18, free

1


For the long slow funeral

with open parachute
failed

you recognize the fall won't take long.

No pallbearers
needed
necessary
or wanted.



2

From here the fields are yellow circles

trapped in squares, yellow

and clay-red,
made of corn
and rimmed with broccoli
coming up at full-tilt,

transmogrifying into trees.
Strands of wheat
in hot, vacant wind
turn the earth's teeth
into a roaring, boiling greeting.

Up above, your folks wave
from the plane--your father, his binoculars,
his victory cigar--and hope upon hope
upon hope

you'll pull your chord

and stop up short
like a coat hanger's hooked your collar,
halted above the wide mouth of stones, alone
in the free air
above the much-spattered ground.



3

As you fall you wait
you scream for a full stop,
and you look:
you can see your whole world, your mama
up there, waving.
The sea wheat is waving, too.
The view is good
but your ears are bursting open


and your chute,
the one you hoped would catch you
is already out
already failing, painted
by the blood from your ears. 

presidential portrait

I see Bush back in 2003

wearing that childlike grin:

he's thinking

--If me and Donald and Dick

drop a cuppla nukes on Iraq and shit

I can build a slip-n-slide in the backyard

and fill it with beer!

Hooray!

i take no responsibility for any of this

In the west I see clouds stacked up

pancake style,

except dark grey like the barrel of a gun

and just as ready to burst.

A high pressure no sunshine system

we got here,

but tacos I got and tacos I eat.

Abraham kills Isaac,

God stops him not. What of that

story and that time?

I avoid what I cannot understand,

but rather I read

the op-ed than the comic strip.

The flowers on my casket:

paint them grey and green,

a tiny bit of red.

marriage poem #3

Sometimes there's not enough time

to talk about the things I want to talk

to you about. Sometimes the time fills up

like a bowl of green curry with jasmine rice,

basil leaves and sliced chicken.

The time with you gets spicy and I forget

to talk about the things I want to talk

to you about. Spices fill up my bowl

anyway, time doesn't. Time with you really

can't be bowled, drawn, quartered

or pressed with garlic paste, distilled

in candy sticks, and I forget to think

what it was to talk with you.

marriage poem #2

Sometimes I am a dick to you without meaning to

those times you sit on the corduroy couch,

your eyes red-hued,

your sotto voce a quiet shout.

Then the balloon of my stubborn dickishness

filling the room with a sad silence,

so quiet the corduroy doesn't even ripple.

You ripple

down your face,

making a maze on your cheeks

clean from the shower.

I was a dick about it, I finally say.

I'm sorry, I say.

Me too, you say.

The whole sofa

applauds with delight.

marriage poem #1

When the purpleblack night grows soft,

blends its own sweet Billie Holliday tune

with the dark morning I shed my shirt,

my pants, slide in naked next to you

and feel the sweet soft ache

in my shoulders, in my legs, my chest.

I touch your tickling hand,

fingers sprawled open on the bed,

limp with sleep yet opening, closing,

the bitten nails tiny,

your breaths regular with a quiet cat-snore.

When I wake in the later morning

you will be on my chest there, there

in the place you love to set your head,

and perhaps, because we are married now,

the air will collapse or be in a state of collapse

under the weight of my many night-time farts,

and things won't get too terribly sappy.

But you will still love me, even then.

With morose laughter, at times, and moaning

at my morning murmurs and the awful

smell. Pulling the sheets up once more,

twice more, I may say, will say,

Welcome to marriage love. Welcome.

sunday school fragment

The sundayschool felt-board

lives within us:

adam and eve naked

close to each other

but rather androgynous.

Oh aint they got fun.

exfoliation

Out of spiced spiked cider and

spliced veins

we got chagrin, we got

coriander,

we got worn out

brown couch
and 18 rainbow-covered pandas

for slept there and slept there,

slept there.

Faith's public swimming pool exfoliates

with the skin

of flacid emigrants--

at least it's closed on weekends.

Lay your sleepy head dear

here and here and here. 

mashed potato clouds

Clouds are piling up in the west,

huge mashed-potato trainwreck pileups,

piling up and greying faster than my father.

Thunderheading east

over Olympics tall, cold and wet,

mucking up all our sunshine

raining grey gravy from the sky.

Measure out thy worst, O great potato peeler!

I fear ye not.

not-sonnet of jimminy cockroach

Crawling in my walls the cockroaches go

hithering thither, discussing the weather

as we all do: hello Jimminy Cockroach,

eaten the poison, or simply just shallow

in all your hopes: I will not touch the stuff

in the trap, mr mouse: am I, nothing yellow

for me, not for me. Mr. Roach, God is, how does 

he doing? Does he stimulate your marrow?

Tomorrow I will arise and fry eggs.

