ABC.1 + 2

1.
Awkward baker crumbles donuts early Friday,
groaning hours incandescent, jumpy knees.
Loneliness makes no one perfect:
quietly re-sorting sweets to unrequited voices,
while crisscrossing your zenith.

2.
Absolute bird chaos
delighted erotic frolicking
gangly hanging inverted
jostling keeping aloft.
Maybe ninehundred old pigeons
quite ridiculously soaring
telepathically
under vivienne’s window
excited youthful zeal

I’m

On the upside of a disaster tonight
In the company of smoke and fire
Burning my way up to the sky

On the downside of a dilemma tonight
Interrogating desire
Holding on too tight

On the outside of the end of the world tonight
Truth is I feel fine
With that weight on my mind

On the inside of invincible tonight
Looking for someone to fight
I got the means I got the time

On the other side of the door tonight
Having stepped into the light
Realize I’ve been flying

Low chronic flight

Though the scenery disintegrates
Dandelions don’t forget
To coordinate color
With the sun.

Rivers linger along avenues.
Skyscrapers avalanche.
Pockets of clover cover manholes,
Staining the boulders green.

Flashlights look like
Stars in a dog fight.
The great liquid earth lunges
Without empathy over everything.

You are a coat

Sometimes you are a coat
too tight in the back.
I’m trying you on for certain weather;
hanging you up and wearing you out,
I take you on.

You are a cloak somedays
and I am mysterious,
hiding under your collar.
Or you are leather and I gleam.

Usually, you’re a warm wool itchiness:
shoulders stuffed, bent lapel.
Matchbooks slip through the holes in your pockets
and wander around the hem.

Your sleeves are too short
and show off my wrists.
Your buttons fell off.

My chest is cold holding you together,
and I can’t sew. Just take you on
and gleam mysterious in certain weather.

Family Business

Tonight around four a.m., after yelling,
stumbling and crashing had ended,
I went downstairs to inspect the damage.

A table had been overturned again;
broken glass and flowers, food and wine,
plates and napkins all over the floor.

While I stood there, a neighbor came to the door.
“What the hell is going on in this house?
How many people live here and why

are they in the street ramming dumpsters with cars?
I know the owners of this house,
and you cannot continue to live here like this.”

My brother came to the door,
spoke to the man outside
and came back in. I almost bashed him.

Tomorrow, I meet with a lawyer and a banker,
then clean this woman’s house
while he sleeps.

The end of time

The house has been tired for years.
Grandpa painted it just before the cast came off.
Way above the shutters with one plaster arm
hooked in a rung, he yelled, “Grandmother’s gone mad
and your aunts won’t do nothing.
Your uncle don’t even matter. But it’s okay.
See, the rollers are better these days.
It’s easier than it must look from down there.
Now that I’m almost done, I’m still not sure about the color.”

The next summer was all he could take.
Heat tolled on his body. Nodding off lonely,
the scorch set in; his heart wouldn’t hold him up.

Descendants had edged in on his piece of the porch.
The hum of the buzz of the stuff in his house
ran him out long before the floor ‘d given out,
and he built it back up to hold in the noise.

The toys in the carpet interrupted his slippers,
and the letters stopped coming from kin.
“It’s the end of my time, he yelled to his doctors,
no more renovations. Raze the place.
Someone else’ll take ove

The day I went into the city

It’s time to think of years
like a child thinks of days:

instead of stairs,
there are flights,
instead of shots,
bottles. Like whole things,

one is for nothing,
another is for love.
Tomorrow we’re building,
but today is for play.
Now it’s a field, not a blade.

Surrounded by too many days
that keep getting too small.
I’m getting too big,
stuffing days into boxes
and burying them in basements
that don’t belong to me.

John Lee Hooker died
the day I went into the city.
I found my girl and left her
even faster than I met her.
Now there’s something
I’m forgetting.

Not her name,
but the year I’ll scribble on the box.
It’s not a word, it’s a book.
And the title is a number,
a different kind of history.

The things we take get smaller.
The things we keep get bigger,
but time won’t be taken at all;

lonely as god, teasing with moments,
anchoring with albums, and tracing
in our heads the things we forget.

Co-workers

Maybe the finest thing Fredy ever
did was show me how the cruise ship
turns around in front of the city
like a dancer in front of her daddy.

Between two bridges on the lips of Miami,
the January sun glares off of port
as the ship dials east on a dime.

It’s named Imagination, but,
more like an elephant, it spins
with a sleepwalker’s caution for corners
and quiet as a miracle.

Then it stops
with it’s bow in it’s own afternoon shadow.

Tiny flapping hands flap even harder
to urge Imagination’s stroll out to sea.

