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

Looking for victory

Because I violated my own soul
with false humility when I was a boy,
because later when violence stupified me
I read about politics and meditated on murder,
I have lost my language
and the sensitivity of my limbs,
I can't enter a bar or a restaurant
and tear the syntax loose
from these horrible conversations,
I can't boil the air with my eyes
or make the carbonations sing with eternal life,
and I have nothing to say to the woman
I have fallen in love with.
All my purity is gone;
yet I will love her even
if she falls into debt,
if she worships mediocrity,
if she is promiscuous,
if she throws tantrums
and smashes glasses
against her kitchen walls
and weeps with shame
in front of the embarassed police.
I will love her.
I will love her even if she dies, and so
nothing can remove her from me.
And I can't do anything.

Autobiography.

in the shell of an exploded human head
scenes from my life are taking place
peacefully. I'm barely involved.

from now on it's going to take
something downright extreme
to make me smile. Sunflowers filled with teeth
instead of seeds, though I wouldn't
want to eat them, might do the trick,
or a girl with three backs.

I won't be putting any of these things
on my Antichristmas list

but I have advertised my preferences
I have made my desires known to America
and if you look through my bedroom window
to see my bed floating in water
surrounded by penis-shaped electric eels
and freshwater seals carrying
little mountains of crayon in their teeth
don't you fucking dare interrupt
my 41st century

insanity is speaking
in the vacancies
between shopping carts & cars
life was a parking lot
some supermarket left behind--

slept, leaving the aisles full
and the eyes empty
oh my people
my people are a pile of sticks
no matter how perfect
the blue geometry of their roads
no home waits for them anywhere
when the key turns the ignition
the hand is already elsewhere
slitting its throat
eternity's touch
is lighter than a feather
a glacier in the belly
a field of broken stones
souls stuck in bodies that are lost souls

I'll smack your face until paint
spurts out of your eyes & ears
I'll revive you
the horizon's ember-red
look at it
burn your eyes out on it
your body
is eternity moving like a worm
lower yourself into me--hurt like a surgeon hurts

Kelly & Mina

The rabbit's ears open like little wallets as Kelly cleans them.
Mina (she's a girl-rabbit) fights and tries to squirm away.
If she lived
with other rabbits, they'd lick the lint out of her ears
more pleasantly, instead of Kelly with a Q-tip,
jabbing like a vicious cloud while Mina squirms.
She lifts the long downward-pointed ears like limp leaves
that need encouragement. She doesn't love you, I explain
to Kelly, who throws a bloody Q-tip at me in response.
I persist: Mina only tolerates you because you feed her.
She knows you are not an ideal roommate. Kelly insists
that this is the difficult part of their otherwise idyllic relationship.

Later that night, after making love(to Kelly, not the rabbit)
I saw another rabbit (without a Q-tip protruding from its ear,
to my relief) sprinting over the sidewalk in front of the video store.
It didn't stop to check out the latest releases.
It may have been searching frantically for a mate
to lick its ears, but I think it was simply trying to escape
from the supermarket parking lot, a frightening place.
I had just returned a movie about a futuristic post-apocalypse world
in which no invasion of supernatural forces had saved the earth
from human intrusion. Not one rabbit had appeared in the movie.
The few remaining human characters spent a lot of time
throwing colorful explosives at each other
and never stopped to lick one another clean.

In the heart a mountain.

In the heart a mountain, in the soul seven glowing stones.
There once was a time we relied
on these numbers and codes;
thankfully that time is gone.

When this city was still a woman, I fell in love with her.
When she tried to become more like a man
I fell out. I didn't want a mirror to crack.
Earth is a place to pretend
it doesn't hurt.

There are so many lives of the party that the party gets tired.
When, still in your twenties, you've already had
too many girlfriends, you know it's time
to swim Egyptian rivers
looking for a sacred cat
to love you and live stiffly by your side. But
all the holiest pussycats are already kept in tombs.

Some say nobody ever walked on the moon, some say
no man ever made love. If you take off your shoes
and let go of the chord
while walking a lunar
parking lot surface
you might find it's all miserably true.
Many sacred things
can be staged on TV.

