Saturday, December 31, 2011

Incantation for Laughter



When elephants fight for tusks,
a sculptor grins and cuts
that dirty little war in stone.

Ancient deer put down their heads
and drive antlers into water.

The lips of one river
touch the neck of another.

Laugh, Khlebnikov. Laugh it out!
Laugh it forth, Mendelstam, laugh.
Laugh, Akhmatova, unlaughfully laugh.
Laugh, you be-laughingly laughers.

Laugh of the languished laughniks.
Laugh of the counterfeit-lauhghkins.
Laugh of the dis-laughing laughlets.

When you're all fed up with laughter,
oh laugh-raptors,
you put on golden wings and fling
yourselves into the melancholy sun.

The sweet maidens of India
and the fragile shadows of Romania
kiss your feathers. They offer you
black Vedas and lost songs of little gods.

Where are the catechisms,
the eagle and the crow?

The Ganges and the Danube flow.
They dance laugh-sambas to the sea.

When smoke turns to dust,
rivers and laughter
turn to stone.

Hunting America

The canebrake hums with threat.
The woods moan like a mother's loss
so that
the hunter can pierce the beast.

Oh, America, why do you
carry the weight of love on your antlers?

The arrow's tip
seeks the haunch.
All the bulk of a fine and portly day
is on your back, America.

Vainly but with such virgin charm,
you dance and dodge the final question.

Every glade waits to ambush you, America.
Every clearing is a dangerous place.

Oh, you fugitive of clover-
devotion and bruised apples
the bowstring trembles.

Nothing's Going to Change the World

Oh, new century, you sag 
like an ancient beast.

Who will gaze into your tired eyes, 
hold your arthritic jaw? 

Who will whisper blood-
sonnets to unfuse your vertebrae?

Every creature must tote its own backbone,
and any wind plays with an invisible spine.

To tear life from its cage, 
one must bind the claws with a single hair
stolen from a lover's skull. 

The cartilage of time is cracked — 
beautiful, sad age.

And you can't keep up. 

And you look back
like a starving animal at the snow
that fills your tracks.

Friday, December 30, 2011

Muttsy Hugbars Sings the Ballad of the Ninety-nine Percent

We dance in a country grown unreal and strange.
Only we two two-step to this back-beat exchange.
For we two chances of lost conversations hear,
and we sing the forgotten song of chanticleer.

These thick words, fat worms, gesticulate,

striking our genitals with God's divine-weight.
My cockroach mustache crawls across your cheek
and reeks of my cologne, Shriekwood Mystique.

The new millennium pirouettes on the floor with us,

dancing a sextant to Ultima Thule, by way of Cygnus.
And always the multitude, the hollow-eyed dreamers obey;

they left-foot, right-foot — so hap-hap-happy and so fey.

And we slog our mazurkas on the looted dream of tomorrow —

a Wall Street treasure-horde — and we sing a song of sorrow.
And we shag and fuck and toil for what it's worth.
Sex — procreation — will usurp the rulers of this Earth.

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Where to Begin?

The air trembles with similes.
This word wrestles that one.
The trees vibrate with Regina Spektor's vibrato.
The two-wheeled moon is some kind of metaphor,
swift-harnessed by a flock of crows.

Forty-seven blessings on the one who names my song!

My tongue
tastes of thyme I rubbed between my palms,
she tells me.
My tongue is tied to a dense, elastic dream,
I tell her.

And inhaling the moist
fossil words we shape,
the taint of ossified hope,
I cough and sneeze and snort
three poems quick as that.

Ha!

And what's to show?
The sharp arch of my aching neck.

All the best lessons
I learned from her, the arrow-finder.

She brushed away the dirt
and rubbed the shaft with silk until it shined.

She hung it over a threshold
so it could rest
and no more have to strike the prey.

Monday, December 26, 2011

Let the First Lay Be Only Shouting



That wet, muddy teen-age spring
she was the hard,
exquisite voice of Michigan,
the ecstatic song of farmland and woods.