Throw strips of bacon at the corner where meets my

pillow walls. You may fight the open mouths of ants

and other cut creatures with mandibles,

with Mr Roach, for the chewable death,

Mr Roach, always, with his ever open mouth.

english professorisms

A rolling pillar of half-tone smoke

half-tone grey in the tonnage

of the heavy effacing self,

heavy in the legs and shoulders,

I came crawling out of the fetor of a weasel:

I, I roared a sickness inside

and out: thunderheads piled

like poisonous sky-stone within me,

poised above my white-hot heat-death:

boiling oil, all I am is boiling oil,

heavy in the porkbelly and coinage,

potted basil plants with placid bookish

rage, thrown red clay and feathers

out into the yard, all the potshards

and lefty goatsherds to gather there

a third world mine own, a sandpainting

for my cross, a mother for my Christ,

a holy but whorish version of Mary Godmother
for you the students, 

the Christ-child born half-Jew and half-Roman

in the alphabet stew; 

no matter: we are in this soup together

now drinking the susurrant milk

of our manicultured fathermothereraser

the stephen king and john berryman write a sonnet sonnet

Welcome to the end of sunshine
and the end of picnic, which
you missed. Thank God. Here’s red rain,
red rain. Sally’s being a bitch—

surprised? Johnny say he’s in stitches,
she so funny. She so gurgle, plarp,
she gutter. Johnny get knife, swing for fences,
hit homerun. Oh God. Can you help?

Blood on my corndog. Blood in my cup.
We not got fun. Dick and Jane,
no, not here. Sally, all fucked up
and lips not here. Sally in real pain.

We need revenge, so let’s get Johnny,
he ain’t patient & his jokes ain’t funny.

This poem in response to Sherman Alexie's "The Facebook Sonnet," which can be found in the May 16 issue of The New Yorker.

panda porn is better than my poems

They say great art should edify
and enlighten. But fuck me
if I've ever enlightened myself
much less anyone else.
All my best poems make less
and more sense than the others.
You could watch panda porn
and you'd be all the better for it--
and you probably will.

ivan walks away

My confession, dear Alyosha, is this:
I broke into quiet tears after
reading the Inquisitor's poem come to an end:
Ivan turning on his low-slung
right shoulder, pivoting

on a fractured limb,

a dove falling from the air
twirling on the severed
bloody stub of its wing,
blasted by a wounded little boy.

(My poor father, my poor father,
there's your money, THERE'S YOUR MONEY

and there, there alone, there's your freedom:

200 red rubles

balled up in the mud)

Where Ivan walks, no hand

to hold him; no extended arm.

No counterbalance for the weight

of the ears carelessly nailed to fence-posts

or girl left alone in the outhouse

all night to freeze.

His look is too familiar, Alyosha,

too familiar to me, like driving away from home

the last time it's still home.
I wish I could dissolve with you.

on the reaction to bin laden's death i will

Dance and sing the spangles,
all the angles of my swordy love
to vanish in the abscess
of the wound which is my country,
my country, my country, my country
spangled like an eighteenth
century street lamp with an amber
purple glow; fragile glass;
a tea light; a flamethrower
dying to die out or start a housefire.

when you don't come soon

Poodle-dog looks sad when she walks Riverside
Park, shitting on every bench,
and homeless people,
fair-game
folks of the world with
pork and beans in their cans,
no fork, no spoon. Arrange
the call of a Canadian Loon.
Make it sad when it rains,
dear Father in Heaven,
so that I will be properly
prepared to feel bad,
'specially when and if
you don't come so soon.

song for a sofa

Rundown sofa emblazoned with pink and blue flowers

full of sleep, remember me

when you are dumpstered for good.

When on the garbage heap full of GI Joe's

memories, remember me and my sleeping

on you. Throughout the night

think of my cloistered eyes:

I dreamt on you

of her whose couch you reluctantly were,

and drooled.

Foolish and full of sleep,

you the sofa kept me

safe.

She smiled at me. I smiled, mumbled;

twitched awake.

I regret everything I ever forgot to say.

infinitive

And what if I were rip out your vertebrae

bone by bone

as if taking brick by brick

out of a government barracks-building,

could you give your ribs to the work

of holding you up? (Shorter, now, oh bloody flesh,

the epidermic, the thrice

swallowed cortisone. Now injection.)

And what if you didn't need that spine?

My spine spills the ability to kneel. To kneel

is to need, where the infinitive is more than

apropos of the wet snow.

to you who know

To all our gone-down suns

we sing, to the waxed moons

and the spring that bloomed beneath us;

the noose that hung from our wind-chimes,

bottles on the bear rug in the basement.

Eight bodies on that rug,

too tired for the most part to fuck,

but we touched. We touched. Such a wonder.

I ask God now what we wanted and

what we got. We bought

happiness and sang it and stayed,

and began to leave, to Spokane,

to the bars of Ballard, the cathedrals of England,

to unknown far off sad Topeka,

and we sought what? What sought us?

Did God save us, those days,

from ourselves or each other, when

the devil brought his own liquor:

the holy veil torn up in a Biblical blunder,

a Messiah come in vein with a bang.

We sang?

melodrama

1

The times I have most considered murder:
or rather, the time this evening:
When two girls who've not lost their cherries
speak with lilts of voice,
talk loudly in the library about the U.N.
as if it were a nice GAP location or
possibly even a Hollister; all this
whilst I try to calculate simple interest,
compound interest, or anything else
like Eulirization, the paths of Hamiltonians;
yes, that is when I grip my pencil tightly
as if it were a knife, and consider
the lives of these two bitches:
consider, grip, and shove the pencil
deep into the folds of my book,
pick up my bag and go to the other end
of the library, still an innocent man.


2

And I think of you, dear reader,
reading where I wrote "pencil"
and inserting "penis"; and I will say this,
which you probably won't think fair,
but I don't care much for you, either. so
Fuck off! Be quiet! It's a library for God's sake,
and I'm not a fan of Freud or Oedipus.