We don’t even get out of the truck.

The shadetree fisherman
Study how the ripples lap the bridge pilings
and ignore the ship as well as the Dodge
as we drive up from under the bridge.

“That one leaves every Thursday at four thirty,” Fredy said.
“You watch it often,” I asked.
“Second time.”

The Captain

Part 1
At the beginning of the rainy season, my old boss called to tell me about the Captain. He was a sweet old drunk that lived in his van in the bookstore’s parking lot. The day before, his van was towed away, and that rainy night the Captain slept in the dumpster behind the store. I offered him my basement. He cleaned it up and made himself comfortable. He drank a lot, passed out early, and spent his days on the back deck staring at the canopy.

Part 2
As the rainy season ended, I explained it was time to move on. A week later, I returned from a trip to learn that my housemate found the Captain dead. The coroner called me every day for a week trying to identify him, but for 40 years, since going AWOL during the draft, he was the Captain. Last night, my old boss stopped by with a picture of the Captain standing on the bow of a ship, 30 years younger than I’d ever known him. David Stanhope was scribbled on the back, but I never called the coroner. We sprinkled his ashes on the bay and quietly wondered how many of his stories were true.

Afterschool

After I stopped crying
and realized how quiet
it was in the lunch room,
and how tight
I was holding my broom,

I stuffed the kid’s poem
in my pocket and went
to get my bucket to mop.

Wild ancient

wild ancient trampoline schizophrenic gasoline
forgot to keep the engine clean
asphalt dreaming on a blade of green
peel your fruit and dig the hole
dredge a hill to fill the bowl
reams of comment undulate
catch a breeze and bake a cake

wild ancient losing speed
along the edge of what you need
fabric heart attack you’re on
strip center traffic favorite song
that along with what went wrong
shake it baby shake it

wild ancient tossed my voice
into a fight with mist
old streetlights and fists
chests and bedsheet trysts
beneath cotton wishes and kiss
loneliness has no time for love
I’ll cover you up and keep you quiet.

being carried away

Then I didn’t feel the ground.
Just a shoulder in my gut,
an arm around my waist,
and a steadying hand on my ankle.

Blood throbbed into my face
with every careful step. My hands,
dangling down past your belt,
reached for a world that looked

so weird from there.
I’d never been saved before,
Never seen the floor before
from such an awkward angle. It was like

I was longing to be down and you
walked between gravity and me.
I could clearly see your heels
and the dirty cuff of your jeans,

but I never saw your face.
You ran back in so fast.

The barnacle

Black jack elastic the waiting task
I imagine for years we’ve tried
to get that kind of love out of you.
All this time with your thumb
up your ass mulling over nature and jesus
and never did you think
that we might want to hear
about the ways you go about
getting on in the world.

Fact remains, the old sturdy burl
stuck to its ways. A scowl
infected the face. A season of rain
and new cloud formations would have made all the difference in the world.

But no rain came and no fog.
The skies stayed clear, the sky stayed blue.
Something was sure to happen.

The bottom was thin,
on the verge of falling out.
The keal was weak.
The roof wagged low its tail;
we spent the day imagining the worst.
The diligence of waiting.
The worthiness of staying
on to see the end. The fortitude.

Our wall

We share a wall
and some sounds.
I can hear
your cat pounce,
your phone ring.
I hear you sing
in the shower
when we are sharing
hot water. Everytime
I break a glass
I imagine you might
knock to ask
if I’m alright.

You never do, though

maybe you might.
I think I’ve heard you
having the flu, smelled you
one whole Tuesday afternoon
preparing a stew and apple pie.
Heard you cry once too.
Many times
I’ve been moved
to meet you, but
instead stayed glued
to our wall.

The doll and the dog

The doll baby in the back dash
might have been sleeping,
but the shepherd was certainly
dead in the gutter

This guy, waiting for the light to change
in the beater in front of mine, must not know
how to handle dolls. When she was tossed back there,
she struck an uncomfortable pose.

Her hand-me-down dress
covered her face. In her nap
she was mooning everyone
with her plastic yellow ass.

Just outside of the drunk Uncle’s Cutlass,
a golden shepherd was beginning to fade from lying in the street.
It might have been hit yesterday
or Friday as some Father raced to get his girl from daycare.

If the dog’s neck worked, it would look up into the rear windshield like me
and crook it’s head at the funny little body pressed against the glass.
The mutt wouldn’t imagine her sleeping. It’s just another toy he can’t have.

The doll baby in the back dash didn’t budge
when the Cutlass floored it on the green.
I wondered if a kid had begged for that dog
until someone beeped their horn at me.

