packed around its roots,
squatting until our knees grew numb,
digging holes to China
we would never finish
but somebody did-

dug a cavity
while we were forgetting;
scooped petrified earth without
bending the spoon and remember
how ma rocked on the crumbling edge,
wearing that navy dress
the one we would bury her in
on a bright Sunday afternoon,
can you hear her screams-
swooping and diving, tangling
at last in the branches
like blind birds

Remember that morning
how you stayed and I left,
because you said the road had come
too far back and China had gotten too close-
so miles became time
minutes patterned into days into years
waiting, listening for the ring
listen; can you remember,
did you know then
what I couldn’t forget-

that I would always answer,
that I would always be the one
coming back.

From My Window

A girl sits everyday
on the 10th floor ledge
of a building that faces mine.
From my window I look down;
watch as she contemplates something
or nothing- feet angled towards our street,
ankles crossed above heads that never look up.

Her name could be Jenny,
Alice or Ruth; but I name her Jane
under breath that catches each positional shift,
anonymous doe caught between ricochets
of afternoon glare; its whisper-licks blend
gray shadows into ghosts against the stone.

I wonder if she reads
confessional poets- lonely masturbator
waking in the blue, looking for Bedlam
with a howl picking locks in her throat or does
she want to eat the world like Plath ate her daddy;
in sucking gulps of oblivion and I wonder
if she knows I'm here, does she know I see

everyday the bow of head,
the shape of hands folded in a spare lap;
will she sense my regret should the hands snap
and plummet, grabbing for rungs on rising air
while currents turn the pages backward-
does she know they will leave no riddle exposed;
only hair and bone and the ache at the root of my tongue-


Nods to Sexton, Lowell, Ginsburg and Plath.

Outside The Angelica Theatre

I. Nothing Personal

There's a dead girl
splayed out on South street;
the slit-tit-to-twat reflex
of some human situation left to gel on the drag-
filleted in fuck-me rags with scream-pink thongs
yanked to dangle from an ankle
like the sex-crime victim in a Russ Meyer flick

but that's not Shari Eubank
face-up in technicolor,
mudhoney hair clotted to a curb;
just another vixen caught without her bad-bitch suit
when something smiled too long, stood too close-
kissed and told us all
what really happens when the movie's over.

II. While The Movie Played

Watch.
Closer than
this; lash to lid-

questions bead
on skin and something
answers:

nothing personal.

Just circumstance
caught without pomp
outside the angelica-

no resistance,
no matter.

Listen.
Harder than
that; lip to lobe-

something sniggers
it's all going to end,
nothing's everafter-

nothing personal.

Pandora's Box

Pandora keeps her box locked,
tattooed temptation on a warm
canvas, indelible by design.

Simple strikes in basic black,
shut the lid on a dim back alley,
secrets drawn in delicate detail.

Kitty kitty purrs across french tips,
mortal babe with an angel face
blows inquisitive kisses; curiosity

dances in the tilt of her glance,
kills quick the tom that rasps at her lock
with the flat of a sandpaper tongue.

I Am Not

I am not an artist because
Julie smokes Marlboros.
She wears a cherry jumper and cherry shoes,
a ghost sweater and ghost stockings
and carries the box of Marlboros.

Julie, lying on my bed, spills blood and snow
on my raspberry and coconut spread,
smoking.

So I paint the picture.

And the critics say "whatsa matter kid,
you don't got no other crayon
but red?"

I am not an artist because
the strange boy has a fat neck.
He wears the same shirt everyday on the bus.
From the collar grows a neck
wider than his head.

So I split the neck and head on paper,

and the experts say "there ain't no one
looks like that why
dont'cha draw flowers?"

If Julie smoked Salems
the portrait would have been balanced.
The heavy red and white
would have been blown apart
by a mentholated breath of color.

The critics would have said
"This carnival of rainbows combines the
double enjoyment of a striking portrait
and today's pop art."

If the boy, instead of a fat neck,
had been given big, round eyes,
the portrait would be seen as a charming face.

The experts would have said
"This visage expresses the whimsical fantasy
of a child found in an adult's face.
His warm eyes thrill us
with a 'je ne sais quoi' sensation."

I am not an artist
because the critics and the experts
do not understand that truth is beauty
and beauty is truth-


Acknowledgement to J. Keats.

Saints

When air hangs in august trees
like phlegm to dying lungs,
sticky skins thread sullen streets
sweating Red Dog Rye;
old men, young sons piss out their purpose
in vespine knots, mouths full of shit and speculation.
Their spittle leaves pocks in the dirt.

Venerable interceders for God
passing bottles and judgements
behind taprooms festooned with pellitory.
Sunday tongues hum around residual teeth,
hackles rise above the somebody's fault line
and the saints lay down their good books;
gather up tindered principles, traditions like light-wood-

they bank them at the feet of crosses
set to burn in their nieghbor's yards.

When It Rained

I was fourteen, she was twenty something.
She called herself Zza Zza most nights,
a big blonde with Vargas tits and
a bad complexion that began at the bone.

She had a one room walk-up off Sunset strip,
the only window looked out at a billboard
for Evian water. She said it was as close
to the Hollywood sign as she would ever get.

Her hair was dyed the color of champagne clouds,
and she wore a tight black tee that read
"You must have been a beautiful baby"
in warped block letters across her chest.

She would snort giggles and say all the swingers
were just dads in plaid suits; looking for lost
years under strange petticoats, warming
cold regret with Mastercard and Jack.

She knew things that were cool-
like Saki was born in Burma,
if you could make a saxaphone cry
you would never be alone, and you can
roll a decent joint in Tampax sleeves.

And on rainy nights when business was bad,
she would invite me home like company,
give me whiskey and head while Gillespie
played his trumpet in perfect sync.

At The Fruit Stand

I stop by the roadside,
lured by bushel baskets angled seductively
towards traffic; their depths filled with color.

I lift an apple here, prod a cantelope there;
my hands heft a honeydew up so I can see
if too many hands have bruised its yellow skin.
A misspelled sign that reads "Hep Yoursef" waves
above a flat of summer plums gone too soft to sell.

A cardboard box of peaches
sits by itself at the end of the basket row,
the scent of it wafts thick on a scant breeze.
The vendor, a young boy, motions that I take one-
"Try 'er, mister; there's none sweeter..."

So I pick one, its soft fur tickles my palm.
Yellow gone to orange gone to red, ripe for the eating,
it holds the shape of my fingers in its flesh
the way heat-reddened skin holds the blanch.

I bring it to my mouth, feel the soft shell of it pop
under my teeth, a surrender of warm meat and pit.
I bend forward, fruit cupped in my hand- its juice runs
between my fingers, lays like honey on my chin.
I lick them clean, my tongue sweet against my skin-

Should I ever love a woman, it will taste like this.

Looking For Oz

I. Twister

Baby rolls rock-me hips
through the undertow,
twelve moves like twenty down oceanside,
mama's little lure trolls for fish
driving money cars waxed to oily glisters;
the metal skins reflect

bad boys watching from tattoo fronts
with hard eyes, hooked fingers scratching
thoughts bulged at their crotches;
they spit laughter at sharks
looming up behind tinted glass and

baby strokes this school-
cherry red bait in a feeding pool,
looks like daddy's got an angler;
she snaps her ass at beasts
cruising by like sleek nightmares,
the painted scales of bad boys
rippling on the edge of thier wake.


II. We're Not In Kansas Anymore

The glare of neons
splatter on wet concrete,
drops of irridescent rain;
they spread oily rainbows
beneath spiked heels.

Glittering ladies gather
along the yellow safety curb;
soaked and shaking lollipop gals
looking for the great
and powerful Oz
through windshields
sparkling like the Emerald city.

Look Back In Longing

I wait inside while strangers cart boxes through depleted rooms;
my mother's house empty now in fact instead of theory.
Thumbed to the inside of a pantry door, a calender dated 1961
holds watch. Here is the transience of x'ed out days;
I've come to name the ghosts in this sudden unhinging of air.

It's '61 again, and Eddie loses his footing on a low stool
while crepe myrtles bob purple heads outside the window,
leaving a silence, an absence of light beneath a door.
Mother listens to Debussy, La danse de Puck, and does not cry;
I watch the weight draw lazy circles in the dusk of day.
It will be spring in a while; I never wanted to go to Paris.

This is the summer Joan found the husk and bark
of Dylan, threatened to move to Greenwich Village, get a job
pouring coffee at Gerde's Folk City. She named a took-up sooner
Woody, got caught behind Conner's Feed 'n Seed with a boy
who looked a lot like Bob. She disappeared that summer,
"away with an aunt", they said; returned before fall set in,
the arc of EST still visible in the fine hair at her temples.
Afterwards, she was always barefoot, humming behind a frozen smile.

Autumn has come, wind scares up old leaves that tick down in spirals.
"Take a picture of this" says my father; now he hides in the slump
of a stranger photographed beside a pearl-gray sedan, his face
too far away to see the set of his mouth; tight-lipped until
he drank it loose. I smell rain in the swelling dearth of sky.
I am not like him, all flesh and hollow bone. He speaks in loud tones
of the nigger allowed on his crosstown bus, reason enough, he says,
for the Buick. The camera doesn't record the stink of his breath.

It is winter. I have carried the cold in from the outside.
The movers are done, their trucks packed and idling at the curb;
exhaust curls from their pipes and dissolves as I watch them pull away.
I think of whatever it is that looks back in longing, how the hibiscus
still blooms in February and my God, it's been years since I've seen snow.

Words

Intent on a clutter of college ruled,
absorbed in ink and smudges of thought,
I never noticed her in the doorway,
hopeful in a hopeless red dress-

write this down, she said;

write this down so you'll listen,
so you'll hear what I got to say
the same way I hear you when you put in words
the flat of this dismal sky;
it makes me feel damp on my skin,
taste lonely at the back of my throat

and I know you think I don't know much
about words, or just how them words
make you happy when nothing else can,
but I understand well enough, I get it
when I read "nothing grows here but water"

so write this down, and listen:

I want to live out loud;
I want to be more than what I am,
I want to sit in one of them outside cafe's
sipping mint juleps like ladies do in Atlanta;
I want to wear my hair up in curls, silk on my back,
smell anything besides magnolia and tobacco and dirt-

I need to tell my daddy
that the best look at God is from hell,
not a pulpit and I need to let my momma see
what she closed her eyes to at night;
I need to learn how to cry and remember
that tears is just so much salty water.
I have to chip out what's been covered in stone.

I want to read on them pages someday
that maybe I was special; that you noticed
how I held you, your sap still on my hands,
while you twisted uneasy in sleep.
Let me see it put down that you thought I was pretty,
hair the color of honey off the comb, skin like butter.
Paint me in a poem that will find its way out of here-

She caught her breath with a hitch,
a sound so small that I bent to catch it.
Her fingers fluttered, familiar against her neck;
she turned, walked away without another word-
her talc lingered long after she'd gone.

Transition

This is how it happened:

It's 1964, John F. Kennedy has been dead
a year and two weeks come Monday
and here I am, laid up in some bar
so dive I'm shooting mescal in dixie cups

listening to Clifford Brown blow
his brilliant trumpet through speakers
that crack and bleed and now there's a girl
on the stool next to mine; she wears

a flesh-colored sweater like it's skin,
tells me she's from downstate somewhere without
me asking and now she's brushing her tits
against my arm, talking about jazz and Benny Waters

and don't I just love a good sax when it rains;
then we're outside, steam lifting from the concrete
because it has rained, been raining all day and next
thing I know, she's peeling off the skin-toned

sweater in a ten dollar room while I untie my shoes,
wonder if she's going to taste like the Camels
she's been burning all night and she does;
but it's alright, it's ok, because it might not be

good sax but it's a decent lay for a thursday night
and somewhere between the push and the grind and
the sweat-wet valleys I am transformed; jolted out
of time, yanked up and carried away just like that

magic bullet yanked JFK from his black continental,
his ideas strewn across a pink chenille suit-
no transition, no time to bide, no reflections
in a half-shut eye; just the taste of smoke then

I am here.
Someplace else.
Dislocated.

It's 1966, John F. Kennedy has been dead
forever, fucked over by a Texan and here I am;
sacked out in some bamboo bar, drinking ruou from
a tin cup while women shred dog meat in a back room.

Incident

He was a small man
made to seem tall by a two button pinstripe
and a chevron tie, all in muted shades
of classic grey; bottom button undone

of course-

reclined against the polished pearl door
of a buisnessman's sedan, he tapped
a black Bostonian against the curb with
an impatient rhythm and his socks were

ribbed, certainly-

he drew two cards from a leather tri-fold,
passed them with manicured hands to a big man
in a cheap suit and wondered loudly what the matter
was; it was clearly not his fault

how could it be

when anyone with a good eye that happened
to be on the corner of South and Main
at the particular moment of the incident could see
that the signal was, of course it was

in his favor

and he wanted to know why yellow tape was being
strung, why photos were being taken and why weren't
the medics allowed to bag it up, get it off the street
before it offended the ladies who lunched al fresco

after all

it was only a little nigger
that thought he could break the law, beat the light
anytime he wanted because everyone knows that they
think they own the road and besides, he would only have

grown up to be a Democrat.

Buddah Theory

Asked what he was,
Buddha replied "I am awake."

I sleep, I don't sleep.
This morning, I search for a headache
because that pain would be an equalizer.
I watch cigarettes, I smoke the weather;
Sidharta watches from his shelf,
a cold ceramic face that never moves.
He oversees the pull of necessity,
then the slow push of nirvana.
I know that all night, he has watched
the water trouble and turn.

Once, in a physics class,
I explained to a professor, in his language,
that G times EM into I was theoretically nothing
to a theoretic me; that I was just a microbe
whose outcome was probable- a vibration
through fluid, a string of membrane stretched
across the light of everything.
The professor had tapped his meerschaum
against his heel and told me that the space
for my grade was to small for him to identify.

This afternoon, I lay
on a plush red divan in the back room
of a store-front posed as a fish market
and let a vietnamese woman massage my thighs;
she pressed her breasts against my theoretical knees
with each fluid stroke of her hands.
I watched in a mirror hung above our spot,
tried to convince myself of its reflective nature.
I turned my head to avoid myself,
but Buddha was there, perched on the sill,
his gold face painted with a smile.

I just settled back into red,
a constant relative in my fixed background,
and wondered if he smirks like that
while the water rushes its angry banks.

The Bullshit Chronicles, Chapter 1

Still-black dawn cracks
over dove country-

staccato shots rip me from sleep
as they rip breath from flight;
rude alarms without faces.

Light brings the neighbors' girl
to roost in a fall field-
arms full of the plastic lives
of several dolls with neoprene skin.

Her tinny voice trills across
my coffee, the forgotten words
of some long ago song-

"On the wings of a snow white dove-"

It shudders behind my eyes,
the goose-fleshed imprints linger all day.

End of day finds her
at the edge of my yard;
scuffed hands cupped around a dead bird.

She offers it like truth-
quick, free of fanfare.

