Snakebit Kudzu

You Will Let Go

2012-02-19T22:30:00.017-06:00

You could just hand me

my compass this roof-iced,

house-empty day.

You could ignore unmeasured clouds

that breathe such lifeless latitudes.

We read the Bible

your father gave you

twenty years ago.

We read all the books

prophets and apostles never wrote,

all the stories they said

they said.

We make love to the Old Testament,

ravish the words of David’s Psalms of Praises,

kiss-lick his gut-punch love songs.

Way beyond these clouds,
stars are blue frost,
feather-thin snowflakes.

The stars ignore the day.

This is a story that day won’t

give morning any time soon,

is what you want to but
never will say.

This is a story that day tells,
each snow-touched thought

and three spring-pressed Maple leaves

marking the Song of Songs for me.

Another Poem About Chrysanthemums

2012-02-07T22:56:00.007-06:00

No, I will not smoke

your cigarettes.

I won’t drink your wine

when you’re dancing drunk,

head-bowed about the room.

You kiss the rising Pleiades

and hug Arcturus going down.

You are like Simon living on a marble pillar,

casting soddy judgments on emperors and plebeians alike.

How powerful a man is

who demands his

hat and single pinch of salt

but forswears a lover's touch.

At our place, peace reigns,

peace and a quiet song.

All the rain-littered birds

raise placid eyes to you.

Though from Another Place I Take My Name

2012-01-19T21:15:00.002-06:00

And every evening,
this one desire of mine
saw her face in another man's wine.

I looked. She raised her arms
and moved her dance along,
tossing flowers to everyone
and spending herself in song.

She pirouetted past a window.
Surely no human hands
turned those pages.

That her face was soiled linen in that light,
like a jaw-clenched winter sunset.
That her lips (the palest blood-clots)
whistled again and again.

Hear!

A snake-heavy, dull-dusty voice
dragged yesterday like a corpse
onto tomorrow.

I died. I started again and all
will be repeated as before.
The frigid snickering of a frozen creek.
The night. The barn. The dog coop.

All the snowstorms of my youth.

There was present in her secret song.
Wedding wreaths crowned
the imagined mountains of Michigan.

And behold,
I'm so feebly mute.

And Be with Caution Bold

2012-01-18T22:25:00.026-06:00

I dreamed my moth-winged soul —

all splutter-smogged, all dirt and thought —

lit close to a thistle’s eye.

I dreamed a butterfly — all color, rainbow, shine,
two silken circles on her wings —
fluttered by.

I dreamed we danced flamenco on the wind,
flaunting laughter-flight and laced

escalloped lines of flame-desire.

I dreamed we flew all curious and curlicue,

rose skyward on such fist-warm air,

wing-twisted with each other into blue.

Oh, my tangled soul!

I'll forget my wounded deeds.

I’ll forget my wing-
broke dreams.

When Ezra Understands

2012-01-15T02:17:00.030-06:00

I’d like to walk home,

smile and jest, just

as everybody has —

is this too much? —

asked, no, prayed
to go home again.

Still, foot by foot,
I’ve learned to run,
lung-paced in step with everyone.

I chant frost-linger songs,
sing lost-finger stanzas,

tongue-touch gloss-glove notes.

Stand up! I stand.

Sit down! I sit.

I’ve learned

my sentence by heart,

and for that roof of words —

admit my virgin soul
died running in the dark.

Andrei Rublev Never Painted Icons in Mississippi

2012-01-15T00:32:00.005-06:00

I said: Provisions for the foot

dug-up and the unwatered foot

appear in “Excavations for Tower Footings.”

Tonight spreads, she said,

a knobbed laticlave across the sky.

Oh, how that purple bleeds, I said.

Who says the quality of distinct sides,

she said,

is derived from the name of a man?

Who says after the usual time

that the mitigant day forgives

even the fallen arch of your left foot?

Is what she dared say to me.

To forgive and receive the like thing,

as to exchange thoughts, I said,

is next to—oh, here it goes,

here it goes again.

Should have known again.

The Devil’s Rag Piano

2012-01-12T23:16:00.025-06:00

High above
the sluggish Mississippi,

way higher than
the southern pines

that reach like nervous virgins up

this hungry valley—

a crow flies.

I go

it alone.

See the crow fly.

Ya'll pass me
that bottle.

I go it alone.

Honey, I spit-comb
my gray-black hair back,

and I go

it alone.

I come round your room,
sweet-heart, I come.

Pass me
that bottle,
baby.

Six is this
and seven is that—

I’m coming over,

hands in my pocket.

I’m coming over,

girl, and I’m coming

alone.

I bet I go it alone.

Some Love Don't Got No Right to Speak

2012-01-07T22:04:00.028-06:00

We asked for the noir suite
with a flashing neon sign

outside the window.

I closed the door behind us,
and here's what she whispered

in my cauliflower ear:

When two equally dangerous people

sniff around the same flame,
they both lose

their wings in fire and smoke.

Her father was attorney general

a few years back.

You're not a turnip, she said.
You're not, are you.

I blew cigarette smoke out my nose
like a cartoon bull.

No advantages known by the police, she said,

putting faith in an obviously dubious turd.

This is a story

told from the point-of-view of a crook

with the hots for a high-heeled

daughter-of-privilege
and lots to lose.

A self-centered way of looking at it,

she said, like an undistinguished actor

playing an undistinguished human being.

Listen, sister, I know
the difference between a good

and a bad girl — so's I can,
so's I can
spit in anyone's eye.

I did before and had my share.
I got nowhere, she said.
It doesn't matter what you did.
We could see this night through.

What are you,
I said to the naked
two-pane window,

a bunch of cock suckers?

Stop laughing

or kiss my fist.

When the Revolution Came to St. Petersburg

2012-01-06T01:27:00.007-06:00

Night came galloping over hills

like a troop of blue hussars

chasing a wounded bear.

Sleighs along Fontanka

split the icy air.

She told me last April:

Here’s a perfect place to plant

a garden of Pushkin sonnets.

This morning she told me:

We’re quits, and we don’t
need to inventory a rash of stars.

White horses slashed

ice on Liteiny Street.

Muted guitars pressed

cold stilettos to our necks.

She said someone — I think

the moon’s footman —

kissed my collarbone.

And the tiered soldiers

sipped their clean vodka,

humming songs they didn’t know.

The moon, master assassin,

came out to pull a job.

Don’t put on your sword, she said.

Don't take part. You know

how many snowflakes

it takes to kill a heart.

I was watching the horses

trample acres of winter-hardy songs.

If to the Left, Suspicion Hinders Bliss

2012-01-02T23:47:00.015-06:00

Clouds hang low
like a gray veil across the night,
the corduroy face of God Almighty
bent over the flesh of the world.

One and just one
shape of the mouth
pronounces the ineffable name.

All existence opens like a wounded sea,
but only infants read the fishes and the stars.

They know the moon was born above
such questions, during a warm hour
when winged darkness held
the earth in its breath.

An orchestra watches
all the layered
depths of existence —
and is at best
noncommittal.

A violin whines
herself to silence.

Somewhere, a silly cymbal
crashes.

Incantation for Laughter

2011-12-31T23:19:00.038-06:00

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

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

The lips of one river
touch the neck of another.

Laugh, Khlebnikov. Laugh it out!
Laugh it forth, Mendelstamm, 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

2011-12-31T19:52:00.012-06:00

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

2011-12-31T03:17:00.030-06:00

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 head.

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

And you can't keep up.

And you look back

like a starving animal at the snow

that fills your tracks.

Muttsy Hugbars Sings the Ballad of the Ninety-nine Percent

2011-12-30T01:55:00.050-06:00

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.

Where to Begin?

2011-12-27T22:41:00.025-06:00

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!

I finally made a clean
getaway, forget that sound
still ringing. I finally made it,
a clean break.

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

All the best lessons
I learned from 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.

Let the First Lay Be Only Shouting

2011-12-26T23:14:00.069-06:00

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.

To Stay Alive Is a Pretty Good Thing to Do

2011-12-23T02:48:00.019-06:00

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 my 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.

Fernand Léger

2011-12-15T22:25:00.019-06:00

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.

Wish You Were Here

2011-12-04T21:47:00.039-06:00

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.

I Build Blogs — She Says I’m Narcissistic

2011-11-30T20:22:00.021-06:00

Not right now, she says,

when the river leans

so heavy against the levee.

What does that mean

is what I ask her.