In the beech-maple forest of our youth,
she sang a chance,
take a chan-chan-
chance on me.

And all the living things
swam in that muddled air,
bathed in that sharp
spring-melt wind.

I made a mistake.
I was confused, lost count.

Before I could tally right
and wrong, she gave me all
the drowned loam of those fields
tilled by the moon's deep plow.

That was a long time ago.

We were two
strivings in a savage land—
Ronald-Regan-America—
teased by ignorance and lust,
breathing illegitimate dust.

Tonight, I clutch her
vanishing shadow, cling to her
fading words.

And the tighter I hold her tired song,
the more I remember how we played
knuckle-bones with the bleached
vertebrae of long-dead rabbits.

Amusing, though, that at the last
indention—despite sharp-eyed
proofreaders and crows—
those naked apple trees
still cast shadows on the marble of my hand.

Tonight, all the fragile chronology of time
collapses at my feet. The river tops its banks.
Earth is a temple and mysteries
take place again.

Who could merge us
for one purpose, we two
enemies of the heart?

Burn all the books,
make bonfires and dance in that clean,
dark-art light.

And still I say
the mistress of my tiny empires
loved me madly.

Tonight, the moon hangs low,
marbled by gnarled branches.

And still I say my shy one—
whom I met on that no-name dirt
road in Muskegon County, Michigan—

forever, ever,
I am yours alone.

Friday, December 23, 2011

To Stay Alive Is a Pretty Good Thing to Do

So many keen, unchewed words have flown at me
that my eyes are no longer scarred by their passing.

First I loved the idea,
then hated the fact foot-caught,
snap-trapped and dragged to a graceful tower.

Here I am,
the first man in my family to break
night across an angry knee,
the first to kiss
the forlorn face of dawn.

And oftentimes cold air
comes all the way from Lake Michigan
to breathe in my Mississippi home,
silk curtains puffing
where there are no windows.

The crow of day
eats corn from my extended hand.
The crow of day
sews the bitter cloth of my last uniform.

And oftentimes I think
that all I learned from poetry is this

The bullet is a mad thing.
Only the bayonet knows
what it's about.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Fernand Léger

I promise you, Nadia,
when the medium dances, he said.
I promise you -- heaven true.

What is your culture to me
she said.

Mediating world & brain
is my job, he said.

Ha!
Said Nadia.

The representation -- or sometimes
misrepresentation -- of self & class
might result not
without its critics, he said.

Ha, ha.

He said a decade later
I hit the fragmented
object of a new realism.

Nadia said bull shit.

This is not to say
the widespread availability of house plants
excuses love-slaps.

He said.

It's true & what's not true
makes all the difference between here & there,
she said.

So I made a big mistake, he said.
So I took the big-take.

Ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, she said.
For once, you don't
want to fight.

For poetry's a social act,
she said, & painting's pure
punch-fuck.

Sunday, December 04, 2011

Wish You Were Here

You gave me the lake moon
shattered by the fish dance.

You gave me the last
taste and first
touch you said
your daddy kept locked
deeper than your momma
ever knew.

You said that, 

my little lady. 
You said it.

Did you really say it?

We saw the Michigan night

drop like an angry back-hand
kiss. We saw the dark
fall fast and sad and fist-

first. You laughed so hard.


Remember when you

laughed so hysterically hard?

Your daddy laughed like that.


Remember how I held
my fingers out to you
like buttons on a juke box?

Remember how you pushed

one-two-three

each finger in turn,
and I sang every song
you asked me to sing?


You're my brown eyed girl,
I sang. 

Sha-la-la-la-la-dee-dah,

sha-la-dee-dah.
 

I sang I wonder,
still I wonder,
who'll stop the rain.

What was that song

you asked me 
not to sing?
 

We knew
nobody knows
where it comes
and where it goes.


What was that song
you couldn't bear to hear?


Oh, my girl, sing.
Sing with me. 


Sing.

You gave me 

a broken moon. 
You gave me 
the minnow-slivered moon.

I fish for you. 

I fish.   
I fish for you.