I keep telling myself, asshole,
You have this much time, and this much
Money to get it all done.
Imagine, okay, the Devil.
He is clean and red and you can smell ginger.
His G-d is your G-d so no surprises there—
But the way he looks at you says everything
About how he uses his belt. And he
Never seems to remember you.
They’d rather lick the clock clean than help me.
Two statuettes complement one another
In my living room.
One is a Goddess of the art deco.
The other one is empty.
The wounds of my judge lie open
I mop but blood abounds. He sees
Me, he remembers me—
And every morning he awakens and he
Drinks a cold lake of brandy. Once he’s done you can see a depression in the mud where maybe
A meteor landed—or a great beast fell
Fighting for its life. Through the
Sinews of his unconsciousness he sees me
In the quiet of my room.
There are moments after sunset
Off the clock
When I find a mouse Tinto killed while
I was at work. I don’t dream about misery.
I dream about Tinto sitting in the pelvic bough
Of a peach tree,
He’s looking down at me with his grey poem
Left by the couch.
And I am the bounty.
A pulpy pink thing came calling
Between my first and third fingers.
Suddenly, I thought I imagined it.
But in the mirror, dystrophied by the sunset
This expression was exactly as I remembered it,
Reversed and less temperamental.
All the heather and the madness,
All the heather and the madness,
All the heather and the madness,
Look again. See it again. Look at it, damned dreamer.
Trouble isn’t trouble til
The hem tears and it’s trouble.
Look at me, not quite fit to come in,
But not entirely turned away. I’m the middle of the night
The horses will begin to kick the stable walls, and a cat your family loves
Will tip over an ink well. I’ll still lie in the peace of the grave
While you
Discern kinky butterflies of your own undoing.
The dream that followed served the first one:
Skulls disintegrated beneath the pearly
Teeth of an earthmover.
Meanwhile, gladiolas rose in an effort
For peace.
The world and where you work is substandard,
So everybody
Figures fuck it. One day all the dog fighters
And dogs will die in this eminent domain
Of peace we feel in our bodies.
The swale in which the lively bathe, and the dust in
Which the sedentary sit share a border. But
There, distant past, we worried ourselves breathless
Remembering history’s Lusitania
And grief crept over us like sunset.
You might never have felt such captive culpability for
Your own breath, but I have.
Fewer and far between,
You dropped the house key in the well
To keep it safe.
But later you started to realize you weren’t
The first one with this idea.
That’s the problem with ingenuity. It’s covered
With thorns and it feels like a victory to
Actively avoid them.
But what about the rest of the time.
You look down into the clear and pure looking water,
And you see your own purple eyes in the poison and the key.
The bigger dream has been eclipsed by moonlight
And rotten ass doo wop.
The lesson covers love, old age, and eventually silence. Every
Great song points us back to the indefatigable
Globe of a thing.
Bobby soxers get together around me.
I’m nobody, but they see the cosmos. And
In their heels
And in their malevolent
Let’s let go,
As if decided at a party for everyone.
I have no responsibilities to tell you about,
This isn’t my job, so if I slip up,
And I’m amateur hour
It won’t affect my pay.
Maybe I should open myself more to risk.
I love the smell of motorcycles,
And once I saw a gargoyle leaving his post
For swimming water.
One of my headlights is out.
The road clears its own throat:
The radio once I get to a certain point on 30 is
Satanic gospel.
But when I come down the mountain the
Sun is there to shine on a world superstitious of loss.
They bake their fallen leaves.
They reimagine the dead in uniform.
There’s a Gulf station in Art Deco
In need of an army.
There’s a duck no one ever saw before but me;
But everyone sticks up for him.
The alphabet was made out of mystery.
I’m sure it wasn’t perfect; I’m sure there were
Hard feelings shared between
The P and the R people.
But someone in the Hawthorne village anticipated
The wilderness of their thinking, and A became A thing.
And everybody followed.
The R lost its trunk and the P became
A predicate form. When the two looked at the Q
They imagined breakfast on their day off.
It was as if in begging, the tongue of
Humanity spoke and did its duty for once.
It was as if the people said for once,
Let us speak for ourselves.
The scientist is so weird—and he owns this place:
The beakers burning, and monkeys bouncing
In their cages. The next magic is in here somewhere,
He says. But is he really the guy?
He’s handsome, and women find him sexy at lunch.
Lightning bends as it crosses the window on his ceiling,
And it raises the sleeping skin in the green of his
Greenhouse..
He grows things, this dashing prince.
Where are you from, patient zero?
What brought you in to us today?
The flag flying above the clinic is ours. The fly
Is infectious. You, through the archway, which is Gothic,
Must dream of a life without all this science,
As you look ahead.
The hill burped when the toad stirred.
The sky shit on me in Washington D.C.
It was a pigeon, it was rain.
People gathered around a wet, dead baby doll.
As they dispersed one could be heard
Cursing humankind.
She was already crying. On the bank
As a kid she saw the toads shake off
Winter as if waterproof.
