bloom

America, You were my first love affair.

Do you not hear your infants,
crying? The voices, clamoring not for a single thing
but clamoring? Everywhere, flooding the streets with our
ideals, night lamps for midnight postman? Have you forgotten
your orphans? Chained in desolate row houses, still believing
in your dreams.

Brick by brick, history stands mystified by it's irrelevance. This rare place of flooding mounts, chained by your history. Our walls are fragile, does our house
lack a foundation? our ill fed thoughts, congesting the hallways, lingering cigarette smoke, the carcasses swept into drains at dawn unnoticed.

Where is your Buffalo now? The twisted steel of forgotten ports lingering where no ship docks, stolen promises collapsing in unused factories. Why did you discard us?

I read your discarded postcards, phantom images, what is left
other than our imagined selves. Do you hear us? weeping through your streets, phantoms lingering in your walls.
Are we ill advised foreigners? Is this our vigil? Have you laid a rosary over our stones, have we bent in the willows, flooded the cemetery, where is the night
watchman? Have your loco-motives halted, your mines collapsed, has the passage from east to west ceased? Where are your majestic ships? Do you hear the sweeping chorus of the strange fruit planted in your cotton fields? Your wind carried us, do you see? Have we yet to become the flesh of your soil? Does the odor still linger or did it dissipate? Have we really become ill advised foreigners?

after the Rubicon

This morning, stigmata,
somewhat a surprise.
Drank a few beers, bled,
watched the blood trickle down
pitter-patter to the floor,
Rorschach test patterns.
Or Chinese ideograms?

Wrapped my hands in gauze,
brushed the teeth in the tub because
the sink was again clogged --
constipated? A metaphor?
I squatted there, brushing,
like a mendicant praying,
imagining giving myself up
to a higher power, up to
something or someone higher.
Mind tends to wander,
while squatting, wandering far,
yet always coming back.
Thank goodness.

Biscuits in the oven,
I read Plath
until it was time for work.
Glorious work!
I sent a text message to a friend:
Middle aged man prepares for day,
stumbles over empty bottles.

Clean shirt, jeans and sandals,
unsubmerged from the pile
heaped in faith on a chair
near the closet.

Outside, sky high,
seagulls wheeled,
alight in pentecostal grace.

The streets were full of young horses.

I want to wipe your tears.

we could shed our mask, could you imagine?
The touch of my flesh against yours at dawn, our silhouettes outlining
the last building before the end...
Am I etched into your flesh?

I dream of writing a post it note;
"Went to the store, be back soon."
Would you slowly drift away or
would you wait until i returned?

You could be the captain, I could be the captain,
maybe we could both be captains and finally...

I dream, absurd claims to justify myself.
All i know is my love.

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.