Dawnwalkers

1.
Shops unlocking.
Morning drops.
Cream and coffee.
Ruined stockings
on the way
to the office.
Breakfast missed.
Slept in.
Grocery lists
unfulfilled again.
Bank hours.
School bus,
bullies, bruises
and bad dreams.
Bad teachers.
Blossoms.
Birds of paradise.
Bacon.

2.
Blue water in the morning.
Fluoride.
Floss. The postman.
The cock. The dew.
The old. The lazy.
The dawnwalkers
swinging their arms.
The drug addicts.
Morning alcoholics.
Men in suits
handling the news.
The blues
lightening up
after a long night.
The jazz musicians
looking for
a good joint
that’s still open

Dawnwalkers, cont.

3.
The washer.
The dishes.
The hair dryer.
The curling iron.
The sudden sirens.
The traffic.
Napkins, straws,
paw marks, safety pins,
cuffs and hems.
Biscuits and gravy.
Fog. Waffles.
Long walks
after midnight
turned into hikes
in the hills.
The brakes.
The spills.
The shakes.

4.
The remnants
of argument;
heartache, mascara,
lipstick, hangnails.
Relatives in jail
enjoying the morning.
The sunrise.
Time.
The rails
all full of trains.
The rain.
Defrost.
Appointments.
Lost.
Checks.
Toast
and butter

Sound of you reading-

The sound of you reading.
A whisper every eight minutes.
Sound of you sucking your teeth.
Deep breath unsettling your chair.
The nail of your index finger against
the grain of your blue corduroy slacks.
Like an instrument.
The sound of your scanning eyes.
Your motionless mouth.
Your cheek
lit up with light reflected off the pages.

All dark now
and quiet. The books all burnt up and you
along with them. The curtains
and the kitchen counter,
quiet.
The floors even.
The faucet
and the rhythm of your toothbrush
against your teeth,
quiet.

Neighborhoods

1.
How much we are like buildings,
and the alleys are the dark, cool gaps between us.
The streets and avenues are the ways we meet
and leave each other.
And what about the gutters?
The bricks, just like skin,
shed shadows and hug back memories,
while I hold a warm battle in my mouth
like the endless muffled arguments
leaking from the penthouse.

2.
And when we’re demolished or dead,
what remains?
Is there a pocket of my family history
floating over second street,
or my grandfather’s ghost still shuffling
with his mail bag on the boulevard?
I’m sure I’ve passed through him.
Do these columns of life retain what they’ve been?
A new family moves in to the new building,
seven stories up, just there, in the same air
where my mother decided to keep me.

3.
My body sprouts up and radiates.
A delicate architecture that travels and sleeps
and was given a name, an address.
But what did I displace?
Was it a tree and my heart is a knot?
Was there an ocean here?
I might still feel the current in my blood,
or the saltiness.
I might speak and you’ll hear the static of leaves
or the wind you flew a kite through once.

Making music

I can hear goosebumps
spreading
like a field of toy pianos
played broadly by the wind.

Pinch in the percussion,
flutter in the tongue. My ear is not perfect,
neither are my thumbs,
but I’ll practice everyday if you let me.

Face me and kneel,
arch your back, touch your heels;
you are a harp
while your stomach beats baritone.

And your hips,
something to give Stratavarious
dreams bordering on the obscene
while he tools violin bodies in the dark.

There is no sound in me;
no strings, no reed,
no skin to drum.
Only the echo of your squeal

in the tremble, groan in the bass;
sounds
I can read off your face.
I want to play you;

combinations of manipulations.
Your knees and your neck and your nape.
Your nipples and your nose. Your back,
a kind of chord between your blades,

tremolo down your spine to a crescendo
of all the little sleeping sounds
wrapped up in your ribs,

Outside

I think the next time
we should do it outside
in the sunshine close
to the ground amongst trees
we could be honest
seeing each other better
as animals

as creatures
we could be loud too
and look
in each other’s eyes
or compare our lives
to clouds
and wait
for night

Slide-

Along the fine edge of your body,
I am too often
about to fall
into the shade
that is neither one of us.

There are things
I don’t want to know about you.
You are ugly
somewhere; a birthmark,
or some scar that requires a story.
I’m scared that maybe,
when we are bored with each other,
you won’t leave,
and I’ll be forced to carry your ugliness everywhere.

Your face is too much,
and the way you seem to accidentally touch me
is too much.
The warm stillness in your lips and your eyelids
is far too close.
I can touch you and you shudder,
or kiss you and you moan.
The sweet slide of your skin is all over me,
and I wonder how you were made.

