STRIKE ANYWHERE

For a while there
it seems like
anything goes, but then

you learn it's because—
the past
is a matchbox,

is a glorious
hot little head-full
of zillions

of identical
perfect hair-triggers—
and the future

is pure sandpaper,
is grainy
brick mortar,

is your greasy itchy
shaking serious
perfect reverent

nicotine fingers
tingling below your
sulfur-tinged nostrils;

and every time
one single thing
happens—lookit

how quick
and hot
and lusciously

two others—
just get
annihilated.

ORIGINAL SCORE

In the quick thaw—
so many

incipient little brooks
and gullies

babble
independently—

their dirty
prosaic

motifs
and non sequiturs

all layering
together

to weave
the impossible

unified
roar

of this
ancient,

this distant—but
madly

believed-in
ocean.

NEEDLES IN THE CAMEL'S EYE

A little siren sleighbell shrieking
outside the Jewel-Osco,
binds together all hypnotized
wayfarers passing,

by parting one and all
from a little pocket money
with the following
incessant incantation:

Even in your most perfect
earthly dream, passing stranger,
your picture of recompense
might rig the whole game,

such that—by the time
you finally stagger
sunburned and blistered,
hardened but tenderized,

and with terrible headaches
in each of your heels
into your private-beach-
notion of heaven,

your homecoming'll be dread-
fully anticlimactic.
No one to talk to
about any of this;

none to compare,
contrast,
to rejoice
with, concerning

the everlasting-
ness of your bliss—since
of course,
the whole place

is literally
all yours—is
completely
deserted.

SOLSTICE

On a dark winter's day,

a sudden mysterious

breeze'll go 

wheezing through blue bristles

of spruce branches,
and in a snap

you think how—those trees 

back in Eden 

must have sounded 

exactly like these—explicit,
equally 

misunderstood,

underutilized,

never listened-to,

and so on. 

Only, in Adam 

and Eve's defense, you figure—
they had a good excuse.

Since that mighty 

wind rending those bleak, 

original branches 

likely didn't 

scare out such perfect
English as these do—

probably more like
some of that ugly Church
Latin, or something.

EXAMINATION

A white head glowing on the other side
of a heavy wide
desk
from me (I feel

like there
ought to be
a Newton's Cradle
clacking as it goes on)

talking,
pausing severely
to hear,
then instructing
the same fingers,

which have mapped
and confidently
criticized thousands of pasty
quivering bodies
before mine,

to type away capriciously
on an antique computer
next to the typewriter.

Gradually, I fearfully gather
I'm being hunted
out here
in the gap:

Is that you?
or me? The voice asks
incongruously
at the second sounding
of a ring tone,

before those giant hands envelop,
unclasp
and then quickly
and loudly
snap shut a shiny flip-phone—

GATES OF EDEN

Scene One—
in the near permanently
beige light

which hovers
around the rectory
at year's end,

a man is sitting
in glum hard soles
at the kitchen table,

hooked like a sliver
over coffee
cups and notebooks—

fretting over
the sermon's climax,

worried
about his credibility,

mumbling to himself
that it's absolute heresy

how
Bringing It All Back Home 
is probably his favorite

album of Dylan's—
but almost entirely
because of the acoustic side.

NO TIME FOR A NOVEL

Felt like every day, for a while

we relied on

cheap, plentiful wooden reminders:

one plus one is equal to two,

fair and foul 

can cancel each other.

But when the hard times hit, 

the orders we got 

were to ration the abstract and

restrict the rational.

Belts grew tighter, skins thinner

ashy and redder 

in the cold, and all the poor devils' 

kids had to use

dry bony sticks 

to do their simple math with instead.

Only problem was: 

stick-plus-stick wasn't always 

two sticks; once or twice, it
was fire.

SINGLE DIGITS

I feel, in this freezing
wind, my oneness—
drawn and haphazardly
pushed around,

scribbled, spit,
scratch-tallied, and
X-ed out—as if this
ponderous, senile planet

is struggling
to teach a piss-ant sky
how to do basic
math with me. And he

(the smarmy idiot)
keeps making
a blustery show
of his trying—but really

doesn't understand—nor does he
see, if the whole world gets it
already, why he should also
have to be bothered.

SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT

At first, there's these
four pretty
poor and unpopular
schoolboys—

formerly sick
with measles
and colic, they stutter
and stammer a lot.

Uncoordinated skippers,
petrified out-loud readers,
domestic animal killers, closeted
floral painting-lovers—

each taking turns of equal duration
hating and resenting and resisting
just how similar he is
to the others.

*

After a few repetitions, they're now
four anxious and fiercely
nationalistic countries—
all running with equal swiftness

toward the mountain of glory
and its crater of oblivion—
but all four
packing so incredibly

close to its precarious rim
as to prevent any
of the others
from daring to jump in, shouting:

Germany! Italy!
Russia! Japan!
Germany! Italy!
Russia! Japan!

and so on,
systematically, but with
no endgame planned.
Until—that first weary note

of dissatisfaction kicks in,
puts a pretty
constipated-looking
human face on everything.

Then suddenly,
it's more like:
Hello, hello, hello, hello—
everyone's cool

just letting it play-out,
even going so far as
to label the whole
scene—a denial.

