NOT AS HELL AS YOU

It was a whole
Day had passed and I
Said so

Many things that might have been
True that my lips
Were chapped, my fingertips

Calloused and white, this evening a song
Says you better come on
In my kitchen and I feel doomed

To absorb disquiet, tiny
Trimmed hairs from my mustache sticking
To the damp bathroom wall, a friend

Calls to tell me he slept
With his boss, another broke
Her leg biking along

The Everglades, when I say I
Refuse I mean trash
As in I trash the idea of a voluptuous

Remoteness and I trash the tyrannical zest
With which our minds injure
And betray us, if consciousness is

A train they’ve uncoupled
The sleeping cars and supposing truth
Is a woman she is

Like Marilyn, stripped
Of all but the most conditional
Meanings, I wish to crowd

This believing, to imperceptibly shift
The spotlights until each
Angle has been teased bare before

The libidinous mob, the man
Under the psychic’s eave is rather
Pacific today, his ear

Crushed against a book-sized radio, no drunks
To taunt him into rage, I fear
I may have misguessed the wallaby’s

Sex having spied it
Grooming a pouch yesterday
As wailing toddlers rode

The carousel for free, I want you
To take me not
As I am, but as I intend

For you to become, this only
Works in poems, the song says I am
A young man that’s inclined

To seek pleasure and I sneeze
On the already grimy
Keys, only the most used letters

Free of it, my love finally
Sleeps, a book of clinical neurology
On her breast rising

And falling like an overturned
Raft, we are determined to sneak
Into a movie, I simply

Have to replace the strings
On my guitar, have to explain the use
Of beliefs bound

To change for a perfect user
Of words uses things and I am so far
From doing either

Subliminally rapt by my
Intoxication for all things bent
On sincerity, on

The hinge that separates a concern for objects
On the lens from the impulse
That traverses an axon and I know

Its silly to think care
Could exist in any sense unsullied
But I also know that it’s bound

To be raining outdoors.

ALLEGRISSIMO

My eyes are no longer cut out
For the likes of midtown, they’ve grown
Accustomed to roofs, stoops, stores

Suffused by an affable
Dinginess and the textures of low
Sound droning

Without tedium, men call
My dad a man
Of decency, an old

World word, would that surprise
Might rupture the hideous
Simplicity of causation, that the tortoise

Might take the hippopotamus
For its charge as perhaps all faithfulness is born
From sloth, "they who have contrived

To retain ignorance" dare
Not tempt the wolf
When wolves they most easily

Become, bombastic architects
Of mediocrity, media’s winking fingers
Upon our knees, yet "no one lies so much

As the indignant" and I weep
Once every five years or so, dent
My knuckles on closed

Storefronts every month, give weekly
Thanks for the absurd
Surpluses of others as my sense

Of direction daily rearranges
Itself in heat, so I take out the fruit
Flies with the garbage

Don my silver shorts and whoosh
Around the park narrowly
Avoiding midday dope smokers’ fishing

Poles to visit the white-tipped
Wallaby recently tagged as Caribbean
Women push towheaded

Boys in overgrown strollers and "I want
To always be on film, to be
Caught in the cut coffee sober," to thrill

Allegrissimo in the perseverating
Predawn dash of birds, I applaud the real
Bodies of women, collapse

Into the tenderness of leisure and all
My bitter recriminations are sloughed in the line
Between void and voice

Between abyss and abundance, shoplifting
Teenagers spiriting lipstick amidst
Half-torn movie tickets, the roots of a once

Stately oak tree sprawled like tentacles
Across the quiet New Jersey
Street, tonight I will play ping

Pong and drink Negro
Modello, eye Elisa’s budding
Belly and anticipate

"Casimir Pulaski Day" at the Bowery
Ballroom, for life continues
To astonish, even as the bomb-laden

Believers of Iraq reek
Their fiery remuneration, a skein
Of cool air descends upon

Brooklyn and the incongruities
Mangle in ways that awe
My ability to reason, which is finally

Unnecessary, as is
My attachment to behavior for
We’ll all of us

Be new here in the end.