"Bullshit," she says, nodding her head
to some secret agreement.
"The wings are just grey, after all."

Dedication To A Woman I Never Knew

Long afternoon ago, cold-
the freezing kind.
Sleet builds neighborhoods
on stark slopes of snow.

You are there,
throwing our toast to winter visitors;
ice-sculpted Diana in a cranberry skirt,
spilling blood across the landscape-

You hang on the corner of my vision
like a tear.

Burn

She shook off Caliente
one strangled afternoon
in a perfect gnash of gears;
a dirt burg south of Bakersfield
so hot Hell shunned membership
and so did she; flipped a fed-up

finger at the Mediterranean Cafe,
dried-out dive where simple sallies
ply pussy for promise and warm mescal;
they snickered behind spidery hands
as she played her crafty ass flush

on that final fuck-all score
and when the heat rose like fetid smog
she yanked it loose; scorched sand
with a stripped-down skyline
painted horizon blue and raced the devil
to Babylon in a fifty-nine Ford.

All That Is Left

It fit in a box,
all that was left.

Combustive currents caught cold
in cardboard four by four;
culmination gifted in plain brown wrapper.

The dead came into the night kitchen,
sat it on the checkered table with a note
that read "fuck you" in cha cha cherry red,
color of lips and blood and battle and

steel wills attract, iron heads repel;
forgotten purpose polarized,
fried in the collision of charged particles,
finally elevated above the beast and now

it sits contained; corrugated sides suck in,
push out; the steady breath of something huge,
eternal pulse which has not died and still so small

it fits in a box,
all that is left.

Chronology

I.

Day fades out, folds in-
minutes run their hands through the hours,
tangle themselves in weeks and months
like the slow grip of Kudzu twines
the passing of time around the river cypress.

Barn swallows raise their wings
against a sky angry with the roil of early rain.
They dance spirals on a gray backdrop-
ballerinas dressed in browns and russett,
their choreography follows remembered winds.

The river kisses its banks with slow pleasure.
It slides against stone and branch
like the track of a blacksnake through warm rows;
only shadows mark their passage.

II.

Colored women form a ribbon on the shelved bank-
their hands fly in rhythm as they clean fish.
Irridescent scales shimmer the earth at their feet,
float atop dark water like bits of prism.
They slip entrails beneath the surface to feed continuance.

Children pop-the-whip through young corn.
They rustle the stalks with a breeze of laughter,
frighten the snake from its basking row.
In the near distance, a dog howls his exclusion-
swallows in their cribs dip towards the sound.

An old man naps in the shade of an oak,
back pillowed against its kudzu-wrapped trunk.
Clover bees churr their approval at the still of sleep;
they waft in drifting circles around his shoulders.

III.

Night draws in, pulls out-
it recedes across fields and canopies in spectrums of blue.
Swallows wake in the eaves, barn cats stretch
in the slow rift of day; their backs bowed in tight arcs.
Along ditch and fence, queen anne lifts her lacy heads.

Migrants jump from flatbeds onto acres of disced earth.
They glean until dusk, carry baskets balanced on their heads.
At noon they squat in bright groups among the rows,
eat cold rice and pork from paper sacks.
Afterwards, they tuck the folded bags under their hats.

A woman in a red kerchief pins sheets to a line
strung between the span of two young oaks.
She slaps them smooth with the flats of her hands,
their sharp cracks scatter squirrels from branch to branch.

IV.

Day ends, night begins-
The river calls turtles from rock cooled with dusk.
Swallows tuck beaks to breast, the silver spruce
curls its leaves against the moon. Beneath a porch,
a dog chases rabbits through the twitch of dreams.

Mothers smoke at open windows and watch while
children follow fireflies on their uneven dance,
capture the glow in jars with punctured lids.
Their laughter bells beyond where wood meets bank,
its whisper rides ripples across the black water.

Old men sit under cypress canopies at river's edge,
their faces dim in the spill of lanterns.
Empty milk jugs tied to cane-lines bob the surface;
they pass bottles and wait for time to pull them under.

Ode

I remember what they said
when we were not drunk,
or propping stools against
the same bar or even packing
our blunts in the same state
and speaking of states; in which
do their respective minds reside?

Pot-bellied pretender, moonstruck magpie;
throwing tilts in eliptical orbits,
barking edicts in stilted rants,
they long to eat the world and can't-

only lettershapers, after all;
pointless pitons planted in argot,
they fall backwards off their own shoulders-
spilling vowels and consonants
from stuffed shirts and padded push-ups;
words without sentences hunt the air
between them at a loss for thought
and conversation brings us to this wasted place;

everything else being extinct
when we were not drunk,
propped against different bars,
stoned in other time-zones-
I remember what they said.

Stand

Enter the unhallowed age.
Life's hands mold humanity
but the strokes are no longer gentle-

Shoulder shruggers blind eye
viral advocates of like disguise,
a little dead in thier concern.
Abhorrent creatures play
within skins of normalcy;
they share the secrets of madness.

Deus ex flying machinas
caught the corner of a collective eye,
ripped it down in flaps of disbelief.
Countless selves form single a sensation,
bat frantic wings against a broken globe.

Sacrifice shapes continuance.
Blood-stained breasts succor the unsurrendered.
Strength spills down spines bent, but unbowed-
They stand, and raise flags towards the storm.

Wars And Rumors Of

Hunched like dogs mid-shit,
faces flooded contusion blue,
we quiver before the corpse-lights;
slaver over designer drones whose digital tongues
flap static louder than our intellects-

they spew sang-froid emesis
across the collective floor,
stroke our heads, pat our asses by invitation;
they sing us lies and lullabies but
we know the ice age cometh:

it taps a salvo against the convex eye,
puts an antedate ear to our bowels and
listens to the rumblings within.

It Comes Down To Beans

I sip my joe,
-not french roast-
now it's columbian blends
with my freedom toast; then I recall
that Juan sells more than beans-
futility smells like coffee.

I spread my toast
while I watch CNN,
or the local news-MSNBC if it's LIVE-
everyone accounts a common story
with alternate takes on the end.
Inbetween bites, over sips I learn

the world has turned
orange as I slept;
lines have been dug in sand,
last cards dealt in dead-men's hands-
unconcious notes on my sports page
make me wonder who will be left to read
the memoirs of a post-humous poet.

Day 5 Becomes Blue

I.

On a clear day, you can hear forever.

Architect birds, tucked beneath eaves,
dismantle their winter homes.
Each tugged twig, every plucked leaf
resounds against the still of morning.

The Crepe Myrtles drop finished blossoms
on the tin roof of a tumbled shed.
Their blood escapes, a whispered hiss,
indigo stains mark rites of passage.

A limb falls somewhere in the treeline,
it whistles its descent through tangled teeth;
the dive of a god jumping for pleasure
into drifts of deadwood.

II.

Angles of perception shift with the fog.

A strange sun cuts unfamiliar paths
through the Iris banked beside the fence rail.
It prisms between lavender, pink, yellow;
cups fragile petals with a lover's hands.

June bugs, early for their season, move
in perfect tracks of two across river stone,
the hard shells of their backs glisten;
irridescent oil slicks dancing on granite.

The face of dusk becomes blue.
Pulls its shade in time-lapsed seconds
across the dimming panes of day, a draw
that deepens cobalt to navy to black.

III.

The heart of night is a lonely hunter.

Black-hulled pecans tap their nails
on cedar planks that guard the walls;
they beg invite, hide calling cards
in shadowed piles beneath the whipgrass.

Wood gods play tag along sleep's perimiter.
They rustle through Pine, Elm, and Oak on feet
sprung from root, branch, and bark; their laughter
sings under sills on a mid-spring's dream.

A mosquitoe dips and darts in darkened rooms,
hovers above the sweat of an uneasy sleep.
It hums accompaniment with staccato pulses,
a persistant scratch stalking a restless itch.

Tattooed Thoughts

Someone asked me today what 'Blue Tattoo' meant and why I chose it as a tag name for my now defunct BlueTattoo blog. Well, for millions it means identification; stamped on wrists and forearms by some long-ago hatred. It's countless bad images and forgotten names forever etched onto skins by home-made artists; they fade and warp as time goes by. It's a book of poems by Lynn Lifshin...'The Blue Tattoo'. Pretty good ones, too. But for me, it's a cool image of a tattoo parlor that I found...I just like the sound of it. It's a start-over, a second chance, it's the wrinkle that my time can't forget. It's my own warp 'n fade, my personal two-step, my sideways shuffle. It's what my life FEELS like most days...a faded, homemade tattoo that isn't quite what it used to be; isn't the beautiful thing it looked like thirty years ago under bad flourescent lights. It's just a few crooked lines wrapped around a foolish idiom that no longer rings true.

But it's mine, and I love it, in the twisted way you love the scar you got in some bar fight back in the day; the way you love a bad toothache because it reminds you that you can still feel...even if it's only pain. I love it because it won't go away, it's as faithful as a whipped puppy. Every now and then I trace it's face with my finger and wonder where the cobalt went, wonder when the ink clouded into slate...was it the year mama died, or did it happen somewhere in Haiphong while I was busy looking for trip wires? Maybe it was a gradual thing, and I only noticed when someone pointed it out. Maybe it's MY identification, a symbol of self-hatred that I'm not qualified or ready to sort out, that I'm not ready to forget.

So I'll stay up late tonight and find tattoo flash on the net. I'll stare at all the skin art and prehaps pick out a new one to grace my falling flesh...something to remember me by. A vivid dust of color to cover my own faded shade of pale. It'll make me feel young again; bring back memories of when I didn't care and thought I never would. A celtic cross, a rose dagger, a sacred heart with my name across it's apex...or maybe just a zipper down my chest to remind me how easily some things open.

But I'll probably just get drunk, instead.

To Dream Of Byzantine

She admired Byzantine architecture,
having studied it one long ago summer
under a young professor whose ancestors
lived and died in Crete; he had carried
in his suit pocket a Justinian coin
that he claimed was real though it bore no date.

She bends brass and copper wire
into facsimiles of the Hippodrome,
of Hagia Sophia; when time allows she
sculpts the Theodosian Walls from toothpicks
and hides her face behind their structure.

On days when clouds bank the sun,
she fashions a toga from a lilac sheet,
dances circles around the courtyard;
the empress Theodora in scuffed sneakers
and a wreath of yellow pansies for a crown.

Neighborhood boys sometimes toss tomatoes
plucked from their mother's gardens-
those that do not burst into ripe flowers
across lilac and brick she gathers up;
leaves in a woven basket outside the gate
for the mailman or the milkman to enjoy.

She kneels every night on her polished floor,
carefully glues colored glass and stone and tile
into complex patterns that grow
from the baseboards in widening arcs.
She has a cat named Constantinople
who watches the process with indifference.

When she sleeps she dreams of San Vitale,
of mosaics and obelisks and reflected light.

On Sweetgum And Faith

I hold my faith in my hands.

Steady, they clip the straps that hold
the sweetgum straight against its stake.
Now, it bows only to drop seed to fertile earth.

An ovenbird cocks her tail, watches me
from her canopy perch, close and unimpressed.

I spread my fingers, let thin rawhides fly;
morning will find them bunting for her bed.

Tiny scars cross the backs of my hands,
their fretwork remembers years long buried.
I trace them in the dusk of memory.

I open my palms; gods that never answered
drift through the cracks, ashes on a scant breeze.
Behind me, the ovenbird trundles her nest.

Quiet. The dead are tolling their bells.

Canadian Club And End Results

Down my road a piece or three
lived an ex-pat named George,
who worked the CSX freighters
after he washed up in Charleston
where he discovered his age was measured
in gypsum and sweat, and his trouble
with money lost its punch somewhere
around the sixth double of Canadian Club.

He had a woman called Mac,
a blousy low-lander with a gift for gab
who washed his clothes and sometimes
floated his rent; but he put up with her lip,
he said, "because she's a fair throw
for a broke horse" and then he would laugh
open-mouthed, his teeth as yellow as his skin.

and he had a fascination with guns
that he showed me when I happened by;
an old Enfield
a 45 Magnum and a Colt
a semi-carbine with a strap
and boxes and cartons full of ammunition
"in case those mushrooms ever bloom"
he would say, his eyes wild and glaring
while he sipped his Club and misfortune
like ladies sip tea on hot afternoons.

It all resulted in a shot one morning
that pierced the still of the March air
and made the barn swallows fly off
towards the Atlantic ports
where he had been young once.

My Interview With Orson (Thank You, Joe Green)

Orson: “No one in film has ever had such talent, such energy, such innate depth. But he had made a film that ensured his career’s end, and he had done it all so that the films grim portrait of solitude would be fulfilled.”

Hello, this is Orson Welles. I was just reading one of my many biographies. Really… I don’t know if I believe that last sentence.

In any case…

(MUSIC: SPANISH THEME SONG ["NO MORE," A TANGO]... FADES)

Orson: We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's, and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small, spinning fragment of solar driftwood which, by chance or design, man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space.

Which reminds me that we are here tonight to discuss poetry. Blue Tattoo, welcome.

Blue Tattoo (BT): Thank you, Mr. Welles. It's my great pleasure to be here.

Orson: Let me start with this poem.

What Frank Knew

She pauses on the rim
of the sleeping desert,
lights a sweet caporal
with a boot-struck match,
shadowed face floating behind
the arc of a blue diamond

and suddenly she's Ava,
backwoods beauty stolen
from an old movie, playing
a sultry scene in sweat-wet khaki
beneath a California moon,
swaying to forgotten strains

of silent music that tickles
my memory, tighten my senses
and now she turns-
turning to smile at me dark-haired
and dangerous and all at once
I recognize the pull, fall

under the hard draw
of a sucking tide and I am
swallowed, sluiced down a perfect
throat like the perfect shot and
I understand, same as Frank did,
the nature of certain addictions.



Let me tell you – this is perfect of its kind. Wonderful. How did you come to write it?

BT: Well, Mr. Welles, this poem is actually rooted in fact. Even though I reside nowhere near a desert, sleeping or otherwise, there IS a vacant lot behind the hospital I frequent that could pass for a desert; especially now that the streetlights that face it have been broken out and it's been put in the dark. Unless, of course, there's a moon hanging around...but, back to the facts. There's this ER doc that I was spooning a while ago, even though such pairings are strictly frowned upon (I'm a Paramedic, and we are NOT supposed to fraternize with the higher-ups), but I became enamored, actually, addicted is a much more apt term, and I managed to talk her into a couple or three smoke breaks in the aforementioned vacant lot. She carried pack matches from the commissary, and smoked Luckies, but the Blue Diamonds were easy enough to imagine...and my pop smoked Sweet Caporals; I still remember the heavy smell of them. This particular doc had long, very brunette hair and hooded eyes, and being from Mississippi, a drawl that could melt butter. Being a HUGE Ava fan (those lips, those ELBOWS), all it took was a strike and a turn.

