homage to vallejo

sad blonde skeleton
tawny muscled jaw awry
once-upon-a-time-friend,
little susie, amphetamined
girl coked & joking in my bed
sick brain still on fire
still hour'ed and houris'ed and she left
for reasons known only
in the trenches. Girl,
your calcium mouth turned
away from love (you live)
in stone-fleshed womb
a life gestated into, time run
backward like 1/2 inch tape
(are you)
remembering remembering remembering
these minor emotional inconveniences
looped now in a figure 8?
somebody needed to tell me
the truth you never did
o in a circuit maybe yes
beyond this petty need & our
psychic destiny ~ it's gone now
this story, rubio y triste

(The Peruvian Cesar Vellejo is the great unrecognized poet of the 20th century. A line of his, "esquelito, rubio y triste" followed me around for years. It means sad, blonde skeleton. This piece is, again, from 1977. The discussion is continuous in those years; the attempt to build some sort of structure from the wreckage of my heart. Sometimes the damage turns out to be permanent in some odd fashion. For me the damage affected the work. So much seems lost in the melodies of these pieces. I can almost hear my younger self in them, his tone, his fire. Sad to say I never really got past this damage.)

Thanks for the Memories

nemesis chick you left
the scene and me here, holding
my prick, wondering whether
there is a point to this romance
even today? nemesis chick
you led me around by the cock
for so many years, yet we were
friends and we were always
disturbed and we both always
knew there was something there
that would not let this dissipate
into the flat air of the 90s

so, despite her long sweet golden
hair, halfway down her back,
and her thin cruel lips, her snake-like
persona practiced and corrupted in
the american west. Despite these
hard breasts in my hands and her
desperate tongue, whispering
alien speech in my mouth, fighting
off the need to fuck and be fucked
she always had that husband
in the background. I always had
first Pat, then Kelly, and later
Becky B. She had her engineer,
carefully husbanded his rugby
playing rage, that singularity that
might destroy either her or me
at anytime. She had her family,
irish catholic cynics capable of that
painful humor that mocks the dead.
She married her john on
kennedy's death day, 11/22,
so as to always remember the date
I was there...sunrise sunset
the sacred hearters in the balcony
were weaving a cloth no one would wear
that day. She could polka a mean
polka. She could twist her body
against you in ways that seemed
to defy the normal lust. I have
a hundred of her poems. Words
shared. We often went, the two of
us, to Jane's house and listened
to her song. And later, with Steven
A.D. we traveled the bars
getting drunk and trolling
Knoepfle's psyche for fun and
a great excuse to be together.

Nemesis chick. She destroyed me.
There is only this dreadful silk balloon
lying flat on the ground waiting for
some sort of reason to bring me up
again into those clouds. What do
I think about her these days? Sometimes
hatred, murder, violence, sadness.
Other times I tell myself she didn't
mean it, all my fault. Stupid male.
Other times there is just tragedy
and loss. Frequent bouts of a particular
kind of despair. She escaped, though.

Gone to Las Vegas.
Disappeared, law degree in hand.
Corlyss said she heard she was at
Bill Crook's house last week.
Well, everyone passes through
Bill Crook's house, eventually.
Don't they?

Would I cut her throat today?
Maybe. She said she loved me. But
it was just a trick. She took my
words and now I am standing
on the edge of the abyss,
the balloon ripped and dirty,
promising nothing but destruction
We all circle down this spiral
gravity sucks our moral character
into an elongated balloon,
devoid of meaning.
It means nothing. Just
ordinary defeat and loss.

another fleeting wind

the train is gone now
alien heartchild—
understanding seems circular
in the morning

your stare is only approximate
in my annotations—ah, desire
is just a cousin at an early age

and so many of your words
are like the lead-coated
bird under Greenstreet's knife

shall we dance
in the pages of another book?
shall we sleep?

(Sidney Greenstreet's character, Caspar Gutman, tries to chip the paint off of the Maltese Falcon statuette to find the gold underneath. There isn't any, of course. An illusion. What does Sam Spade say, the last line in the Bogart movie? "The stuff dreams are made of...")

Forensic Habit

I stole her fingerprints
like you would have
mad oriental friend.
I hid the glass,
carefully wrapped in a handerkerchief
behind the files of old letters.
Later I watched the cubs
lose to los angeles
knowing you would have
cheered the Dodgers.
Ah, there was magic in your voice
in my dream, there were women
and words and rice wine
and the sweet red calligraphy
of the martian seas
and its your exploration now—
I can only watch.

but I will keep the fingerprints
for your analysis
should I prove lucky enough
to live to see
your return.

She disappeared
in the central highlands anyway.
I've no wish
to convict her.

It's just
we always
preserve the clues
even when we do not know
what they mean.

(For a great deal of the later 1970s and early 1980s the figure of Keye Luke, the actor who played Jimmy Chan in the Charlie Chan movies, remained a major icon in my poems. The conceit was that we explored Mars together and mapped its surface. This poem also has many elements taken from Ross MacDonald, the remarkable mystery writer. McDonald's classic story inevitably had a current mystery and a mystery from the deep past that was involved with the main story. I sought this structure in my own life and never quite found it. But I know that it is there.)

hard rain

madonna's shuttered eye
opening with a one line pose
so brief it was eternity
a clear night at the hop
in teenage city—very top 40
she knew inside me
how bad the disease had got
it was post nuclear war
and the radiation was
going to kill us. I begged her
let's make a baby
let's make some love
with the taste of hope in it.
But she said
dear one a come is
just a flickering vision of death
and we are pretty close
already.
we wanted to cry but couldn't.
there were photographs
fluttering like flowers from
the clear night sky—
they were all pictures of us.

The Heart Is Me

the world's so blonde on blonde
in my spacy head, the ice runs rivers
as it changes back to wine and back
to blood. Lots of folks talk about
leaving the valley, tell me I'm static in
the plains but its an oh no never mind
kind of thing. I'm up at dawn here
with a lot of rain headed towards a
runoff to the Big Muddy and Illinois
and Lincoln's ghost and a half a dozen
stories I 'll never get time to write
just make me smile at the crazy
suggestions. It's a sweet world sam
it's so blonde on blonde. It's this room
on Scarritt for a thousand nights
like this. It's a change in the inland sea.
Its rivers and kisses flowing from the heart
and the heart is here, gang.
The heart is me.

cartographer seeks landmark

sketching maps/finding hills and roads
in the verbal bloods/running through the fires
and the rain/in the circuitry of the planet
there's a vein/and there's an artery
and this is the main pump/the felt tip pen
marking a funny valentine/the heart of me
at the headwaters of the mississippi
man on the cross/still loves the legend
in the small box/lower left hand corner
with a few words/in different colors
and wavy highway lines/seen in infrared
through the wrist/where the nail went in
it holds us up/but that's the support
not like a limit/more like a border
see, every map ends/although I do insist
on taping them/all together
gonna hang em on the big wall
inside the cave/just before I roll away
the stone

cardio event

my day is stroboscopic
flecked with photos, phrases, commercials
of desire I remember
holding you and how it always
surprises me
why do you suppose it turns out this way?
the heart is alien to the mind
the heart is amused by these words
its smile is secret, internal
there is nothing I can explain

exit

no way out, just dying,
dying again no
no way out
darling
you know that much
about me
another century
another envelope of flesh
another telephone conversation
ended with
'later'

no way out

Compass

you give me needles, darling
methods between the stitching of days
sharp memories of certain pains
thin steel rods, conductors of this life

there is one needle
floating in a pool of my blood
in a small stone bowl
it always points to you
I cannot change it
I've tried