She says,

Is it all about me?

What do you mean?

You are weak, she says,

and I am strong. It's all

about me, ain't it?

Ain't it?

She says.

Paranoia’s in bloom this spring.

Paranoia and the black mold and the long

fingers of victorious high school principals

snapping those vapid Victorian songs.

Oh, we should never, we

should never be afraid

she says to die.

Assurnasipal II of Assyria inaugurated something or other.

He smoked cigarettes and built ziggurats.

I build a tower of words

with poplar poles and cottonwood beams,

a tee-pee whose top

reaches unto heaven.

I build my flimsy tower

on an inlet of the Internet

where the search engine shows

me my eyes.

Where the search engine shows

me the me

my eyes want to see.

Where the search engine flows

syllables over the levee of my heart.

Lafayette, Indiana, July 1995

2011-11-28T18:22:00.029-06:00

That kid on a red motor scooter knows
the limits his desire reaches under
mid-summer maples he won't
remember because his dad

maybe an older brother chases him down

riding a little bicycle

screaming obscenities like Fuck

you little fucking shit you

know you ain’t supposed to ride my bike you

get your ass off my scooter and home

before I break your fucking skull in the silence

that follows -- though never quite

quiet for day settles anyway like lace

thrown over the back of a tattered couch

or the shoulders of an old woman

who won’t say thanks because she’s got

only a T.V. screen and a cinder-block wall

-- not even dust floats down but

I expect the one absolute one
day arrives and I too lose

this afternoon

lose myself too.

Mickey Ceasar

2011-11-15T23:11:00.002-06:00

That last beer,
the coldest
bottle in the fridge,
so far back on
the bottom shelf
I was shoulder deep
just to grip it --

the one
I said I'd save
for you --

I drank it.

One chance
is what I thought.
One chance to get
everything right.

Fuck it.

Sometimes it don't
fall that way.

You know
what I mean,
my far-flung,
wind-tossed
brother.

You know
when lines
get short,
it's hard
to think.

Just
drink.

Happy, Happy, Happy Birthday, Devil Dog

2011-11-10T23:23:00.015-06:00

Happy birthday, Marine Corps,
you sag-titty, one-eyed bitch
who never let go my nuts.

Oh, yes, I'm happy-happy-happy
for what you taught me,
Marine Corps, you taught me
how to touch my lover, my wife.

You taught me how to touch my
children. Thank you,

Oh, carrion comfort.

Thank you, Marine Corps --
my mother, my father, my lover.

Oh,
let me go.

Let me go.

Let, let, let go --
my mother, my father, my

one-eyed self.

Litany of Hermeneutics

2011-11-07T21:41:00.078-06:00

Like first light

clawing up from dark

water, I'm the strict

interpretation that starts
with misunderstanding.

You know me, my darling,

my bruised peach.

I'm your thin skin

sliced — the finer,

more manageable crisis.

I'm the morning's first crow,
the wild turkey that startles down
dawn with my pine-bough drop-flight.

I make you draw red
lines all up & down

your arms, my
whisper-swish razor-love.

I'm translated into forty-six languages.

I saw cancer, indifference, & hate
kill all the best

ladies I ever knew.

Jesus was a personal friend.

That's a few years now,
the systematic fist,
Bible verse, knife.

Christ, you say.
This isn't what

I came here for.

I say:
You want a job,
right?

Right?

I hasten to say that JFK
was not my father.

I have about thirty-seven hand-gestures
I could teach you,

my lover, my dove.

I have about gone mad twice
as many times as my old man.

I wanted him to see my eyes

when I took his pistol.

I want you to know

the careless practice of interpretation
really pisses me off.

I want you to know savage pain
is the name of a punk rock band
I never started.

You know I wasn't

a really good dad,
but I was damn,

a damn good Marine.

And fifty-seven fists fall on me

like the cold, back-hand waves

breaking the shore of Lake Michigan.

One time I heard a story.

One time I heard a song.

One time I heard

my name on your lips,

your lips.

You know I still
tell lies
like flies on shit.

Well-Well-Well-Well-Well, Don't You Know Her Well?

2011-11-02T22:51:00.007-05:00

It's gotten late now
she wants to be alone.

Having forgotten how to fly,
she still remembers where
she put her wings.

Welcome to paradise.

Welcome to three days drunk
& twenty-seven yellow-eyed smiles,
thirty-seven good-byes.

You've seen my name, she says.

You've seen dawn drag day
down my father's narrow valley,
sag like a last note,
a final wag & waddle of the crow
gliding above that little creek
where my father drowned.

Why should you care,
she says.
Why should you
when I'm not here?

I'm thinking of that song
The Postal Service sing, she says.

I'm thinking of my wings,
my dusk-feathered,
last-light flight.

Such great heights,
she says.
Such great heights.

I'm dipping my wings in those clouds.
I'm dipping my wings in that creek.

I'm dipping my wings
in my father's grave.

Phoning the Poetry Hot-line

2011-10-04T21:43:00.027-05:00

Every poem I write,

every song is a threat

is what I say to you.

You ask me where

will the poem explode.

What does it look like?

Did I place it myself?

You ask me why.

You are taking notes.

You write long distance phone

booth connection. You write,

I hear a street,

maybe a PA system or wild animals.

You write kitchen sounds, quite

possibly fried eggs

like a mother used to flip.

We have many children in the building,

you tell me, and I have a family at home.

You write the caller’s voice—

a hairy, nasal slur
like a wet fart.

You wonder if my voice is familiar,

who it sounds like.

Does it smell like

mustard gas and roses,
you wonder.

What is your name, you ask.
What is your address?

I put another jigger in my song.

I won't pull the trigger
till you're gone.

Hello, I say, I Johnny
Cash the bomb.

The Chorus Sings in Act V of a Neo-Classical Tragicomedy

2011-09-21T22:06:00.019-05:00

We soldiers watch
two sovereigns meet to sign
a signature of peace, all
questions of imperial supremacy
answered with our blood.

We soldiers take for hope
a morning song of hostile crowns
joined by marriage,
reconciliation of rivals
through the hand-fast love-clutch
and our blood.

We sing unearthed elucidations,
twenty-year-old secrets
offering succession rights,
a princess and prince on whom
dawn and the fate of two kingdoms depend.

As do equations of our blood.

We soldiers dance.
We soldiers dance.

American Girl

2011-09-21T21:16:00.006-05:00

To the students: Westminster College and Bible Institute

does not necessarily endorse the contents of this drawing

from the standpoint of morals, philosophy, theology,

or scientific hypothesis. W.C.B.I. is fundamental

in doctrine and Weslyan holiness in position and practice.

Iconic Geometry: I'm In The Dog House Now

2011-09-04T01:48:00.054-05:00

Yes, we can, we can, we
try to find the sure foot
that slide-steps
the tragedy, the punch-love
function, a lesson say up
jump the boogie to the bang
bang boogie to the hip-hop,
the hibbie to the hibbie to the stop,
to the top-rock south of Vicksburg.

All right, ya'll, crank it up.

All ya'll wish I was frontin'
some slap-crappy happiness,
but I George Bush the Button.

I follow bad weather
straight to the spear-head
that the earth-born bear,
the sharp-thoughts eschewed
by the muddy daughters of dawn.

I smoke cell-phones & do-dads
& holler shoe-spits & moon-spats
at the shrug-narrow shoulders of new shirts.

Dust my mother's lawn.
Break my brother's brawn.
I sing like fifteen crows
drowning in a jacuzzi,
catch a cold & wrestle
the Holy Ghost, one wing woozy,
the other comatose.

Add some pump-punk, some jazz-junk.

Yes, yes, they learn as they observe & infer
what each thing is / tragedy will achieve /
tragedy will achieve what each thing is /
the speeches in which the speakers
decide or avoid the nothing &
the nothing at all.

She sang: I don't do much.
I sleep thirteen hours & fuck
around the other twelve.

That cryptic code, that septic ode,
haunts the falling smoke-dust night.
We eat pommes frites
with vinegar & curry ketchup.

Hey, did you hump her, Harry?
Did you hump her?

My songs give you life & bring you
closer to death. There's nothing more
boring than a heroin addict,
except a tangle of addicts tooth-
grinding a ghostly road,
haunting the next-fix.

You done followed me too far.
I tell you I chill, if that you will
a while be still, & stop
wearing those fucking man-shoes--

Do I look all right? I look
like a beatnik, honest?

