STIRRING PASTA ON THE STOVE, YOU FEEL LIKE A DICTATOR
Stirring pasta on the stove, you feel like a dictator
responsible for the deaths of a million people.
You must have bombed a supermarket in your sleep
watching the neon sign scatter like a bed of coals
whacked by a stick in a waning campfire.
Why you should feel this way
while making spaghetti for your girlfriends
in the bottom of the month of May
is a mystery your hidden cruelty can only answer
by running naked around the house
smacking all your friends to death
with a hot metal spoon.

THE HEAT IN THE MANTLE OF THE EARTH
The little boy is swinging on his brand-new swingset.
The poles are sunk shallow in the earth
and when he swings his highest the whole thing crashes down.
In his dizziness and weeping after landing,
he starts to dig at the ground and the dirt stings him
under his fingernails. He goes deeper anyway
past the many different colors of clay and sand.
He finds an alien body all leather and twigs.
He knows it was his body once.
The sky is an old man's face.
His sadness presses him deeper until he digs himself
out of sight, far past the fallen swingset and alien
bones, and steam begins to rise from his tunneling.
The heat in the mantle of the earth smells like pussy.
It is alive with the cries of young boys
who have fallen while playing.

THE BIRDS AND THE BIRDS
who do the birds call for
on the last morning of the world
whose face do they see
in the drifting earth

how do they follow the throat
of their dark routes knowing
planets are collapsing into sand

people spend their lives
listening to a song at 5 a.m.
staring terrified
into an unfamiliar mirror

the birds so quiet in the air
this stricken morning

THERE IS A HEIGHT IN THE DARK

there is a height in the dark
no day can strike

the hatchets fly from opened flies
past the daybreak

bodies hatch bodies in air from a smashed
skyscraper window

the American work-week becomes
a throbbing axe-wound

and history falls open like a deer's belly

LOVE SONGS ON A BROKEN RADIO
In dreams I discover a coin in your mouth
to buy your nakedness the taste of copper

we've been standing on a train all our lives
hanging onto the ceiling trying to kiss
while the tunnels rush by
advertising a world we'll never discover

we enter each other within the sounds
of children running rampant on the roof

I can't buy this house that surrounds us
I can't paint a picture of your mouth

but I can feel the beams of light shattering
through the plastic subway window
and dreams that have never felt a hand
trace their aching jaw

teeth that chatter inside electrical wires
yawns from a melting trumpet who loves the dark

when the city drained the ponds I found a baby
wrapped in black leaves, face covered in soot

the child was ours
and the dream had conquered all reality

SOME DOORS
Behind this door
is a freshly fallen rain of bent pennies.

Behind this door
is an orchard of trees made of light
being eaten by termites made of light.

There are worlds on both sides
of this door.

And the worlds on either side
of this door are doors.

And the door itself is a world.

Transparence is a brick wall.

Behind this door
there is a couple making love without moving.

And a used book sale
taking place at the center of the earth.

POLICE FORCE LOST IN THE SUNRISE
there is no time in the backseat
when a trusted friend is driving
roads of glistening reptile skin
undulate in harmless breathing when the wheel
is in those holy mortal hands

cops of freshly healed bones try to stop the car
try to flag it down with their failing hands
those warriors made of pale meat
losing their heads in the hot gray sunrise
falling through mirages on the tar

as we drive past like the noise of a rippling American flag

NOBODY'S BOY CLIMBS THE RAIN TONIGHT
Nodody's boy climbs the rain tonight
and sees in a haze the alternate dimension
of his lonely town
kissing itself in a blaze of bright red hailstones
soaring down
windshields turn into crystal flowers
moths are beaten butterfly blue

rain puddles morph into spreadeagled girls
for me and you, shadow
boy

sprinkling your children on the drugstore rain
getting arrested for decent exposure

