black and white keys are bullets from a piano loaded in your eyes then fired by trigger fingers curled around the doorknob where you lived at 63rd and West End someone calling out "who's there?" when I would stand outside listening for the ricochet of silences as if there would still be echoes 50 years on instead of shots from the projects across the street and tasting the gunsmoke of heroin-grey sky smelling jazz salts revives me from touching the numbers on your door, the rooms now empty of music, no piano in the kitchen fact: our apartment was a block from your house Thelonious Sphere Monk Circle of 5ths where the rhinoceros statue was cemented head first by its horn in the ground as if a fat-man trumpet player made a swan-dive of scales from the balcony above the rooms now full of music the color of money, tickle the ivories tickles your teeth with diamonds until the piano player calls it quits and closes the shades each note recluse as the door bangs open the new tenants brush past me coming down the steps in overstuffed coats as if whatever music was left in the walls they've hidden in pockets or packed for extra warmth and smuggle down to the subway take the A train to Harlem where the notes escape like a flock of birds riffing into the sky
Category: The Sunday Muse
The Firepossum
I look over and see a firepossum trundling in from the storm – eight baby owls on her back, her crown of scarlet begonias. She heads to a stack of journals, feeds on the garbage I call poems. Spits and hacks out most, but a greedy smeck smeck smeck from time to time. I say "Firepossum, play dead!" and she filches around in her pouch – has a bootleg tape of the Red Rocks tour – Jerry and Co. jamming on Row Jimmy. Wikipedea says the firepossum is a mythic beast that rises in flames like Phoenix from ashes of suburban shopping malls in Arizona. The familiar of muses who blow into the mouths of the owls like feathered ocarinas tuned to the key of see? She climbs into the burning hearth, disappears, leaving an empty room and owl pellets – I hold in my hand inky bullets of hair, bones, claws, and teeth.
TSM 197
There is no poem here, just my uncle in the first hours of August 6th, 1945 watching in darkness the Enola Gay gain speed on runway Able, North Field, Tinian Island. Mid-morning the sky – a blue and turquoise axe handle – swings down a flaming red blade on Hiroshima. He said they saw the light 1,500 miles away, a second dawn. No poem. Talked with the ground crews, went to mess, played poker with his tail gunner and the navigator. Will meaning come later, if ever? If he drew to a flush of hearts, he does not remember. Or if Tokyo Rose played Blue Skies on the radio.
TSM 195
I thought snuff poems were illegal since at least the 90's – No more candles in the wind, thank Jesus, no night stars blowing out one by one, all the tropes of hope and light gone up in smoke – arrested, up against a cop car, spread-eagle and cuffed with zip ties. A young poet I knew went to police academy to play cops and robbers – bad idea – our metaphors mug honest words at knifepoint, disturb the peace of stolid, taxpaying nouns, graffiti defacing the library wall of verbs. she forgot all art is theft and poetry is murder.
TSM 194
Your glass eye(s) breaking my heart like a highway at night of endless black mirror crushed beneath tires at high speed the splintered light of oncoming cars unseeing but we are not blind in the onrushing darkness, no love is not blind in your arms the shivers and slivers clear and bright
TSM 190
No, no. No lap-dances with angels, no pushing cash into the elastic bands of their wings and copping a feel of heaven. Is it my fear, yours? To be skeevy and homeless in the afterworld? Me, haunting and flapping down the sidewalks of paradise, the smell of urine parting a sea of cherubim. And you, in Job's rags, riffling through the trash, collecting Diet Coke cans of redemption.
TSM 189
Watching Beatles clips on YouTube – John Lennon walks into the studio in a giant fur coat twice his size that looks like an apex predator humping Little Red Riding Hood It is the moment just before they devour the band forever, and all I can think I as I watch – they all have such small teeth
Whisky Elegy
Reader, now you are fully here in the poem. This is how the poem, you, and I transcend illusion, maya. Tell us how outside your window rain beats a can – the one you left on the porch of hair mixed with coffee grounds swept from the kitchen floor last spring. And I will admit my mother was already lost as we drove from warehouse to warehouse in Denver looking for heroes and boxes of steel ball bearings. The poem tells us these are where we hide, our thoughts tangled in umbilical, helical ropes that hang our hats or our heads. I am a large man, if I try to wear your clothes they will burst. If you try to see yourself in my mirror you will be unshaven and want a clean bar of soap. There is no "chop wood, carry water" here, only an apartment in Weekhawken above parking lots filled with brown leaves, thin puddles. Let us break bread together then, raise our glasses without deception – utterance and burning promise in our throats.
After UA 14 Overnight to Heathrow
Dawn edging London, that red-eye planet. Reader, stand with me here in the hotel shower, face-up to the spray. Slowly turn up the heat until water is a lash. Not penance, no. You understand how this is necessary. Agree it would be a mistake to reckon and tally. Or call back dreams from distant beds. My clothes on the floor an abandoned spacesuit, skin professing faith in time-travel. There is nothing faster than light you say, from beyond the mirror's blur. No trick of gravity or imagination that grants us passage. A twist of the tap unseals the locks. I must learn to breathe. Only the long way home. “To be loved or broken, to be born again or die…” A woman waits for me.
*Salman Rushdie – “Quichotte”
TSM 182
Follow my nose, eh? As if I were a narwhal whose tusk – my helix of sharp sorrows – was a compass pointing true north. Did you say you heard me clicking and singing late into the polar night, our saga of when mermaids rode whales to war? Or just my silliness again, getting on in years. We sit together at the table and talk about the ice floes. Will we will remember the way? Or will I make a wrong turn, end up at the mall again – at Sleepy's laid out on the white expanse of king-sized mattresses, holding hands in our parkas. While they call the children to come get us, I wrap a sheet around me – a body ready to tip into the sea. Returned to the water – the two of us whale and seal. I test my tusk if its point is true, and you riding the surf in joy.
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