THE MESSAGE IS THE MEDIUM

Behold the perenially prodigious artist

and his

unassailable

arsenal of marvelous masterpieces—

uncountable 

catalogs 

of masterfully 

casual 

agreements—to always remain

in the business 

of making 

these

teency little

individually insignificant 

changes—

to his

workaday one and 

only canvas.

ARS POETICA

All the distracted
ladies on Bluetooth
while jogging unruly

dogs down these
streets, each
blithe kid biking

past you while hurling some
buoyant profanity,
every last hollow-

cheeked old man
yowling something
about Sports on each cozy

neighborhood bar's
crazy multiplicity
of flatscreens—for years they all

seem to mean
practically
nothing to you. Until the

great day when,
upon find yourself
tired of trying

to deliver
such respectful and
meticulous translations,

you first hit upon
the beautiful gimmick—
of heedlessly cramming

every word they say, wholesale
into your own
preexisting melody.

TACIT

In the soft-pedal
piano of early morning
fog, just after

your car
pulled off, I saw
for a second—I could perceive

the gradually growing
space

between us
without the need to
understand it.

Like some
newborn child

whose presence is
his art,

I just stood
where I was, bereft

but content
to be a wordless

poem for you—
composed
of the same intertwined

billions of bands
of vibrating light
and matter as you were.

But soon
the tremulous idea
broke—it was dull

but loud as the throat-
clearing thunder—

and it dissipated that spell
in a flash,

and all the old
words and cold
symbols began raining,

until I was thoroughly
soaked

with the same
gray and dismal sentence,
which read—

I'll never be able to
show you anything

you haven't seen for your-
self already. 

LIGHTEN UP

This is a sunny autumn poem
in which

some dusty-ish
finches are happily thrashing

and chirping away
in curbsides

of old
gutterwater.

How many? What color?
I no longer

feel compelled to remember.
For no images

presented here
are facts; they're merely

encouraging interpretations.

Whatever

they conjure, these words
aren't the truth;

they're just it's swift little
messengers.

And I—I am just
a word too,

however useful
and inspiring to you—as some

swift little vagabond
birds were.

COMPACT

If everything is made of starlight,
what makes certain
things so heavy?

If everything we
know is starlight, how could
there be so many

words to learn? Speaking
of which—if everything we
do is starlight, how come

there's bad guys, and sometimes
even good ones, who fail
to state their cases right?

And further—if everything
we say is starlight,
who's to say we're still

the people we claimed (and they
assumed) we were
before we went to

bed last night? Then again—
if everything we imagine
is starlight,

nothing wrong—since
everything's alright. Do you not
agree?

IMAGINARY

The older I get, the more I find 

our arguments 

are far less

controversial 

than our actions are. So,

Slowly—surely 

I've been working 

more concretely 

on my invincibility—

by watching slideshows 

where pictures of me 

dawn and dissolve 

in grateful 

time to

mechanical funeral 

home music—

and by lying (supine)

down each day 

in one additional translucent 

grain at a time

of warm wet sand—

for just one 

grim and ponderously fictional

milli-

second longer.

INTUITIVE EATING

Haulting to stare down into
another yellowish
one-third full
bowl of hasty food—

you'll grudgingly consider,
per instructions—
I'm probably not 
appreciating this stuff enough; 

until that slow fury of routine
hunger—which never fails to
rise up and flare hot again
into each dissatisfied cheek,

immolating any trace of this higher desire
before such an exemplary
sentence can even be completed—

reliably bullies you
instead into exonerating
the conciliatory impulse—to finish

something
by completely
destroying it.

DEATH SENTENCE

Let this abject failure to imagine
my last words
serve as proof

of that which they
should have been—
remember to let

your kids
have pets

and hang
posters—and those

frivolous
glow in the dark

stars in their
bedrooms.

EKPHRASTIC HAIKU WITH QUIT-SMOKING-AID FOR MAGRITTE AFTER BATMAN

This is not a pipe

you could use—but it is the

one you need right now.

COMPETING STRING THEORIES

1.

Performing any
disciplined action

for any
amount of time (note—waking

up in the morning
doesn't count

unless you're doing it—to
spite the alternative)

has been shown to
strengthen the self-

control muscles,
mostly

by sapping
the ego.


2.

Sitting and thinking—perhaps
time doesn't pass

if nobody 
measures it—still doesn't

give you
what you actually want,

still won't make it run
backwards.

In order to do that,
you have to

impoverish
chaos; you have

to wash
dishes.


4.

As years pass, the strings
pull taut

but get
longer in the process.

Things get
streamlined, yet

simultaneously
more complicated. For

instance,
now, the old saying

actually goes
more like—

Damned
if you do.

Damned if
you don't.

Or
if some

cop—
or the

doctor—
says so.


5.

Man is
garbage. His

ideas
are the recycling bin.

What is
Justice? But the crusty old

ruins of
Revenge—with just enough

of the
blood power-washed off.

DAWN OF MAN

Stranger stumbling around downtown

somewhere, I see your glum reflection

just before it peers up at that glass tower,

wondering, incredibly—how can I best

fit my spirit to that structure? 

And then I catch it again afterwards, 

extending skyward—and somehow growing

just a little straighter, before sauntering

off in some subtle but unmistakable 

new sympathy for—sheer geometry.

LUNATIC MODE

For years now, I've been 

trying like 

hell to figure out

why my lips and the 

tips of my fingers and 

toes—are always 

going numb and tingling

with cold.

