douse yourself, delouse yourself

I have been hovering a knife
over the eggplant

your foot hovers over the last stair
I have heard the creaking
of the preceding stairs
and the shifting of your weight
as if on pulleys

you are motionless
I am motionless
the eggplant is
motionless

these are the aubergines
and there are no shepherds here
there is nothing here
but dust percolating

step down
off the stair, the egg
is getting cold
there might still be time
there is always time
for waiting
and for the craning of necks
each to each

pest control

So I will sit on the bus
and study monkeys.

don’t try to teach me how a door
works. Someone else paraded
the knowledge. Oui, la porte
elle est ouverte

“You might wanna take the metro,
sort of.” Half-half trains like berets,
tanned coffee, tawny styrofoaming.

woke up, caffeine sleep. sheep bleat the beat
nothing like assonant mystique.
if you’re not careful you’re going to miss your
stop.

please stop
shaking the salt, the rocks, the basalt. eggshells
personal best. impersonal worst.
dissonance

does a tall man use a tall umbrella?
girth birth mirth
who’s counting, anyway.
any way, trivial.

none of this will transcribe
well. one dose of coma
two dose of death.

you wake up, you do,
you have a little death,
you go back to sleep
do not poke fun
I am not entirely comfortable, either.

Reverse robber, creeping out
of the house slathered toe to head
in blue and black.

For the first time, I am jealous
of the smell of cigarillos
so I will sit on the bus
and study monkeys.

wash and dry

Birds pendulum-ing power lines, taking voltage wings.
This morning there is snow from yesterday because
the night was insular. The men scrape frost from the windows
like scraping cash for bread, for cigarettes. Mutely, buying pop.
Restless. Waking on crumbling cots. Falling right out of dreams,
as we do in dreams. The geese are so fat we cannot catch them
and if we did, we could not kill them. The power has left
our fingertips stinging,
birds pirouetting power lines, taking voltage wings this morning
there is snow from yesterday. Because. Because.

non sequitur

i will abandon the buttoned down
sentence at dinner parties, galas, banquets

select instead a barefoot
heathen’s moan

a formal science of words
lined in a row, atomically
exploded, here i am igniting the

mismatch
there will be

linebreaks like jailbreaks
with all the synonyms
running

hush, unconscious stream,
there will be better dreams, nights.

on being cavalier

No horse required, firstly. However a sense of
malfeasance versus windmills is quite the charade
to embrace. Chain mail, either letters or packages, will do fine

as will any other postal attire, including but not limited to
chicken costumes and nakedness. Avoid at all costs downtown
and uptown rotundas as these will surely lead you

squarely astray, and out of town. Read, absorb the needs
of nights before you. Anticipate the ways of children
and cats without food or fear. Catch them

red-handed. Sleeplessness is necessary at all
intersections of life and death, as are clean nostrils because
how ever can you be chivalrous

when a wretched collection of dust sits at the apex
of your nasal cavities, presenting with a proclivity towards
oxygen embargoes and inflections?

out of loud, nice

((temporarily retracted for editing))

alive and kicking

1
Isn’t anywhere the bus stops
a bus stop? Here’s the thing about youth,
distilled in neon dew drops
& elementary children, a buzzing
electric, with the businessmen
commuting dead-suit to work:
it will set you free. it will set you,
free. There is a baritone murmuring from
the back pew, an objection raised
then put out to black, some victim
of a bishop hat snuff. Here’s
the thing about youth,
it’s all liberal and lively
until tax time.

2
And another,
it’s not as if this arthritis occurred
magically, some marauding Merlin of
calcium deficiency. Last words
kids: drink your milk,
crack those chestnut knuckles loud,
& get your lazy ass out
of that seat on the bus
because my postwar pelvis
is the bedrock of America
and it hurts like hell.

making love on september eleventh

You both were
asleep,
on the bed-

side table watched your glasses,
the clock all colon-eyes, glowing
and accounting minutes from hours.

She knew
you wanted to
just from the way

your toe grazed her calf.
it was like a seven
forty-seven.

the headboard shook,
shook and cried.
you rose.

inside, dark and fumbling.
smoking, smoking, like your mother
when they met in the backyard,

twelve years ago. and
impact. Nicking the skin,
knuckles raking it dry.

this, second. the second tower,
that second coming.
growing tired. sagging.

the hairs on your chin menaced
like a thousand paperclip shards
her thin lips.

shrieking. dancing the line
between joy and grief.
ties and nooses.

looking skyward over the Hudson
just past the husband
and everything explodes.