Vicksburg Mississippi done left
it all up to you. Your heart's in your head.
What do you want to do, Baby?
I'll leave it all up to you, to you.
You do what you want to do.

Tonight the moon is pink & she
takes one more step
dancing toward the only minaret that's left.

The gardens of the Taj Mahal,
the four squares & the four squares
& the obsession with perfection & geometry.

You don't often see squares in nature, she said.
North, south, east, west,
like the streets of Roman cities & in Asia,
the north facing the south,
the ruler facing Tiananmen Square,
subdivided into nine further ones.

Ha!

she said.

The Eight Squares of Heaven
& the inside square, the building itself, in turn
has a proportion, a full
orchestration -- maybe fifty-thousand singers --
a magic square, an infinite thought.

That's why,
she sang.

She sang,
That's why.

You decide.

You or we or I.

I or we or you?

Now, she said, I have to go
outside the square,
a beautiful, a capsule or a cube,
an ideal containment of the classical box,
the Taj, a square within a square.

More than half of Vicksburg, Mississippi,
almost eighty-percent, I said,
waits
for the two-thousand-thirteen
deadline.

We're through. We're through,
she said.
We threw you through.

The Dance of the Do-Wrong People

2011-08-23T23:48:00.016-05:00

Joe-Boy goes to Mahogany Hall.
He sees Lulu with the red-flame wig
& diamonds on every finger.

Moonlight slips through louvered blinds,
a double shadow on the wall
like Lulu's octoroon décolleté.

Joe-Boy won't tell her
he picked cotton
for the plantation penitentiary.
Before that,
he spread the flesh plague.

You're the strangest man
I ever knew, she says.

Three Tabasco drops
in every tequila shot,
Joe-Boy dances the Grizzly Bear.
He stomps out blues
like cigarettes on that floor.

What makes you think
you know me?

I'll keep you from going blind,
Joe-Boy. I'll keep you.

I heard better, he says,
but you sing just
like you pay the bills with it.

I say yes to everything,
she says,
your skin-sin & shit-words.

I want you, Lulu.
Be my taxi dancer,
my yellow-song girl.
Be my first-night virgin.

Yes, you be less
than a buck, she says.
You be my five-
&-dime man.

Songs My Mother Never Taught Me

2011-08-20T17:00:00.001-05:00

Dos Madres Press

Small Press Distribution

Two For The Show

2011-08-09T23:38:00.010-05:00

London's burning, brave & fair.
Day tossed a coin; night called its fall.

Misery loves money begets law,
begets words nor listen to betray.

Crowd every penny-wise night;
crowd every pound-foolish day.
Render unto Caesar the things,

pander unto God who brings
low what Rome built in a day --

built in a day,

a day, a day,

built in a day.

Pelota

2011-08-09T22:24:00.006-05:00

Light a match.
Drink some water from a glass.
Look directly at me.
Look at your fingernails.

Take the false equation,
the one I hid behind the bookcase.

The morning I'm no longer
able to deceive you,
that's when you'll learn
the secret to strategy

and discover we're all at once
our original selves
with a single word.

I'm Not In Love

2011-08-01T04:29:00.002-05:00

Hello?

Your number's been disconnected.
This is how it is in the current
political landscape, she said.

Here's a thin pamphlet --
the Holiday Book of 1885,
an entirely new edition
of Lord Byron's Childe Harold.

She remembered when she held my hand.
She felt the arthritic lump on the first
knuckle of my left middle-finger.

She said:
Everybody goes to parties;
everybody does all 16 dances.

A Tomato of Great Merit Is One That Has Met Great Defeat

2011-06-29T22:37:00.084-05:00

When the tomato was dying—
blood-letting in a mud hut,
bleeding-out in some flung
cranny of northern Iraq—
the tomato said:

I prayed Mohamed.
I prayed Jesus.
I prayed Moses.
I prayed them all.

Jesus Christ, guys, just get me right.

Before the war, the tomato survived
the indignities of modern farming
and two semesters of Catholic college,
learning how to sing In-Just-Spring
and the Canticle of the Three Children.

The last day, patrolling a filthy village,
the tomato saw the desert dust
the husks of homes and hungry kids,
scattered bricks and burned-out vics,
shattered and spattered tree trunks.

The tomato saw
the dusty beards of Muslim farmers
who traded their tools for guns.

We are firing at the past,
they sang.
We are firing at the future.

The tomato wrote these words
on a Texas-wall near Mosul:

This is no place
for cowards and liars
be damned.

The tomato's last letter
pressing the pen so hard
maybe to make sure
the words were heard.

No use waiting night.
Only two ways to get home—
stepping off the plane
or being carried.

Kill Kill Kill Kill Kill The Poor

2011-06-06T22:17:00.008-05:00

America, I will tell you how to do it.

America, we must begin
with a geometric problem
converted to an algebraic equation,
and then, having simplified it
as far as possible, solve it
geometrically, in a manner like that
which Descartes used for quadratics.

America, we are talking issues of geometric algebra,
quadratic equations
not in the algebraic sense of the Babylonians,
but geometrically,
somewhat in the manner of the ancient Greeks.

America, there are mathematical ways
to solve any problem.

Poetry & Mysticism, Part Two

2011-06-04T10:13:00.023-05:00

I am sitting with Machado and Lorca
at a table outside The Red Lion.
Every twenty-two minutes,
an empty streetcar clatters along the cobblestones.

Lorca says: There are nights
when my shaking tremors will not go away.
Do you know anyone else
whose body prays without him?

He tells me to give myself to poetry
and she would call me
acolyte in spite of my spelling.

Lorca is talking as he reads
a message on his iPhone.

Machado chides the final
cadences of the vain day.
He says:
You will not be what you were,
the no-movement of emerging night
like the two crows of easy money,
double nickels on the dime.

Lorca is reading
a newspaper on his iPhone.

Machado says:
I don't want to hear it,
these minor threats from evening.
I don't want to hear it, the forged
silhouettes of ragged desire.

Lorca is kissing his iPhone.

Someone somewhere is listening to "Surfer Rosa,"
but I can't tell you
who or why.

Machado is kissing Lorca's iPhone.
I am kissing Lorca's iPhone.

Lorca says:
We are the ecstatic émigrés of dream.
Let's abandon our deluded shoes
and ride the streetcar's tail
down the city's naked throat.

It's Morning Again In America

2011-06-03T02:07:00.005-05:00

A down-sized world,
I mop the long floors of a high school
I graduated from three months ago.

I got all A's in algebra.
I loved math.

Plato said the man of war
must learn the art of numbers
or he will not know
how to array his troops.

Can Ronald Reagan calculate the end
his monologues will meet?

In the last book of the Republic,
Plato refers to a number he calls
the lord of better and worse
births.

What star saw my nativity?
What number am I?
What unembodied object of pure
intelligence factored my sum?

Ronald Reagan
is a shithead.
Ronald Reagan's a turd.

We Jam Econo

2011-06-02T02:52:00.003-05:00

And we look for some song to give
immediacy for the way we peel
thin layers of skin from the sun.

In Some Respects

2011-05-19T22:11:00.002-05:00

That winter evening on Lake Michigan,
the Black Ship sailed water clear as vodka--
from Muskegon to Sheboygan.

The Big Lake was placid and clean.

My old man said the sun
had a score to settle with Wisconsin.

He said: Don't buy no hope from that
long shot. He said all kinds of things
I don't think you need to know.

The smallest sparks
fell from his Lucky Strike.

That was five years
before he quit smoking.

Then the River Swelled Its Chest & Blew & Blew

2011-05-06T23:34:00.002-05:00

The first decade of the century
tossed embittered stones & spring-melt
cigarette butts at a lonely boy.

The kid pretended they were Army men.

He pretended these toy soldiers
hunted down & killed a villain,
posed for digital pictures with the body

before dumping it from a helicopter
into an unnamed ocean. He pretended
they called it a burial at sea.

He pretended the end of something,
the beginning of something else.

The Syntax of the Second Chance

2011-04-28T21:46:00.015-05:00

Your poems make
all the right
gestures, she said.
I'm just not sure
it's really poetry.

We were driving to the place
her oldest and bestest girlfriend stays.
The roads were dark and wet,
and the rain had stopped.

There was only one
break in the clouds

They pretty much do want you,
she said, but to serve in silence.
That song was obviously written by a man.

The belt of Orion
aligns with this road;
that's some kind of omen
is what I was thinking.