A jukebox floating through space
from a wounded flight
might have one last message for us.
Let's hang onto the trees upsidedown for awhile.
Let them climb us while we wait
for a country music meteorite.

Trying not to live

Keep a calm face and a calm body.
These ornaments cannot handle
the weight of a full soul. Hold tears within
when a war is passing. There'll be no arms
to catch your fallen body if you walk
on the grass of other timid feelings.

There's a blackbird tied up in guitar strings
near the doorway that is a barroom ceiling;
there's a captive in red at the top of the stairs
in the house where all bill-collectors are slaughtered
and grace has rudely conquered karma.

The imprint where a cherished body lay
is glowing with a slow-growing flame.
The coals on the blanket & a baby's softest hair.
Surrounding shelves stripped empty
of everything you've ever read.
What was once the rough charcoal sketch of a life
violently about to be painted in.

Sadness is something you can kill with your hands

Sadness is something you can kill with your hands.
Sadness is something you can lick when you're old.
You can maul it like it's a chicken, with a hatchet,
you can lick the twitching stump as if it were
a beloved sexual organ.
And watch sadness run around the yard brainless,
spurting blood, until it's just a stupid word
among other emptinesses.
You're getting ready to drink a beer.
You're preparing to murder your sadness.
You're about to throw the dead bird at the jukebox
and watch it slide down the songs.
It's finally stopped running around the yard.
And the light behind it is a chalkboard now.
Sadness is something you can kill without love.

Our Inheritance

The blood of slaughtered women is running through my veins.
There is too much of it.
It bursts my arteries. It pounds in my head.
It chokes my heart. My father shed this blood.
My grandfather shed this blood.
I've drawn some of it into myself.
My mother put her hand through the telephone
and opened a wound in my neck.
I'd been hurting her with a jagged voice,
demanding to be rid of this blood.
A little girl lowers herself from a treebranch.
The tree is planted in a fog.
I'm there to catch her but I don't know what I'm standing on.
She trusts me. She doesn't know what I've done to her mother
or what her mother's done to me.
A beam of red light comes blazing
from the tear duct in her left eye.
It heals the gash in my neck. My arms go limp
and she tumbles into a pile of leaves
rapidly materializing. She is giggling and glowing like a light
from under the ocean.
She rises on her tiny feet and says into my eyes
"again, again. Pick me up and drop me again."
"It's fun." She's turning into a woman before my eyes.
Forgive me before I hurt you again, I beg.
She laughs at me and says "I want to play"
but the child in her face is growing confused.

grey squirrel running across a powerline
traffic-light dangling beneath you

the distance & the rushing cars
the hardness of the tar, don't frighten you

you carry a small rotten crabapple in your teeth
a brown fragment falls off onto a windshield as you

scramble over a red light turning green--
the man behind the windshield looks up

to see you suspended by electricity
drives into the sun & burns to a crisp

you reach the telephone pole on the other side
of the street and climb down to stand

upright on your tiny hinges, stuffing your cheeks
while people scream and the wreckage smolders;

a heap of black roses covering an ember

Nerve-ray fragment

I saw a swirling red lake
through the window of a mental hospital
scared waterfalls were pouring in from every side
massive logs turned in the nervous gush
never moving toward the center's
mysterious whirlpool
and a waterslide beckoned with
diamond-bubbles of sun
leaning against the sky's veil
an afternoon moon lit it all up

I could see the childish feet
of spirits climbing
up metallic ladders
fire-escaping towards the sun's reflection
on a meteorite made of sidewalk chalk

All our stupid horses

All the head in my water is clean
from being laser-scrubbed when the temperature's low
plastic futures in an android's hair
lead me to believe my fortune's not here.

Taking a sponge to hotel-room walls
in a hologram world there's no rise and no fall
a floating brain in formaldehyde jar
isn't something appealing to kiss.
And the unwound circuits in a pretty girl's wrists
are no place for a man to stop and drink.

Double vision leaves one deadly road, the other
faint heaven where mirages touch
like couples groping feverish in the mist.
An upright beaver in a cinema world
cuts its teeth to pieces on a telephone pole.
The kisses in the forest unheard still exist.