You both were
asleep,
on the bed.

turn of the century

In the same way you had discovered the stove
was invisibly red-hot after the Kraft Dinner

delight, you too would find out that at the back fence
just above the dead-body hill where parliaments

convened, barefoot cats ambled through, feline
lightning lingering more than it should.

It reminded you of southern states, or their peaches
humming in the sunlight, falling to the mushy ground

and landing perfectly, subject to laws defined
by other governing bodies. Owls for instance

can only clutch what fits in their moonwax talons,
like when old women board busses near the mall

overflowing. To me, this revelation seemed mundane.
I kept fingering the piano, like a kitten

being softly grasped by a falcon, carried off
to feed and delight its naked nestlings.

aurora

Waking up early seems an insult to the sun,
as if my open eyes suggest I’ve completed

my rest far before he ever has and I’m just
the impatient, feverish mother shaking him

by the shoulder. He throws fitful rays
through the blinds, off the high chair, tattooing

the floor. Bending with a morning back, cracking
in the knees, I mop some, sloppy, with a paper

towel. Heaven help the single mother.

the politico

(This piece is by no means new--it was written about a year and a half ago, but recently got re-edited. I think it has some merit, despite the fact it's overwritten.)

Pace yourself, save some for later, but no—
& in this flagrant dereliction there is only a stumbling gait
capable of shooting you right off a cliff into your own skin
(all along you were naked without foliage)
& upon your inauspicious arrival to the solid earth no horns will sound.

The lurid orchestras will remain hushed; you’ll see this
martyrdom is not what it seemed when you were interviewed for the cause—
(don’t worry, dear, you’ll get dental)
There is nothing permanent in this throttling mania, so here,
Take this trafficked burden & have a great trip.

The lilting musical introduction did nothing to soften an entrance so abrasive
Dragging in the proverbial tabby
by its knotted, gnarled tongue.
Taking reign behind your prophet’s pulpit,
Before God himself, pausing for genuflection—
you state your case for the world’s shattering iniquities
& your own foolish ineptitude.

A hungry crowd forms to gobble the words plummeting from your slack mouth
Personalized raindrop bombs on the community swimming pool
Shut up—
You’re preaching to the converted.

Perhaps this is what you were built to do—
of paperclips & amateur origami, strung together with week-old gum--
Your two-bit maelstrom impresses only the clapping ants on the floor,
you miserable plutocrat, you’re still pandering in tune to Chariots of Fire
But the kettle drumming is now the writhing, rhythmic fracture of your own alabaster skullcap
So go ahead, you thundering lunatic—
Crash, bang, stomp
Onward in your quest to rise above your laughable pomp and circumstance...

See what I care.

Here, though, your voice wavers,
then silences.
your face turns cardinal,
tear hurtling down your leather cheekbone
(this is the moment, now, in the harsh bright fight)
it clicks. You realize
those damned harbingers of worse times,
they were right.

hysterectomy

come and take
from me, my hair
soundlessly
smudge
into blur
these tangerine
knees
melt
these shoulder
blades to
their core
recast me,
fisherman-god
another lure.
begin, begin.

uses of force

The clouds in war paintings:
never impartial enough to be
believed. Often, battle cries

vault into the heavens,
the commandant catapults a glance
to the bruised sky above his enemy’s
twisted crown

and already the war has been won.
Soldiers peddle against soft mud,
bayonet the enemy. Bayonet
double-edged.

These forces captured
on canvas, of men and meteorology;
leaning in blue to crimson
breathing in son to son.

Thunderhead compatriots
marching off to war, rumbling
nimbus standard issue boots.
To think they are so close.

malgré (upon discovering a gift)

Sleep fell heavy. I fell out of bed.
Spilling saline. Waking was estuary,
mingling memories, brine dreams.

Sprawling on the couch, crouching
in pain. Then my mother, who knew years
ago the same magnified pain
exclaimed.

Like a robber you stole
onto my porch leaving
a box wrapped, a friendship
trapped within. I saw your
tailights slink off. Ebbing.

Post-its, CDs, audiovisual stuff.
Chocolate chips. Seawater.

High school, which makes out of us
broken billard balls on constant rebound;
we always docked beside one another
nibbling galley jetsam.

(Maybe I’m too close to the shaker
to think clearly about it. Gushing.
The cueball much too near the pocket.)