A GEOMETRY OF SLEEPLESSNESS

When I was eight
I knew I would never go
To war and so

I knowingly deformed
My knees in an effort to approximate
My father’s, knocked, a little

Awkward, I’ve never been
One to calmly stomach
The mundane violence of being

A man, nor my own
Coursing potential to harm, hands
Thick-knuckled and shaky

Even on my twenty-eighth birthday
As I toured to the Bronx
Zoo and lurked amid The Land

Of Darkness, where umbrella-winged fruit
Bats keep pink-eyed
Deer in fear, I refuse hate as a kind

Of occupation, also kindness
As an excuse for simplicity, now it is
Friday and "blood confuses

The heart," which dithers serenely
One moment only
To be throttled the next, when I was

In high school I used
To keep myself
Up at night envisioning strange

Geometric shapes, each expanding to the point
Where it seemed to miraculously fill
My head and transcend it, this uncanny

Mathematics of volume turning
Spiritual as whole
Hours passed untended, unintended

Fatigue suffusing my days as now
There dwells a plenteousness confiding
Itself by honk and whisper

A squalid transient barking
At pigeon chicks
Hidden behind the psychic’s eave

Today’s miscreants hardly want
A mound of clouds to lounge
On, they want Mom and Dad’s job

To mean something
More than a fruitless lull
In the maroon

Between existential jokes, my love
Needs sleep, my knees
Need skin and I am becoming too much

A part of this
World, the callous-thick
Feet of a bearded

Bum swelling and bruised like plums
As the heat index touches one
Hundred degrees, "one should not go to church

If one wants to breathe
Pure air" and I now
Know the sum of learning: love

Terrifies the lover and loved alike.

THE THIRTEEN YEAR-OLD SCREAM

After work you re-park
The car, head
Over to the Russian hairdresser

For a trim, make small
Talk until Night Moves comes
On the radio, then close

Your eyes and tingle
As the razor grazes your now
Pink neck, come home

With the words
Rasping repeatedly, "woke
Last night to the sound

Of thunder," though you woke
Last night to the thrill
Of naked legs, the air conditioner

Clicking metronomic to some
Circadian pulse, what seems
To happen becomes its own happening

As the truths of a new
Millennium dabble and abscond, each
Consequent possibility—comfort

Nothingness, ecstasy, hope
Mutilation, wonder—occupies
Its provisional realm

Only to misplace itself in the relentless
Shuffle, this morning you gave
Sonny Pain thirty-five cents, Jews

For Jesus gave you
A brochure that asked if you were
Interested in "Computerized

Donuts" and you weren’t quite sure
What they were getting
At, the scar on the forearm of

The woman wearing white
Linen pants on
The train was shaped

Like a toy boat on the mottle
Of sewer waves and you proceed to grope
At what can only be approached

By a gape, mouth hot
And dumb, top lip
Thin as the bottom protrudes

In its sensual idiocy and don’t you see
The eyes of splendor
Penetrating the face of travail, the interminable

Act of remembering wrongly as "the night
Takes on a weird electronic
Tingle," for this is the place you return

To through the need
Of living, a cavern translated
By an immaterial

White profusion like
The color you see in the middle
Of clouds beyond airplane

Windows, you were asleep
When the foul world
Changed, your loves revoltingly

Aged, your hands grew
Cumbersome and a whole lifetime
Passed before you

Realized that it hadn’t, you were back
On the train where
The stifling obscenity of being

A thing causes the thirteen
Year-old girls to scream
"I need a dick" in harmonious unison

So that you might
Cringe, so that the transparency
Of grief might blush, so

That the silence might finally fuck off.

THERE IS SOMETHING LOOMING

The humidity surges, a bird
Furtively huddles on
The stoop quivering, the air is still

Composed of translucent arrows
As tenaciously we stand
Vigil at our own diminishing

Prospect, I am not heavy
With reason, have yet to grow
Enamored with the tragedy

Of monochromes, Colin
Drives with his bicep
Half-out the window and loses

Himself in the contemplation
Of bird’s breath, I see the future
Announce itself in

The inexplicable carom
Of ricochets now
Outreaching their dubious reports or

The lingering buzz
On the lips
As a famous older poet

Unexpectedly plants
A kiss on you in San Francisco
Or how the ruby panties

On the woman in the advertisement
For coffee shock
You into a buried remembrance

Abuse is no more
Real than tenderness, the branches
Outside the window group

And sway in their snaky
Amicable way, a groping mass
Of cable cascades in black

Tendrils from the roof and my eye
Is full of promiscuity, the graffiti reads
YOUR PROBLEMS LIE

WITH THE POOR, the dogs
Make their concerted dawn
Howl, an hour is lost in the augury

Of clouds, August
Impends, consciousness
Punishes and if

You think there is something
Looming there is
Something looming, the difference

Engines we portend
Locked in a stutter of forms
As when the blind woman

Recalls the faces of ski
Jumpers or the retired fireman
Eyes the figure

Of a stranger approaching and I am
That stranger, in need
Of a haircut, my arms pendular

With a secret happiness, one large
Foot passing the other, two
Hours playing softball and then down

The avenues to beer
With intelligent and carousing
Friends, a fortune

From the Chinese restaurant
In my pocket, which
Reads YOUR FEAR CONTAINS

ITS OPPOSITE TO BE BROKE OPEN.