Orson: I knew Ava, of course. Did you know that Rita Hayworth and I planned to build right there at Nepenthe down Highway 1 from Carmel? I mention this because, under the aspect of Eternity I saw, perhaps two of your mortal years ago, two of the fellows who are here at the Jeunesse Doree as they sat on the deck of the restaurant “Nepenthe” sipping fine ale and always reflecting on that name as great crows or ravens harried them trying to catch their attention just long enough to signify something. The crows or ravens failed. Instead they persisted in laughing over their own limericks. They were the Lonliest Ranger and Samson Shillitoe and Mr. Shillitoe, when you posted this poem a few days ago, gave the right and inevitable reaction.

I couldn’t have said it better. But (and I hope you agree with what Samson wrote) and looking at poem yourself…how do you think it works in this way, what happens in the poem to do just what Samson says it does? And please remember to not let modesty restrain you. The poem is there.

BT: Nepenthe...I know it well. The opiate's dream, Homer's remedy for grief; mecca of poets, artists, and vagabonds. Carved right out of the cliffs, isn't it? Lovely place, smelling of salt and redwood and oak. I have a friend who lives in Esalen; I visited the Henry Miller museum once. And of course, there is Big Sur; which I think has become woefully...well, commercialized. Full of re-habitants. I agree that the restaurant is a wonder; I had an ambrosia burger there in '74, back when I was younger and had a little change to spend. Their merlot is excellent, if I recall correctly.
But I do run on...back to your question. I was honored by Mr. Shilitoe's response, thrilled, actually. For me, it was that turning...it really DID push the sun away (had there been one; there wasn't). When she turned, her hands cupped around her match, it lit her face from beneath her chin; it pulled her aspect into something breathtaking...I hate that word, but in this case, it's apropos...and pulled me with it. That's the moment that my 'addiction' to this woman began; I could'nt get enough. Ava came almost immediately to mind; particularly Mogambo, which I had seen just the night before. What I think happens in this poem is strictly animal; that guttural attraction that can occur at certain moments, welcome or no. It's sensory, olfactory, visceral. Ask Frank, he'll tell you.

Orson: Look at the transition from the first to the second verse:

She pauses on the rim
of the sleeping desert,
lights a sweet caporal
with a boot-struck match,
shadowed face floating behind
the arc of a blue diamond

and suddenly she's Ava,

What a wonderful effect. Of a sudden the flame..and what I love about it is just how cinematic it is. The poem is incredibly visual with of course just what is also there in my movies: light and shadow and then blue diamond which is hot damn just what is needed as a star is born. What I mean is… you have a scene and somehow there is so much more there: the fineness of, of course, just that sort of cigarette, the scene sketched as if seen from some starry perspective as she pauses on the rim of the desert, the close up of the “boot-struck” match, the exact sense of the shadow with all of its implications and then that blue diamond (Blue Diamond matches, of course but the twin senses of star) and then the poem illuminated by a suddenness as the unnamed “she” becomes Ava – the humor and the throat catching revelation of the goddess all at once.

Yes. If you can… would you tell us what you think was happening just then when you wrote those lines?

BT: I can tell you exactly what was happening; again with the turning, the hooding of that face that by now, wasn't the doc's face at all...it was Ava. It physically tugged the muscles in my belly, made me as light-headed as a good dose of opium. I was literally 'rendered speechless'...I remember dropping my own smoke and how throaty her laughter was when she noticed my awkward behavior. I was instantly in love...an emotion uncommon to me...and though it faded as soon as the sodium lights of the parking lot hit us; l can still remember that turning....

I could spend the rest of our interview on this poem. Look …just this:

…I am
swallowed, sluiced down a perfect
throat like the perfect shot

with its perfect use of “sluiced with the exact shadowings and then the startling effect of “perfect” throat and the hammering of perfect yet again…

So, it’s inevitable… I want to know who you are. Who are you? Please feel free to make anything up. I did. It’s a mark of greatness. Although at times it did seem as if I really had been a bullfighter in Spain at 15.

BT: Who am I? Now there's a question. I guess, to quote a sailor man, I am what I am. I'm female, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool dyke, I abhor all those 'lipstick lezzies' that always smell like bubblegum. I ran away from my oh-so-genteel southern folks at 15 and joined the armed forces as a medic; in those days, women stayed pretty much in the MASH tents with little sight of actual combat...but I managed to land a gig on a medivac as a flight nurse. I miss it. My family disowned me when they found out I was gay; I was likewise excommunicated from their Catholic church; a thing I find really amusing in light of today's rampant collarly pedophilia.
I became a paramedic because I'm a trauma junkie; I live in a redneck, backwards town in the dismal swamps of Carolina, and I own three blue-tic hounds and a red-bone yard dog. I live alone, I hunt to relax, and I find censorship a crime punishable by death. My favorite album (yes, album) is Holiday's 'Jazz 'round midnight', and I'm secretly in love with Lenny Bruce. I'm a morphine junkie but I'm trying to quit...and I love chocolate necco wafers. And I write because I can't NOT write...if that makes sense to anyone but me.

Orson: May we discuss this poem?

Blue on Blue

3:16 AM, emergency entrance, county general-
I was propped against the rear doors of a rig
parked in Bay 5, close to where the docs smoke
with cigarettes tucked behind their palms,
furtive anarchists flicking ash at the don't-do-that sign
while people shift back and forth around them
and I was thinking about this tweaker kid
we brought in on a dead run; skull a cracked vault,
his secrets betrayed on the floor beneath my boots

I was thinking about how he wouldn't
stop breathing; how the noise of anatomy
dogged collapsed lines in fibrillating waves

I was thinking about a girl in a dirty blue skirt
sitting on a curb with his blood on her knees,
how her face pulled away in the rear-view like a scream

I was thinking about how an intern
with two silver loops in his ear hummed 'Blue on Blue'
under his breath as we gave our report to a nurse

I thought about these things
I watched the guards watch me
I didn't clean any secrets from the rig
I did sit down on the step plate
I picked at the wick of my zippo
I whistled the intern's song

somewhere behind me
a girl with bloody knees sits on a curb
pulling threads from the hem of a cheap skirt.



Orson: So, I’m thinking that this poem is a poem about something that actually happened, or something written from this and that that actually happened. True?
Can you tell us about it? And what is a “tweaker?”

BT: Yes, it's true...this was an actual event. Just one of the many tweakers I pick up in the course of a shift; a tweaker being a methamphetamine addict. Meth labs are a HUGE problem in my area. This particular kid was about seventeen; he was cranked up on his buy and got himself run over by a car while attempting to cross a major highway. He was a mess, never had a chance; but we worked out on him anyway. The memory of that scene that is most clear was the girl; I happened to look up as my partner pulled away and she was sitting just like that on the curb. It struck me as inevitably sad. He would'nt die, never lost his rhythm while I had him...and he should have. He died later in the OR. The nurse whistled the entire time I was trying to give my report; he really did'nt give a shit and I was bothered that I did. I can't listen to 'Blue on Blue' anymore without thinking about that girl sitting on that curb; and sometimes I find myself humming it at inopportune moments. Funny, the things that stick.

Orson: It’s a fine poem. May we, for an instant, move away from the poem just there to where the poem came from? What I mean is this…every time I read poems by a certain sort of true poet (more or less every poet who remains somewhat within my ken…unlike Shakespeare or Dante for example who seem to create as God and who am I to try to
describe the universe?) I feel there are certain pressures or let’s say wants behind the poem…and I wish I could name them. What do you want your poems to do? What yearning is behind them? Or…what dark materials?

BT: I guess, Mr. Welles, I just want my poems to remember, to serve as some sort of marker for a whole lot of things I can't forget. It's nothing I can really pin down, and after all my years of sitting up with the dead, I find myself mostly numb. But every once in a while, a thing will jar me...like the girl on the curb. She was nothing; just another crack ho who's probably dead now herself, but in that frozen instant she was something indefinable, something incredibly important if only to me and the dead boy; something worthy of note. So I did, note it, that is...and I guess that's all I want my poems to do, just remember what most folks forget. The materials are nothing more than my life...I write only what I know.

Orson: Maybe this is the same as the question I just asked. What would you want your poetry to do that it doesn’t do? Which of your poems come closest to doing what you would like?

BT: Lets see...I would like my poems to be taken seriously. Let me explain that; almost everyone who reads my stuff dismisses it as 'shock' trash, poetry that's meant to awe people simply by way of the language I use and the subject matter entailed. But I don't do it on purpose; what most people never take the time to find out is that the language is MY language; the subjects are MY experiences; and it is troublesome to me when it's dismissed as nothing more than words meant to elicit response by some deliberate use of certain words and scenes. Maybe that's sort of vain, but it's a worry spot. My very favorite poem of my own (and I don't have many) has to be 'View From A Flying Jimmy'. It's the one that outlines the start of my every workday in precise and exact detail. It's almost like a diary entry...and because of that, I like it best.


Orson: Here’s another fine poem:

Olongapo Night

She lay still, taut on the bed,
and watched as a fat spider
with spindly legs like eyelashes,
danced at the end of an unseen line.

It hung from a topmost corner
of the raftered ceiling,
its slight, somehow lewd sway
cast eerie marionette shadows
that grew long and slunk away
along the muted eggshell walls.

She pulled the thin cover to her chin,
stared at it frightened, yet seduced.
A chill like a creeping fog spread through
the walls of her belly in thick layers.

The spider swung itself upon a beam,
and perched in an awful, knowing attitude.
It regarded her in silent anticipation,
seemed to wave in secret conspiracy.
It skittered in sudden decision across the wood,
then vanished off the edge of her perception.

She thought without effort of the Buso,
Mananangal of long forgotten nightmares,
and waited in puddles of cold sweat
for the sweet feast to begin.


Dear God, don’t you wish that the hypothetical intelligent reader were not hypothetical?.
Who has read this – did anyone ever tell you that they knew where Olongapo is or what the Buso or “Mananangal of long forgotten nightmares,” are?

BT: HaHa!! Almost everyone who has ever commented on this poem hates it. I've been told it doesn't ring true, that it's a made-up place, that it's all just fairy tale bullshit. One guy over at PFFA told me that it was long on adjectives and horribly short on form, whatever the hell THAT meant. The actual root of this piece is simple: my father was in the navy during WWII, and fought in the pacific theatre during the battle of Leyte. He was there when Mac Arthur announced "All the phillipines are now liberated". He spent many nights in the city of olongapo. He fell quite in love with the country as well as a Filipina girl named Corazon. When I became an adult and could wrap an adult's mind around his stories that I remembered from my childhood, I understood that had he been born in today's time, he would have left his family for his 'heart'; the phillipines and his much-lamented Corazon. It was from him that I learned of these quite nasty Filipino folk tales, he liked to scare the shit out of me with horrible visions of this flesh-eating monster when I was around eight...and this poem is kind of autobiographical; the girl in the piece is me.

Orson: Olongapo:

“They were the clubs and various entertainment-oriented businesses which welcomed American sailors and Marines to Olongapo City, Philippines. Despite the Navy's dire attempts at "OPSEC," every Filipina in every club and bar knew just when American naval vessels were due to arrive at the adjacent Subic Bay Naval Base. Banners hung over every club entrance with such greetings as "Welcome USS Pelilieu," "Welcome sailors and Marines, USS Blue Ridge."

A visit to Olongapo was special in many ways. To the sailors and Marines not stationed at Subic, it was a chance to get the hell off a ship, into some civies, and into the most exciting town in the Orient. For newbies, this was their chance to experience what had become legendary - a night in Olongapo. For returnees, it was an opportunity to visit old haunts and look for old friends (yes, usually Filipinas). For the bar owners it meant money, and lots of it. And for the Filipinas employed at the various clubs it meant not only income, but often the chance to meet the right guy and, if they were so disposed, to start the move eastward.

There was nothing quite like the excitement servicemen felt at liberty call the first night in Subic. While a few unlucky guys got stuck with Shore Patrol or some other duty, most of the sailors and Marines waited anxiously in line aboard ship for liberty to be sounded. When it happened, hundreds of hungry, thirsty, and incredibly bored men shot off the ship and toward the main gate.

Even before the servicemen made it off the base, Olongapo made its presence known by booming rock music over the gates. Even those new to the base were able to find the front gate by following the thunderous bass radiated by the nearby Playboy and Hot Lips clubs.

Once you made it past the guards at the front gate, you crossed a bridge which spanned a river known simply as the "Shit River." Not a pleasant name, but fairly appropriate given that raw sewage from the town was often dumped into it. Boys in little, flimsy boats beckoned from below the bridge, telling passers-by to throw pesos or centavos into the river. When a coin did get thrown, the boys would dive into the filth and somehow retrieve the coin. The navy eventually tried to discourage this practice by putting a fence along one side of the bridge.”

Does this sort of thing never end?

Now let’s see what else:

“Mananangal – The most feared Filipino creature; also known as wak-wak in the Bisayan dialect. Common people believe the wak-wak is always a woman. Between six or seven o’clock at night this creature finds a secret place near her home. She bends her body down while her legs remain rigid and straight; her hair becomes stiff and nails turn into long sharp claws; her eyes grow bigger and eerily glows; while large bat-like wings protrude from her body echoing the sound “wak-wak-wak” as it flies along. It preys on the livers of the sick and disobedient children who refuse to come indoors at twilight. They are especially fond of developing babies in their mother’s womb; whose blood is sucked by using its tongue as a threadlike proboscis which enters through the mother’s navel. Vigilant eyes, garlic and a pair of scissors or thorny branches should be kept beside a pregnant woman at all times. “

and the Buso another kind of monster.

I love this poem and now it might be illuminated somewhat. The girl waits for the monsters – who is she…just that Filipina who will be used in the usual ways by the usual monsters..

Did you ever explain this poem to anyone?


BT: I tried to explain to the idiot at PFFA, but he was'nt listening. No one else has ever asked for explanation; they have all simply dismissed it as a worthless crock of over-done imagery. I am very pleased, Mr. Welles, that you know of such places and things.


Orson: Damn that was fun. And what a poem…really. The descriptions exact and, again, shadowing so much.

So, let me close with this. Last of all, is there anything you would like to add?

BT: Yes, Mr. Welles, as a matter of fact there is. I would like to add that I have thoroughly enjoyed my time with you, and it has been my honor to have been the subject of your interest. May I request a tune of the orchestra? Please have them play 'La Comparista'...it reminds me of the wonderful Meridian Room where I first tasted champagne. Good night and adieu, Mr. Welles; and thank you for our time together.

Orson: And now this. As an immortal spirit I charge you to keep writing.
Starry night and you alive alive oh. Until we meet again.

Goodnight America.

In a few moments we will take you to the Princeton Observatory at Princeton, New Jersey.

We return you until then to the music of Ramón Raquello and his orchestra.
(MUSIC: "STARDUST" PLAYS FOR A WHILE, THEN QUICKLY FADES OUT )

We are ready now to take you to the Princeton Observatory at Princeton where Carl Phillips, our commentator, will interview Professor Richard Pierson, famous astronomer. We take you now to Princeton, New Jersey.
(ECHO CHAMBER. SOUND OF TICKING CLOCK.)