We drove by Sassy Suds--
walk-ins welcome,
appointments preferred.

I was thinking about the eight
times I tried to climb
back into this conversation
and her bed after the last
and final word of rain.

I was thinking about a pot-bellied professor
who left his wife
and took up with a young graduate student.

We take four-sixty-seven through Edwards
all the way to Raymond, she said.
Dorothy said it used to be so nice,
but she's thinking
like fifty years ago,
when she moved here.

I was thinking
the Mississippi flood
of National Poetry Month 2011.

Sorry about that
racket this morning,
I said. My dog Blue
croons like a drunk
troubadour when it storms.
He thinks he's a goddamn poet.

What, Edwards?
Just a little town, she said.

Coopersville-Michigan-size?

I don't know where that is,
she said.

I was thinking fucking bastard,
dim your headlights over a hill,
dumb-fuck.

Take a left at the Pabst Blue Ribbon sign
on J's Tavern., she said, and drive
behind Hinds Community College
all the way to Sonic.

Tomorrow, the river is rising.
Tomorrow, the river is rising.

They're like
right here,
downtown --
at the corner of Dupree
and Port Gibson Street.

Tomorrow,
the river
is rising.

This Is Not a Poem -- It's a letter to a daughter or notes for a memoir

2011-04-25T22:20:00.042-05:00

The days have been bright & breezy
& cool in the late-afternoon shade.
The birds have been rapturous
& varied at your mother's feeders.

Among the visitors, the raucous sparrows,
unruly & unkempt, are my least favorite.
We hear them gather before they
pounce on the feeders, winging straight
over the lattice fence & into the red-bud
or the golden rain-tree.

They gang-up on sunflower seeds;
they are the little
bullies of the bird playground.
Thankfully, your mother feeds
other, more alluring birds.

The mourning doves congregate in their head-
bobbing pairs, woo-woo-wooing as they land,
one, two, beneath a feeder.
They’re content with droppings,
the countless husks & seeds that
fall on the grassy hill.

Rose breasted grosbeaks arrived last week
& seem to be gone already -- like listening
to a White Stripes song too young.

The cardinals make a racket, too,
but tastefully & from a distance.

(I told your mom
the cardinals of my boyhood
sang, Murray, Murray,
Murray-Murray-Murray
in the hardwood forest
around the house. She said:
They don't seem to say that now.)

The blue jays are the serious
bullies, really, of the feeders,
especially the tray feeder
hanging in the dogwood out front.
They arrive like pterodactyls,
scattering the carolina chickadees,
the house finches, & the wren.

Only the hummingbirds, sipping your mom's
sugar-water, ignore the squawking jays –-
the hummingbirds & that cantankerous woodpecker,
who bitches at me from Mr. John's ancient live oak
every time I walk into the front yard.

I dropped a few limbs today,
from the elm behind the house
& the hackberry along the driveway.
One branch fell & nearly crushed the young
sunflowers growing beneath the tall
feeder in the dogwood. I threw the limbs
over the fence on the hill behind the house,

& not long after --
while I raked magnolia leaves
from the east side of the house
where we cut down the old magnolia –-

I heard seven pistol shots beyond the fence,
9-millimeter. Probably kids
blasting into the berm above the house,
where the ash and water oak shade
that piece of Main Street blocked off
ten or more years ago. I was thinking

about the time some kid -- I presume –-
tried & missed shooting Blue,
& the round came down through that high window,
lodging in the wall above the living-room couch.
We had just returned
after picking you up from school.
You left your book bag on the couch
before going to your room.

I know you remember.
You were in tenth grade,
I think, at Warren Central, right?

Anyway, I thought about all that today,
but only briefly & without rancor.
How could I feel rancorous this day,
when I saw the neighborhood swainson's hawk
dipping first one, then the other
outstretched wing on a wind
I couldn’t feel but only see
at the swaying pine-tops?

She was hunting up there,
looking down with those eyes.

Three mornings ago, as I backed down the driveway,
she swooped over the side lattice fence
& over the hood & windshield of my car,
& I thought, Those little birds better watch out.

This morning, I saw her take a baby bluebird
from the grass beneath a red oak.
She flew over me, & if I reached out my hand
I could’ve touched that young thing
screaming for its parents
chasing the hawk.

This afternoon,
I found eight mockingbird feathers
beside the japanese maple
your mother and I planted two days ago.

How can I help but love
such a hungry bird?

After Reading Undid in the Land of Undone, Jesus Told the Following Parable

2011-04-23T19:24:00.008-05:00

If Lee Upton were a cat,
a slamming door
would startle the woodpecker
she is stalking beneath the dogwood.

If Lee Upton were a bird,
only night would silence her
tap tap tapping on the tree.

If Lee Upton were a noise,
she would sound like
what silences a woodpecker
just before the cat pounces
like the slamming of a door.

Math Lessons

2011-04-23T00:24:00.025-05:00

I flunked tenth grade algebra,
and you never believed me
when I said it was because you stole
the abacus of my heart.

Right. I got it -- that sounded like
a line of bullshit, but it was true.
We were standing on the pavilion
by the school pond, out behind
the school barn. Remember

when you let me kiss you?

I gave you the Gideon Bible
I carried in my back pocket.
I gave you my only cassette
of AC/DC's Back in Black,
remember?

In my old man's pickup, we played
"You Shook Me All Night Long"
all night, like until morning,
until the last beer, at least.

You were dancing in the headlights;
I was standing in the shadows.

I wanted you to teach me
the secret of decimal fractions.
I wanted you to teach me
the infinite values of Pi.

You taught me
the history of mathematics
is not smooth and continuous.
You taught me
that some answers
have no questions.

Maybe somewhere you
saw me piss behind a horse barn.
Maybe somewhere
you remembered a blacktop road
where Galileo rode a leather-mouthed
pony, a short-haired Shetland.

Rough-neck farm trucks
shouldered that road, and the ditch
was deep. Maybe you told me
Galileo tossed empty beer cans
and a fist of pennies, one-by-one,
all along the way.

Maybe you knew
why he rode that pony.
Maybe you knew why
the pony walked that road.
Maybe Galileo called for you,
Marina Gamba.

Maybe you

taught me that night
the one-to-one relation between all
integers and perfect squares,
between finite qualities of lust
and infinite equations of love.

Next day at the dinner table,
my dad tossed me my wallet
and watched me count
six wrinkled Washingtons.

If you take your pants off in my truck, he said,
don't leave your wallet on the floorboards
when you put them back on.

The Eccentric Motions of the Bossa Nova

2011-04-21T23:20:00.000-05:00

I found the five
unanswered equations of Apollonius of Perga
scrawled on the last
page of a 19th century German bible.

I found a formula
for the eccentric motions of celestial lovers
and the unrequited desire of planets.

I found the names of the conic sections,
the dates of their birth and death.

I found the tangents and harmonic
divisions of the bossa nova.

I think Tom Jobim wrote those notes.

This Is When We Tire of the Whole Kit-&-Caboodle

2011-04-20T23:25:00.017-05:00

Five trees -- pecan, red oak, cedar, live oak, & magnolia --
shade my left hand every time I walk to where I teach
composition and literature to students who don't know
the names of trees.

I stand akimbo in a classroom
waving a ragged fan of red oak leaves
& a duster of cedar needles. I dance
like a catfish flopping in a flat-bottom boat,
sing like a crow, croon like a mockingbird.

Don't ask why you want to know my name.

Don't ask.

Don't wait for me to push you off that cliff,
the one from which you wish to soar into clouds
you drew on butcher-block paper for seventeen years.

I'm somewhere over there,
beyond a flotilla of cumulus freighters,
skimming winds you never see but only feel,
wide-winged and swooping with
the simple things of the spirit
that breathe the smallest dust mote
down to the singular dream.

I'm on my way,
and I'm listening to "Mary Jane's Last Dance"
and thinking about tomorrow when
we tire of screwing up. We tire of this town
again, tire of these hot summers & cold
winters necking in my lady's car.

We tire of the whole kit-&-caboodle.

When You Began to Know Your True Measurements and Dressed Your Mind Accordingly

2011-04-17T21:24:00.051-05:00

I was toting a three-gallon bucket of goat's milk
when I saw you by the woods behind the barn.
I always carried milk to the house left-handed,
on account of my bad elbow. That's why
I only ever Indian-wrist-wrestled
the dudes at school with my left hand, too,
because of my bum arm.

