BUSY BODY

So
very
disorienting, at first

to traipse-
out anonymous in the city's
oppressive din—

but gradually,
it gets easier
to perceive there—and even

to make a
little spare

sense of
this bizarre tingling
thing, this

slithering
feeling you get,

of—
hearing so
much! and yet, nobody

talking. Of—
deep and ancient
currents, of the arcane

filaments
of a somehow
sentient Monday

morning,
which just
sort of

brainlessly but
reverently stretch,

now threading
out and among
and between the bald

trees from
street to neighborhood
street—flexing to contain (and this

is the really
sticky part): not just you

and your story,
but the
whole situation—

in an invisible
and an in-
divisible slush

that's getting slowly meshed
and strained togther
in the same coagulating net.

And then—after that,
coalesces the milky
thought

that sometimes—loud silences
such as these

are described
as being "profound."

But a lot more
often than that, they're
mostly only sturdy,

that is—thick
with the
tart cool

of their own
simple dumbness.

EATING ALONE

You think—something funny 

must be going
on, and I no

longer want

to kiss you.

But seriously, I'm

just looking
for excuses—
to do fewer dishes.

TIME LAPSE

Actually—not so very
long after

row row rowing—
our boats all
the way

across the wide
titanic

sea—in search of some
freedom,

what we
found was—ourselves.

Marooned
in the same huge
line, in front
of some very sleek futuristic

stainless check-
out counter,

and all staring—duly hard
at the magazine
and news-
paper

racks while
we waited. And reading, to kill
the time—again

and again
and again, all of their tall
fantastic

headlines, in the vain
hope that,

on one
of those passes—something
about one

of them
would start
to look

different to us,
even if it
still

sounded exactly—
the same.

DEFERRED

Dear William 

Carlos Williams,
you were 

wrong—not about 

much, but about early 

spring 

and all

that reddish 

purplish twiggy stuff—for 

sure-

ly,

there's no 

such stark dignity—

there is only 

someone 

like me

arriving here, 

probably a little too early, and 

yet,

so 

so so 

so so so very 

lonely late—to see

these old

strands of icicle Christmas 

lights, still clinging 

pathetically 

to so many wrought- 

iron neighborhood 

fences, long 

since turned- 

off and unplugged, forgotten,

and just left 

here, dripping wet

with slow 

thaw and suspended—as if found

guilty and hung,

for the sheer shameful 

spectacle of the 

scene—as the March sun 

approaches,

and the tipsy 

birds—begin hollering.

A SHOW ABOUT NOTHING

Huge and oblong, city
blocks built of fog and filthy

cold vapor—stretch- 

out before your body's 

tottering gait,

confounding the repeated 

attempts 

its stubborn feet keep 

making, to get 

its hands in 

possession of pen 

and paper,

or to stick

its dumb face 

in front of a screen somewhere.

But when at

last, its legs succeed 

in the latter 

endeavor, some terrible 

passion—gathering, so much

like the blurry 

weather, behind its wet 

eyes—can sense 

the keys 

of a frail home 

computer 

craving to shrink 

away and recede, under-

neath 

each obscure and dangling 

finger, the nearer and 

nearer it comes—

to putting 

pressure upon

those little black 

squares which might

be most representative—

of what the 

truth 

of its  

own, personal

experience out there—really was.

THE STEAM COMING UP OFF THE TOP OF YOUR COFFEE CUP

It was probably
the sky

the made the mountains stick,

and it was
probably the mountains

that made some clouds gather,

and it was
probably some clouds that
called in that rain

fall,
and it was probably
that rainfall

that made a little sun seem

like a good
thing

to step outside under
after,

just spitting
and smoking
and thinking

up things—
and whatever.

NOT ANOTHER CLOUDS POEM—

I'm not
a weatherman—
you're not

supposed to 

believe me—

I just 

really
want you

to imagine—what it 

might mean
when I

tell you—tomorrow
looks

sunnier—

than today.