Malgré.
Impossible de dupliquer tout
ce que nous avons vécu
et vécu ensemble. Les seuls

mots qui surgissent,
à intention inondation,
des cavernes de mon cœur des marées:
Je t’aime, fleur de sel.

publication in 'dreamscape' : endpoint

Just received a great letter of publication-- genuinely my first (hopefully of many). My short story titled Endpoint will be published by the Poetry Institute of Canada (Young Writers division) in their annual compilation titled Dreamscape and will be forwarded to the final competition.

ENDPOINT

The blind man, you knew him when you went to college, well he was a lawyer, beforehand, I mean, you knew him from business school but he changed majors—I can’t imagine how someone could change the course of their life like that—well now he’s blind and he was walking down the street and he was going from door to door, trying his keys in the lock, just like a salesman, but this wasn’t just any neighborhood, no sir, he went up there and everyone was quiet and in the houses the clocks ticked as he jiggled the locks and the eyes were stuck to the doorknobs, but they came out, the occupants, the people of the town, and they followed him from house to house, never saying a word, just standing in the street, at the curb, as he would climb the steps to another front door that was yellow or blue or green or red but he didn’t know which but he grew to have many pairs of eyes on him, and he would lead them from house to house, when finally he got to his house and the door clicked and puffed inwards a little bit and everyone standing in the street gasped, not at their own pace but gasped all together as if they were sucking the same oxygen which they were but it was different molecules, so they stood there at the curb, and the blind man walked into his house but it wasn’t his house, it smelled different, like someone had lived there, but he knew it was his house by the carpet under his shoes and the jackets on the coat-hooks but it wasn’t his house because it wasn’t the same, it wasn’t truly his, you know how lawyers are, always conflicted, always wanting everyone to play by the rules.

things i do not know

after a poem by Andy Weaver

Russian mobster etiquette.
The number of pages
in all Bibles thumped.
The conversion
of currencies.
Why farmers still have
donkeys. The contents
of baby formula or
white bread.
The drive behind
mathematicians.
Why strangers
smile. If marbles
are carved of marble.
Or how your hips
might dance and roam
in this gummy
summer moonlight.

for the cedars

there is no your side of the fence because
it is all over on the rooftops
men are playing cracker jack
soundtracks to silent movies in
the darkness of these knuckle folds

a good night beats.
pulsing and contracting
in the sky moaning
a virulent beast, back arched, howling
spanning both sides of this filmy, pathetic
façade.

capture the night.
enclose its
bestial hours. In this
woven metal are forged
men who dream of
women and women
who dream of liberated tomorrows.

there is no your side of the bed and
this mattress, skinny and contrived
aches for us.

all along the roads and all along the streets
are weeds bending in the heat
from the opal sky we look like rodents
gnawing.

six heavy men could never carry us
to the peaks we visit
bedsheet valleys and mounds we conquer
as the summer plates vegetate among mothballs.

moonlight assaults
your cheek, bleaching every
peachy pixel. you lay down slowly,
aching.

of a death

bridged traffic—
slow suspension

wires taut, freezing
naked over riverrush air—

the city bus veered
over a slick yellow median line

seats spilled red
imitation velvet all

over the aisle.

Into dagger waves
chopped by rescue oars

fare quarters
tumble like acrobats
from the till

defibrillate.
clear.

clear.
flatline.

silence
damming the gush
of motorist passerby

from each end
of this metropolitan artery

so far gone

dancing on the cusp

1

we’re on the same continent
but there are things we cannot share

bricks of walls uniting and dividing
memories of men we cannot see

you live over there, I die over here
laughing and dying of it

hand in hand between bus stops,
deliberations on juries hanging

there are things we cannot share
bunched up in fists

2

shaking your toes.
thunderous, thighs roaming

hips singing the psalms of
laughter bouncing off your

ivory chest tusks.
the enamel fronting your

plaqued veneered lies
laughing.

your elbows jut
just above my face

these model skeletons
haven’t the time of day.

3

how we can bear to be
so insular I do not know

routinely there is something
speaking in my chest

tentatively poking a microphone
and dropping tender syllables

like wartime parcels
or delicate slippers

but my dearest,
my most dear;

why are you speaking
so far from thirsty ears.

homebody

Sweltering morning. Birds
announce a funeral's grief,
deepening this delicate June mood.
The window stands open a crack.

Sitting in the backyard making
typefonts from grass blades,
sweet iced tea sweating on
the worm-ridden picnic table.

There’s an intentional accident on
Fifth street, tires screech. Walking
on. Weeds will cover abandoned
schools, ivy on education and mind.