You were standing there, way back by the trees
beyond the barn's flood-light. I could see you
were wearing one of your mother's dresses,
about two sizes too big. Night was shadowy and cold,
and there was no moon. You had a suitcase
I saw when you stepped into the light.

I called to you,
but I don't remember what I said.
I wanted to tell you:
You come across and you go back.
I wanted to tell you:
I come across and I go back.

I said I fed the horses, didn't I?
I fed the horses
hay and a little grain. They liked the grain best,
but you knew that already. You knew
the mind of a horse like the back-hand
midnight of Jamaica or Majorca or some other place
you'd never been and would never go
with my best wishes. You knew that sure
as a swallow's tail or a falling stone.

The weather's nice in Mississippi,
you said.
If you don't like it,
wait ten minutes
and it'll change
just for you.

Wait ten minutes,
is what you told me.

And then it began to rain
just like I knew it would.
And my elbow ached
every time I heard your voice.

361 Exclamation Points Don't Mean Shit

2011-04-15T00:30:00.001-05:00

I love you like the Heroic Age, he said,
like that time before mathematics and Plato,
before Theodorus of Cyrene and the method of exhaustion
and all those godforsaken
mountains beyond mountains.

She said: Sand-reckoner, measurer of the circle
and the angle trisection, why must you conjugate
the diameters of our love?
Why must you break
these tangents and harmonic divisions?

Three Stanzas on Why You Must Believe Me

2011-04-15T00:00:00.004-05:00

What the answer was and what it's worth,
how far your parallelograms,
your transcendental functions
reach -- oh, my lover, all that dust
and horizon on horizon.

I built a house between two rivers
and waited in vain for you.
I caught the felicitous fishes,
the infinite improbabilities of water,
the exponential calculus of mud.

I broke L'Hospital's Rule, I broke
all your father's fences. I won't
apologize. I won't be the one
who sometimes can't believe it.
I won't offer the synthetic
geometries of ancient Greece.

The Germanic Algebras of the Days of Rage

2011-04-13T22:31:00.007-05:00

Richard Nixon said:
Let's recognize these people
for who they are -- the same thugs
who've always been against good
god-fearing Americans.

When Fred Hampton died in his sleep
on that west-side Chicago naked mattress,
December 1969 bit its lower lip.

That blood wasn't real, that blood
was from Bonny & Clyde.

Mi Lai bodies & god bless America
is what the poets sang.

What grand project
for the transformation and purification
of the world?

What back-break dreams and half-baked
ideologies fell that night with all that rain?

The Weather Underground,
an armful of bourgeois punks
driving to the mountains
for target practice.

When the people rioted in the streets,
fire-bombed the city offices,
the unofficial statement of the Weather Underground:
We didn't do it
but we dug it.

He said: I'd say that's the one
point in my life when I was
overwhelmed with the heaviness of it.

Everybody on the Left said, No,
this is only going to last
a few months.

The citizen's commission investigated the FBI,
hippie-acid smiles and
there's no end in sight.

Feels like winter in America.

Vietnam, Watergate, recession,
Ronald Reagan.

Feels like winter in America.

Muttsy Hugbars' Complaint

2011-04-06T22:56:00.025-05:00

I know this cat, Captain Shugars,
and I’m tired of his gut-punch poetic.

He wrote a cycle of poems across Afghanistan,
one in the outhouse of each Buddhist monument
dynamited by the Taliban.

He plucked a turkey pen
and feathered a love poem in Bayou Pierre,
near Port Gibson, Mississippi.

With the long line of a fishing pole, he cast
the twenty-first century epic of Gilgamesh
in the desert water of the Tigris River.

He tattooed the 46 haiku of the earth-
worm on the forearm of a tsunami.

He sliced the ballad of the fallen dawns,
the sick-moon laughter and pop-song
possibilities of a government shut down
on the neck-ties of all the politicians,
regardless of party affiliation.

I saw him read his poems
at the Speckled Bird in Cincinnati.
On his balding head, he wore
an extra-small pair of boy's briefs
like a beret; he waved his arms
like a Baptist preacher.

I saw him
read his poems at that dinky loft
called Chase Public in Northside.
In one hand he gripped a glass of sangria,
in the other, a fist of papers --
unpublished poems that smelled
like piss-warm PBR.

He needs to find
the corner of a room or street
where someone gives a shit.
He needs to find
mountains beyond mountains.

He sings songs
like sand in my shoes.
He sings songs
like the carnivorous feast
of identity theft.
He sings every song
Arcade Fire ever wrote
and calls them his own.

He eats tiny stars
and sweet-farts
small galaxies.

He never shuts up.

How To Judge a Poet

2011-04-03T00:46:00.006-05:00

When you meet a poet
outside G&L's in Muskegon, Michigan,
where all the poets eat
the best goddamn chile dogs
anyone has ever had,

do as all the people do,
and say: Hey, what's up, dude?

If that fuckin' poet don't say,
Sister, I got just the song for you
right here in my back pocket --
and whip out one hell of a song --

if that poet don't do that,
fuck him or her
and the horse they rode in on.

They ain't worth the chili dog
they just ate.

The Original Pabst Blue Ribbon

2011-04-01T03:55:00.027-05:00

Someone was playing
an eight-track tape of “Gold Dust Woman”
from Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors album,
and I was dancing with Pammy,
Old Man Miszewski’s daughter.

We were young and happy and grabbing
fistfuls of blueberries
from her old man’s bushes.

I kissed Pammy
full on the lips.

She pushed me away and sang:
Baby, I don’t want to know.
I don’t want to know how
you never loved me.
I don’t want to know –
oh no – I don’t.

In the morning,
the Mexican migrant families picked
their berries as they always did,
tight-lipped and sharp-eyed,
and I watched them from two rows away,
and I heard them singing, but
I didn't understand a single word.

I knew they sang to Jesus.
They sang to Cesar Chavez.

Pammy sang
the corridos of Muttsy Hugbars.

She sang of the left-hand poet, the last
bastard bard of Muskegon County Michigan,
the destined exile of the dirt road,
the half-assed landslide and dirtfall
poet of small hills and his flatland people—
the flatfoot folks who walked that road,
who picked those blueberries,
who sang those muddy songs.

She sang my song.

I had a plastic milk jug of dandelion wine.
I had a can of Pabst.
I wanted to know where
is the topic sentence
we heard John Fogerty sing,
that we heard Creedence sing.

We saw all the wattles of the old men,
she and I, we saw the fat
jowls of the men in their thirties,
those flabby fucks
who prowled the horse barn at the Ravenna Fair.

They skunked around the stalls
not looking at the ponies
the girls rode.

I want to be with you
is what she said to me.

Can you hear me holler,
she said, and no one
listened but me.

I want to be with you, she said.

On The Verge of a Momentous Decision

2011-04-01T01:35:00.001-05:00

How tall can an ash tree grow?

My neck aches
when I think of looking
up through the thin, spring-
leafed branches all the way to the top,

where a hawk roosted two days ago,
eyeing my wife's house cats
as they prowled the front yard

and wrestled under the flowering dogwood.

When the Mockingbird Sings in Mississippi, I Think of Home

2011-03-28T00:48:00.016-05:00

You're never, ever there
when I draw
that straight line on the thin
parchment of my heart.

I know your spring-melt creeks,
your muddy fields and woods,
your lonely roads.

The half-blind headlights of my old man's pick-up
cast a sallow eye on your darkest blacktop --
Heights-Ravenna Road --
a country highway that still pours
all my youngest years into the deep
water of my midnight soul.

When did you do it?

When did you wash away
all my most secret maps,
Ravenna, Michigan?

When did you
lose track of me?

Early Spring in Mississippi

2011-03-18T21:48:00.014-05:00

First light, and he follows the levee
two-track across the spill-water culvert.

A beaver hears him and slaps the lake.
Rings ripple out across the languid surface.

Three crows wing high above the mist
rising from the water. They call
down day to the long-leaf pine forest.

A startled tom gobbler
flurries toward him from a red oak
so loudly he remembers

a Black-Hawk helicopter
and a hot LZ in Iraq.

First Story

2011-03-12T21:22:00.000-06:00

The Last Dream of John Lennon

2011-03-08T20:45:00.000-06:00

You remember when the moon rose

like the death mask of Oliver Cromwell, he said.

The stars were his cavalry, she said,

and the King's men fell before their trotting charge.

