A MOVIE ABOUT DUDES

Eleven inches of this mundane gas

that’s what separates me

from the asterisk
her tiny blinking

eye robed
wetly, taken
into its digital

loom

I thieve as I
will, needing others to
keep ahead of myself

as in an act of forced improvisation

an act of shedding

worn topographies for
another’s gait or tongue

The bum is now
donning shorts
his ankles scaly, red

Buds are calibrating the park
but there is no liberation

I came home to find him perched
on a nearby stoop

wearing his BORDERS T-shirt, his ear
mashed up

against a silver radio whose fuzz
would not stop

*****

The rappers say it’s like
that and what’s
more: it is

In the same way
that music disturbs
a silence

that never was
I find parts
of myself torn into

frays of sonic excess

parts of myself snarled in the convolutions

of an always already
choreographed world

I do a small dance only
to find it large
do a so
simple step and end

up staggering in
fury

*****

Most stay testing the gray
balloon brains of their enemies

I swell

It was the Sunday
after my Bat
Mitzvah, ogling

mugshots at the precinct
so many torn
out eyes

*****

There are always cats
in old French movies

A cat erupts
on the nightstand
and wine moves into the socks

Then it was that we rented
a movie about dudes
blowing other dudes
apart

Everyone was constructing
I from within
the men from without

A quivering bird took quick
refuge in a length of pipe

The poor own the clouds
and we love them for it