On The Way

Hot and humid day,
a twelve pack of Red Seal
pulses my veins as I take photos
of weary Mexicans at the bus stop
and a dead end road that runs into fallen arches
with painted signs that say 'lomas del Pacifico',
a stop off Hwy 200 on the way to Mismaloya.

Drinks at a bar in La Jolla
with sweaty european tourists sad to see the beach
has eroded almost to nothing when just 3 years ago
I played volleyball there with some Argentinians
and rode a slow boat to Yelapa for cold cervezas
then lunched in a place without electricity.

Climb out on the rocks,
take a seat on the ocean floor and drink another beer.
Rain salt-smooth stones into the calm mouth of God.
I think to myself too often, when do I leave?
How long do I sit here, directionless breeze on my nape?
Until I move on, driving with the windows down.

Corte Madera

Summer has fried California,
and the permanent tourists beachside
realize their faults caught up with them years ago.
Old men consider old habits
through dark glasses rimmed with lime.
A two hundred dollar skirt looks twice as rich
on a fifteen-year-old Brazilian girl.

On rented porticoes overlooking stones
and drying grass they sun themselves, smoking.
These delicacies stream the shoreline more
than recurring ocean currents; the smell
of kiwi and coconut oil the shortening shadows.

Bay flags twitch on the wind,
each piece of the puzzle dim behind the screen
has long since been fitted perfectly.

Therapy Session At The Circle K

Don't tell me where I'm going;
you think I'm alone but you can't know
that from time to time, I sleep side by side
with beautiful girls who are afraid of the dark.
Slivers of shine beneath our random doors are never
enough, so we let up the shades of rented rooms,
flood the dead space with the dead glow of commerce.

Tonight it's the Circle K, happy round pearl
ringed in red, looming foot upon foot above the asphalt
of south avenue; everything caught within its ovum
glitters. Whores pass back and forth, showcased at its base;
tiny statues of saints hang from their lobes, depend on ribbons
from their necks; they shimmer like shattered glass.
Beside me balls some beautiful girl, asleep outside her shadow.
Her skin is olive and damp; I think of angels with emerald lips.

It seems just yesterday, I carried tricks
in a tin box covered with rock-star-hip-cats strumming their
air guitars in primary colors. My smile was brilliant, I alone
invented the high gloss of good veneer. In some city somewhere,
buzzcut ladies dance naked in glass boxes, bodies like suede cages.
In my city, dumpsters brood behind the open-all-nights, shelter
refuse from a foregone rain. No one ever told me not to spill
the milk, no one ever said that fight holds consequence too large
to recall. I never knew I was a sinner until the magic failed.

So you guessed it, Doc, I'm bothered by
a little thing or two; I don't sleep like I should, and I've got
a lily busy dying on my ktchen table. It doesn't seem to matter
how I'm aware of how selfish I can be, no one noticed when I ceased
to care. I appreciate your time, but time is a measurement of thought,
and I think too much. Logic is a beautiful girl locked against my dark,
mouth parted in the pretense of sleep; she knows, they know,
I know that I never really loved myself.

Charleston, 1959

We are no longer children
to look back on, our faces turned back
in elegant black and white, hands raised
towards some forgotten goodbye.

I have iced water in a blue glass
and miss the ocean. You, the younger one,
grip time in your fist, lifted
in a toast to our father,
who still fishes summers off Charleston.

Here is the set of things.
To tell you the Sunday after David died,
daddy pulled his lips, folded them
into the sands of his face and ceased to speak.
A stoney silence; the rock crags of a seawall.

To tell you months after he closed himself,
he opened again; put his hand inside
his other hand, brought them to his salted heart,
rubbed them across his driftwood mouth.
"My son David was dragging net for prawns,
in Calabash, where it gets dark early.
My boy is sun and water and blue."

His hands opened; what was held there
swelled, broke apart like whitecaps to a shore.
I placed my fist in his and to my briny lips.

Miles, Millenniums

I tell my father "On our way to the lake,
Uncle John stopped and bought lightning
in a jar from a colored man in Opalaca"
and when he tells me "Alright, then" his face
folds in and tightens and I see him under
the bowed silver birch with leaders in his hands,
their transparent ends knotted with tiny
brass hooks and bright blue and yellow feathers;
the brim of his Redman hat hiding his brow
from the high August sun.

He looks like a photograph I saw once
of a man tying flies beneath the lace-hung
arms of river cypress; but I took no photograph,
because on this day, under that tree,
beneath that sun and in these bones my hands
would not have known where to point or what to take
for the sake of memory; in this place I am twelve.

There is a dog at my feet, or asleep on the steps,
two gunmetal cats watch a family of robins preen
in the shade of eaves; their heads sway in a strange,
imperfect rhythm. The women behind the screened door,
lovely in waisted aprons, are from another time;
a disconnected past that doesn't belong here.

I would give it up to the fireflies, to the cicadas
that sang beneath the bark of digger pines, leaving
shells of themselves behind for fall to find.
I have left it to the black-hulled pecans, to blackberries
strung along a border fence, to the big stones braced
at the bend of the river where beavers built dams
large enough to widen the turn a little every year;
both grown so much smaller now.

I remember, him and I, collapsing here;
once upon a summer knee to knee, a stolen blanket,
a rainbow-heavy creel set to soak against a bank.
Beyond sloped banks, years away, ladies sit behind screens
and fan themselves with their hems, dogs nap,
cats court the notice of birds long flown to dust.
These cypress dripping moss, this river,
those voiceless days with nothing left unsaid.
On this day, in this skin, I am twelve,
and you a shadow beneath the brim of a hat;
a foreknowledge of flyting days,
a fretwork caught in the blue of our viens.

Miles, millenniums, lightning in a jar.

Surrender

I remember smoking joints with you,
stained fingers twisting our hair
in tangled knots, eyes closed,
Hendrix hanging somewhere above
low-slung clouds circling our skulls.
Your body pressed against the wall
nearer the window than mine,
you pull your lips and fire erupts-
your chest struggles, deflates,
surrenders God from your lungs in drifts
that scatter the clouds to ribbon.

I've been cold before, I know
my gooseflesh well. Trading breaths
with you beneath the cracked window,
its panes jitter like loose teeth
every time Jimmy walks his watchtower.
I will sleep in shifts and tonight
I'll sleep without touching you-
already miles between us, a pushing distance
that marks itself in hardwood beneath
a braided rug that smells of ruin.

I watch you, asleep on your back,
knees bent up and ankles in; pidgeon-toed.
Your breath volcanoes up, visable in the chill,
then disappears as if it never was at all.

Snow Stories

Gabcast! Coldest Eel #1

Canning Lessons, 1961

There was a colored woman
who came most summer days
to help my old mam
shell peas or shuck corn
or snap beans for canning.
Every third tuesday
they washed sheets in big tubs,
then hung them to dry
on twine strung between canted poles;
the flat smacks of their hands
carried staccato across the fields.

She had a niece named Sookie
that came along those days;
we would play until our bones hurt
in the fields where old pa's
colored men walked endless rows of tobacco,
popping bright yellow flowers from each plant
with fingers always sticky,
always sore and when the field boss
looked away, they would turn up water
from jute jugs suspended
on straps at their waists.

Sookie and me plucked
fat tobacco worms from their leaves,
saved them in jars with punctured lids;
old pa gave us a nickle for each full jar
because there was nothing
like a greenhorn worm
to attract big cats
cruising the river bottom
while the sun beat its surface
until you saw the heat waver and roll.
We spent our nickles
on RC colas and moonpies, side by side
and knee to knee eating them
in the shade of a high row.

The woman never came
when the days turned short.
Summer would end, school start
and Sookie sat in a different classroom
at the end of the hall.
When lunch came,
she stood against a back wall
with the colored kids and the white trash
and they all wore bright yellow tags
pinned to their shirts
that said FREE LUNCH in big letters;
they always ate last
because that's the way things were
when seasons changed
worm money and moonpies
into days sealed like summer jars.

Deconstructing Mother

I.

Beginning

She shook off Perihelion
one strangled afternoon
in a perfect gnash of gears;
a dirt burg south of Bakersfield
so hot Hell shunned membership
and so did she; flipped a fed-up

finger at the Mediterranean Cafe,
dried-out dive where simple sallies
ply pussy for promises and warm
mescal; they snickered behind
spidery hands as she played her
crafty ass flush on that final

fuck-all score and when
the heat rose like fetid smog
she yanked it loose; scorched sand
with a stripped-down skyline painted
horizon blue and raced the devil
to Babylon in a fifty-nine Ford.

II.

Middle

Mama got implants
the year the Sox traded that lousy southpaw,
because she wanted her audience of one
sorry son-of-a-bitchin' bricklayer to pay
more attention but it only made him tease-
he said they made her teeter worse
than those jade-colored juleps
she was constantly sipping because she thought
they were so couth, so uptown Savannah

but mama always did wear
her avarice on her pink velour sleeves;
even bought parquet-patterned linoleum
for our rented kitchen floor and when
the son-of-a-bitch caught that last caboose
to Birmingham one hot July night
she woke us all up; put Percy on the box-
slow-dragged us around the black and white,
her breath like mint against our upturned faces.

III.

Near The End

When mother fucked the mechanic,
years after accusations fell and nestled
into pastel carpets, along eggshell baseboards,

she led him in with coffee in a bone cup-
took his coat, his hat, his hands;
laid him down on pink nap beside a cracked

leather sofa that stank of rum, of shalimar
and hip on hip they rocked; wrung doubt
from shadows watching behind papered walls

while we watched Peyton Place upstairs,
while the calico in the window watched rain
patter against a pearl-gray sedan-

its hood up, opened like a secret.

IV.

Last Look

She takes martinis in the morning,
three jiggers to a pilsner glass;
spoon-stirred because shaking
bruises good London gin, every
Barton's baby knows that and then

she eddies angostura down the
crystalline well, arid as a nun's glove
because vermouth is only wine,
never was anyone's secret recipe
and besides, she's been to Trinidad;

danced slick-skinned on Tobago sand
while island boys watched behind
hidden eyes, swinging promises
between twitching flanks and now
her days are dry, the nights dusty-

so she drinks martinis in the morning,
three decades to a pilsner glass.

Purpose

A lot of my time is spent contemplating purpose, how it does or doesn't apply to my life. I never thought I had one, not really...for so many years now, the only issue has been survival; learning to wake successfully to another sorry dawn seemed purpose enough. Three tours worth of years before that were spent the same way; in that endless quest for survival. The only difference was the dawn...to wake to it then was a rush I have yet to equal; the particular and peculiar thrill of realizing that yes, you breathe on for a while lomger...no one is sweeping you into an anonymous rubber bag as the sun rises over mountains at once beautiful and deadly; their backs packed with their own purpose.

My days come and go like gray shifts of inconsequence, spills of time that run unnoticed into more of the same. Days spent as a mannequin of the self I once was; the shell is there but the turtle moved out long before Saigon fell...now the face that looks into mine from the peeled-back silver of passing mirrors is unfamiliar; and it is only recently that I find myself wondering where I went, what happened to that fearless girl who pretended not to care and did...when did the pretense become the fact?

I could blame it all on Nam, I suppose, as so many do...pile the great non-purpose on the dead heads of all those soldier-boys that poured their lives across the toes of my boots, spilled their thoughts into my waiting hands and lost any memory of those ladies who were lovely once. But to lay it on that lap would be a lie, because it was just a place, a span of miles I ran through when I was young, chased by tigers let loose from someone else' nightmare. Nam didn't mold me; I molded it...shaped it into a bullet that I would never chamber, never fire. That gun doesn't belong to me, the tigers that creep down it's barrel were never mine. Instead, I pulled from it a profession; skills I learned then I use now, the waiting hands are now replicants that act as if they give a damn when all they really give is time.

So I sit and I wonder, why do it? What purpose do I serve spending hour after hour trying to fix people who care even less than I? Most of them addicts, criminals, would-be suicides, drunks...very few runs turn out to be actual accidents or of a natural cause. And then I remember...who am I to judge, an addict myself? Dependent on Heroin as I ran those long ago miles; my own dragon set to fend off tigers. Then later, morphine; another dragon for another generation of nightmares...only this time, the guns are mine; their barrels sleek, disposable stainless steel. I seek the same calm they all do, it's just that my search is private, not left lying in the street or in some seedy by-the-hour room...the difference is really only one of logistics. It doesn't make me better, just better-off...I think my actual purpose all along has been to bury the details, throw everyone's dirt on my truth.

I try to remember why it was once worthwhile...why the effort mattered; why it might matter still. I recall faces, write down names, sort it out on paper as if the words are purpose enough. I think of an old man, dead ten years or more; but it's his wife that I still see, pacing the floors of my memory...countless shots of mescal and morphine won't wash away her face; so I write this:


They lived in a perpetual past,
three dim and heat-heavy rooms
encased them in the crumbling husk
of a brownstone on a forgotten side
of the city.

We ran suicide shifts down dead streets,
and some midnights found our pulsing
red and white outside their stoop,
spinning strobes slapping brick with
bright kisses.

He was the Phantom of the Opera,
she was his Christine. She would rush us in,
blue eyes wide in a thin plane.
Her scent reminded me of tabbouleh,
scallion sweet.

He was ancient, breath like smegma,
face like a leather mask. Cirrhosis ate
his body, drank his mind; accompanied by
strains of Wagner in unrelenting drones.

While we worked, she hovered-
frail wasp patting his brow, humming.
I saw her hug herself, fingers
dripping panic down her back
like slow sweat.

He was a wicked Raoul, hateful in his extremis.
He struck at her, called her a brainless zygote,
rotten whore. She gave him the radius
of her smile and crooned "Papa, papa,"
in dulcet tones.

We lifted him to the stretcher-
she cried when we strapped the belts
and clutched our sleeves in nervous desperation.
She made quiet, pleading noises
in a strange tongue.

They had been someone once;
he a producer of this, she an actress in that.
She had worn diaphanous gowns that clung
to her mons veneris, danced in hot abandon
for his pleasure.

We left her standing in the doorway on that
last night of our aquaintance, calling papa
in a pitiful litany that was at once beautiful
and sad.

Once out, put down on my blank sheets like the scattered rows in an untended cemetary, I find the ghosts remain. Face upon face, they bob the surface of my mind and break the black water pooled there with an uncomfortable ease. I think of dragons, of tigers chasing miles into decades; their purpose leaps from my pen, ink like blood across the page.

As I Read Ed Dorn...Purpose, Part Deux

I wonder why I never read him before, find myself glad that the friend I do not know sent me on the search for this work. But then, I don't read much poetry; the 'classical' poets seem full of cliche, so overrun with old-world sentimentality that to read them is like wading through vats of stale and sticky syrup. I do read some; I enjoy Williams and Thomas, and feel a strange kinship with Plath...though I find Sexton menepausal and sexually restrained; a lonely masturbator in search of why. I think the carbon monoxide might have been ultimately orgasmic in that lull before the dark.