He said: Today I saw a parliament of crows

consulting in a pecan tree along the Natchez Trace,

and I heard what they had to say.

You always did, she said. You always did

look for trouble when it wasn't coming your way.

I'll Let You Borrow My Four-Leaf-Clover

2011-03-05T21:54:00.013-06:00

Go on. Do what you want to do.
Say goodbye and get off the bus.
Send your Aunt Hazel that postcard
you promised twenty years ago.
Send secret kisses to all the ponies
your father never bought you.
Reach out and take it, the only sin
you wrapped in a white sheet
and dropped in Lake Michigan.

Go on. Take it easy on me
and the three crows of your desire.
Take it easy or any way
you can get it. Your father, the knight,
lies slain under his shield. You know
his body waits in that field
where the crows rise
like a river into the trees.
You have been watching that field
for twenty years.

Go on. You've thought about it
for a long time. And there is no
love like ours, and no one knows
where we're headed. We have
no consolation prizes. You know me,
and I know you will crank shut
every folding window in your house trailer
when your black dogs yank
their chains tonight.

You know I will be
prowling round your place.

You know the three crows of desire
have stolen the key to your back door.

And Darling Is What I Wanted To Say

2011-03-05T20:45:00.005-06:00

I dreamed about the raining man again last night.
He was looking at me as he always does,
and he was saying:

When winter tells a heavy tale,
when the white crows curse the frosts and snows,
and the ghost of every untold truth remains
silent as the naked birch trees and brown grass
behind your father's barn,
when you miss your lover
every time she's in the room with you --
then give me ale and whiskey to melt my icy heart.

I will bring spring rain, he said.
I will bring the moon and her sister stars
down to the water, and the fish will feed.

The fish will feed on all the dreams
you have discarded.

TR & Me & All The Ladies

2011-03-03T23:31:00.001-06:00

I dreamed Teddy Roosevelt was there
when the women resorted in the monastery.

They were dancing with the relics,
tossing the coals on which St. Lawrence was toasted,
flicking the toe-nail parings of St. Edmund,
pilfering the penknife of St. Thomas and wearing his boots.

And I was there, too,
when TR offered all the ladies
the skills for the morning headache.

from: The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You

2011-03-02T01:28:00.001-06:00

MLK & the Flying Pulpit

2011-03-01T18:20:00.010-06:00


I drew Dr. Martin Luther King & his flying pulpit, & I was thinking: Now, there was an American who believed in God & collective bargaining.

Interests

2011-02-28T21:40:00.000-06:00

Cooking beans & rice.

Returning every goddamn cigar butt

Samuel Fuller left smoldering on my Persian carpet.

Smelling cornbread & watching dust-quiet songs

falling on the tongues of handmade shoes.

Tasting a well-turned phrase.

Pondering the distance between heaven & hell

in the eye of the bee. Watching glass melt.

Lassoing bot-flies with a lover's hair.

Mailing turn-of-the-century postcards.

Singing with Sandy Samantha & Miranda

& writing their names in the river with a knife.

Standing beside chiaroscuro mannequins akimbo.

Making continuous line drawings with a green pen light.

Dancing mazurkas in moonlight

& soft-shoeing sunrise.

Witnessing the singular moment.

Thumbing the petosky stone in my pocket.

Ignoring the glass eye & tattoo of the last

mukhtar to sing down rain in this desert

Not Guilty, I Said

2011-02-28T17:22:00.001-06:00

When I was 19 & drove my car into Lake Michigan,

these are the things I gave away.

I gave nineteen palm kisses to all the girls who didn't love me.

I gave an Abhayamudra to my twin brother, Night,

sitting in the seat beside me.

I gave the Bellamy salute to American Legion Post Number 1964.

I gave the clenched right fist to my high school teachers;

they knew what I meant.

I gave the fist bump to intangible friends

who feared the handshake.

I gave the Moutza to all the people who wanted to do

away with collective bargaining.

I gave the ILY to all the girls who didn't love me.

I gave the Varadramudra to the crows who would pick my bones.

I gave the thumbs up & the thumbs down

& the telephone gesture to all the girls who didn't love me.

I gave them the sign of the horns.

When I was 19 & drove my car into Lake Michigan,

I was a saint

who didn't want to be found.

Southerly Wind

2011-02-27T21:21:00.007-06:00

The sky is the color of Regina Spektor's eyes,

a water-thin turquoise ocean, you say,

and clouds rush like an anxious flotilla northward.

The Japanese magnolia is blooming, you say,

and the pink-white blossoms

open like the cupped hands of our daughters.

Would you believe me, my wife, if I said

I lied to you, if I said I lied

about talking to you in my sleep?

What would you say if I said

I never thought I could love anyone,

anyone but you? Would you believe me?

The Japanese magnolia trembles in this wind.

The tree unflowers, you tell me, one-by-one,

the nine petals of each bloom.

Oh, my friend, we have no words

for the blush and tumble of these petals

littering the winter-bleached lawn.

Look, I say. A ragged line of crows

meanders against the wind, calling

onesies and twosies to one another. I suppose

I need this day to flow, to keep right on flowing,

just as you do, my darling, just as I wish it to

keep on pouring into my heart, into our hearts.

Tomorrow, I'll write a poem

and say we walked barefoot on the lawn.
I'll say we danced like teenage lovers

beneath the Japanese magnolia,

and we watched, we watched each other

kicking the fallen petals windward.

And I'll tell you the truth. I'll tell you the truth.

The sky is the color of your turquoise eyes.

Metropolis Maria

2011-02-04T23:16:00.011-06:00

She whispered my desire
through a smoke-ring smile.

She said: You think you're in love,
but it makes you kind of nervous
to say so. She said:

My pistol is the Devil's right hand.

I touched you with my bronze epistemology,
she said, but you never know what happens
until the deal goes down. Nothing touched
the trigger but the Devil's right hand.

I said: I think I’m in love.
Think I’m in love. Think I'm in

the Devil's right hand.

When Yesterday Was Young

2011-02-04T21:51:00.002-06:00

You saw the new moon last night,

and it was holding the old moon in its arms.

Four-and-twenty stars fell,

twenty-four brief needles of light

that kept my deepest secrets.

You saw night lean on me, my lover.

Tom Waits was singing something

about moon-shadow mosquitoes and sour lemonade

and the forgotten lyrics of “The Nut-Brown Maid.”

You saw night look back and wait for me,

and I didn't wait for you.

Desert Sand Blues

2011-02-01T21:22:00.002-06:00

I was not intent on standing

for the next elections,

said Hosni Mubarak.

I thought I

was in your sight,

your heart.

I sobbed and sighed.

Adieu, love,

adieu, love,

untrue love.

In Scarlet Town, Where I Was Born

2011-02-01T21:04:00.007-06:00

If I thought I saw Bill Evans

leaning like the smoky shadow of a crow
over cracked piano keys,
if I saw his narrow shoulders hunched,
pale hands poised like two forgotten thoughts,
his corduroy jacket wrinkled at the spine --
if I thought I saw all that,

I'd tell the horns to shut their goddamn mouths.

It only takes as long as one smooth pull on a cigarette,

one long push -- and the smoke

smiles away into the darkest thoughts of any room

you can't remember.

That's what I said to the man at the door,

just before he tossed me
and my military ID onto the curb.

And Mark Winkler was playing piano in a club across the street,

and the rain was falling on New Orleans.

Strawberry Larry

2011-02-01T17:19:00.000-06:00

Mon Frere Thierry

2011-01-28T02:15:00.002-06:00

I live in Vicksburg, Mississippi, now,
but I remember snow
falling on the campus of Purdue and you
and I were thin as sin,

drank gin and grinned at winter Indiana.

Sandy still plays her violin
and I still can't sing worth shit
or play an instrument,
not even spoons -- but you
were Pan's right hand, the man
who touched the keys of spring,
whose voice caressed
the robin's wing,
and a single feather
like a whispered secret
fell.

And summer is a-coming in,
you sang. Summer is a-coming in
someday.

Valentines for the Vampires

2011-01-22T22:48:00.023-06:00

Your kiss tattooed my face
with the thin calligraphy of love,
said the queen of vampires.
Every vein screams
how much I love you.

Sweetheart, said the king of vampires,
you caress my soul with a serrated knife.
I want to sing every song
the Flaming Lips recorded in 1989.

She said: Oh, my dear,
you grow old. You grow old.
You make me
want to slip on my white dress
and slice
the tips of all your fingers.