smooching the stuffed-animal lips
of the alternate-dimension sweetypie

who won't let you have her in this
bedraggled dog-kicking world of bars and cars

sliding their carcasses home in the icicle rain

UNTIL I FALL THROUGH THE CRUST OF THE EARTH
I want to go sit in the bar next to men with ham sandwich faces
and drink suds until I fall through the floor.
Everything will be dark green under there
and broken glass will fall past the eyes that are left
of my disintegrated body.
I want to buy ten thousand disposable cameras
and take pictures of everything that goes on
around here while most of us are asleep in our hells.
Then hand them in to the all night pharmacy,
photographing the last few strands of silent sidewalk
as I enter the door. I will cut the pictures to pieces
and array them in a fractured whirlwind on my wall,
so that when I rise in the morning I will see
what swirling shards we live among
until someone looks, and someone records,
and someone cares and weeps
for the world left behind.

Part of a proud history of fuck-ups

while walking under powerlines
a voice drew near to me and pulled me
behind a telephone pole and spoke to me,
and said to me, don't be ashamed
of the ragged clothes you've worn
for so long you've forgotten
the feel of fine thread, don't be ashamed
of your low beaten bed, you're part of
a proud history of fuck-ups, part of
a proud history of fuck-ups.
the kings who ignore you
and occupy your throne,
the women who scoff when they should be
bearing your glow-in-the-dark babies,
the countries at war in the night overhead
are blessing you silently with their violence
blessing you silently with their violence
clearing a path for you to walk
through the desolate dessert
they've created; only the furthest outcast
can climb through that wound,
only one who hears electric voices
on a magic sidewalk, who is part
of a proud history of fuck-ups.

may a holy spirit guide your hand
may a holy spirit guide your hand
may a holy spirit guide your hand
you're
part of a proud history of fuck-ups

The songs of people trapped in the air

the time is hidden hell, the air is muffled strange,
the wooden gates in sunlight are a mansion's porch,
the walls are folding outwards in a sneer,
all birds within the highway lines are screeching
insisting on a home in highway air for me and you,
pine-needles and maple leaves fall stricken
through the air and fall so gently on
simmering pavements, a sledgehammer in a dream world
falls on their passages, disintegrates the gentleness
of their wafting down, makes the roots tremble
in their most fertile soil, climbing to riverbanks,
shredding stone with the urge to grow,
five girls fuck run under the bridge, tying a rope swing
to the rusting girders underneath, giving birth
to five baby demons in the brown water,
they are my sons, speaking fresh from the womb,
striking a match on the encrusted metal,
beating their new hands on their watery chests,
thudding their heartbeats into mine,
stringing their blood-murmurs on the wind,
tearing the sighs from swingsets old and trembling
placing them back in aging carbonated beer bones,
making a cut lawn of every future, breaking the knives
in the grass, the green blades where a guardian angel
danced his last, and an infant spine went unprotected
as he ascended on a river of chimney smoke
through the shallow sky of an early winter
placing his hope in the cupped hands of a young girl
standing on the red porch boards of her house insanity,
black-eyed susans willing themselves out of the soil,
screaming bumblebees offering honey from
a broken stem, nourishment from war-torn earth,
love from a pistol weeping tears of oil.

the mountain is strange in the early light
it seems to have moved closer to oceans thrown
thrown sideways into leering lantern eyes
watching to see if faith can shake all foundations,
and the prophet's voice resound throughout
every payphone. the stream of whiskey water
brown and clean, over the lichened stones,
over the man of water and the highway of water,
over the ribs of water and the earth of water,
throbs a heart in the moss, pulls an indian cucumber
out of the famished soil for a starving mouth,
the nourishment proceeds into the dessert's taste,
the earth and the human ribs gasp in terror,
both are starving, both capable of discordant orgasms,
both raising fences against the entrance of
their own children into a new garden, the flowers
appear to be plastic until a toddler's hand or a violent
breeze from hurricane-stirred oceans
touches their lips, finds the patterns in a grain of hair
that grew their stems shriek upward in the soil,
wheelbarrow full of steaming strength new life,
yellow petals making sense of charcoal core,
tearing loose the clouds that gather in a fuming dome
above the garden's crayon mountain.