Turns out, I've been frozen 

for years now in the same lunatic mode

of trying to make
my whole day into a poem;

rich with its evocoative mix
of sensual rituals,
featuring loads of repetition and

paying too much attention,

each step heralding some auspicious 

new place.

In each hand,

a uniquely

unbearable perspective grasped. And

every last 

breath, a wild incantation. But goddamn—

how perfect-

ly pitifully translated 

here 

at the 

end of every evening, into mere 

words 

at my own overwhelmingly dull— 

and yet still unspeakable—

peril.

STATUTORY

When the going is tough, and I lack
a potent narrative;

I'm quick to imagine I'm really
Superman

and Lois
Lane's only secret

out of
wedlock kid—the incidental-

yet-perfect genetic mix
between

an unstoppable man—and his
victim.

ALL-BUSINESS

We are latterly what
you could
call partners, administering favors
from the same

bed, but always carefully
operating
separate computers.

In a fairly equitable 

division 

of labor—you give me 

all your money,

and I fold it 

back into perfect paper 

cranes for you.

You add the gas bill 

to the cable 

subtracting the electrical, before taking

the fastest available

expressways out of town—

while I focus 

on the grunt work 

of napping 

so diligently each afternoon, 

as fail-safe way 

of continually reaffirming

that, deep down, you 

have your own

agonies—those certain

bracing and non-

transferable hurts, which

I should never 

even dare dream 

of being able 

to do anything remotely

capable—to heal.

INVOLUNTARY

High up specks of little

birds' wings'

reflexive beating

softly, efficiently 

trips some ancient 

circuit in me, 

repeating—like it or not, 

some invisible 

force is

always working;

an invincible 

nurse—who may 

not care, but whose duty 

it is nonetheless,

to wipe all our 

tears whenever we 

fall—if not 

our sorry 

incontinent

assholes later on.

PLAY IT OFF

Morning, to-go
cups full

of brown, 

beige or virgin-white 

coffee clutched 

tight like new (and right

where those

old) stuffed 

animals (used to go)—passive-aggressively 

awake now, 

although 

that's what 

we're going for.

*

Quitting time, dying like 

hell to cash-

out, to grab hold of what-

ever coins we can and 

explode like heretical 

scrolls full 

of incendiary common-sense 

knowledge from some blustery

infernal old monastery—still compulsively

smoking a little, but making it look

as if 

that's 

what we're going for.

*

At night, feels like even to sleep 

is to chance 

cheating, to risk being called-

out by Tomorrow

for attempting 

to sweep-in last
minute for the fast and 

cheap lottery 

ticket dream—so completely and so utterly
broke, although to be

fair—that's

what we're 

going for.

POEM 2

Grim lines 

form some 

gaunt parade—

a slim
but determined

celebration

in public—
of having

had this

sparsely
attended 

thought today.

CHOSEN

Get up 

and wipe 

your bloody 

nose upon

the following

all-absorbing 

truth—

you were

literally

born to be 

proof—

such luck 

was always

incredibly 

risky.

ABSTRACTION

This whole poem is just
a dumb little

song
for all the long shadows

gradually colonizing city
street corners;

whether dilations
of mirth

or gloom, of exuberant
sky-

scrapers or contentious
nursing homes,

of empty luxury hi-
rises, or

garbage-
crammed and abandoned

mail boxes—it doesn't
matter, so

long as
today and ever

after,
they continue

to afford us
that unconscious-

but very
conspicuous space

in which—not
to think

but simply
reiterate

all of our prior
versions of things,

to bravely, if even
for a

minute,
barely contemplate

the sheer
density

and
the thickness

of every saved
draft waiting

weightless—back
at home.

KILL YOUR IDYLLS

     I love not Man the less, but Nature more. 

     -Lord Byron


This mute potted

plant, that 

handsome

flat rock—help to keep

living here

from feeling

oppressive. 

But—a city,

an entire 

army

of each?

Well, we'll

see—

FAUSTIAN BARGAIN

It seems now, however rare
and however useful,
that certain words cost

a lot more than you
ever imagined. 

And to be sure: a good very many 

you received in
exchange were extremely
beautiful—luscious as pure 

cream, juicy as heavy
redolent fruit, and cut

precise as rare
gems, and inlaid in intricate,
particular patterns;

but precious
as they were, fatiguing to find
and even more formidable

to use (so secretly, 

so palpably inopportune—

that even post-hoc impressions 

of the ulterior labor of their 

assembly seemed
tacitly to serve
as appreciable features)

can you still say 

that it was worth it—when
not one, let alone 

the garlanded strands of hundreds
you've been hawking

alone out here
for years now, has ever 

earned you one red
cent, or turned a single 

head—blond
again?

NEXT THING YOU KNOW

If every moment's

such

a precious 

possession, 

then—

how the fuck do they

always manage

to change-
up all the

billboards—

when you're not 

paying attention?

*

Your desiccated liver pills
expired last month.

In another hundred 

years, your bones'll be chalk.

The prospect of protective containers is starting
to look like a marketing gimmick.

But if life is not a gift, then it must
be just—a bargain.

GUMBALL MACHINE

You can't help but
always eye-up

all the most
preposterous words,

juicy and
jumbled

in sensational
colors

expressing
exotic-

yet-
familiar flavors,

piled to full-
on bursting

in that lustrous
transparent

globe
over

there near the
exit door.

*

So as
usual,

you—quickly

procure yourself
a couple,

and each

dribbles
down

out of

order,
and they're

hard

and too
sweet

in your

mouth,
and the

whole plan

was
dumb.