He sang: Come dance with me,
my lifeless queen, come dance
until tomorrow. I waged the moon
you'd rise a star
that fell a flower.

The queen of vampires moaned.

Oh, my black-eyed lover,
let your bloody fingers
jackson-pollock my white dress.

When Joe Pass Plays Guitar

2011-01-17T01:00:00.027-06:00

I was thirteen
when she laughed at my voice,
the choir teacher, that
sexy broad who gave me
my first hard-on.

I sang a scale
I wouldn't learn for seven years.

She laughed at me.

Fuck music
is what I learned from her.

I wanted to blast bass
for Teenage Jesus and the Jerks
or bust drums for DNA.

I quoted Rimbaud for the goats
I milked every morning
before the school bus arrived.
When I squeezed those tits at night,
I quoted Walt Whitman.

The barn cats
moved like Miles Davis.

Oh, when Crockery Creek
topped its banks in April,
I ran naked through a third-
growth forest,
swum like Adam in that
muddy water.

I jacked-off on spring lilies
and slept on new moss.

No shit.

Herbie Hancock taught me to sing.

I purged my soul
on the clay banks of a little creek.

I tossed the ultimate question
to a suicidal Santa Claus,
spitting soliloquies at Mars
before I knew where the music ended.

I saw the fiberglass arteries of Orion,
the pinstripe suit of Ezekiel.

When I was nineteen,
I heard the horn of Miles Davis
before he took a chariot to the other side.
I saw him on the stage,
and he refused to look at me.

Where is Joe Pass on guitar,
my girlfriend said to me.
Where is black-angel music
when God says
make a joyful noise,
she said.

Fuck music,
is what I said.

Love Poem # 46

2010-12-25T14:02:00.016-06:00

~ For Miranda

We are like Méliès,

that artist of the silent film
who died poor --
the fate of all who pursue

something out of love.

Face it.

We make a handsome,
paranoid couple

sleepwalking backwards
hand-in-hand in

the midst of plots
and sheer drops.

We back our way into tomorrow,

looking down but leaning
both shoulders against a filthy wind.

We back our way
into a flotsam of broken voices,

the detritus of arguments

we never saw coming.

The Girl Who Bought My Bibles

2010-12-10T20:38:00.011-06:00

Since she was seventeen,
she wakes early to watch
the gray-frost morning
yield to the day landscape.

She adores the way night
fights a graceful retreat
from the penumbra
of every pine shadow.

She can play them, too,
these branches waving
a canopy of shade.

This is her song.

She shunned this dog
since she was seventeen and singing:
I'll be damned if I dance
and I'll be damned if I don't.

She dreamed this scene
for the rest of her life.

Dancing with the last cold
breath of last night,

she was seventeen and singing:

The day is broke.
Be wary; look about.

Then, window,
let day in
and let life out.

Camp Life

2010-12-08T13:44:00.001-06:00

Before First Battle:
First thing in the morning
is drill, then drill, then drill again.
Between drills, we drill
and sometimes we stop
to eat a little and have a roll call.

Before Last Battle:
After breakfast there is little
for the well men to do in these
winter quarters. The forenoon
is spent in poke, poke, poking around
till the appetite says
it is dinner time.

When Bonnie Parker & Clyde Barrow Woke in Bienville Parish, May 23, 1934

2010-12-06T17:31:00.062-06:00

Bonnie said:

We forswear salted horse

and the hard take

and the random thrill

kill. Our nature is raw.

We hate all law,
stool pigeons,

spotters and rats.

Clyde said:

My lover, ignore the riotous
affairs of this raffish,
faith-based sunrise.
Such a dawn has only one
remedy for all that ails us--

a thread-precious death.

Bonnie said:

We forswear the first

and final word we heard

about the kidnap demand,

the Kansas City Depot job,

and clinically proven
hair-loss solutions.

Clyde said:

Say goodbye, my darling,
to the bald apostle
who pawned his soul

for a pair of soiled wings.

Bonnie said:

We forswear songs we forgot

we wrote in my mother's bible.

We forswear bus-station farewells

and a journey that takes us down

a gunpowder road

where day waits in the cane brake.

Clyde said:

Abandon, my heart,

the art of letting go.

Let's ride our horses

toward all the towns

we plan to name our children.

Waking Upside Down Under Water

2010-12-05T11:14:00.043-06:00

He dreamed
he was waiting in line
at the Department of Motor Vehicles,

standing in a row of cardboard eunuchs.

They were holding hands like a
paper-chain of faceless children,

and they were singing:
Please cut us out

just as fast as you possibly can.

He was singing, too,

and thinking of the last time

he kissed his wife's hand.

She was looking
out the passenger window.
I'm lonesome as hell, she said,

whenever you're around.

They were driving somewhere
through flashing shafts of sun and shade,
pillars of pine-shadow and green-dusty light.

He took her hand
and said:
I wasted life.
Why wouldn't I
waste the afterlife?

The Lament of Yoko Ono

2010-12-04T22:30:00.033-06:00

I was so happy

that last night with you.

Every time

I see the moon,

I think of you

every single day.

You looked

like a skeleton

with skin on.

Wasn't that night

so scary?
is what I want to say to you.

And you would say:

Yes.

It was.

The Love Song of Don Rigoberto

2010-11-30T21:55:00.020-06:00

All cosmic activity
that does not contribute,
even indirectly,
to testicular and ovarian arousal,
to the meeting of sperm and egg,
is contemptible.

Take a falling star. I mean,
imagine a meteor plunging earthward,
a flaming rock
slamming the shell of the planet.

The spawn of this
galactic lust,
my love,
is us.

We are space-dust golems,
silt-sifted mannequins
posing for a brief
season behind dark glass.

I could beg you to sing,
my darling. I could
plead until you dance.

So what if a fox
prances on your midnight lawn
beneath the winter magnolia.

So what if I do.

As If Anything In Language Could Make Language Tremble

2010-11-26T23:43:00.023-06:00

Two things interested God about poetry,
at least the stuff
God cared to read --
music and voices.

The way sounds rub against sounds
and words brush words
thrilled God,
as if language had a mind of its own,
beyond the maker's intent
or the speaker's desires.

God was distracted
by the rhythms of human speech,
the singular sounds that defined
singular identities.

These two qualities of language,
the music of words and the spoken voice,
created any magic there was to find in poetry,
God said.

The thirst that compels poetic practice,
God said,
is quenched by a vast river
flowing from these two trickles.

God said,
You don't have to play
jazz trumpet or have a tune
stuffed in your back pocket
to be a poet,
but you must embrace
the long apprenticeship in the language.

God said,
You must
humble yourself on the shore of the Word.

You must dive naked in that milky river
and swim against the current of language.

Tugboats will push long barges upstream,
and the waves will kick
you always toward the muddy shore.

Ha! Hallelujah!

Three-Penny Desire

2010-11-25T23:45:00.015-06:00

That morning, he woke and said:

Like the long shadow of a spike
sunk in a waterlogged coffin,
my heart points always to the west,

beyond the Mississippi River,
beyond the desert
and the Continental Divide.

I've never heard your voice,
he said, but your words
wake my heart--

mixing memory and desire,
stirring dull roots with spring rain,
etcetera, etcetera,

in the midst of life
we are in death,
etcetera and so on.

She said:
Stay home,
hometown homespun.

Stay home,
provincial provocateur.

Remembering the Aria of November

2010-11-20T03:07:00.010-06:00

The morning your parents conceived you,
clouds lay across the sky
like bodies all asleep in beautiful disarray.

Your father said:
The gray centuries of dawn
blow secret kisses to our bones,
and shadows coil along our spines.

Your mother said:
The harlequin moon
sinks behind the trees,
and leaf-lean branches
lift the palanquin of day.

When your parents embraced,
a mockingbird sang
like an ancient, exiled desire.

Your Mother's Roses

2010-11-13T20:10:00.001-06:00

Your mother's roses
bowed in that heavy light.

I was thinking who
will save the bright culture
of this digital world
after we're all gone.

This light falls
the way a torn kimono falls
from the back of an old arm chair.

This light hurts
my right shoulder
like a day-old flu shot.

Someone Somewhere Will Always Whisper Narratives

2010-11-08T21:08:00.006-06:00

This frosted morning along the Natchez Trace,
pines lay long shadows across a low field.

Six Brahman steers lounge in dawn sunlight,
pulling up damp grass that sighs
thin steam along the shadow's edge.