this is no earth, but a fuming ball of dream,
no holding hands, but broken bodies thrusting
compound fractures we call genitals into each other's
crushed forms, resuscitating grey flesh, bringing
a tan to an android's cheek, breaking every blossom
and bud with a deflowerer's experienced hand.
in the metal of the gates lurks the craftmanship
of the lecher, and those who hang on to earth
from desperation and not from love.

the garden is a rectangle of pumpkins,
a rhombus of pears, we find no trouble there
where the pink and orange glow of mild colors
heats the air, makes small volcanoes burst
like bottle-rockets in a century that fire
does not recognize, does not touch hand-like
with its flaming heat, tracing backyard pools
with fiery murmurs of deceit in the air.
the chlorined water trembles in the movements
of unprotected sex, and an infant with a glowing
radioactive mouth is born from coupling
in the pool whose water surface is coated
with pine needles, coated in maple leaves,
coated in suit jackets from thrift store sales
thrown off from businessmen in burning offices,
inherited by isolationists who sleep on
beaten mats in a streetlight dawn
through a cheap apartment window;

this is what happens when a tall glass of beer
collides with a mind trapped in forty-hour
work-weeks and then suddenly freed,
free to see the glass tables that stretch
into eternity, and the disintegrating restaurant
bars that comprise the sky. angelic forms
are drinking there, pouring the whiskey through
their hearts and onto the floor.

This is a letter I just wrote to a friend:

Last night I was assembling some new collages at my apartment when D-rock came over with the new Flaming Lips album, 'At War with the Mystics' (great title). He seemed mildly distressed by the record, but wanted me to hear it. So, while he drew and I collaged, we listened to the whole thing, and I must say that I was not impressed. The lyrics are as uninspired as U2 or NIN, dull and cliched--not one of them really stands out. Lyrics like "every time you state your case/I want to punch your face", obviously about you-know-who and the warmongers. Horrible. To their credit, the album doesn't sound like anything else they've ever done; the vocals and harmonies are different. Maybe it's not a complete piece of garbage, but it's the most fluffy thing I've ever heard by them, and I find their mellowing in their old age predictable. (But I also thought 'Yoshimi' was one of the best records of the 21st century so far, so obviously I'm not opposed to mellowing per se). The anger and preachiness of the songs doesn't fit with the fluffy orange melodies and vocal harmonies; listening to it made me feel discouraged; I thought, "if the Lips have fallen prey to political frustration and hollow preachiness, the rest of us must surely be going to hell". Nowadays when I see people talking politics passionately, I feel like I'm watching our whole race get cloned by the Borg.

But what I really got out of my disappointment was this: I remembered our conversation about politics, about "getting more involved". And I knew that getting more involved was the worst thing we could do. What was once great about the Lips was their ability to create an alternate universe, and as they've allowed themselves to "get involved" by speaking to current events, albeit in muddy, unspecific ways, they've let a lot of the fun out of the balloon. Same goes for the Beastie Boys. I'll be blunt: I think you're wrong to desire more involvement. I think you should desire less. I think that if you attempt to confront the machine, you'll become part of it, at this point. I think it's time for us to recreate language, and music, to re-create the world, not speak to the one we're in. THE ONE WE'RE IN CAN'T EVEN HEAR ITSELF ANYMORE. I don't know how we're going to do this. But we're going to do it, dammit. I will not be a product of my time. I will not be another reactionary.

What's happening here is that the whole damn country is getting politicized, apparently from weariness and a sense of guilt. The protests sound more and more hopeless, as if the protesters know they're trying to reverse time itself. How many albums has Bush ruined, so far? How many poems? How many more will he ruin? How much more dull self-righteousness and cliched, vapid, obligatory denunciation will he attract? How much longer will he keep us from looking deeper at our own faults and learning from them? His preachiness is reflected in those who oppose him. They have become more like him in the effort to oppose, to win over, to convince. Art shouldn't TELL. It should SHOW. Responding to authority often makes you sound like an authoritarian.

