When three dogs howl in the night, what's a catgirl to do? Skinned of song, you yowl the blue in your veins like a train whistle exhaling, wailing, disappearing like oxygen that ends in fury, a holy song that confesses what every Tom in the alley knows: hide your heart fearless girl – it's only a short toss into the remaindered hay, for when the winter snows part there are no coffins for strays.
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
The Web of Life
Did you just brag you measure your life in sheets of toilet paper? Stuck to the bottom of your foot, uncoiling the roll as you leave the bathroom you are a Charmin spider, exuding and unspooling your load as you walk through the living room and out the door, taking the bus to work where you circle the conference table until your boss is wrapped like a Halloween mummy so they send you to Paris and you are on the airplane jet trails of TP streaming and screaming out behind you, you’re a paper Frequent Flyer, Million Miler club of all the crap you’ve had to deal with, don’t cry or the world cries with you and we have to wipe the whole soggy gobbledegoo from our eyes our front yards the earth a trail of tears and a white Christmas after all? Be careful – no smoking – or you will light a fuse and find the world is a bowl of cherry bombs, an explosion of blackberry cobbler without sanitary napkins, a spark that follows you back igniting your history if not your imagination, unwinding and spiraling the idiots and maniacs into torched frenzy until at the very end of the line you find your head in a gas oven like Sylvia daddy daddy daddy with poems burning their way across the kitchen floor.
Bobby Bly and F. Scott Fitzgerald Walk Into a Bar…
Bly's is the cue ball, his mind breaking Fitzgerald's rack, club ties striped and solid but eight-ball in the corner pocket, the dark-haired fever of it – F Scott buried in a pauper's grave Though Bly is only twelve in 1940 the next morning they're chewing cigarettes and champagne, tobacco bubbles and sparkles in their teeth – light of the sun trespassing through the empty glasses Fitzgerald is a flabby edition, his suit dog-eared, unsteady from the hotel, bookstore to bookstore, asking for a copy of his books, but no, his work a has-been, a feather mourning the precarity of wind and tremendous fame. Bly says we're dead now, whither shall we go? We lived in the front pocket of delirium, sorrow and lint to mix for our ink. Vienna will not have you nor write on your tomb: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
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.
TSM 181
You there! blackened gum on the sidewalk –
I consecrate you. A dark host
for a dark celebrant.
And you, man walking your dog at 6AM –
I bless the parables in your teeth,
clacking to stay awake.
For at this hour I am the Bishop of everything
diagonal,
cater-corner,
proximal,
but never finally touching,
that doesn’t hang together, connect.
Slip sliding away to infinity
I raise my arm in Taxi benediction –
the Blessing of the Fleet
a checkered yellow –
I am Pope and cornerman to box shrubs
in my square priory, my tiny park.
A voice pulls at my elbow
from a window far above:
"Take off that silly paper hat!
What are you doing out there!
Act your age just for once,
and get back in here before it rains!"
My mood darkens, whom/what
will I excommunicate
with a wave of my crosier, my
wind-broken twig?
Congregants pass unrepentant
with their strollers and scooters.
How will I bring the morning
its salvation, like an everything bagel
warm in the bag – when it refuses the wine
of my poems, so cross-eyed with gall.
This crucified dawn. This Sunday that slants
to salvation or damnation.
TSM 180
Eye for an eye, lip for a lip: my love not retribution but desire – just now, just this, our kiss hanging in the air between us like a mirror flashing the sun, flaring SOS to pilots flying low out of LaGuardia in Manhattan's endless, island search party. Form: "NY Minute." A NY Minute is like an American Sentence, but doesn't give a crap about syllable counts or anything else. You got a problem with that?
qbit 