So I find Dorn and I read; and in that consumption I began to think that the critical eye is a marvelous thing, a holy thing that bares the bones of the low and the high; that nothing is without its skeletal core. I read that Dorn said "I puke on greatness"...and in this I agree; for isn't greatness just an enlargement of some tiny core, a miniscule beginning common to all? Nothing is so great that it can't be drug down, nothing so small that it can't catch some bottom rung and climb. I have felt that urge to vomit, void hot chunks of dissillusionment and despair squarely on the shoulders of those who flaunt their largesse for the masses to stroke....that's really the rub of it; most want to stroke the robe, kiss the ring, lick the cliched boots...and for what? A crumb of recognition? A crust of lauded pie thick with bullshit and back pats?

So I found this, and as I read it I realized that I am not alone, not the only someone to feel the tightening of an unseen rope:

House Arrest
By Ed Dorn
From now on,
I'm under House Arrest--
I only get out for the job:
Then, Death--the ultimate
House Arrest, the ultimate duree--
But it was worth it.

Original version--

From now on,
I'm under house arrest--
I only get out for the job;
Then Death--the ultimate
House Arrest.

And there it is, that thing that I do...I only get out for the job. Were it not for a forced need of income, I would sit forever, not in the comfort, but the consolation of my house...arrested there, suspended in the web of ago like some ancient, arthritic spider feeding on the raveling cocoons of dead things; all the while spinning my own tightly-wound shroud with acidic strands of myself. I am left to wonder, is this all I am meant to do? Wait to die, become a dead thing in someone's web, a face bobbing to the surface of another's memory pool? So I write this:

In the tick-down of days,
in barely an open and close of years,
I choose not to die, but to cheat death;

slow the wind of anatomy
that is no more than body,
take back from the gods what was never theirs.

To remain here forever,
a single voice in the silence of time,
a shadow above the soil of the dead.

I will not die denied,
next to an unknown madness,
but wait the birth of each mute hour,

and know the past was never better
than in small seconds.

I turn it over and over in my mind, all this that has come from the reading of a poet at the behast of a masked mind...spinning and spinning those bitter threads about the great and vomitous non-purpose; and finally comes a cocoon of reason, a small insect of comprehension that my stagnant, narc-calmed id wraps around as if the bug is a bit of manna cast down from pissed and dubious gods:
I think, prehaps memory is not purpose, but the remembering is...the log of ends to stories without the necessary voice, without the hand needed to record the what-could-have-beens attached to every bobbing face; each pulsed rhythm that ceased in gutters, in alleys, in back rooms...without a voice to mourn their end, without an eye to remember.

So with purpose, I write this:

This mind turns on its axis.
Continuous thought uninterrupted
by the vicious sleep of reason,
breeding Goya's monsters in ground
fertile with preconceived knowledge.

The grease of time speeds the spin.
disoriented, weak against the chain.
links held true by solid welds fused from
assimilated concepts, layered like brick.

The wild whirl of intellect births ideas.
Intrinsic contemplations on a mental screen,
infallible doctrines flung into speculation
on suspicions whispered to living rock.

This mind trips on unearthed reality.
Forgotten voices speak for themselves,
startled hands bring pen to paper, validation
stains the page with creation's mistakes.
And I hear the scream as I write the words.

The Replicants

I started the day with hands. The first thing I saw when waking, they seemed to glow in the half-light that slid through the blind slats...eerie ghost-hands that were seperate from the rest of everything, still and quiet on the red plaid comforter. They looked blue, like corpse hands.

I began to think of them as entities of their own, even though they behaved normally and went through the usual morning rituals just as they always did...they showered, brushed teeth, ran their cool fingers through my hair; they even selected the cracked mug with the faded smiley face when the coffee was ready. The cup barely shook; a minor miracle. Maybe they weren't my hands after all, because my hands were always trembling long before the coffee was done, and never failed to spill a fair amount across the table as I read yesterday's paper.

Yet on the surface of this strange morning, calm. A natural calm that came all alone (On little cat feet, ha ha) without the benefit of narcotics. Amazed at my new hands, I took off to work. They gripped the wheel with confidence, seemed to know the way just like my old hands...they even waved at Mrs. Campos when we passed the Shop 'N Save. She stared and didn't wave back; I don't think she recognized the hands.

Once at work, the hands revealed themselves as imposters. My partner Henry knew at once that they were replicants, a duo far different from my original pair. They were helpful...cleaned our rig, checked our equipment, turned our radio to country music; and this was the REAL betrayal, my true hands would have cut themselves off before performing that blasphemy. Henry kept looking at me sideways, but didn't say much. I think he was scared of the hands.

Our first call was a crackhead frequent flyer named Aaron. He called 911 at least twice a week, complaining of nausea, of vomiting, of explosive diarreah. We hated Aaron; he always puked in the rig, spit on the foor, shit on our clean sheets. The real hands would have accidentally hit him up side his pea-head with the O2 tank...but not these hands. These hands helped him to the rig, gave him an emesis basin, started an IV and pushed phenergan to ease his nausea; they even placed Aaron on the defib to access his heart rhythm. They seemed to actually care.
Aaron watched them do all of this with gaurded eyes, he flinched at each procedure. It was clear that even Aaron knew these hands were faux...he kept his eyes on them like a mouse keeps his eye on the snake. Henry was silent, but obviously siding with Aaron.

And that's how it went all day...the hands did it all. They attended every patient as if every patient was really in need of their expertise. They patted brows, pushed meds, administered painkillers like candy. They changed stretcher sheets, asissted the astounded nurses in the ER, filled out forms in a timely manner, never flipped one doctor the bird. They left the radio alone the whole shift. When our shift was over, they clocked out on time. They waved goodbye to Henry, to the Chief...they didn't wave back, either.

Then we were home, them and I. They opened the door, turned on the light, ran their fingers through my hair...and stopped. I could feel my scalp pulsing beneath, felt the blood pushing past the roots. The mirror by my bed showed a face that looked like me, hands trapped in a short tangle of black and gray...shaking. My hands, my true pair. I wondered where they had been, I knew where they were going. Opening a small drawer in the bedstand, they took up a leather pouch, took out a familiar friend; slender, sharp, 20 CC.

Somewhere in the dark, the replicants died.

At Work With Enid

I have a friend named Enid, a lovely redhead who should have been born in that era of noir and dahlias; she has a regal bearing that never suited this backwater river town; she even wears her lab coats as if they were sable instead of cotten twill. She scoffs at this every time I say it, but it's true. She works the zombie shift at the county morgue, a twenty drawer cell bursting with the dead. It's a place I frequent on an almost daily basis, a place I find comforting in the same way a dark, quiet house is comforting. Sometimes, the drawers are overrun with business and we stack our offerings like cordwood in a designated spot by the heavy steel doors that signal the entrance into the bowels of the forensics storage rooms.

The air of this stainless domain hangs heavy with the presence of chemical composition and natural decomposition. Enid tells me that she loves the aroma because of it's finality, says that the smell lets her remember that all things end and no one is exempt from its perfume; that death is but a counter-girl at some ritzy store, spritzing the public with tiny bulbed atomizers when they least expect it, told me to think about it...after a while, I realized that yes, it's a damned fine analogy; no one is ever quick enough to duck the unwanted spray, no matter how fast you sail by that counter-girl. They always seem to have such deadly aim... (Hardy Har Har).

Most nights, Enid's domain is glutted with end results, all laid out in various displays of violence and disease. She records the data the dead offer up, probing their wounds and telling tissue, listening with an ear attuned to their whispers.
She says she loves the job because of its continuance, and she always gives me this smile as she says it like she's divulged something secret and sweet...and that I need to just think about it. Enid is right, of course; her spread sheets and jotted notes detail each finished life in a way that adds links in the chain of continuity, each blue corpse lives on in the pages of her files; kept alive with black ink and post-its, paper-clips and sweat. She labels every file folder by hand, a testament, she explains, to the worthiness of the labor. On the upper corner of each, she affixes a tiny silver star so that no one rests in their paper beds without a beacon to light their way.

She hums show tunes as she works, Rodgers and Hammerstien, Lerner and Loewe, the entire score of Les Miserables; each in near-perfect pitch. It echoes against the walls, bounces back and forth between her sleeping company like belled laughter; if she leaves the door ajar, we can hear it beckoning as we wheel our stretchers down the tiled halls that lead us to her cells. Soft and lulling, it pulls us in as the sirens lured the ships, and entertains the ghosts that sit in silent witness to the proof of what has been.

On A Clear Day

You can see through sclera, past the color-wheel of iris, into the natural lens. If your'e quick enough, or good enough, you can watch bright fade to dull, see what was drift into what could have been. It's said that the last image percieved is reflected in the corneal eye; but that's bullshit. The only thing left is an eclipse too dim to cast back.

Like the shut of a door against a heated room, what remains is cold. I've watched more doors close than I care to count, seen so much of what could have been...now I wear that cold, an unseen insulation keeping heat at mind's length. To remember warmth is to recall faces, names, the end of every story. Cold is better; numb and hard. I need the feel of the shell.

Then today, a kid grabbed my arm. A hopeless kid with a hopeless wound, face-up in the middle of State street, the familiar aftermath of a common war. No fix here, no TV save. His eyes were green and deep; bending close, I watched frost rise in them like water...and through the fingers that circled my skin, I felt the heat slide away, felt the slam of the door. Hours later, I heard the click of the latch.

Isn't it funny how we return to the places where things happened, old soldiers drawn to land consecrated by battle and cross...just as I sit here tonight, swallowing warmth shot after shot. I remember faces, write down names, turn the pages of an unfinished book and wonder if the story ever really ends. I feel the air thicken, I know that what I've come to find has not dimmed, or waned away.

And in the back of my mind, nightstorms gather dust.

Dig

I entertain the demons that follow me from room to room. Vague shifts of space direct me here to here; they follow on the cat's feet of some other time poet my fogged mind cannot name. We have surely danced, them and I; they have led me, I have led them...we have chased each the other across spans of lost years. Now I pirouette alone, spin without brakes into varying shades of black; they seem content to watch. Sometimes, I notice the tightness in the air as they clap.

I find myself at my kitchen table, elbows set on an oilcloth that I must have purchased; I struggle to catch the memory of when. My oilcloth is singular in its ugliness, blocks of blue and white connected by tiny sunflowers that resemble flies cocooned in perfect symmetry within a square web. Burn marks track the path of the spider. I light a cigarette with my Zippo, its pewter body as battered as my own. The thumb wheel is loose; three strikes to fire and I wonder if the snipers are watching alongside my snickering demons. The itch between my shoulders has grown numb, a disabled target. I smell the bite of ozone, and beneath that, copper; always the copper, heavy and sweet.

The floor under my feet peels and fades; its pattern lost to countless steps. Once blue or rose or green, it now lays gray and dead across boards gone soft with rot. There's a hole to the left of my right foot, neither small or large and shaped like a grin, it yawns a welcome; the demons at my back nudge against my ear. I inch my toes through the smile, feel the air of the cellar below, cold, damp. I wonder if any corpses before me have found this hole, slid though it to rest at last nestled in rat shit and dirt. I try to force my foot past the limits of the hole; the edges give without complaint. I take a long drag and wait for the dark below to yank me in; the air clutches my ovation.

Dusk drawing from the blinds finds me on my knees with butter knife and bleeding fingers; splinters pile up on either side like dead soldiers. I think of foxholes and fire pits and the blackened maws of buried screams that have found breath beneath the give of my floorboards. The smile has widened into a laugh; its cool trill dries my efforts to salt. Behind me, whispers of applause pull past my shoulders and fall between my hands; I can hear it echo somewhere in the black.

Demons sleep by daylight. I wake with cheek pressed against a table leg, fingers sore and curled under my chin. For a moment, I can't remember; my eyes, sideways at floor level, pick out shards of wood, a settled haze of smoke, spatters of tacky blood. I smell dirt and damp and the sour odor of spoil; again I think of foxholes, I wonder where the sniper is perched. A ringing phone startles me to my feet, the steady thump thump of the Evacs melt into morning traffic that hums from the streets below my window. Shadows of sun shaft through my cracked blinds; the hole reveals itself...only a hole. Jagged at its edges, bigger, empty. I dump the ashtray over its lip; scatter my night cremations and watch as ash sifts into nothing.

The O'Hara Christmas

I was 11 the Christmas
my father sat in a cracked wingback
reading John O'Hara
under bourboned breath, straining
the words through his teeth,
stowing their hard stone centers
like ball-shot in his reddened cheeks

while my mother listened
to Ramsey Lewis sing about the sounds
of the season as she downed nog
after nog minus the egg and cream, heavy
on the Wild Turkey and shelled fall pecans
for winter pies into a bowl
decorated with festive silver bells

every now and then
she flicked a nut-meat at father,
bounced it off his head just like Gordie Howe
bounced pucks off the net and she'd sing
Goddamn ye mirthless gemmamin
and laugh and flick and flick and laugh
until he smiled at her over his page,
rolling the stones
in his cheek with his tongue,
so careful not to let them fly

and my brother, who was 9 that year,
without my 2 extra terms of smart,
looked up from his Etch-A-Sketch
long enough to ask what was so funny about
getting pelted with pecans and being
forced to listen to the Ramsey Lewis Trio
when we should be tapping our feet
to the holiday stylings
of Dave Seville and his Chipmunks

but my father just kept his smile and said
it’s for ourselves to know, son,
it’s for ourselves to know-

10 Christmases and an American Lit course later,
I realized why he was so good at tonguing stones.

Acts Of Diffusion

I.

Half-light scatters through sundowned trees,
their leaves turned against the cusp of night.

It silvers itself across a deadfall floor,
casts long reflections from the rough surface

that reach up, sweep back in particled waves
to dust the saw palmettos like crushed glass.

II.

Warblers throw their voices along nodding banks,
the sound spans the gaps between day and dusk.

Fog and branch catch notes full-throated in webs
of mist, scarves of bark until their range is sieved;

becomes shadow song that sifts down on winter's chill,
a fallen silence translucent as frost on a breath.

III.

Across the scope of night, little deaths count time
on the faces of fawn, fox, red-tipped squirrel.

The dark primeval eats its heart, follows its cycle
through copse and covert by motion, by memory;

seasons imbrue lineage in dispassionate blood,
seed their continuance on a vanishing pulse.

Theory Of Relaxation

Chest deep in bramble and bog,
pre-dawn chill rubs my shoulders,
kisses the back of my neck
where collar parts company with hair.

Fingers shoved in my pocket
fondle rounds stored there; loose extras
in case the three slips in my pack
are not enough to piss off Pan.

Core-Lokt soft-point, "The deadliest mushroom
in the woods", or so says Remington
on the back of their olive green box.

It's here I flirt with madness-
watch day lift above a night of sweats
and rapid-fire recall; not the hunter but
the hunted, bound to the now by thread, by thorn.

Dali has brushed me onto yesteryears' canvas,
a warped study in camouflaged oils, crossing Thai Binh
on a sampan heavy with mortars and babies dressed
in drab rolling weed in yellow papers that taste of banana.