You've been duped by an unhealthy, overpoliticized climate. Fooled into taking the walking dead seriously. Yup, I'm dead serious. We need to escape this climate as completely as possible no matter what the consequences.

Some people say that whatever we do is now a political act. So be it! In fact, that's ideal, because if all my acts are political then I want them to be as unpredictable and as far from common language as possible.

Leave beautiful art behind you when you die, and you will have achieved something incredible. If you want to recycle and avoid meat and drive an electric automobile, so be it, but keep it out of your art, 'cause I don't wanna fucking hear it. That's my attitude.

Part of what was fun about this past weekend was our removal from the outside world. We need more of that solitude, no matter what the consequences.

Anyway, that's what's been on my mind. I don't want to talk about it ever again, though I'll listen to anything you have to say. I hope I'll see you this weekend.
It's time for me to drift out into the galaxy.

love

Luke

THERE'S ALWAYS ONE BIRD LEFT BEHIND

There's always one bedraggled bird left behind
when the flock takes off on its yearly
migration. A frightened pair of jeweled eyes
reflect the huge V-shape of departing wings,
then search the sidewalk for a piece of bread,
pecking at an old shoe left behind
by a man who was chased down Main Street
by a rabid bear, and will one day be President
of the United States of America.
He will tell the audiences at all his rallies
the story of his escape from the bear,
of how he lost one shoe as he ran,
and the audiences will laugh and laugh.
Their laughter will knock the birds
out of the sky. And he will tell them
how good it is that bears are now extinct,
that nothing is left on earth powerful enough
to make a man run down Main Street.
The bird picks up the shoe in its beak
and begins the carry it down the sidewalk.
The shoe is heavier than he is
with his hollow bones
that will make good flutes
for the savages inhabiting Main Street
several centuries from now.
It's 2a.m. in New Hampshire, and all his cousins
in the sky are going crazy.
at this point the town explodes upward
with blue towers of pulsating light.
The sky is a reflection of where he stands.

SHE HATES MY LOOKS

I want to charm a black-haired girl until she's wet
I hope she hates my looks
I want her to love my voice
buying her a piece of fur is suggestive
giving her a handful of popcorn is suggestive
reading the real estate of her palms and fingers
is totally inappropriate

filled green with hate, her dumpsters smile
from everywhere
the multiverse is a bicycle broken
at the edge of a driveway
in the light of a supermarket sign

THE RUINED POET

One night he fell asleep earlier than usual
and dreamed that he left his body
and walked around the street on which he lived
wearing the shadow of his usual clothes.
And he stopped at the houses of friends
and told them that he knew that he was dreaming
and wanted them to know that they were dreaming too.
And he asked them to stop by tomorrow morning
to wake him up, and tell him that they had seen him
in their dreams. He asked them all
to leave their bodies every night
and go into the dreams of their neighbors
and tell them that they were dreaming too,
and that it was time to wake up for a great event.
He himself did not know what the event was.
But this is what he would be doing for the rest of his life.

there are plenty of things unlike people
I can grab ahold of
that will not let me down.

that big mound of snow in the corner of that parking lot
is a good girlfriend for starting over with.
I'll make love to it like I used to kiss my pillow, practicing.
I'll thrash around on dirty white until
something connects with something.
I'll hit the pavement like an egg.
I'll pick up the colors revealed
with their budding circuitry aborted.

The world doesn't have to be made flesh
to make me yearn.
I'll frame it as a steaming image
with the part of me that can't believe
my own ability to breed.

I got this apartment for the winter
because I wanted a place with a window
looking out on that empty parking lot.
At night the plows make it shiny and clean with long
surging kisses. When the cars fill it up
in the morning I feel like I'm about to cry.
The form is so much better than the function.