Inwood, New York, September 1957

On a back porch in partially eclipsed light
a little boy is playing with a wounded chipmunk
who sits trembling in a clay bowl on broken haunches
licking his paws as the sun is blotted out.
The little boy puts oatmeal and baby oil
into the bowl; soothing things. He'd put salt
to cleanse the wounds but he doesn't have the stomach
or the sternness to be a healer.

The chipmunk's cheeks twitch but it suffers quietly.
A car's tire caught it running.
The boy's face is grave as he gently splashes water
trying to wash the pain out of the little animal.
The chipmunk's face is really a face for the first time;
he looks humanly worried.
The water is pink with blood, not dark
with the gush of the heart.
But the legs may have to come off when Dad gets home.
Mom is slipping into another dimension.

Flames of fall lick the edges of the porch.
A green and orange fire crashes on the steps.
A sinew comes apart in both; the chipmunk
breathes heavier and the boy's breathe corresponds.
Scared teeth nip stigmata into five-year-old hands.
The sun goes purple-white and dims on their interaction.
From overlapping discs (the world is smaller than that touch)
the holy spirit pours down into this.

scrap of bright
spirit battered clean
comes clattering over waterfall
tense bodies shimmering below
descent turns into scar
water drained through quiet skin
rock opens rock
gashed landscape fills with moss
speech dulls thought

ruined sidewalks
lichened fingers
red leaf falling through grey world
hands turn into babies
nothing screams to hold

dick-sucking tree
wavers at cliff's edge
branches make nervous notation
between spores aglow

planetarium sky
shattered
curved glass raining broken dome
paradise's circuitry in fingernail
what was the body is a hurt nerve
twanging in an outstretched arm
Milky Way cancelled
solar sheep ambling
coats glowing with
raindrops of transparent sand

Looking for a nymph in metaltown

claw feet picking at the leather floors
of waterhouses
(to save a soul
you must drop an audience)
a word that has never been painted
a tongue to fill the dryest mouth
skyscrapers of chalk
standing, waiting
eternity
standing, waiting
in those windows
whose eyes are always eager for shattering
littlegirl hold my hand
all the ferns and flowers turn bright red
littlesister ride my shoulders
into a twilight that comes
for only one of us
this body falls like a rag
hair soaked blonde in gasoline
souls walking atheistic corridors
bewildered by academic vomit
stung by a rose's cliche, lashed clean
by the fingers of a forest's first branch

Outline for a news & entertainment magazine:

There are a lot of important people
doing dangerous and important things.
A lot of important things are happening.
Last week so many books were published,
all the trees grew wings & started flapping to get away.
Flowers were thrown on the streets, to no avail.
You showed your nakedness to the world,
and nothing happened.
Paint your body, starting with the eyes and nipples.
Put a bright Star of Bethlehem on your forehead just for fun.
Being sad is an un-American activity.
Ships like massive icebergs are arriving.
Their jagged bellies nudging at our shorelines.
Put your eyes in my mouth.
Put your mouth in my hands.
Put your feet in my eyes.
The kind of smacking-each-other-in-the-face-with-joy,
asshole-licking, rolling-around-the-carpet sex
we've always wanted to have.
Build yourself a new ribcage with tin cans.
Go up to the roof of a long long factory building
and see how many suns are left.
When the ocean comes closer you can catch a starfish.
It's always the Fourth of July. Fireworks eternal.
Say the word "Love" and a thousand wings start flapping.
Say the word "Death" and watch a stone
turn to water in your hands.
Watch the streets and the buildings turn to water.
Watch your face turn to water in the mirror.
"This is a head. These are hands touching
both sides of the head's face.
This head is precious. The hands that touch this face
are precious.
I have smashed my brother's face with a rock.
I have raped my sister. Yet, against my will,
I have been forgiven."
Imagine waking up after a long war
in a huge pile of black olives.
Imagine lying in a bathtub filled with vegetable oil.
There are a thousand dead souls
whimpering in your eyes.
Your fingernails were made from a multitude
of crushed bones and burnt hairs.
The noise of beards growing sounds
like snakes slithering over the edge
of an old flat world, dripping into space,
and space is a sink at 4:15 a.m.
In my dreams I can transport everyone I've ever known
into the living room of the house where I lived as a child.
Somehow they all fit on the sofa, sitting next to one another.
Stretch out all your limbs inside my body.
Nothing has been reported.