DON'T KNOW MUCH BIOLOGY

Not until some
twenty
or

thirty minutes
after the car
drove

away—walking, by-
proxy,
Lucy, in the

slowly dissolving cool
of mid-
morning sunlight,

did my upper
right side―first begin
to goosepimple

and tingle a little,
to feel—not
on my

skin, but bubbling
shyly
up

from somewhere secret
and microscopic
deep inside it—
the weird,

quickening difference
between
the fact

of dumb love—
and the

very well-
formed and
allowable phonological
fictions which surround it—I mean,

between—
a purposive I

Love You (tightly
understood,
loosely

solicited) and an ape-ish
little one-
off rub

of a
tense upper
arm—

which definitely
wasn't.

PRAISE THE DAWNING

Sunrise magenta sky-

pink Solo 

cups—lending a

distinctly
feminine touch
to—the hairy bulk

of crumpled 

up papers and 

blunt Cigarillo 

chunks, stuffed—like some

desiccated cough-

yellow 

leaves half-

inside a few travel-

size

bags of Doritos—which scrape

as they 

tug—along Milwaukee

Avenue's 

acquiescent

gutters this morning.

BROAD SIDE

It's not

complicated—
a barn

needs a roof
so

its 

cow doesn't—

get cold.

NOW AND AT THE HOUR

First—you must
forgive!

your-
self for
writing this

one.
Last—you've got
to accept

and
get
past

the fact that you
didn't—

sooner.

SUPERPOWER

Literally anything

he didn't
like, he could—

with no
more than the

slightest

flick of a
muscle—turn

into its own
reflection—

in water.

DISCO

Blown back 

towards home pre-

mature and sniffling, by huge 

blue sheets 

of wind, starchy

and stiff with square 

blocks of city

silt, and just 

when I'm thinking—hell,

everything in front of me
seems dead 

or mostly

on its 

last legs, anyway;

there—across 

that last street, 

and fatally 

flagrant inside

the lurid 

swaying box of black

which can

barely contain it—suddenly flashes 

and bleats

the wild throbbing  

beat, of a huge 

orange open-

fist, beckoning—

hurry 

quick, hurry 

up, step

on it,

kid, look—the 

thing is, you're right: death

is coming. 

But

life is—

not 

waiting

for that.

PRACTICALLY

Last night—the porcelain-
blue moon,
though still

only half-
full,
could have almost

certainly—swelled to burst
and shed
its translucent

corona—in soft
shards, to shower
and feed the teeming covetous

young colonies of night-
snow marooned
on the bony sidewalks below, only:

I—too proud and too cool,
would not let
it do that.

For volume is a trick—I whispered,
before I knew
I was

even thinking it. The true way
to measure
a thing

is by
weight. (And I knew
this was true—and the unsatisfied

satellite
knew it
too.) So i

sighed, as I
turned and shuffled
back inside—ashamed.

FOUNDATIONS

Bright slender expeditious

Poet of the Big

City—it's said 

that you held in your 

(just as) auspicious non-

dominant hand—

the keys to the 

Kingdom of Heaven;

that you—by virtue

of your decades-long independent 

study, your reclusive and muddy 

digging for something secret

and amazing 

in the flotsam fishy 

banks along the ruddy clay 

lake shore—that you alone 

became the one 

true Lord and Savior, protector 

of what was true 

and—more important, what was 

Literary. And eventually, that 

only you could

possess this vast fortune. But how 

generously you flung

the riches back out!

In tremendous spangles, which tended

to dance from

the edges of your fingers

and wriggle directly 

into to the hearts 

and bulimic minds of

millions—as naturally 

as reflections 

of private lights from Gold 

Coast high- 

rise condominiums danced 

(and still 

dance each night) in grand 

ripples across the inscrutable 

face of inky Lake 

Michigan night-water.

But—here

on this white page;

here, where I still come 

to meet you every

afternoon, and practice 

and prove in secret; 

here we both 

know—all you really did

was play 

at pushing around the very same 

currency we all use, albeit

in greater 

denominations,

to tell some folks—
all
flowers smell nice,
all
buildings shall burn, 

and 

etc. etc. etc. And today,

the real beatific reason 

your letters still tend 

to land and stick

and burst to blaze-

up the tawny

pages in their minds—the way 

catapulted waves

of titanium 

sunlight lap and ping the sheer cliffs 

of downtown stainless 

steel and glass—is 

actually because 

you didn't know (and never 

even claimed to)

who 

the hell God was. 

But you were always

pretty passionately damned
sure—he wasn't

you.