I got this apartment because I wanted to believe
in my ability to live without
the company of total strangers.
I got this apartment because I didn't want
to get anyone pregnant. It looked at me
from among the classified ads
like an eye looking through flames,
just as desperate as myself, and more open:

single man seeks single woman
to remain single with;
single woman must be non-smoker;
must be

himself

pressing against an empty bed,

rehearsing both parts.

someone will know what you're waiting for

there won't be anything left in the house to open

there are as many lines here as there are
levels in this building which will be rubble
by the time you read this. something like a leaf
will fall off this poem.

there isn't a right limb. or whole bodies fall off
wherever a hand takes hold.

I see how unprepared I am for you

We were unhappy, fighting each other
We thought we had to be unhappy, fighting each other
We thought our unhappiness was necessary
We thought our anger was leading
To a wonderful breakthrough
We were terribly wrong
This is the song of our terrible wrongness
Look how clumsy it is
I cannot ask you to listen to it

Here's something I've never done before: I took one of my old poems (written some time in 2003) and cut it down into a drastically different version. You can check out the old version here: http://home.flash.net/~unlikely/whitesandand.html if you want to compare. I tried to select the strong, spare stuff, add a few little bones to the skeleton, and cut out the fat. I hope there never comes a day when I want to put everything I've ever written under the knife. But I enjoyed pruning this one:

white sand, red sun

I went on a white beach
to pick you flowers made of red fire
(there were none)
and it was a sun under my feet.
I let it burn until the earth
was torn away by its heat. I let it burn.
I went there to find you some shells
that the ocean had washed clean
their meat gone
their hour of oblivion and beauty come

I pictured them held in your hands
shimmering--
remnants from some underworld's broken skeleton
...an eternity swum and never reassembled.

I saw the water, mercury, uninfinite,
in its stretch toward
the false edge of this planet
the way the mist moves as the fish jump through it
and I wanted your hands on my body
to make my blood move
in the shadows of buildings
stretching their sun-drenched gravestones;

a leaf of paper falling sideways in its drift
and whispering on the skin of my hands.

later, over the bedside table
where the shells were drying,
I saw the hard light enter the hotel window
like something thrown from a mirrored universe.
all day I moved
like an aging helium balloon
dragging its string in the sand
toward a distant dock
until the children dragged their pails up
into shadows of adult umbrellas
in the backseat of the sun

the bluefish smashed their muscles against the air
the seashells warmed in the flesh of my hands
I looked at your picture through a distance of water
with the murdered gift so silent in my room
a small thing from the sea that cannot live.

Live lonely or die

I think of us all like flames pacing our apartments
scowling mica into our mirrors

naked, sick of all fashion
waiting for dandelions to sprout
from between the floorboards;
something fertile to make our cells bearable,
since we so seldom feel secure enough
to bless with kindness at each other's doors.

Don't you wish we were kicking a yellow
rubber ball back and forth across a big front yard
freshly cut grass sticking to our bare feet
the smell of life's blood enveloping us

waiting to hear a voice from a huge musical kitchen
call us in for dinner? And that we all had the same parents,
gentle people with plenty of time to laugh over a big meal?

LOVE POEM TO THE CONCEALED

2

In the next life you will be wearing my clothes.
You will have to unbutton my shirt near the top
to make room for the roundness of your breasts.
You will have inherited everything
that ever touched my body.
It will be an entirely different planet.
The blood will have been hosed off the sidewalks
and the broken windows will have melted away.
It will just have snowed. You will be your own child.
No
body built in childish humility
will ever fall down.
The trees will look like the skin of a baby's hand.
It makes me ache to sting this:
you will make it to heaven
and I won't be there to hold your foot.

LOVE POEM TO THE CONCEALED

1

I will wait until you are about to leave
to tell you I'm in love with you. Not
to make you stay. But I believe
that moment on your doorstep
when you gently respond "I know"
and kiss (not too near
my lips) goodbye
or look startled and slam
the door and
keep on packing (not letting me help you
carry the boxes
this time) will become
the tallest column
of pure winter air
on earth. Seen from space
that pillar of cleanliness,
untouched by sex
and lover's arguments,
sealed by just one
declaration, will be felt
moving from zone to zone
like a painting of a tornado,
a sculpture of a hurricane,
in your memory. For your mind
is my only country.
The gods will say
from the battered moons of Mars
these states are not united,
but something holy,
free and unrequited
is moving over them
like a queen without
a king or pawns to conquer.