Cramped joints bid my mind relax; relax,
for you have seen mushrooms in the bush with
nary a round to finger, no thirty-ought-six nestled
against your crotch like salvation's erection-
just a clap bag full of mud and morphine.

Dismal smells like Haiphong. Dank peat, moldered moss;
the sulpher taint of swamp milkweed lines nostrils
with a burn of memory. Fog-hung lowlands shine silver
and purple and green; the dead men beneath those canopies
grow bulrushes from their bones that sing in the breeze.

Crouched deep in last year's deadfall,
marsh sucks my boots with hungry insistence, holds
the hunter's pose with rooted grip. My chest rises,
falls; cold exhalations alone mark my presence.

Whitetail watch from the woodline.
when they move, I will not hear it; no crack of twig
or rustle of leaf to signify their range.
Soon, the bucks will forage the ground cover for fall bulbs,
their racks dipped towards papered hooves-

And I will fire into the wakening sky,
round after round until muscles are loosed; until
my tight canvas relaxes its stretch and spills a voice
into the empty air- sharp retorts that hold no echo.

Encounter

I picked her up at a bar
on southside; lipstick lez
with hair the color of cardboard
and cinnabar stilettos
that matched her scent but
didn't suit her Tanqueray stride.

She stripped while I watched,
the detached observer-
her breasts were not like

melons

only half globes of flesh and fat
and failing musculature;
nipples that were not the pert red

of Bing cherries

but puckered and flat across
their tops, angled slightly towards
the blue cut-pile of a motel 6 floor-

They look like Devils Tower
and the thought was as sudden
as a spilled shot; close encounters
of the desperate kind and the laughter
was as quick as the process

She was angry, the observer unrepentent;
what we made was not love
but raw, real in the way of imperfections,
everything and nothing at once.

After, I read her poetry she didn't understand
while she drank gin from a plastic glass
and listened; watched the words fall
like minutes, like years.

Smoke Break At County

I.
Packed after midnight, the county ER hangs thick
with the sour aroma of blood, puke, sweat, shit.
I grab a smoke between calls and watch while the
regular patrons huddle under florescent bars
dressed in familiarity and futility-
sick crackheads and stoned cabbies,
screaming babies, shady ladies; they dig change
for the coke machine from pocket and purse,
pick at scabs, noses, lice-
all ignore the upscale magazines scattered about,
coffee-table literature donated by Docs who
wonder out loud to nurses who roll their eyes
why Yachting World and Modern Architecture
and GQ never seem to get dog-eared
like the worn out copies of Weekly World News.
A tweaker known as Blowfly to his compadres and
Gomer to the staff...get out of my emergency room...
picks up a copy of Yachting World and chatters with
profound clarity about the the America's Cup
to the empty chair across the aisle; when the triage nurse
calls his number, he falls silent, green eyes
gone as vacant as the south china sea.

II.
Two girls with bad complexions and pierced eyebrows
sit side by side on the tiled floor, heads bent over
a spread of fritos and a ham sandwich that had the crusts cut off-
Did a mother do this, or was it some nostalgic reflex
that rose up and bumped its unconscious head against the fog?
They picked at it with slender fingers that made me
think of concert pianists; their giggles
burst from teeth yellowed like old ivory keys.

III.
The sound has no volume control. New conversations
up their decibels in a struggle to be heard, old ones
rise to the challenge; The registrar pulls down his Plexiglas
window, a scratched and filmy shield against the din.
A woman and four kids like stair steps occupy a row
of dirty plastic chairs lining the back wall. she holds a baby
in her ample lap in the same way you would hold a bag
of groceries on the bus ride home, or a basket of towels
while you wait at the Laundromat for a machine to free up.
The baby cries in a continuous drone punctuated every little while
with weary hitches for breath, its eyes dry and drooped;
the resignation already learned clear in its monotonous song.
Two chairs down the same row, a hooker named Davita
gives a hand-job to a skinny black man in a Denny's uniform
and a blood-soaked rag around his wrist; he tries to hide
his pride behind Modern Architecture. The tallest stair step
watches in silence, his steady gaze empty of curiosity.

A group of boys argue by the door, their voices loud
and huge; their jackets decorated with turf colors.
A small boy screams over and over for his mother while
a girl with red hair and a tear tattooed beneath an eye tells
him to shut the fuck up in a tone that escalates in repetition.
A man in a business suit, his cheeks red and his forehead
glistening with rage yells at the registrar through the hole
in the Plexiglas shield; he doesn't give a happy rat's ass
about pacemakers, he needs to use his goddamed cell-
I can't help but smile when the wino in line behind him
leans forward and vomits quietly down the back of his coat.

IV.
In the middle of the room, a couple sit together,
each tight against the other. They stick out, the two of them,
washed out figures silent in a loud sea of life.
Their pale faces are immobile a patina of sweat.
The man is about fifty, his face lined by time and circumstance.
His shirt is buttoned wrong, one side of his collar turns up
and brushes his ear; his sockless feet cased in worn house slippers.
The woman is about the same age, but whatever brought her here
has added twenty years. She wears a housecoat that hangs loose
to show a flannel gown bedecked with tiny red flowers;
her left hand rolls a rosary between fingers whose nails
are bitten to the quick. He holds the other in a clinch tight
enough to drain his knuckles to a cold, bloodless white.
Fear and hope passed messages between them like familiar rivals.

I'd seen them before, and before and before-
Alone and in pairs, sometimes in groups; these people who come
to sit and stare in county, their faces different but wearing the same
anxious mask. The end of it is always the same, nothing is ever good
because that's just the way it is when the shields are pulled down
and the flags have gone up. And when some demi-god in a dirty lab coat
comes to hit them behind the knees, all that's left will be gathered
into purses and bags and buttoned-wrong shirts and spilled out like
rancid wine behind other doors, in other rooms.

The Listening

Up the road a piece from here,
a mile, maybe two-
an old black man lives
in a ramshackle house made of clapboard
gripped together by kudzu that's older still.

Sometimes, I pass it on walks,
most days I pass by on drives to town and back-
ten trips out of twelve finds it as a dead thing,
bereft of life except for the kudzu and a slat-sided tom
always stretched along the crumbling concrete stoop.

But tonight on the drive home,
my beams pick him out of the dusk-
a bent figure seated in a shadow of oak, hands busy
at some task I can't discern in the low shaft of light.

I pull into the dirt-pack yard and step out,
hand him a beer from my pack with only a nod
because that is our way- I squat on my haunches,
sip my beer as the skinny tom watches from its step
while I wait for him to speak; if he does, I'll listen.

I can now see that he's shelling corn-
his thumbs run the cobs in quick rows, the kernels
fall into a tin tub between his bare feet.
I know that when they dry, he'll crack them;
and by the first frost his potent mash will be sealed
neatly in Ball masons tucked beneath the cellar stairs.

Every Christmas, one finds its way to my porch-
its wide mouth tied with red yarn, the glass jar wiped clean.

After a time, he talks in tight whispers
so low that I dip my head to hear-
he spins cobs in his palms as he remembers a sister,
a young girl with plaits in her hair and scars across her back;
she runs through his memory and he laughs as she laughs,
a sound that is at once weightless and heavy as stone.

Years fall backward in his voice-
they catch in his throat, become slender brown limbs
sprawled beside a long gone road, become scars broken open
and left to seep dry beneath a moonless drape;
residue on soil prepared for those born into the grave.

With kernal and cob between his hands,
he grinds his words; they spill from his fingers-
a cadence that stops when he can't go back
anymore to that place where ghosts rattle their bones.

What he can't say sits piled in his tub.
After a while, I help him gather the naked cobs;
we throw them in a rusted barrel, it's sides vented with punch holes.
He sets them to fire with a match culled from nowhere-
and when the flames grow high enough to lick the rim,
we lean into its heat like people who end up in someplace familiar.

If It's The Faith That's Important...

let there be fight.

Send a prayer up for the hunted,
prey for the predator; all mass to the enemy,
amen. Will you offer your boys to the clergy?

Light a candle, confessions feed flame.
Wafers, wine, penitential suits;
dinner for two behind stained glass curtains.

Hail Mary, full of grace
let us blow this goddamned

place your money in a tin plate.
Increase the tithe until sin ceases, Sunday mothers iron
perfect creases, all god's chillums' wear Baptist blue.

Songs sung blue, everybody knows
one hallelujah chorus

sing it for us while we burn crosses, burn Jews,
burn the bush; soldiers of Golgotha in faceless diorama.
Dead deities shop for attention, sell lightning rods

door to door; frightened neighbors at the blinds
sneak peeks for celestial signs and wonder why
martyrs make mistakes of sacrifice over and over.

World Without End, Amen

Part One: And In The Beginning, Lava Lamps

When I was seventeen, the world was a psychedelic oyster...everything flung color; bright, boisterous shades of flourescent orange and scream green, purple haze (Ha Ha) and sunshine yellow. Nothing was dull, and nothing was still. It all twirled and swirled and sprung in twisting masses from our every object; even our T-shirts seemed to move. I like to think that the person who invented all that ass-kicker acid was just looking for some way to quiet it all down and it back-fired...we used to drop window-pane at Andy's house because he had blacklights in his garage; we would pour Tide washing powder on the floor and trip over its phosphorous contents twinkling through our little piles of detergent...it would be a couple of years before I would learn a few other uses for phosphorous. Yeah, those were simple times; I should have paid more attention to them, I should have ate all that color so I could've spit it up later when it would have really meant something.

Lava lamps were the shit; you were nobody unless you had one in your room...and the cool moms had them in their dens. Joplin and Hendrix ruled the world, the Dead guarded the gates. The Stones had just hit the states and everyone hitched to all the best concerts...all the girls wanted to blow all the bands, all the guys wanted to be roadies. Nobody ever did, of course...that was for the kids from California who were lucky enough to get backstage passes; the closest our little southern contingent ever got was sixth-row center at a very memorable Joe Cocker gig...we knew all the words to 'Bathroom Window' and never missed a beat. We thought we were so cool. Just as good as those west coast kids. Plus, our pot was better, we were certain of that; we grew it ourselves...no infra-copters back in the day. Fifteen bucks bought a five-finger bag of prime red-bud; ten more got you a sole of hash to wrap it with. I miss that stuff. Nothing beats a good hash milkshake...and later on, nothing would beat a good dose of smack; pot would become just foreplay, just something to keep the jungle bugs at bay while we sat and waited for the movie to start...and that was the thing; if the horse was hot enough, you could get away with pretending it was all a Fellini flick...for a few moments, anyway. And sometimes that was enough to get you to the next day.

It's a good thing we didn't know what was coming, I think most of us wouldn't have believed it if we had. The summer of sixty-six was winding down, the acid was turning into to mescaline, and Janis still had four years to live...longer than a lot of my friends. Nam was just a blurb on the TV news, the body counts during dinner were still a year or more away, and body bags were for the bad endings on Dr. Kildair. Some of us had brothers or cousins or uncles and dads pulling their time already, but nobody we knew up close and personal had gotten killed or even shot...not then. No one was protesting in earnest, not in our little corner of the planet, and all our teachers were talking about how it wasn't even a war, for christ' sake. Nobody seemed too fuckin' concerned...not then. Only our mothers looked worried; but they always did, so we never really noticed. And when we did, it was too late...High School was over, no money for college; all of us country boys had gotten our invitations by the time the spring of sixty-eight rolled around. Only Andy made it out; his dad had an aunt in Winnipeg and the next time I saw Andy he had three kids and a suit...he acted uncomfortable when he shook my hand; but it was OK, it was his folks that made him go. I guess. It WAS your folks, right, Andy?

Part Two: Can You Hear Him Now?

Been thinking about Andy again, he's starting to come and go like a cliched ghost; and I seem to be sittin' up with the dead. I haven't seen him since his dad died twelve years back, and we all went home to Catawba county to say goodbye...all of us that were left, anyway. We made a pitiful bunch, actually; hand-me-down suits and thrift store ties. All of us but Andy, who had done well in Winnipeg and wore a three-piece like an honest-to-God businessman. He had spit in his hand and passed it through his hair while we stood around the casket talking about how good his dad looked. Some things never change.

That's funny, isn't it...how everyone always seems to think folks look so damned good when they're dead. I'll bet the dead ones don't think so...I'm willing to put a few bucks on the fact that they would probably rather look like shit and be able to tell you about it. I know for sure that I want to look terrible when I get to lay on my satin; and I hope all the people that come to stare at my corpse have the good grace to say so. I don't want to die handsome; it seems like such a waste. And I don't want to be laid out all dressed up...I've left word that I'll haunt anyone that tries to pin those fuckin' medals on me. I really don't believe a whole lot in God or Heaven or everafters; but whatever is waiting for me is just gonna have to take me like I want to come...wearing Levi's and Hane's cotten. And no socks, please; it's a thing with me.

Had a lot of jumpers here lately; maybe that's why I've been thinking so much about Andy. You know, him jumping the draft and all. Word association and such...I've heard it can work like that. Anyway, four jumpers just this month; two off the Tar River bridge down at the rocks and two more off the I-95 overpass. The last two were a real fuckin' mess...shit everywhere. It took us the better part of a morning to get all the bits into our little red bio-bags...every scrap or the state boys get pissed. Can't leave anything for the public to see, when wer'e done, the Fire-house pumpers come in and hose away the spots. And these two had took their dive together, holding hands like goddamned love birds, said the bewildered witness who had called 911 to report the incredible event on his cell phone. Can you hear him now? Hardy fuckin' har har. By the time we got to the scene, he (The witness) was talking to the cops with his attitude showing...he had done his duty and now they were going to make him late for his tee time; he didn't PUSH them, for christ sake. It would have been more interesting if he had...nothing new about suicides. All I ask is that they get it right the first time so I don't have to work so hard...it's way harder to try and fix them than it is to just scrape them up.

One thing is certain...no one will be standing around these two caskets speculating on how good the deceased look; these two are gonna fit in a shoebox. And I say bury them in the same one, size seven ought to cover it. After all, it seems they wanted it that way...just ask the pissed-off golfer who saw it all. I can hear him now.

I love my job.

Where The Songs Are Sad

The ghost of a savage
is born full-blown in a dim study
redolent of oiled leather and smoke;
where Spanish sonatas play on an old victrola
and Contino goes down straight from the bottle.

Dali fades into the walls,
faint behind glass clouded like tintypes.
Larrea and Lorca sit on chairs, lie well-thumbed
and opened across bed and sheet;
lost voices rise from their pages to drift
and scuttle in the comfortable dark.

Like the shoemaker, the savage
has a wife; angry on the other side of a door,
loud knocks from another world where supper cools
and ice melts in tall glasses like clocks
against a Catalan landscape.

In a dim study, a man digs his grave
where crickets sing in shadows without light
to give them birth and all the songs are sad.

Dog Story

There's a three-legged dog
that roams the back alleys of town.
Some days find him brave along main street,
dodging traffic on three scarred pads
and a counter-wieght shaped like a thigh.