SPARRING

The sun—in its deathly serious

mood, rises 

still

more slowly—

a whitecrimson maw,

now chewing 

the ice-

blue 

skin from the 

sky as it wanders, keeping 

even lower—

to those lank

and snow-

limp ranks 

of old treetops

below—where

three rawboned finches 

dart and argue, 

ravenous—over 

this one 

particular 

cracked and hollow—

hull 

of yesterday's 

bread.

SQUARE ONE

I always know—that the big careful 

things which I build

all day, I tend no longer 

to care about protecting, when the hard

wrecking ball of 

evening comes. But each of the ruinous 

things that I manage 

to conjure every night to bomb 

and incinerate and

obliterate the structures, I also know 

will themselves collapse 

into odd piles of rubble 

again—to be cooled and 

washed clean 

away, by the blue ebbing 

tide—of every perfectly

clear tomorrow 

morning. And invariably, there'll be

no purpose or justice

or function, in any of the 

messes I'm left 

with, but there will be plenty

of the coziest, most

spacious and marketable 

roomfulls of mercy available—not

in surveying the extent

to which those things I've built

still exist, or 

don't 

any longer. But rather,

in negotiating—how?

BINGE WATCH

Attention—
gravity's

waves

have
just been detected—only,

fuck, you
still can't—

get them

on
Netflix.

BABEL

Another clamorous moiling 

Blue Line train—grungy, 

dead watersnake 

silver—nosedives 

south-

east bound 

underground at the Paulina 

Street cross-alley, while
red apple-cheeked

boy

after boy, high 

up on dad's lumpy 

shoulders—goes on

on gaping and 

chortling down through 

the greasy province 

of old chain link 

fencing; since, 

to him,

all work 

is nothing

short of silly, 

but all 

power is—unequivocally 

fascinating.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

Bang.

I'm a noise.

A gun full

of blanks.

No, 

I'm a name.

A licking flame;

a little dancing belief 

in some—finite existence.

Now, 

a performance. 

Some bloated, disordered,

and complicated system; A full-on 

rhetorical fireworks display—going off with no explanation.

Then, it's 

not so much—what 

do I do next? but, how can I refuse?

And lastly, 

not so much—what have I become? 

as, how was I used? and how often? and, most important, by whom?

I'M FINE WITH THIS

These days, my mind for
you, is
less some filthy

zoo, than it is—a suite
of comfortably cluttered rooms

that I've simply
owned for far
too long

to ever
contemplate redesigning;

and where you
and I casually
recline and talk

of lots of
ordinary things together—

which we usually
do for an hour
or two daily,

with extended visiting
opportunities on weekends.

But isn't it stimulating? how
every increasingly
intimate detail

which I can
recall about you
now—still

presupposes the way
you look

in
my mind—when you're

sprawled-
out on its furniture.

FAT TUESDAY

I guess I just—don't really
want to grow up,

the boy with the beard
confessed—to the mirror;

right before commencing—
to coax his old Remington

slowly over—each familiar range
and delicate fold of his testicles.

SNOWBALL

Winter in Chicago—goes

loosing its

impalpable fortunes

of useless 

but utterly

limitless surplus—everywhere you go,

thwarting your attempts

to notice

and compose:

So much fine snow.

So many vulgar birds.

And then, you

start to suppose:

this is

just how life is, though—irrelevance;

mountains 

and mountains

of it,

some of it 

quite beautiful, and some of it—

you flush to admit—

some of it

simply

not quite as visual.

And most of all, just 

so much 

of it to find, that you're 

content—to take a little

and leave 

the rest behind.

MODERNIST RECAP

A filmmaker by temperament
more than by trade,

even as a kid—our Hero 

always feels that he knows

a whole lot more about the world

than he can ever—dare to remember.

To counteract 

this epic 

tragedy, as he grows

and becomes more confident 

in the inherent beauty, truth, 

solidity of objects, and so on,

gradually fine-tuning

all his grand 

theories of aesthetics to follow suit,

the guy decides—at last, to always view life

as through
a movie camera.

That is—indiscriminately recording 

anything and everything 

that should happen into his field of vision

and considering each 

an equal and individual-

ly important part of his colossal worldview;

of course, as a result—he never once considers

(not even for a split 

second)

in his valiant and thereafter 

life-long commitment

to this pretty herculean attempt at indiscretion,

any

one single

tiny little infinitesimal speck of a thing!

which is, out of sheer necessity, 

being—so epically 

excluded.

