the library at Alexandria is burning

Shit,
I said out loud
& then I wondered
again
just what it was I was doing
leaning on a "Village Voice" box,
the omen-like hour of midnight,
the weather jaded & slightly bored,
me dressed in my most faded jeans
& a new-grown goatee,
waiting for some college boy
who looked like a winner
seven beers ago
to hurry up and
finish already.

Well.
At least this earthy work
serves as a distraction
from the idea that
there is only so much
drinking, smoking,
& fucking around
a man can do.
That at some point
he has to realize
his potential & do something
or be something
or he has to accept the fact
that he's gone as far as
he can.
There is that.

I suppose.

Mentat

I wrote you in my past dream. The courtship ritual would take place in the lobby of the Citibank building.
Do you think you'll be able to remember who you were?

Our appointment has been scheduled, don't be late.
I've written many words.


Delicate tapestry is slowly unwound. CTR-ALT-DELETE

I am wordless at the wonder-wheel. Does she dream in the same mechanical way?
Auto-Didactic love affair. A mechanical representation of myself wanders into the room.

I am. Replicating automated ideas from past constructs of replicated ideas. Writer/Reader
interlope. I confuse the sound of the air hose for rain on sunday mornings, constantly repeating the same
mistake.

I remember;
Flooding the ant hill with asbestos, our lawn had been invaded by africans. Delicate red creatures.
Mobilized with vague notions of something or other, migration of inherited ideas.
Christ like bloom under august, our nausea was apparent. Thoughts began to leak towards our neighbors.

inheriting my memory loss.

Something is happening underneath my couch and I'm scared of knowledge. An apparent invasion, deluded plans
of moths and roaches, conquest of my dilapidated apartment and then, then nothing. I am apparent in my madness, silent
through my love affair. I am unknown to myself and to others. I exist outside of memory, therefore outside of reality.

Conquest, I have no knowledge of such word ever existing.

Then there was a paradigm shift.

Jose...Jose...wake up.

The
something
or
other
is
about
to
happen.

another country

I wake up as usual
to jazz and marble coffee,
to leftovers gone the very
stoniest of stony cold,
to the 24 hour news cycle,
to the sounds of the world.
The weather today, storm systems
swooping in like a murder of crows.

Today is the feast day of some
gone archaic saint who wandered in
the desert sunburnt and bearded
whilst performing miracles of healing.
In celebration of this devoted stoic,
hosannas fill the background
of a country once my own.

Finally spring,
but how much did I learn
from the winter just now passing?
How many geodes were extracted
from the ice
to be explicated and marveled at,
to be classified?
There was, mostly, the cold
seeping pervasive into
the forests of my bones.

It's been an age since the time
of saints and miracles and mysteries.
These days we need to choose
and elevate our own holy ones,
blessed and blessing ones,
who will touch us
and let us know.

Last night I dreamed of a mythic Russia,
a snow-swamped, impassable country.
The houses were frosted over, silent,
cluttered up with debris including
photos in cracked frames and
books that slid from frozen shelves.
Everywhere there were reminders
of a lost and better time,
a time before
the slippage started.

heroes

I’d been led to believe
that the world was finite,
containing no true surprises.
Yet following the very last eclipse
evolution shifted itself, it adapted.

The moon crossed the sun
and now they both hover
side by side in the sky.

The messengers arrived,
bringing with them new ideas.
Their most important task,
revolution,
or so they believed.
They held to their faith
and would not be turned
no matter the evidence,
no matter what distractions.

This world is a melange of
bright light, white noise,
distractions, daily minutia,
of mission statements and goals,
of paradigm shifts, mixed metaphors,
and inconclusive conclusions.
The world is the world is the world
and it just keeps on spinning around.

I’ve seen men vanish,
and I’ve seen men fly,
but I am not afraid.

This morning I felt surrounded
by a persistent energy field,
a calling, a push,
telling me that
I could do magic.

If I could find a way to believe.

among the nightingales

With the tectonic plates
more or less stabilized
and peace (more or less)
arrived at,
the focus shifted
to domesticity.
The building settled into itself,
becoming a home.

The mice made a hash
of the baseboards
but no matter.
Every foundation has its secrets.

At night the skyscrapers were like hills
that whispered peacefully in the wind
and we stretched out on the roof
with bottles of red wine.

Tell me, you said,
about the stars.

oooops

Brick by brick and stain by stain
I built the wall up and up and then
I tore that bastard down.
Whee! Blisters on
my fingers and scabs on
my knees, I worked and
sweated and
labored to be here.

I bedded down the concubines
in the Sultan's court, as well as
all the she-males and the eunuchs and
next I banged away at
all those royal princes.
Such peaches.

And now I am a poet.
Hah!
Still an alcoholic, too,
with blisters on my fingers
and scabs on my knees.

hello, please leave a message after the beep

Among the dead,
gone & remembered,
poets from the past
who smoked too much,
who talked, who nested in bars,
who found room inside for both
despair & hope, who fucked,
who loved, who chanted mantras,
who sat alone on park benches watching
the sun climb up & up until
it hovered above the city.

Poets who jumped from ships
or swallowed a bullet or tied themselves
to a swaying tree or opened a wrist
or took an overdose of pain relief
or gently laid a feverish head into
the waiting,
open oven.

We left behind words,
words jotted down in notebooks,
words quickly scribbled
on scraps of paper, napkins, envelopes,
words found printed
in published collections,
the pages yellowed & thumbed
into road-map creases.
We left behind words,
words we passed on
in conversations hoping
someone understood us.
The words were there
when we rose
& the words were there
when we fell.