Phoning the Poetry Hot-line

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

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

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

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

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

Dos Madres Press

Small Press Distribution

Two For The Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Some Respects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.