A girl & I were taking a walk
and we found part of a bird:

tonight we saw
a bird's wing
in a parking lot
all by itself
it was sticking out from the peak
of a snowbank
Mount Monadnock lay
low in the sky behind the snowbank
the snowbank looked like the mountain's child
or it's shadow burned down
into a pile of white ash
and the bird's wing looked like
more than a battered flag
it had so many finely crafted
strands of color
and it was such a sculpture
we pleaded with an unseen hand
to re-make it

with a frightened look
you grabbed the wing and pulled it out
but no bird's body followed

where are your eggs, little bird
where are your children
are you bleeding in your nest
are little blue eggs dotting the snow
like fading drops
from the brush of some landscape painter
running away with their canvas & knives
to save their painting
as the snow engulfs them

did something tear you apart
I hope something didn't tear you apart
if it did I hope it was quick

I promise to be quick

I hope something gentle & strong
is carrying you away in it's teeth

there's a heat inside snow
everyone feels and denies
ash is raining down
from a burnt sky
we wag our tongues
we touch our tongues together
we laugh at how our tongues feel,
touching each other

Nervous breakdown man

father walks in the sky the sun
is dispersing the continent of clouds
on which he walks and he's so brittle now
that he can't carry you
to the fragile heights he's living

father sits on a stained bed it's his magic carpet
in his mind it's a rotten place to sleep for the rest of us
a weightless place for him to live I think
he found the wrong heaven
but the female angels are wearing their uniforms
the food is cold and clean in its basket of air
he sees it suspended in transparent stomachs
the male angels are eating their fill they are not
vegetarians

his mouth is a trap he can't open for fear
of letting god out to avenge
the clumsy loves of all his human cousins
living in the shadow of the hospital
in two thousand winters one day his shattered pants
cloaked and scattered the mystery
from which I leaped, impotent

Talking sociopath blues

days when there's nothing gentle left to say
to anyone
skies flash open on every planet like ocean shores
of broken seashells

the way you speak the word love
makes them call you crazy and mean
you ask between kisses why there should be
another song on the jukebox
another drunk fuck if it's not
going to change
everything

and your half-friends roll their half-eyes
call you half a fool
agree mildly
that we all need to be raised from our graves

but
who wants to do
all that shovelling

The cloud people

the clouds have style because they don't
change because they can't help it
evaporate because they're in love
with not being in love with being in love

the clouds I can't explain
are ruining a life I don't want anyway
the replacement is a bowl of peaches in hell
the replacement is a girl
beautiful and holy
turning into a woman
while nobody watches
in a bar full of
violently idle drunks

Letter to a girl

I apologize for typing this on your body

I ran out of paper

there's something wrong with the landscape tonight
the snow is soothing in the twilight but
beams of light keep shooting upwards
from the footprints I leave behind

that doesn't make sense, does it

also, I've noticed beams of various colors
shooting upwards from other sets of footprints
some of them are brighter than others,
and they're everywhere

the sidewalk is covered with bouquets of light-beams

I'm confused

what I'm seeing is dragging me out of this world
forehead-first

I don't want to live in a cave of diamonds all alone

I need your help
I can't carry this dazzlement around all by myself

that's why I'm typing this on your body
not because I ran out of paper

some bodies look
hand-crafted
with such an intensity of love

it burns my view of the world
(which inhabits my body)
down to one glazed eye

staring at a wound in the sky
and inhabiting that gash
like something looking back
with its own whole body

the lips of the wound calmly open
huge globs of yellow paint
rain down like punctured hot-air balloons

splattering sad pavement
making the landscape of the eye
live again

blotting the lines on the lot
where we park our restless deaths
every day

& walk out of our hulking bodies
like birds on crutches
a series of wounds inhabiting a larger wound