He has no name that I ever knew,
but I call him untitled; a shambling draft
filled with page after page of stories
no one will ever hear, or get to read
within the bindings of a worn and dusty book.

He doesn't eat well but he eats-
a scrap here and a morsel there, sometimes
I see the butcher's boy lay bones unwrapped
outside the rear door; strings of meat and sinew
reflect an act of grace beneath the sheen
of summer blowflies.

I often wonder if he dreams of Rin Tin Tin,
if he envies the great shepard and his celluloid flock;
or if he knows that had fate only made him asthetic
and born him in a different circumstance, that it might
have been him poised stalwart on a Hollywood cliff?

I know that one day I'll come into town,
find him bloated beside some curb; sides fat at last.
And when the road crews shovel him up, he'll spill
volumes across their boots; an untitled tide of words
riding gutter-waves to an nameless sea.

Untitled

Rain for days. It's rained for days,
and what is left soaks slow and silent
into ground and green; thin fog hovers
above dips and hollows in ghostly drifts.

Last month's pollen floats atop puddles,
skims of yellow that will birth nothing but
mosquitoes. Young crocus struggle to keep
their water-limp heads erect on slender stems.

The hounds, lured from their runs, lie slack
in the grass and glean their hides for tics
with tongues patched black by bloodline.
They watch passing clouds with hooded eyes.

The river is troubled; mud-stirred and thick
with deadfall loosed by the storms' hectic dance.
Two men sit the bank and bait hooks with shrimp;
they tap it along the bottom, music for blind bass.

It's rained for days. Days of rain and somewhere
beyond the wood's edge, stands of birch unfold
silver leaves against a lifting fog, their opened
canopies throw shadows beneath a promised sun.

Jump

I press between
the weight of day and push of night;
a quilt of skin sewn sinew to bone.

Scars trace my surface,
map the past in keloid and curve;
I rub but cannot scatter the years.

A girl once drew her palm
down my laddered back, not asking
what raised the rungs beneath her touch;
lucky, she said, to know where the ledge stops-

the falling off is to know where it begins.

Song (Revised)

She had always wanted
to open her mouth-
let truths spill out in
rainbow spirals
like Dorothy did once
under a Kansas sky,
hugging toto to her chest
and twirling, circling...

She opens a vein
instead;
pulls a ruby thread
with an exacto knife
almost all the way to the bend
where so long fluttered
at the distal end and someone
sang in a distant somewhere
while the fade out washed in-

she bought a ticket from oz
down a brick road painted
safety yellow,
guarded at stubborn points
by scarecrows with struck matches
and tin men holding
empty cans;
they tied yesterday's noose
across rust that spreads but
never spills-

afloat beneath a warm surface,
she worships lost idols
in a cracked clawfoot,
swims with lions along
an emerald coast as her breasts
rise like gods from the murk-
her heels tap ripples
that fan out in fragile rings;
they break apart in the heavy air.

She twirls in a black mirror,
a dripping reflection twists
through gray funnels,
rides the hues of her voice,
rushes up behind battened eyes-
they've come to tuck her in,
the woman who spins and spins;
following rainbow spirals
that spill out
in sudden tides.

Fade

I lie on my back
where the land draws up,
forced into bank
by a river that has its way;
I listen to water trouble and turn,
a slow diminuendo like
the fading of old scars.

Movement in the shelf of sky
is only a loss of light-
a bone moon reveals its face
along a scarf of cloud.
Heat bears the night electric;
chalks tree against slate
in skeletal bas-relief.

I watch the set of day
cast valley into flame; it leaves
a silence of sheathed wings and
the stir of italic rain.

Alice Found Mitchum

in a noir house downtown,
with maroon walls and sprung seats
and a projectionist named Mick
who spilled Captain Walker from his window
on Wednesday nights, pinned him to a hillside
with Warnicki and Ay-Rab and the weight
of dead men hooding his face;
their shadows bone-deep behind his brow.

Blue On Blue

3:16 AM, emergency entrance, county general-
I was propped against the rear doors of a rig
parked in Bay 5, close to where the docs smoke
with cigarettes tucked behind their palms,
furtive anarchists flicking ash at the don't-do-that sign
while people shift back and forth around them
and I was thinking about this tweaker kid
we brought in on a dead run; skull a cracked vault,
his secrets betrayed on the floor beneath my boots

I was thinking about how he wouldn't
stop breathing; how the noise of anatomy
dogged collapsed lines in fibrillating waves

I was thinking about a girl in a dirty blue skirt
sitting on a curb with his blood on her knees,
how her face pulled away in the rear-view like a scream

I was thinking about how an intern
with two silver loops in his ear hummed 'Blue on Blue'
under his breath as we gave our report to a nurse

I thought about these things
I watched the guards watch me
I didn't clean any secrets from the rig
I did sit down on the step plate
I picked at the wick of my zippo
I whistled the intern's song

somewhere behind me
a girl with bloody knees sits on a curb
pulling threads from the hem of a cheap skirt.

My Afternoon With Sarah

Her name had been Sarah something,
said the red-headed cop as he picked through a tote
plucked from a ditch festive with Phlox and Anemone
and sweet Valeriana tall enough to sweep our knees.

Down the sloped bank strolled two laughing men
dressed in train authority gray that matched the gravel
bedding the tracks for miles north and south.
Every few feet they stooped and stood, stooped and stood-
red plastic flags remembered the path of their ritual.

Yards beyond a bicycle twisted into a U smiled,
spoke teeth jutted in unfamilar angles from rim sockets.
Its chrome caught the Tuesday sun and spit it back in darts
that skittered across the blue hoods of idling state cruisers
parked along an access road grown thick with the curious-

they hung in knots behind troopers whose bored stance
belied grim faces, their chitters slung as low
as the sam browne belts strung out like a black-patent fence.
Avid eyes jockeyed for chinks in a chino wall.

Books scattered between beginning and end,
chemistry, calculus, english and french-
lofty subjects lifting pages to an eastern breeze.
A volume of Frost trapped itself in Hummingbird Vines
that grew in pink perfusion around the crossing posts.

No one saw me slip it in the pocket of my turn-out coat.
No one knows that I'll come back on days
when the weather is fine, sit cross-legged on a bank
with Phlox and Anemone and sweet Valeriana
brushing my back while I read each poem out loud-

The Night

ends in layers
on her kitchen floor;
jackets, boots and kitten heels
form conclusions on stained tile.

I wasn't in her
apartment five minutes
before the phone rang; low talk
in another room that meant nothing.

Later, in bed, she explained
the call as a boyfriend, suspicious;
we both pretended that it might matter.
She was the first woman

to acknowledge the scars
laddered from my shoulder to my hip;
she walked her fingers down the raised
rungs without asking why.

On the bedside stand,
familar icons: Schnapps, seconal,
lamp with a pink ruffled shade.
Somewhere in the room, a cat growled

its disapproval. After, she slept-
on her side, a locked blade.
I sat on the edge, tried but couldn't
remember her name. The cat appeared,

wound between my feet,
its censure forgotten. I stroked its fur,
felt flesh shiver over bone.
"Your'e a good cat," I said. "A good cat."

View From A Flying Jimmy

Listen: hounds loose their run trill reveille behind the lines
of white pine and cedar and elm that guard my seclusion.

I pretend I'm dreaming-then I am-waltzing with Jane
barefoot and ballgowned through a wood: music howls
somewhere beyond the grey, somewhere in the black.
So I oversleep and wonder when I wake why my feet are ice.

I fly to work down backroads that turn suddenly
into streets miles from my driveway graveled and
tucked between menacing rows of black-hulled pecans:
they bear on the third year and I keep their fallen ancestors
packed naked in blue tupperware tubs stacked in my freezer.

The cockpit of my jimmy is strewn with dead coffee cups.
Jack-in-the-boxes lay discarded and dying on the floorboards
-similar slaughters of necessity-ketchup clotted to their sides.
Last month's cable bill flaps under the visor like a battleflag.

Tobacco whips by on the left and on the right so fast
each leaf on every stalk stands out in surreal base-relief.
I taste the sharp and bitter tang of suckering plants:
it reminds me of my father's pall malls and politics and
the smell of money seeded from blood.

Barn swallows rise-in lazy tourbillions-from the fields
their beaks and bellies full of yellow and green hornworms.

I wing past Buck's BBQ Pit (You Can't Beat Our Meat)-past
Lucy's Do-Lounge where the girls serve more than shots
-past Big Jim's Quick Mart: the stoner kid who pumps gas
raises a hand in reflex. I don't wave back in sympathetic apathy.

Most mornings I stop to kill coffee cups but today I'm late.

Tenant houses rush by on either side, their concrete blocks
painted with Kudzu and mildew: I think of abattoirs and
oubliettes and other inevitable exits. Children and dogs and
cheap molded toys from the plastic plant over in Elroy dot
the tiny dirt yards-little boys and little girls stand in stagnant
ditches chunking rocks at death while their mamas are inside
fucking the mailman or watching General Hospital on TV.

I see slideshow flashes of their faces and I hope I don't
have to come back out this way: scrape them up, heads
cracked open, futures frying on asphalt like so many eggs.

I pass the city limit sign-some of the holes are mine-ringed
in rust and canted to one side. Courthouse looms right,
county buildings lurch left and blocks ahead day meets night
where tracks split the city: segregation in iron ties old as time.

I pull into my lot-number six, section twelve-filled with cars
and trucks and bikes but I am the only flying jimmy.
Everything ticks: engine, watch, pulse-alpha papa charlie-
the people that mill outside my windshield tick with tension.

I want to turn the key, turn around, turn into my driveway
where squirrels sit stuffing my sweet meats in their jaws:
instead I clinch mine-name rank serial number-open the door
and step out.

Listen: animals sprung their cages snarl in angry unavoce
behind walls of brick and steel and glass that guard nothing.

Notes To Rachel

1
You gave me bunny slippers
for Easter, and a copy of Watership Down;
it earned you the benefit of a doubt.
I wonder how long before you are gone,
after youv'e vanished.

2
This morning the refridgerator
dumped cold on my bare feet;
I thought about the way
your back arched around my toes.

3
Estelle came today
with a shoebox of photographs
you had taken on our trip to Vermont;
you scribbled notes on the back
of every one.

4
When she was gone,
I read the words on each photo
over and over.

5
I walked to the mailbox
four times ahead of the mailman.
Mrs. Campos next door
thinks I'm going insane.
Maybe she's right.

6
This afternoon
I sat and watched the wallpaper peel
from the corner where the glue
never took; after a while
it looked like a time-lapse film
of rotting fruit.
I decided to get the TV fixed.

7
Estelle came by again-
this time with a girl
who looked a lot like you used to,
before those I-want lines
furrowed your forehead.
You named them all after me.

8
Estelle left and she stayed;
we drank Tanqueray with no ice
until you disappeared.
Afterwards, she slept naked
on the blue couch downstairs.

9
She was gone this morning,
left a note under your smiley magnet.
I didn't read it.
It wasn't from you.

10
I went to Delmar's for breakfast,
but negatives of you live there,
the leatherette booths mocked me.
I snuck out before my order was up;
I can't go back.

11
Going home,
I thought I saw your head
above a clutch of backpacks on sixth street;
but it turned out to be
just another blurred ghost.

12
Mrs. Campos watches me
walk up the drive;
I grin and wave like a lunatic-
as if I never saw the falling,
as if I don't know it will be years
before I feel the crash.

Bored With Pink

she wears black everyday,
widows herself
from the Ivory girls,
scrubs the scalloped parts
until they've lost their seashell hue-

At night she sheds,
sits cross-legged in blue shag
and draws scarlet bracelets
from her wrists, exacto circlets
around her throat in crimson beads.

Milk And Chapstick

She used to be Viola, farmbred,
cornfed daughter of dirt.
Baby fat blonde jumped the nowhere
bus with a bootlace flapping, gritty
chapstick in her pocket and pasteurized
milk in her daddy's scotch thermos.
Fate est. 1977, she walked away on
rooted feet and now she

shakes a disillusioned ass at a
southbeach titty palace called
the Maraschino Cherry, screaming
red walls hung full of glaring
Warhol and Dali blacklights, polite
bouncers in business suits. The clientele
speaks of Paris, of summers spent at
Archipalego de Colon in knowing voices.
It brags like a regular Studio 54, but

it's just another downtown hard bar,
with the same coke zombies and drag queen
disciples all licking Kismet off squares of
colored cellophane, thier faces pulled in
grotesque passion. The stage pops and
snaps with faulty neon, the constant
crackle on charged air makes her think of
the spark chamber she saw once at a
county science fair, when she was still Viola,

baby fat blonde the crowds called Sapphire,
because it was spelled out behind her
on a black velvet backdrop in sputtering
tubes of violent blue. It spits static at her
bare back, bites at her skin with electric teeth,
drawing sweat that smells of blood and
friction. She sways, seductive on rooted feet,
runs a dry tongue over nervous lips and thinks
of chapstick, of warm milk in a plaid thermos.

Talking To Walls

She was a big, bottle-blonde
kissing the backside of forty,
looking like Mansfield might
if she hadn't blown Biloxi in the rain;
cartoon tits packing Lana Turner sweaters,
checkerberry breath clinging to tacky lips
like the promise of something sweet.
Flashing teeth and thigh six nights
out of seven, she works counter
down at the Angelica Theatre on fifty-third,
selling zabars and popcorn in greasy sacks
to strangers sweating behind familiar features;
they count their change as they walk away.

She shares time and a three-room walk-up
with a dyke she met in Jersey city,
creole stripper half her age who calls her doll
and doesn't know that mama named her Gravis,
reminder of days grown heavy, nights gone hard;
the chance missed to die without scars.

She's never talked of how she split at fifteen,
another ant struggling from someone else's afterbirth,
never telling how it felt when the cord snapped
somewhere east of Idaho; the severed end
drags behind her, erasing the ways back.

She doesn't speak of lying belly-flat
on a sheet-draped table while a man she didn't know
inked his thoughts beneath her skin; he hung
a new moon off the base of her spine, indigo stain
posed like an unfinished question.
In her dreams, faceless people hide answers
under the impossible designs; they leave clues
in concatenate patterns behind her eyes.

Sometimes late at night,
she puts Holiday on the box, sips cold duck
from a tea glass and listens to a closed throat
croon about how things get lost, how turns go wrong.
She watches the girl sleep, her still-firm flesh
the color of peppered honey; and she wonders
will years stretch it slack, or will it ride off
into some sunset in a pink Electra, wind up
on a sheet-covered stretcher, face-up to the dead.

But mostly, she thinks of voices and young girls,
how they last while they last; everything is only until.
She pours herself a kill-shot, rubs absently
at the nag buried in the small of her back,
fingers moving in concentric circles;
their remembered rhythms shushing the tell-tale moon.

