It grew increasingly clear over time, despite small victories along the way, that I was coming out a loser. This distressed me because I had always envisaged myself as a winner. If you’re resigned to being a loser, then it’s easier to digest. If you have somehow fooled yourself, or others have fooled you, into believing you’re a winner when the opposite is proving true, life can become a monstrous drag. And what makes it even more of a drag is that even though you’re always entering the fray with the best hand, with the technical or mathematical edge, the underdogs are coming out on top, arms raised, the crowd cheering them on, almost every single time. It leads to despair. But you have to push on. You can’t just hit a restart button. Even jumping from an eighth floor balcony requires some forethought. You have to consider the pain, shattered bones, horrified passing children or seniors, and the trauma to the apartment building itself. And what if by some miracle you survive such a fall. Surely you’d be a drooling vegetable, loathsome to look at, a burden on family and society. If things were fair, and the odds weren’t always being bucked, life may have been different. But you can only play with the toy truck of “what if” for so long before your maturity or sanity comes into question. Let’s go to the balcony and reach back our arm and hurl that toy truck across the street. Let’s also hope that no children or seniors coincide with its trajectory.
Archives for July 2017
At Dusk
Walking at dusk, wild
flowers fry on the gray-green
back of a world half
asleep. The sun sets
fire on car fenders while in
kitchens cutlery
clinks. A show bell rings.
Dogs call out in their yards: Hey
pal, you hear that? Hey
hey, hey. Shaking voice
boxes at the fading day.
Hey hey, hey. Hey hey.
Transformation
Kore is me in the eyes of my dream.
Rivers are my first mirrors
a game of pass-the-rumors to leaves
in the wind, my first telephone––
in this dream, caked in the back
of the skull, speckled cobwebs
are the night sky I watch
my airplanes dance ’round Venus
like a ceremonial feather spinning
circles to a mourning mother’s expectations––
I hear orchids growing from my nails
and rejoice the day the dark man stole me.
From the Porch of Madonna della Salute
—for PD Mallamo
Abuement and abut; she’s mighty. Stretched right over a quarter light year the surface of the event horizon here in our center; shaking our mast.
I send the probes down into it and we watch them shimmer over its surface like small wings, cutting into its damp. Flickering.
“She’s a beauty,” she says, and I say, “Yes.”
Yes she is. For one thousand years we’ve been approaching her and performed all kinds of models, sent in scouts, listened to transmissions, even spoken to a species who has penetrated it, written of it in poetry, sketched in amber and basalt, sung and performed, made movies of it, written under its bough, but still nothing compares to the vision we have of it now, under its doorstep, watching it shake.
We live beneath fifteen miles of metal so it isn’t as though our naked eyes behold it, but this is the closest.
One quarter of one light year—maybe two trillion kilometers—under her cheek.
Suddenly she throws up a storm, and we’ve been seeing them for weeks, months, years, but now we’re right underneath it, facing as Turner the implacable face of Atlantic god, superhuman stunningly on met and sanded geodesics curling out of the starry rainbow mirror of it, cutting into our metal and through the phosphorescent cameras which die and are reborn giving us our visuals:
“Yes.”
She shivers like a woman, this window into galactic center, horizon Pacific, delimited delimitless ocean, our door . . .
White blanks the eye and we move under its ejection, iota spundicular in the gassy eruption; bacterium through geyser; I blink.
“Whee!” she says, and I kiss her.
I shouldn’t have done it, but I did it. Our city shouldn’t have come, but we did. More insanity is hard to mention; anything more absurd; anything.
The dimpled mat of a sea god; river god; naiad filled with a righteous anger, unreachable, erotic, and mighty:
She wavers and then I see a probe re-emerge from her, Orpheus out from Hades, and though it is destroyed we get a burst of data and our physicists cheer, weeping, looking over the parabolics for the right equation to mark our entry point.
Holding on to the lyre.
Exit Music: Microcosm
This country/ it’s the little things
This planet/ the street you grew up on
This moment may be/ your most recent lover’s choice of soap
A haunted house/ if you look close enough
But I’ve got my own/ their stage-whispering obsolescence
Rickety mansion full of ghosts/ it’s circling a black hole
And the living/ I am a black hole circling
I keep it in my jacket pocket/ like a music box
Sometimes I peer in there/ oh my snowglobe
Watch the little haunted people/ turn the key for a song
Burning the furniture for warmth
And making flutes/ a bigger black hole
Out of one another’s
Tiny bones
[We grow away from strangers]
We grow away from strangers
remain unsolved
by a bramble-shadowed stream
grey rock turning black in a sudden field of snow
your distance I wonder at
tightens the loveliness
reaches in
to lead us out
Words that Glide Past Cryptid Hunters
When records open to eclectic simulacra,
Spinning like Disney’s hippos in tutus,
They prove, again, business’ isotopy.
Poor craftsmanship’s happenstances,
Offering no signs of fiduciary rendition,
Cough or hack vis-a-vis virtual reality.
The illumination of the actual orients generative
Grammar, remains the stuff of speculative fiction,
Gives over ideological pablum in horrific doses.
Accordingly, the offspring of self-fulfilling critics,
Signify that certain observed objects produce
Alternative paradigmatic events, also plum jelly.
Metaphysics-oriented tackle, needing existential
Importance (and access to fine bibelots) rots since
Opinion relies on perspective, bribes, good teeth.
Before we delight in empowered organizations,
Clarify hypotheses on earth worms, maybe caviar
Should support theories that generate royalties.
Soundtrack
In the space between hearing and listening I’m stuck. Imperfect soundproofing hands me half an earful of narrative straight from another kitchen sink. I should listen away. Can’t. Sleety sound effects, trickles of dialogues seep out, soak in my low-quality socks. Downstairs as downstairs neighbors are supposed to be, they lift the lid of their domestic music box, lift it with the very tips of their voices. Humming thrumming drumming. I make out few of their words, high volume helps, & ■■■■ is an easy one. The others wade beyond recognition, end up moving like shadow puppets made with mittens on. Their mouths are not the only ones talking. Their TV set has a loud flush. Their chair legs sharpen their claws on the tiles. Their cigarettes hiss by the window. Huffing puffing. Their trained bed comments upon whatever love they are making. Their doors slam themselves to sleep. Their arguments run in red high heels. Babbling. Their baby girl must question the ceiling every time my pile of books tumbles to the floor.
Dutch Tilt
Dreamed I was in the back seat of a car with Robert Downey, Jr., a big black Packard like in a James M. Cain story. We’re making a movie, we’re making out; we’re being filmed through the side window by two guys crouched behind an old-fashioned camera shaped like Mickey Mouse ears. Robert wears a white shirt. He bends over me as I fall back against the vast upholstery. There is a driver, black suit and skinny tie, half turned in his seat. He gestures, and we look behind us, and framed in the back window is the top half of a huge rising moon, craters visible on its surface, moonlight shining in so that Robert’s white shirt glows and glows, the light nearly shattering the blue glass of my eyes.
The Red Disk
—for Joan Miro
one does not
blanch
a river’s
milk in
a trench
