It never completely dries ─ the indelible, infinitesimal ink stains bonding
sweat and bacteria, perfume, cocaine, green webs and autographs, eyes and
pyramids to the palms of our hands….

Once looking out a subway window, I saw a man fumble his gorged wallet
and lose to a gust of wind a flurry of bills. The recovery on the platform
was choreography for grey suited soloist and core of bystanders
who seemed to radiate and draw to his center like a swirl of metal filings
to a magnet. As if it were a shooting, as if he had been shot many times and his blood
were spilling…. Some froze in their distant stations, some began to stir in
random dust devils, others came to gather and salvage his blood,
went down on their knees to bring the soiled blood back to his dying body,
unafraid of being drenched in it, stained by its impurities.
And when they came to him, he was the wise husbandman who had given each
a talent which each was now was duly rendering back.

There were once economies in which nothing was given up forever.
An older boy had a machine like a small toothed grinder, whose gears
sparked and whirred. Doing as we were told, subjects in the experiment,
the group of boys and girls formed a circle hand in hand until the last
child took the handle that gave the shock. Its blunt needle went right
through us, knitted our small bones for just that second. The circle broke.
Some crying, some laughter. Thirty years later I can almost remember
their names, their faces on the currency.

trading faces
of dead presidents
for sweetness

It’s the job I’ve always wanted─ ladder and chamois,
buckets and blades, high above the Monday morning
traffic. Before I found this niche, or aerie, I suffered the
belatedness of cities, dreams already sub-let, area codes
exhausted, every inch pre-strung with webs of wires and
clotheslines.

Secure the swing stage, strap the harness, set the controls
on “glide”. Who says there’s no advancement, no future in
my work? Even if there’s nothing to show but shine, every
day’s a branching out, another set of stories to scale. The
fluid world flows back beneath my blade. Sometimes I see
myself on hands and knees, kneeling in the stream you
can’t step twice in, the wet skin of sky that floats
powerlines and billboards.

Only so many practice runs─ steady the squeegee, circle
the wrist for the broad unbroken S-sweep down the glass,
then for years it’s all patience, entering the distraction, the
blur and clear and blur and clear made up of those
awakenings when a whole ensemble lies before you like a
shiny museum case. You open it and touch everything and
nothing can be broken.

a whole city
soluble in fog
only the antennas

The cat is suddenly in my face licking the tip of my nose.
In an effusive spell he marches across my keyboard, knocks over
paper and pens, wraps his tail around my halogen light.
I’m feeling you come through him, a chill across my skin.
He looks directly in my eyes and keeps on looking… the reddish markings
underneath the gray and black around his nose and mouth
blur in the blue light of the computer screen.

Lying down on the bedroom floor, I feel the whole house tip
as if awkwardly gauged stairs
led down hallway to bathroom, then into the shower.
I get up, walk to the bathroom, begin to open drawers.
In the third:
Q-Tips, Visine, nail clippers, #15 sun screen…
an old razor.

For a moment the reddish fur of the cocker, the reddish grain
of the hardwood floor, a prism edge along the wainscoting
at the red/ orange band of spectrum
glow like embers and I remember that first autumn
falling in love, the red flushed through everything
like a wound plunged under a faucet. Then it drains
in a breath. The cat is just the cat wanting to be fed.

An ant circles the “O” of October ( Circus Maximus, carved in granite. A rain
of hay drifts at the turning post. The sound of the mowers far above, blue sky of
another world… The rest of the letters and numbers (your full name /your empty dates:
the simple maze of 8; the oxbow of S, the great serpentine without its Versailles;
the drained locks of H, its empty artificial waterways. The great moulds emptied
of molten summer. The prison yards, pristine canals, the stalls and slave quarters of E.

You were always the laugher, ripper out
of leaves before the last pages ─ nothing
in reserve. Catenaries of spider silk
collect a land bridge between us.

I call you arrow;
            you call me lens.

You tie back the unlaced contrails,
as cloud patches unfold your shoulders.
Warped timbers surround the launch site
like stages in the brambles of gravity.

You call me corner;
                      I call you ledge.

You polish your fingers against the window
until they lose their superstitions
of wanting and spending.
One curlew mark where wall becomes sieve.

I call you axle;
                                you call me stem.

You humor me by understudies and stammers.
The farce of your hiding
like poppy seed pressed into parables.

You call me screen door;
                                I call you sail.

You are messaging in loops.
When I look to the space you left,
the stars fold back on their hinges.

We have sealed rooms already contaminated
by our thought. Setting up a lab in the midst
of our imprint. Did you put your face shield on?
Which is nothing more than surface and
overflow. Did you pocket the telescope arm
of your action/ arson/ sequestration?
What we found was more than ancient echo,
spotted horses, or starfish symmetry. One of the things
that won’t tame, that won’t translate, won’t
cooperate, won’t draw itself because the mirror
will never be invented, because exit signs,
escape hatches, exit ramps will never be invented.
We were already there at the source of contamination.
The altar was the first machine. Already irritable
for the more, the making means of, the fallen soft
ceiling of spores the size of whims, the most auspicious
antlers as candelabra, as time capture, as whole flash
fiction. We did not set out to study cave
art or hang ourselves from the cave mouth. The guts
of the question contained the bacterial answers.
One of the things that won’t be rendered
innocent, innocuous, one of the things that won’t
be renditioned. You can’t draw yourself out
of the rock, the footprints collapse into deeper
footprints. We have sealed the rooms.
There will be no further questions.

