Lafayette, Indiana, July 1995

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

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

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

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?

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

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.