Bring on the heat,
the clammy dusks of blushing sunset.
Mosquitoes vortexing sluggish columns
buzz through it with Popsicles, those

fluorescent icicle imitations.

We think of knitting hats for winter.
We dream of frozen snow angels, reveries
of miniature ski hills compiling
on frost-sealed windowpanes.

And hardened tire sludge, cracking and gliding—
Braking cold with a panicked skid, swerve—
Exhaling two smoky fumes, rapid,
he’s intact for another autumn.

bribes are good for the economy

She awoke with a pain
in her swollen left arm
on that Sunday in November—
thankfully she’d been to church
the night before but lying
in bed against the hard twine edge
God remained deafer than a
postman asked to step off the grass
and away from burning
bushes. Clusters of tulips sans
petal thrusting virility into
virgin September weekends.

Monday.
The kids went to school,
appropriately dressed
lunchboxes. At home,
ice cream dreams and
soap opera laundry pierced
by timid solo missions
to the psychiatrist.

The quotidian rumbling
of freight trains
is calling memories of
her father facedown in
war mud—
her father with large hands precise
as cogs in bank vaults.
Deposits of secrecy stayed
in her bones until it meandered
to her tear ducts at his
funeral. She was keenest on him,
knowing how his wife could
be moodier than he. They slept
early and set out at dawn westward
on noiseless auto routes.

Dusk, eating little saltines. In
nights dark and blind in bed
they bickered and she jockeyed
for spare inches away from his
rough machinist hands.

on mute

I want you to know that when
you woke up yesterday morning
And scratched yourself and walked
Out into the cold
Your mother felt the frigid tearing snap
Of the life cord ring around your neck
In the violent morning day ready
To grab you up and leave you unfindable
To the rest of us.

You didn’t need the wind.
You found your blood
out there in some vial hanging
On eaves at the neighbor’s duplex—
Frozen and suspended in dusty midair
Like some abandoned February percolating dew.

Scrawlers, brandish your wells of ink and emotion
Spring is hardly here but
There’s poetry in the transition to longer days
And the snowbanks receding like old man’s hair;
You played chicken with the train and
The foundation cracks and sizzles.

I want you to know that if you ever took the words I say
With a grain of salt they would
Taste sweeter than they did
As they came out they tasted like
Vomit after fellatio.

lipogram submission, '09

A lipogram (from Greek lipagrammatos, "missing letter") is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is omitted, usually a common vowel, the most common in English being e. A lipogram author avoiding e then only uses the 25 remaining letters of the alphabet.
(source: wikipedia entry "lipogram")

2009 Submission
The tethers of theology

I want you to know I found that kindling folio
of postnatal thoughts you cast off,
that book with markings in margins and jottings on
our vicars and parsons and cardinals.
I’m not apt to blind faith in man or God but
pious saliva won your most doubting Thomas; now stooping,
having paid your customary cost, match hanging midair,
I pray you first confirm that a sinuous wick,
(so muscular and thirsty, awaiting a tiny spark—for roaring ignition)
is not in fact winding its way tightly around your own gluttonous waist.



Lipogram '08
*first prize winner of 2008 Montreal Blue Metropolis Foundation Lipogram Competition
Nocturnal vigil

And a crash and a smash and a big bad boom!
In four parts a man is born: of fibs and spirits,
Of vacant days brimming with dusty sky, of bold gut,
Of illicit thoughts. Vim and vigour: tools of a rival in this
Instant, and stop! With a gun in tow, you wait with
All that's sworn to you, through will and birthright,
Lying low for a familiar burglar who'll approach
Surfing a conduit of sin, lust, and viral cicadas
To pinch it all away in this hungry cosmos of night.

driven

When we knew him at the dinner table we could not imagine
all the work he did with his hands between LA and Chicago.

He spoke pink-tongued of your sister, leaving her nameless.
Tomorrow the leftovers will be ground into patties
Left to mold inside the refrigerator, fester.

(In his shoes men kissed the earth.)

He should like to stand on the vapid
landfills of emotion whispering
incantations to God.

When we met him in the graveyard,
we in our sun-dappled skulls danced;
he spoke but said nothing.

In December clouds, misers reminisce.

Prelude--Intentions

This is a blog I've started to begin a very difficult process for me: letting go of my creative work. I have a very strong tendency to keep it buried, to hide it... so I am trusting you.

I hope to be posting pieces in verse throughout the rest of the year and mainly in the summer when I get more time off.

Thank you and I hope you enjoy the read.