There Will Be Smoke in the Cookhouse Tonight

2010-11-02T08:53:00.003-05:00

She said: My lover, I give you all
the wasted timber and abandoned cord-wood
you can harvest from the stump farm of my heart.

He said: Hand me down my double-bitted axe,
my darling.
Hand me down my mattock and my cant hook.

Mississippi

2010-10-13T10:57:00.003-05:00

This morning, first light,
I saw rolled hay bales
in a field of knee-deep fog,
an archipelago of silence.

Oh, when dawn whispers
day-secrets to night,
even the doe and the mockingbird
pause to listen.

Maybe She Would Like Some Water, Kapuscinski

2010-09-11T20:18:00.010-05:00

She rode a postwar Polish bus into the dark
neighborhood of my heart. Through the window,
untiring street lamps in the borough of silence
invited her to smoke her destiny in quiet puffs.

On this bus, she heard someone playing
an iPod so loud that Nirvana's Polly
bled from the ear-buds, and she thrummed
her fingers on her knee with the music.

Everything that is
our strength
is also our weakness, she said
to no one in particular.

She was quoting from I Wrote Stone.
I saw a tattered copy of the book
stuffed in her purse. I saw it
when I stole her wallet.

No one comes to my neighborhood uninvited
without paying for the ride
except dung beetles, ladybugs, and cockchafers.

Out In the Desert, We'll Have No Worries

2010-08-17T00:14:00.011-05:00

Every night
she dropped her dreams across an uncut lawn,
dark feathers I gathered in my sleep. I knew her lips
would kick-start my heart,
such massive drains on unknown power grids.
She said there was a factory that
manufactured what I needed most.
She said we're going downtown.
And all the headstones climbed Cemetery Hill
just to watch her dance.

This morning, Mississippi huffed and steamed
and sweated like a fat woman who sang thin, sweet songs.
If I heard her on the radio,
I'd swear to God she was a Swainson's Hawk
wobbling in on a river of wind.

I'd wait ten minutes
before calling my daughters
outside on the limp lawn,
saying, Girls, look at that, will you.
I'd say, Here she comes, this young
thought, driving against all that wind
and a mouth full of surprises.
I'd say, There must be diamonds in her heart
and ice on her wings.

Where is Kate Smith when you need her,
is what I'd tell them.
Where's Philip K. Dick, for that matter?

Ever since I came home from Iraq,
I can't find my memory.
I know it's there, biting its cud
and chewing its tongue. I can hear the old cow,
pulling the grass of my future
up in fresh, green fists,
ripping tender blades from a field
I dreamed
every night for eleven months.

But this song is for the sleek rat
who got fat on the flax seed
I left for the songbirds
that never came.
This song's for the river birch
and the white-nosed fox squirrel
and the fallen box elder.

I knew a girl, Holly Anne, who taught me to sing.
She taught me to dance. I worked for her old man,
hauling hay in summer and milking cows.
When I walked through the barn,
she wanted to run, she told me. When I came,
she sent all her shadows to tempt me, dark
feathers lighting all around my sleep.
She twisted, double-fisted all the foot-
bruising gravel of my dirt road youth.

Now, I am a mole. I'm a mole,
sticking his head above the surface of the earth,
and I'm only waiting for the fever to break.

.

How to Kill a Tree

2010-07-13T18:58:00.008-05:00

When you decide to fell
the dogwood behind the house,
do it quickly. Saw it at the roots
and watch it fall.

Don't limb the tree -- dropping
first the dead branches, then
the less dead -- and let it stand
alone on that hill, a bare trunk
with two raised arms
cut off at the elbows.

Don't leave it there
naked in the Mississippi heat,
saying one cool morning
you'll finish the job.

Ha!

2010-07-07T22:16:00.003-05:00

I'm a tame cat,
a domesticated feline --
shampooed and combed fur
subdued by a chartreuse collar and a pink bell.

I leave the mouse's head
at the foot of your mother's bedstead.

I continue to keep fighting the good fight
against my own bourgeois self.

Seeing and Believing

2010-06-11T18:27:00.005-05:00

We are born with a mandate. We must strive to live in a perpetual state of surprise, experiencing the sensual world with wonderment. We achieve this variously. One way is to seek new places and experiences, which becomes a kind of drug for some people, a restless desire to abandon what is familiar.

I am less adventurous, perhaps, and more compelled by commitments to people and places -- so I tend to stay in one place for long periods. Therefore, another way to achieve constant awe is to look or listen or feel the familiar from unexpected positions -- as if it were possible to be born anew each morning, each moment.

Seeking out the unfamiliar experience in familiar surroundings requires a subtle discipline, rigorous in its way. Until this way of living becomes habitual, one must practice it. Do the unexpected, and see what happens. Make outrageous claims that even God could not support. Put your fingers in your ears and listen to your heart beat. Stand beneath a white pine while eating molasses-soaked grain and thinking of the first cigarette you ever smoked, the first dog you ever shot. Stop and observe the smallest details.

Once when I was up at Oxbow Lake, near Ludington, Michigan, where my extended family has owned property for generations, I watched a dragonfly free itself from its cocoon attached to the roots of a tall oak.

The creature was translucent at first, the color of milky tea, and its four, shriveled wings looked as if a child's hand had wrinkled them. It crawled up a blade of grass in a dapple of sunlight. I'm not sure how long I watched, but I witnessed its soft, pale skin harden and darken, and its wings unfurl into transparent iridescence.

Still, the dragonfly clung to the grass blade, and still I waited to see it take flight for the first time, which it did, finally and gloriously, launching toward the lake, its wings buzzing, and I was wondering how it viewed the world, and then a swallow swooped low and snatched it away.

What a miracle. What a gift to have witnessed such a small and perfect spectacle of creation and destruction -- and to have the honor of remembering it in words.

Love Poem

2010-06-08T18:56:00.000-05:00

I danced for my lover under the Japanese magnolia --
slender tree whose every leaf is a tongue,
each one singing with a single breath this simple song:

If I am not with you, where will you set your heart?
If I am not with you, against whose thigh
will you warm your hands? My lover, bury me
and my words in the river
your father turned to water your mother's garden,
if I am not with you when I end this song.

What She Said

2010-06-07T00:20:00.003-05:00

In the chamber of destinies,
she donned the first of her seven splendors.
I prowled the night forest,
sniffing and pissing to mark my passing.
I saw her putting on her splendors.

I spoke and broke the silence.

When my lips gripped her name,
constellations died. My words
toppled the hall of designs,
and she flew into the ancient forest,
dropping her splendors like glorious feathers.

Enkidu, you stupid, stupid man,
she said.

This Is How We Steal the Fire

2010-04-12T12:48:00.011-05:00

This is the forest of affection

where we find the tree.

This is how we stand

when we chainsaw the tree from its stump.

This is the stroke that limbs the timber.

This is how we stand

when we chainsaw the logs.

This is the stroke that splits

the oak of affection,

variously and always.

This is the cord-wood we

bequeath to our children.

This is the furnace in the belly of love

where we heap the kindling.

This is how fire comes knocking,

selling bibles door-to-door.

This is how fire

moans in the cellar

like a wounded angel

who visits for a day

and stays on

blowing

hot breath through organ pipes.

Spread Out the Maps on the Hood of the Gun Truck

2010-03-23T18:31:00.018-05:00

--For Daniel Todd

I got home three days ago.

I spent a day

stowing my uniforms and gear.

I spent the next day

rearranging the furniture,

finding avenues of approach and egress.

Today I walked my property line

three times. The sun was bright,

and I couldn't find my eye protection.

I gathered a pile of dead-fall limbs,

which I'll take care of tomorrow.

I stood on the hill behind the house

and surveyed the leaf clutter

and twig litter on the roof.

I stood on the hill behind the house

and took my first sip of whiskey.

My dog Blue has forgotten how to fetch.

What I Share with You

2010-03-13T14:30:00.001-06:00

Last night, I caught my last hour in Iraq.

I wrapped it in a black burka

and stuffed it in my rucksack,

next to a copy of A Farewell to Arms.

When I get home, I'll go in the kitchen

and place that beating hour on a cutting board,

put an edge on my cook’s knife,

and slice that bleeding hour in two.

I’ll grill the halves with olive oil,

red skin potatoes, Michigan asparagus, and a pinch of salt.

We’ll share a bottle of valpolicella on the patio.

The Diamond Tree

2010-03-12T08:08:00.002-06:00