BACKSPACE ODE

At last—
can you imagine
how anything
halfway decently enduring
ever got written

before this
latest, au courant, up-to-
the-minute
master creator
was given

his benevolent druthers, his
capricious dominion—
to whoosh back
and obliterate all offenders
to the missive

with quick
cataclysmic bolts
of sterilizing lightning
waggled from the
merest tip of his

fat itchy
pink and bald trigger pinky—

two, three—wait,
half

a dozen times now, at
least?

MINISTRY OF WINTER

At the mercy of such pristine majesty,
everything manmade simplifies,
like some haphazard fraction.

No terrific, mottled Appaloosas—only the innocent
infinity of their barnyards
everywhere; simultaneous lengths of all

time and roads compacted,
creaking, and anonymously on display.
Even at the bracing

smokewhite of daybreak,
all seems equally
dazzling and incidental,

slowed to a dead pause on the brink
of immeasurable sleep. But in this breach,
what unsought but remarkable

freedom exists: every tightfisted
and usual path
having just been—humanely erased.

FOREST

Once, I felt these shallow aspirations
dislocating my body

from tomorrow, breathed deep and
supposed I needed to

get somewhere new.
But instead of changing my address,

my tack was—to continue
to stay in the exact same place,

not moving, rarely talking
(and only then in a kind of raspy whisper),

never sitting, but always
standing-up in front

of a desk all day
with my arms held out.

And sure enough,
after a while, everything I could see

out my window on the street
began to look complete-

ly wrong to me—except, I guess,
for the trees.

PSST

The poem you want
is over there—
off to your right. It's
the way
the coffee sits
so still
in your cup,
so calm
on the roiled table,
so black and
so warm-
looking
next to the white high-gloss
cover of this
wretched little book.
Doesn't it? Um,
I mean—
isn't it?

THE SOLUTION

Some say—
the best defense
is to make ourselves
used to this,

with words as old
and gentle
as rain—

softly spoken,
and spoken regularly, to soak
and dilute the potency
of their poetry.

For example—
How catastrophic could
a symbol be?
those increasingly

less-frightened
people go
mumbling, almost inaudibly.

Others know—
the best offense
is probably
not to talk at all,

instead letting
giant billboard signs
do all the proclaiming.

I Just Want To Be Ordinary,
the boldest of those
signs might read,

meaning—

not perceived
as part

of the problem.

WHAT'S THE FUTURE GOT TO DO WITH ME?

Walking around
any big bomb-
gray city
is

a great way
to re-
assure oneself—that

at least
God's creation

is both

way
too
lumbering-huge

and
far too
unsure of itself

to ever really be changed all that quickly.

Still,
considering such

a gross
timescale,

one then
imagines

He—
would have
vastly preferred

dealing with
trees—
to all these

unstable motherfucking

megatons

of people.

IT'S YOU

Fight it, if you like.
It's still going to happen.

It's not
that it's meaningless. Meaningless—

you could do
easily. Unfortunately,

it's you—
staring down another faultless

surface every morning,
watching it

defy you, with that indomitable
prestige, called

The Way Things Are,
to improve somehow upon

its chaste perfection
with your prejudiced

and hypothetical burdens,
to somehow

trade places
with an uninjured rectangle.

It's you—
you

verses art.
But—just the thought of that

and it's like you've
already set to the task.

No greater pressure.
How can you lose?

Perhaps only ever
by endeavoring not to.

OLD MOON IN THE NEW MOON'S ARMS

Whenever you see
me—bumbling
down the street, I

assure you,
I'm only about half as
distracted

as I look.
It's actually just almost
exactly the

opposite.
It's just that—most
evenings, I

already feel myself—such
a concentrated
poor husk of bulk,

a prematurely
frightened and terrible
old widower;

all those blithe ideas
from before
I knew her—now ringing

as ponder-
ously many, as difficult
to imagine

hurling into motion, and alas
as equally
cold, dull, and relentless

as every last
bell that has tolled
since after.

SPHINX RIDDLE DO-OVER

I walk for miles in darkness, but down
familiar roads, disappearing often

not into space, but curious silence.
There are no red letter dates, nor any peculiar

atrocities there—just many, many
coincidences, reams of exemplary scenes

from one epic master-movie, created
a long time ago by those huge faceless proto-

human shades—and then cut-copy-pasted
over generations and reduced, so ruthless and hard

as to to fit on a white three-by-five index card
which I carry creased neatly inside an otherwise

empty wallet. Presently, I'll unfold it and
reanimate the words one-by-one, each as

perfect as your growing discontent is. I'll watch
as you hear them gradually disappearing,

and those snippets which you couldn't seem to
make-out or understand will be my grim masochistic

pleasure never to forget. One last hint—I am
pretty famous as a pretender. My stage-name is:

let me think about it for a
minute and get back to you.

BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS

By early afternoon,
late evening
invades downtown—

hungrily
spinning dollops
of unseasonable light

into long, candied filaments,
which flicker their
semaphore lectures

across the grim, dis-
concerted faces
which improvise this cab stand—

just like
so many twenty-
five cent candles did

back
in that dingy
crimson church vestibule,

back when
poor grandma, and then
grandpa, quickly departed—

as if
our precious dead

are here
with us still, ever so

faintly,
but insistently

criticizing the living.