temporary assignment

your normal truce
signed at the back door
never reproduced
never stopped the war
you waved politely
leaving in your car
the weaving of my frenzy
is a page too far the
noise becomes distraction
in the sacristy of your charm
I taste the blade’s cold
reasoning and pull the metal
home

interdimensional stasis

dear AG/
dont know why this, now,
on the st. louis bus—thinking
of you and the letters,
your historyetched in
genetic chains/
it's coming up Samhain again.
Another centenary birth for you.
So now I am keeping careful notes
of your dreams, attempting to reap
the metaphor, the strictly crystal
cut of this frame & that image
of the woman with woven red flame hair
(like medea who I spoke of last year)
I'm thinking of you, of course
and the strictly personal power.
This all opens like a line shot
gone braille, touched with silvered fingers
pressing at your focal points.

And now I love you like the wanton you are,
expect your story to follow more of the
genetic spiral than the others.
In May, walpurgisnacht, I'll celebrate
with Gary D., burning your memory
in an iron bowl, calling it out,
fearing your incipient fate
and you—in Ireland? Are you
riding a storm on an interdimensional
timeline; are your words only experimental breath
in this personal relational geometry?

in this time
On the st. louis bus
this pen annoys me.
It will call no souls this evening
on the greyhound, lapsing
into commmon speech.

in this the city of my discontent

too many old friends removed from the scene
lost to anger, death, and transferred by success
lost to my foolishness, and their pride
and the normal mode of breaking apart—
the sand on the beach in its helpless geography
and I have been here with my heart little more
than a passenger on someone else's hindenburg
for two decades now. No one seems to keep track,
but I know all the pitiful tales from the various rings
worn by us allo, one weekend or another, 70s, 80s, 90s.
soon the millenium will wander through these petty days
and I will imagine where you have all gone.
once again left behind in my naifte, in my sour guilt.
in this coffin of poems & songs, acting
as if I knew something.


(Apologies to Vachel Lindsay who wrote a much better poem by this title. Springfield, however, is the city we shared in our discontent, though he was dead twenty years by the time I arrived on the planet, and nearly 45 by the time I got Springfield. The punctuation is wrong, this is little more than a standard lament. Adieux to all those who may be the source of this piece. I wish you well, in this life and the next.)

Cruise Missile

He glimpsed her in silks
and his candid memory recorded
another possible moment
having nothing and everything
to do with passion.

But somehow it wasn't sex anymore;
it was the memory of smells,
it was the recognition of her muscles
in a series of different temperatures,
it was the words written on
the sides of his throat unable to escape
his pride or his psychosis

& so his expiation is this series
of kinetic singular moments
when his ex-lover is revealed
like a demiurge, strategic, ravishing,
a cruise missile targeted on his heart,
which lays carefully on the lachrymose
silk pillow of his bullshit guilt


1993
(Post breaking up with Bradway.)

poem in parts

all the voices
were angels or devils
his hands could not
separate the curtain
noise filled the room
like insecticide
the white sounds
came from underneath
the phonemes all blurred
the meaning was in
thousands of languages
but he could not
understand it

he said
"I have been who I am
for so long ..."
the whistling filled his coffee cup
the choirs tormented him
nothing was clear
nothing lasted longer than
microseconds
all the ants and silverfish
lay in lucky dead piles
he held his ears
but it was still
there

woman as goddess

in this vision
this woman is white, so very white
her limbs are geometric, tense and slack,
her skeleton the armature for this fate
her translucent flesh grey & pink
and she is just wet, just gashed open
waiting for that certain poem, that key

baby, we have to serve this universe
we have to join genital to genital
word to word my tongue becomes your tongue
you become the huntress in the night
who speeds across this february sky

the white girl spread open like the milky way...
I hear you in the savage wind, your song

false hopes, 1980

asleep in your husband's arms
I hope you are warm & comfortable
the universe is iranian at heart:
capable of execution without trial

the man howls yeah he knows
how stupid it is out there
just a state of being
jive people keep these lists
you know, how old it all gets
—need reasons but maybe
end up on some manson's altar
so keep your eyes open
to the hard facts

there were so many false hopes
handed us
so much nazism was there
to see
it is surprising we can laugh
so much

This was written just after the Hostage Crisis in Iran that destroyed Jimmy Carter's presidency. I firmly believe there was a fix between the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Republican strategists. Did Reagan know? Hard to say. In any case, this poem uses the iranians to represent the sudden change of chaos. The reference to the nazis comes from several of Janne's poems that function using Nazi as a synonym for evil in the unviverse. In my generation the third reich dominated all other forms of evil, mainly because they had such great uniforms. Larry Smith once wrote part of a novel that spoke about the nazis having stolen sex from everyone else. And that was true in the fetishistic aspect of speaking. We all loved those boots, those riding crops. The idea of torture is so catholic and completely hooked up to our sexuality. Alison certainly had that deep within her in those days.

waiting for the spark

fortune is a vampire
fooling with the child in me
fortune takes its blood
from my womb
& crowds me in a steeple
dense with excrement

my child is dead in me
my intestines trap the funeral gas
and I float in my sleep
above the highway
like the Hindenburg

the day flies toward you

I will keep your words
gathered to me in this
chromium clock ticking dollars
off the world's responsibilities
I will remember your waking face
your windowed eyes washed clean
with sleep's dream stories
I will remember day the beginning
life like a newborn
pleasurable in all things

your marrow is my lyric
your fluids are my river
your breathing is my poem
bursting on the surface of this sea

the day flies toward you
no terrorist will hold it hostage
the clock will not still
time thickening like gravy
but rather the seconds
will pour past me
racing my heart to the open door
where you wait