ED

Illumined by the scrawny light clinging 

to the ceiling of

the hulking white 

GE refrigerator, 

his midnight eyes flashed and saw—backwards

for the very first time:

and how bedraggled,

how cold,

pale and pitiful!

the little motherfucker 

hidden away in there,

now looked to him from the outside:

it was just—so tempered

by unctuous dread, so oily with anxiety 

that there really was no purpose;

that the sight suddenly made him—so ravenously hungry, 

that there once again 

was.

THE MAN UPSTAIRS

Who makes the rules?
Before you
answer—

fashion yourself
a little vessel
out of words,

conjure
a bit
of black coffee up,

pour the stuff
with some
authority in there, and

just you
watch what
happens. Now who?

tells you—
things you
shouldn't do.

11:59:59

What a tumultuous million
invisible and peculiar melodies
must be simultaneously hitting
their sourest notes—at the very instant

the wan morning air—such a moist
cold
and vast slow gray,

so wide-
open
and unclaimed,

but which kindly comprises
in that boundlessness,
a home

to those little magic kisses, those flighty birds
of mere possibilities,
evacuating calm and mildly
through your wettish nose and lips—

suddenly,
and inexorably—
condenses

into tame and shrewd gunmetal
curtain of air
which calls itself—the afternoon;

and which offers no shelter anywhere
in its dark hard folds
to those silly prospects
and winged potentialities,

but only scrapes hard
at the earth near your shoes,
hollow, desiccated, and brooding—

how much stuff
do you
still have to do?

THANK THE PHOENICIANS

I.

In the beginning was the word. And
the word was with god. And
the word was god.

Remember how easy it was?
to learn—your
ABC's?

Remember
how much harder? the Roman
numerals were?


II.

Opera becomes
the preferred form of entertainment
for a while.

Words become
husbands in need of
more and more—supportive and

immaculately-
decorated wives.

III.

Quick, quick!—
There's nowhere on earth
left to sail! Leave the forest,

but damn its trees!
Everything in sight—
must now be paved

straight-away.
Say, how many "Sycamore
Streets?" do you think

they'll be able
to keep straight?
Answer me, councilman. I'm serious.


IV.

If John F. Kennedy's car could communicate
with the others on the highway,
it'd say—

if we all just agreed!
to move forward
at the same time,
at the same rate,

we'd all get home sooner,
and everything would be safer!

It is not our disordered and terrible bulk,
but rather—our lack of trust
slowing everything up!

Forget about what time it is, for once.
And have a little faith—
in space.


V.

Dateline 1965—
Dylan goes electric.
Elvis has already been there.
But no one liked his gospel songs better.
Except for my mother.
So it didn't matter.


VI.

Cash-only Restaurants
could at least

have one of those goddamn
cardthings inside them—he snorted, gobbling the red hots,

confident
that she had understood him
perfectly.


VII.

Honey, get off the toilet, already!
I'm trying to use the shower.


VIII.

The channel 2 news
isn't really so bad
when you think about it:

It's all—What happened
someplace else
to other people. And then,

your tremendous sense of relief—
that neither were you
responsible for it,

nor are you presently
being called upon
to do anything.


IX.

Honey, get off the computer, already!
I'm trying to use the phone.


X.

Eventually, all of their ships
were blown back
to where they started from.

And there came to be
invented—the most fabulous
napkin dispensers

which could—legitimately
double
as picture-menus.

I GET THE NEWS I NEED ON THE WEATHER REPORT

Life is so short—
and death

is so sure,
that I

suddenly cannot take another step.
In my

huge cement boots—
which I always seem to wear now,

regardless of whether
there's snow on the ground

in twenty first
century Chicago or not—

for fear of the echo
of my next tremendous footfall

sending ripples—though all
of cruel time and violent space,

in every wasted direction at once.
Somebody

help. Quick,
I feel so

petrified.
I feel so heavy. And small. Please,

I cannot move at all.
Not at all. Or I'm liable to fall.

And I know
this sounds crazy, but I'm one

hundred percent certain,
if I slip—

that Rome—
will fall.