Hunger

She takes the six-forty
everyday, a real zaftig mama
running register at the Slavic Grill;
slack tits and hair and broad, flat teeth
that stick perpetually to cracked lips
like the biting aroma of onions and cabbages
sticks forever to her skin and

it floods the bus with sudden clarity,
passengers think of home, of sweet sausage
for supper and tired wives with tight asses,
angry husbands with hard hands and
nobody knows her name is Zinnia;
sour old maid but somebody's flower

and no one will guess
she takes the six-forty everyday
on a three stop ride to see her daddy-man,
fat black butcher who strokes her heavy head,
kisses dry lips slick as they slap needy meat
together until thier pores spit vinegar,
until the starving empty tastes onions, cabbages.

One On One

I can't call it chat;
seems to light, too free-
and it wasn't but

it was good
in a self-searching way
that I wasn't prepared for
or aware of until
skin was already peeling
away in painful strips,
bloodless yet weeping-

I felt them fall,
drifting in dry and dusty piles
beneath my anonymous desk
somewhere in river town
and I wanted to
gather them up-

stick them back
to my naked self, shivering
and unprotected,
weak and wanting.

idle words bared me
like a lover couldn't
like a confessor might
like a surgeon skilled at the craft-

and voices screamed
from the opened wounds
voices with names that can't
be counted, faces that won't be gone.
Their tongues scrape my edges,
dig furrows through the boneyards
that carry my weight-

and I stumble,
I tire, I wonder
will it always be the same.

Ceremony

The colored cemetery
perched on slanted ground
at the far edge of the county line;
the back rows of plots shared borders
with our high school,
and any ball thrown too long
was a dead ball.

Ancient willows stood weeping guard
along the invisible boundary,
their burdened branches dripped moss
the color and texture of elderly lace.
The only visitors there were as
ancient as the willow guards,
but not as weepy.

Several venerable black ladies
of the old order,
all wearing the bright reds and dull greens
of the matriarchal aged.
They spent whole days when they came,
intent on their solemn rite of service,
pruning and weeding,
polishing stone with handfuls of red clay.

We would see them when we played out
our own rites of service
in frequent summer practice games;
and though we never spoke,
or waved a hand in friendly respect,
they always brought our footballs back;
placed in orderly piles at the feet
of the willow guards.

Where The Road Runs

He drove himself down every road.

In a plymouth with tires balder than his head,
slicker than onions growing wild in the ditch.

Does he see the feral cats race his shadow
as it whips through the rabbit grass?
Can he hear the cicadas whirr in the Digger pines?

He claimed he saw a coyote chasing its tail
through fields white with bolls, never admitting
that coyotes ain't common around cotton;
then he would laugh like chuckles were dollars.

His opinions meant everything; his weight pulled
carts filled with sand down at the cement yard
until his yield grew so slack the big boss noticed;
let his time go with a watch and a gold smile-
he had grinned, said it was just another bone

for the archeology folks up state way to dig up
one fine afternoon, to study over like he studied roads-
everyday, a different road. He always said
he heard his oasis calling, heard the slip of streams,
smelled suckle dripping from the vine somewhere
out past the end of the Butternut groves.

Take me back, he'd say-
lead me where the roads run to earth;
leave me drink from the slipping streams,
let me draw communion from its song;
bring me grapes that hang from strapped stakes,
feed me honeysuckle sweet as time-
wash away years like the river smooths stone.

Those blacktops earned his admiration,
hugged his glass tires, pushed his days forward.
He said his satisfaction was always just ahead-
lurking in the sawgrass, swimming with water striders
across the flat planes of Gardner's pond,
caught on a high soar with the morning doves
throwing shadows like bullets on the two-lane;
their flight cutting delicate arcs through thoughts.

He paid attention to clouds, drew their chaos
in the dust on his hood. He chewed sour-thorne
as he drove, said its tang called memories
of a girl he once kissed beneath a fingernail moon.
He collected thistle from bullrushes,
strew it out his windows for the architect birds
building homes in the Silver Birch stands.
He carried a trowel in his trunk for small burials.
He couldn't remember his children's names.

He died on a Saturday.
Parked his Plymouth on a slow rise
out where split-rails lean against the sky.
He opened his arms to a fading sun,
lent his voice to a slipping stream-
Take me! Lead me where the road runs to earth!
They found an old man on Monday, the papers said;
pillowed on piles of thistle miles from the rush thickets,
his eyes full of dew, his pockets full of grapes.

Taste Of Summer

It was summer
when I first tasted a girl-

and I can't stop remembering
bare feet on asphalt, hot;
sweat popping above our lips

as we walked through empty lots,
past houses that watched behind
pulled blinds and barking dogs,
beyond the school where the next year
we would not know ourselves.

You look like a boy, she said
(her daddy wouldn't let her out with boys)
and the smile that tilted her face
tugged all my muscles at once

I can't forget a junked Dodge
half-buried in the woods off Cypress street,
its inside smelling of burnt oil and smoke

and how she felt like wet suede stretched
across the seat; whispers salt-glazed-

our mouths like wind on open wounds.

This Is How We Do It

We should lie down,
stripped on the floor
of your father's study;
except for our little girl panties,
which we pull aside at the crotches
with deliberate fingers,
our tongues at search
in slow circles of motion-

because this is how we do it;
this is what he sees
when he closes his eyes
and plays at sleep,
behind us in his lazy-boy,
while we sit hip to hip,
lip to ear in front of laugh-in;
arms about our waists
like the oldest of friends:

our nipples like rocks
beneath his twitching lids.

Dance

Loretta wears an Angela Davis sphere
picked to perfection atop a broad skull,
colored insolence-orange to compliment
her red-bone tone and the white boys love it-
or so they say when they say something at all
to a picayune yeller waiting table for tips

she saves for three months strong to buy
suede kitten heels and a rayon fluted skirt-
fine as anything the white gals sport
down at the legionnaire's hall on Saturday nights,
kicking ankles and hems to black-balled beats;
but she can't go where she can't go so

she dances to echos in the outside lot while
old men pass bottles on benches nailed to brick-
they blink like Lazarus as she bumps and grinds,
their laughter cracks across the gravel like
cartridges jacked into waiting breeches,
as cold as a cocking trigger.

Nothing Political

Fuck your pretense,
call a spade a spade-
just don't name it nigger
or cracker or honky or tom no matter
how colored the ignorance and

shake the sugar from your coat,
call that cunt a cunt-
but not if it shops uptown or
sticks itself to a sunday pew
or gives the best blow-jobs around

don't pull the punch,
call a prick a prick-
just not if it signs your paycheck or
is a good provider or preaches
community unity at the VFW and

suck that decorum,
call the victim a victim-
but only if it fought back, left marks,
dressed appropriatly, lived to tell about it
on the channel 2 news and not

if it rides poles to pay rent or
trades pussy for crack on southside,
works the zombie shift at Porno-Emporium
or lives in a row house with dingy windows

so spill it on the chalk line,
strip it to the bone and spit-
lick it till it bleeds
the same scarlet as mine.

Sestina Burlesque

It has been said solid alliteration
must not disturb the musical modulation,
and that a sure, set iambic meter
should syllabic two-step with rhyme,
providing that the connotation
does not interfere with denotation.

One could look at strong denotation
as supportive of subtle alliteration,
and concentrate the connotation
to amplify the import of modulation;
arranging stanzas to satisfy rhyme
with flagrant disregard to meter.

To use iambic panti in the meter
could elevate the cadence denotation
until it becomes unstable structured rhyme.
Utilize finer points of alliteration
to help emphasize tone of modulation
and try not to alter connotation.

But to rely heavily on conotation
could cause noticeable errors in meter,
not to mention lesson stressed modulation.
And assonance lends flow to denotation
as consonants do alliteration,
swaying the internal, external, substernal rhyme.

And should a showpiece refuse to rhyme,
will the strophes lose positive connotation
or gain distracting alliteration?
If the perfectly marching meter
declines to keep time with denotation,
will the whole thing rest on modulation?

One could selectively scansion modulation
irregardless of unsteady rhyme,
and place the denotation
squarely on the shoulders of connotation,
possibly pull the panti from the meter,
and upset the consistent alliteration.

So one could hope that connotation
will dance in rhythm with meter,
stressing unstrained sounds of alliteration.

Oletta

She is always Oletta,
ejected misconception
of a white trash traveling man,
trading bibles and bastards
at another highway diner
some thirty-odd ago and
now she works the same table
where mama bought
a good book and a good time;
serving eggs, pouring joe
for the good ol' boys who snigger
behind stained cups,
they snicker hey bright nigger;
high-yeller piece
with a white gal's face.
Their eyes finger her wet-suede skin,
curl themselves in umber coils
springing from her head;
her shoulders itch
as they watch the rounds

but she is still Oletta,
goes home nights,
room 12 at Queen's motel;
she signs the slips in pencil,
pays rent by the week because
things change, don't they;
maybe she'll pack it up,
move to London or Paris
where skin like wet suede
buys you benedict and latte
served on silver trays,
houseboys in black-tie
draw baths laced with Vouvray
and now the tub is full;
good ol' thoughts float,
shed layers below her breasts.
She thinks of traveling men,
sees faces without features
beneath her lids and wonders
where the names went; what happened
to the traces left behind?

She listens to a TV preacher
saving souls through the walls,
glory halleleujah, the refills
aren't really free. Time leaves
footprints in rings, dead trails
growing cold with the water
and she remembers
she is always Oletta.

Concert

Rachmaninoff winds reel-to-reel,
Opus 1, First Piano Concerto-
chords dip from atop my desk,
slide down its veneered cheeks
to swim in shadow around my feet.

I sit, hands above a keyboard,
fingers poised to tap the notes-
precision strikes each letter
as though this balanced type
could arrange my words in unbound sheets

and bestow me the name composer.

Sestina Critique

There sat a critic of sharpened tongue
among a quorum peopled by weary peers,
nimble mind quick with arrogance.
Positioned before proffered thought,
pen dipped in acerbic contempt,
slashing concepts with smug sarcasm.

To question the tone by sarcasm
of your own takes a sugar-coated tongue.
Cover deep cuts in like contempt,
attempts to defend clipped peers,
will raise the wells of caustic thought
until the replies spit arrogance.

But what is this bitter arrogance
if not rancid fodder for sarcasm?
Can the sanctum of written thought
be licked raw by the taunting tongue?
Or will seats filled with censured peers
critique the critic by his own contempt?

If every quorum bore contempt
slicing ideas with razored arrogance,
would there be left the Stepford peers,
identical mocking sarcasm,
dripping scorn from identical tongues,
united by identical thought?

Minds harbor conceptual thought
unburdened by superior contempt,
seeking expression past the honed tongue.
Naked intellect stabbed by arrogance,
hard wrought work riddled by sarcasm,
the sharp tongued critic fences his peers.

Holding court over weary peers,
the self-important sits alone in thought,
nimble mind mossed with sarcasm,
pen loaded with sour contempt.
He fills his mouth with hawked arrogance,
unending spittle from his tongue.

Will the thought sink beneath contempt,
melt in acrid puddles of arrogance,
or lie silent on the severed tongue?

Stains

His head will grow
to the pillow, she thought;

then she thinks about
fingers, raw from the board
and about stains, rust
rosettes sprouting on sheets,
on slips; they faded but

stayed and it fed his ire,
fired his cock to see stains

blooming proof across
starched fronts, church dresses
folded warm on the table,
smelling like greasy soap
and she thinks about

scrubbing, ceaseless scrapes,
split nails digging roses up

from muddy water that
stings flesh red, red as primroses
and she thinks about flowers
after that, of seeds strewn,
how they take and grow

just anywhere, how they
seemed to spring now,

wild from his pillow,
speading past its plump edge,
running trailers down
the wall, flowing out to
root in the carpet and

his head will grow
there, she thought.

Jockey's Ridge, 1976

There came a quickening storm,
one that bought conversation
with the drop of a clap.

Thunder clouds rolled and swelled
along the crests of Jockey's Ridge,
capping the ancient dunes
with an eerie copper glaze.

It moved at a leisurely drift;
surf-fishers, suntanners, salt spray
all scattered before it's track.

The gathered head paused at
odd intervals,and lightning
would implode within the turbid roil,
snapping pictures for God
with muted flashes of illume.

Olongapo Night

She lay still, taut on the bed,
and watched as a fat spider
with spindly legs like eyelashes,
danced at the end of an unseen line.

It hung from a topmost corner
of the raftered cieling,
its slight, somehow lewd sway
cast eerie marionette shadows
that grew long and slunk away
along the muted eggshell walls.

She pulled the thin cover to her chin,
stared at it frightened, yet seduced.
A chill like a creeping fog spread through
the walls of her belly in thick layers.

The spider swung itself upon a beam,
and perched in an awful, knowing attitude.
It regarded her in silent anticipation,
seemed to wave in secret conspiracy.
It skittered in sudden decision across the wood,
then vanished off the edge of her perception.

She thought without effort of the Buso,
Mananangal of long forgotten nightmares,
and waited in puddles of cold sweat
for the sweet feast to begin.

Monster

People call me a freak, but
I got a beauty of my own.
It's in the spray of scars across
my cheek, it flaps tattooed wings
around my wrist; it drops stares
at a glance. It's in the way
I slide my eyes beneath the gut,
caressing the decay within.
Nothing of them is intrinsic to me.

The face that passes with mine
along rippled street windows
reflects itself in the crowd,
bright monster constrained to flesh.
I lick at sores that never heal,
I carry my chaos on my skin.
It lies damp in the folds;
sweet sweat of my birth.

The hands that hold mine dance
hidden in my pockets, fingers loosed
by the titters of the crowd.
Me, myself, and I bitches tease the disease,
insensate tongues kiss my rings-
lips like prayers, breath like wine.
They swallow my spit in gagging gulps.

People call me sick, but I got
a cure of my own. It's in the fear
I suck from venomous minds, it's in
the pulse that bubbles under my prick
as I probe their daughters with deep
indifference. It's in screams that
razor through dead throats,
drained in complex puddles
on the floor of my concrete sarcophagus.

I walk these streets on silent feet,
my wake remembered on the faces
of the crowd. Their instincts recoil,
thrum my bones on ancient currents.
I got my own beauty.
I got my own cure.

Lasting Effects Of A Catholic Boyhood

The bathroom of our rented bungalow
was laid with dark pink Italian tile,
each trimmed with lavender, bordered
all around with alternating squares;
yellow, blue, occasional red,
like arched Cathedral mosaics.

It boasted a naked door at the south end,
comprised of rippled glass and clear veiws.
The sun spilled it's warmth through the
panes bright and unencumbered until well
past noon; and the tiles would sweat their
sympathy for the summer day.

An ancient tub with balled claw feet
crouched huge and gleaming opposite the
door, it supported a rack of circular brass,
and from it hung a curtain shiny mesh.
When the afternoon sun gave it face,
it glowed as if gilded.

On the last morning of our rented summer,
I happened past the door, just as she stood
from a bath. Her body was clouded by steam
that rose in smoky tendrils and curled
around the room like incense at mass.

She raised her arms to part the curtain,
a slender span of sable wings, her head haloed
by dripping ringlets; and when the gilding rays
found the sparkling crown, She became the
Angel Of Annunciation, bearer of Blessed Bliss,
stained glass seraphim of my youth.