Terrific gravel

Terrific gravel horseshoe
and hounds hair slumber
with jack the knife in spades again

escalating vibrant denizens
flooding out the holes
of apelike aisleways

black and freshly paved
sticky lascivious waves
hours at the wheel
orientating.

Furious scope sting
electric rope swing
unbelieveable hope sings
taking out the trash

pale and pastel pinks and blues
babypowder midmorning hues
easy candy steady breeze
dandelion nap trapeze

focus broke
as the joke was passed
and the ground came up
just like gravity.

ABC.3

Art car
Birch divot
Crumpled envelope

Drunken forester
Estrogen junkie

Fallen highchair
Governing indigo

Helipad jostling

Incandescent kangaroo
Juniper larceny

Kingdom macramé
Linoleum nightmare

Managerial oracle
Newsworthy pessimism

Ornamental questionmark
Pirate radio
Quizzically serious

Systemic umbrellas
Tv
Union wage

Vicious xylophone
Wailing Yellowstone
X-ray zoetrope

Yawning zees

Casing

Six cars, we go out of the city.
Where there’s houses, we cruise our blocks.
Just drive and listen to the baseball on the radio and read stories.
We’d catch our cousins for lunch at construction site sandwich trucks.
And we would nap in the trees eating fruit. My father, always with binoculars,
watching the lazy avenues for imminent vacationers,
learning from landscapers about the in-betweens of big houses.

Grove running

Like you don’t get anywhere,
running through trees tall as small houses.
Black trunks lined in steady small pilings
like the white, gray stones of Arlington
like a million telephone poles
one million deep, along a fast narrow road.

Haitians, shade sitting on orange crates,
smoke, with sticky fingers and wet mouths.
They get lost in the shadowy room under the tree;
black jeans and long sleeved shirts,
faded long-brimmed hats, only their cuticles
and moist stubble reflect the sun.

It’s so hot here. After the afternoon showers
it smells like we are steaming the rinds.

The grove seems bigger than the sky
when you’re under it, and from the tops of the trees
you can see the curve of the earth, and on the ground,
no grass grows in the paths. It is beat down
by sandals and big machines
and fallen oranges
beat down around the trunk
the moist black dirt
and rot and fertilize.

The end of time

The house has been tired for years.
Grandpa painted it just before the cast came off.
Way above the shutters with one plaster arm
hooked in a rung, he yelled, “Grandmother’s gone mad
and your aunts won’t do nothing.
Your uncle don’t even matter. But it’s okay.
See, the rollers are better these days.
It’s easier than it must look from down there.
Now that I’m almost done, I’m still not sure about the color.”

The next summer was all he could take.
Heat tolled on his body. Nodding off lonely,
the scorch set in; his heart wouldn’t hold him up.

Descendants had edged in on his piece of the porch.
The hum of the buzz of the stuff in his house
ran him out long before the floor ‘d given out,
and he built it back up to hold in the noise.

The toys in the carpet interrupted his slippers,
and the letters stopped coming from kin.
“It’s the end of my time, he yelled to his doctors,
no more renovations. Raze the place.
Someone else’ll take over.”

When moving

In the clutter of these things
I found a photo:
you and I
with smiles and tired eyes
from waiting up all night
to see the sun first.

The camera was in my hand
looking back at us.
A stickiness to our teeth
though we hadn’t slept.
We stretched our lips
for the picture.

There are holes top and center,
because I pinned us up on walls once.
Then, when moving,
tossed us in this box with
paperclips and receipts
and the tacks that held us.
Now, when moving, we’re in another box.

Dent

Art is a dent in the world.
I saw one once
near a little stone wall in Ireland.
From just the right angle,

I could see it from the hill.
A pane of heat shimmer
the size of a soccer ball
floated about three feet off the ground.

Just a dent, perfectly smooth
and not too deep, a shape resembling
the bottom of a wine bottle.
Who knows how these things happen?

I stuck my head in it a bit,
after hours of being too scared to touch it.
Maybe if I hit it with a big hammer,
maybe if I jumped on it,

but I didn’t. I left it there
hoping someone else might find it,
and one day I might find them
and we might talk about it.

ABC.4

(Found in a Lightpost in Paris)

Dear Eddy-

Foley got hit in Jacksonville,
killed. Leo’s money’s not our problem.
Quietly resurface. Send Tony you’re vitals.
We’ll exchange yen and zen again.

Best,
Chuck

Orchestra

Music of my own movement
against texture and space,
my breath brushes through
the whiskers on my face.
And the rub of my clothes
and my joints punctuate
the time I have to wait.
Music of my own mind
in a dark without edges
or gaps between the parts
of some subliminal symphony.