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.