This you we fall back on −this drift net you. All the corrections, the crossings
                                through, mobile tool–as friend is

Second self, as my enemy’s
enemy, as lover is…

you are…

As I am not my own, feather caught in concretion
of seaweed and shells. Second
                                person shifter, genetic

rift, reflex
                                of overtones
                                without their bell and shady

(as in consorting
with the dead)
                                               polymormous
                                                                                         polyamorous
                                                                                         incestuous

Reader— it is all of the above. It is a congeries, cohabitation…

Whatever you might say at your safe distance, I admit I half

                                invent you as you wait and

invite me as you are still unfolding from the landscape…
                                                                  

overdetermined…undecidable….

You have as many tones
as Greek has words
for love.

Oh, My Cosmic Croupiers, Silent Spinners of the Wheel,
Holiday Greetings

I’m shacking up at “Desert Song Motel”– no glass shards now,
but the coyotes sound closer—more aggressive. Let’s say I have
my reasons for stripping away the dead reindeer nostalgia
where antelopes are roadkill. As Sera says in “Leaving Las Vegas,”
“I’m an equation most of the time…”. Thought problems like: how
many barrooms will punctuate Christmas shopping night with dad?
Six years sober, I picked the film up at Blockbuster, watched it
alone—Elisabeth Shue pouring whiskey over her neck and breasts.
Someone must have thrown a match—auto da fé. Tonight, the only
scorch is my room service risotto. Here, I’m pure flaneur, voyeur.
On the strip you could trace my vapor trail by the zigzag out of range
of drunks, protesting evangelicals, families, prostitutes, and drag queens—
who instinctually pick up my discomfort with my body.
For all the so-called ‘sisters’ on stages, the gay ghetto bars are dank
dungeons. But Vegas loves its Liberace, Wayne Newton, Siegfried
and Roy. No such thing as ‘speakeasy’ for me. The Evil Elf Queen in
green mascara says she recognizes me from ‘Devo’. No, my only
real sister is Sera. And both of you? You seem so far. So much has
happened since Boston. Matthew Shepherd misrecognized
as a scarecrow? Giant snowflakes fall made of glitz and nicotine.
‘Reservations recommended to reserve an igloo.”

inside the snow globe
of America—
shaken, not stirred

Beat-the-House Bob

Dear Mardi Gras Queens,

I’m sitting here not drinking five minutes from Bourbon St.,
full to the brim with homemade affirmations:

1. May I have the courage to adopt uselessness
as its own solution
2. May I remain unhindered in my misdirection
3. May I luxuriate in the stickiness of failed places
4. May my adhesions be to buoyant things

All I can think about is the cemetery scene in Easy Rider:
Clue #1 that Captain America is gay. The sexy non-sex scene
between Peter Fonda and the young hooker. Once had a
“girlfriend” who turned tricks with straight high school boys.
She guided me gently through a night of drug psychosis
that left me waking on a golf course.

reading epitaphs
through the fish eye lens
of acid

Your tortured tour guide,
Bayou Bob

Dear Monopolists,

The problem with other people is mathematical— the leap
from one to two already too many orders of complexity.
Bet you didn’t know I was a math wiz at 10— a special
program kid scrutinized by benevolent Ed School groomers.
Could have been a baby bookie running numbers on
the milk money. What you don’t know about me could fill
an inventory ledger. I’ve found this place by chance—
avoiding football bars, cheap building materials,
and anything ‘beach’. Ushered into the house-museum
by a straight couple who’ve housed fifty thousand
versions of the world as a sliding square dexterity
puzzle. I found these docent-hosts slightly smarmy
in their zero-sum coupledom. Not that I’m against
all publicly pantomimed relationships. I’m out to
simplify my mergers and acquisitions— trade the burr
of mistake for the whiteout of error.

Non-Player character—
a racecar up on blocks
at Marvin Gardens

Yours,
The Unsolvable

Dear Indivisible Duo,

I offer you a peak under the carnival tent, into this cabinet
of curiosities, skull by skull:

#28 Protestant soldier, suicide by gunshot wound to heart
(because of “weariness of life”) North Hungary

#30 Painter, suicide by potassium cyanide
(because of “grief after abandonment by mistress”) Vienna

#40 Catholic suicide, cut his throat
(“due to extreme poverty”) Poland

You have perused my autobiographical x-rays, so you
won’t be surprised I joined the goth circle at the glass
candy jars of congenital anomalies, among them the
famous skeleton of “Siamese Twins”, who I prefer
to know as Chang and Eng Bunker of Wilkes County,
North Carolina. Both joined the Confederacy. So much
bondage. I’m reminded of your bonsai, pruned and trained
with copper wire to shape an exact asymmetry.

Anatomically yours,
Bonsai Bob

feeling my own chest–
amniotic memory
of another half

cut along the dotted
line between fingers     hands
earlobes       we who alone

have lashes
on both lids     testicles    ovaries
make a ventral incision

remove the pretense
from tense         find
the collective firing pattern

in heap    or mass    we exact
ourselves    grain by rain-
glitter grain    from anthill ziggurat

to fecundity of compass points
extracted         out of the very animal
parry apart

the appendages   the patents
pending               such unravellers
of our own entrails

divination        by divvying up
the digits         cut corners reapportioned as hazarded
time     gouts          clots

such clumsy butchers
of our own embodiment    cutting
across the joints     object

lessons           ripping
open       the whole cabinet of curiosity
with our bare           rib spreaders

rack and pinion           pruning hook
to dowsing rod   dentist drill     to circular saw
doxologists of double      exposure

mobbing words
in their plurals        pinnate             leafing
up          from the tongue