My little brother, 3 years old

for Joey

My little brother's left eye was stronger
than his right--it tried to pull away.
It left the right eye hurting to catch up.
Now he wears glasses to balance
the aching twins at war
in his head. The lenses glint,
almost alive with the things
that make him wonder. And everything
makes him wonder.

I am too serious today, and I search
his face for emerging signs of concern.
It shows none except a questioning eye
when confronted with dogs on leashes
and people who yell at each other--
things appearing chained or unhappy
confuse him. My eye-sockets darken with adult powers
watching his face dimple in puzzlement at any pain.
Already something in his body
is hungry to liberate our pitiful lives.
Little does he know how we'd string him up
if he tried. Little does he know, beyond the wet grass
demanding nothing, a planet's population terrified of joy.

Let the little blonde head bob between gardens,
look on teenagers playing frisbee
and wonder at their long crazy legs.
The world smells so good to him from here.
I've carried his cotton-soft life
in my arms through parks before,
counting on his cuteness to bring the girls;
It always works, and when they come I say:
"Let me touch your body with mine and maybe
I'll put one of these in your belly, but I can't
promise to take care of it when it comes.
I'm still too much like him to be a father."

Most of them laugh--but one looked terrified.
My little brother gently smiled and patted
that one on the head, almost tumbling out of my arms
with sudden reach before she could turn away.
She looked ready cry under his touch. An old boy, and the young one
in his arms, watched together through six eyes
bristling to properly align their powers,
her thin shoulders tremble as she walked apart.

A child's touch makes matter itself
stir immeasurably. And he is already accustomed
to people weeping. Like the nuzzling
of a concerned dog: a gesture
meant to comfort or express affection
reminds us of the innocence lost to us
from which it comes, of how badly we need comfort
and how little we can expect.

The Atomic Bomb

In a suicidal letter to a cute girl, though she's only sixteen (but so


intelligent, I swear), I cried out with the vehemence of Jeremiah

that I could think of no positive act or invention
to match the dismal immensity of the atom bomb.

She argued sensibly for me to think of more intimate
and simple acts, her antithesis of mushroom clouds blossoming,

suggested that eating pussy might make me feel
more useful. "It feels like an inner atom bomb to us ladies"

she exclaimed, her prose bright as a bluejay eating seed. I replied
with great maturity (and felonious intent) that though an increase in

cunninglingus might not uninvent the atom bomb, I would certainly go
down on her in a daze of gratefulness if ever she came up

from her grey New York
to my green New Hampshire.

When my father died, the world broke into blossom.
When my girlfriend died, beauty ran rampant.
When my guitar died, all the rivers sang.
When my cat died, leaves turned into lizards every midnight.
When my best friend died, I loved the faces
of strangers on the street.
When my god died, I made friends among the mortal.
When my lawyer died, I loved my neighbor.
When my country burned, I found silence and childhood.
When my forest fell, the dome lay down on the sphere.
A massive blanket enwrapped me.
When eternity disintegrated, the clock stopped.
When lovemaking was no longer possible, memory began.
When my mother died, I had eyes again.

the hot-dog seller clad
in white that is no longer white
sadly watches passengers
on sidewalks broken decades old

behind the sex lies of magazines
real lips wait to peel you open
in a bus station (today long-distance lover came
to visit from a smashed New York)
enclosed in glowing glass

girlfriends almost lost to memory
and a timid dog wearing black leaves for fur
join hands that are not hands
in an unseen ceremony
nothing dances unless earthquaked, nobody rises
to pick up the phone unless it chimneysmokes

a woman so old and so short, weak steps
silent except when they drag
shrivelling, limp buttocks rising to meet the back of the head
sheep's wool grey-white

dying suns surround our extinguished child

sad passengers still walk when they're too old to move
the city is a dirty bandage
shabbily clothing loneliness
every person walking will be ageless as god

some(dying)day