To be inside a body that’s going to go

is not so bad. A train rushes out of a station

and by the time it’s gone around the bend

that town is a tiny abandoned World of Tomorrow.

Passengers looking out of the train

see the windows of warehouses are the slow in a penny arcade

and they tell time by the clock face of every house.

Steel springs coil inside the trees.

Then the train will pull them down the tracks

they can’t invent fast enough for their need to survive.

His voice is dreamy, saying her name.

Sometimes don’t we talk that way

about the old loves, the lost ones?

Said as if parting had charmed her life:

that Pelican girl,

named like the one if a fairy tale bewitched at dawn,

awakening to a fish-light polish

along her spooning bill and newly hopeful

boat-shaped buoyancy. Later the townsfolk,

whose eyes are idle glimmerings,

will search the waves for her human body

as pelicans plunge and scoop

and her happiness opens out like wingspread

soundlessly over the rooftops

as if it were trying not to wake them.

The street didn't know there was anything wrong

with its shingles, flashings, sockets, anthills,

deferrals, lulls.

I heard the sound slide out of its words.

Not a full-moon question asked of the windows that gorge

on the magnitudes of the stars

but a lifting up of a human voice

that could not lie and could not promise to lift us

out of disrepair

or lift us in our waiting out of what we are waiting for.

I’m sure you won’t believe this,

but if a policeman walks behind me, I tremble:

What would Shaft do? What would Shaft do?

Bits of my courage flake away like dandruff.

I’m sweating even as I tell you this.

I’m not cool.

I keep the real me tucked beneath a wig,

I’m a small American frog.

I grow beautiful as the theatre dims.

When I am fat,

Ladies sipping diet colas will whisper:

Look at him. My God how’d he get so big?

And beneath those questions they’ll think,

I wonder if he still makes love?

I wonder what he looks like naked?

Love me skinny girls,

As you love jenny craig and vegetables,

Love me fat girls,
As you love insecurity and everything filling.

I’ll let you kiss my triple chins,

I’ll let you swim in the warmth of my embrace.

I have a goddamn for every blade

of snow. You’re not even to the road

before it’s clinging to your coat.

Said I wouldn’t write anymore

about matters of the heart,

so I’m writing about the snow –

God’s cryogenic rain; cold trick/le

of repetition falling quietly as ghosts.

Is this what Etheridge meant?

Walls blacker than a throat;

Poet dying at the window;

Flakes / covering your tracks as you go.

A bobwhite sounds through larks

and jays, the wringing-wet shade,

as in the first world, before Adam

understood their sharp iambs,

when the refrain could’ve been

anything’s: plant or animal, or light

so pure it sang. Even now

how absolute, how wondrously

primitive the singularity rings –

shouting its name, its name,

its name… till from elsewhere

an echo swells through April-thick wings

as if addressing some question

on the presence of parallels.

Houses that crackled all day

with the rusty chirp

of hedge clippers,

summer’s chords of sparrows

and edgers, kids

springing on trampolines

now simmer like embers.

Glads and day lilies dream

under a street lamp’s

alabaster glow.

Sometimes a plane glides

loudly through the indigo

till it vanishes

behind the crown of pines,

till it’s again still enough

to consider this universe

of atoms embracing

into flowers and light and rain

for all the Junes that follow.

There’re days when we too

            do as little as fattening

                        among chrysanthemums, when

our lives must seem as mundane,

            and even clothes bind

                        like a chamber of dirt.

Yet, on a whim we can

            surface into the potpourri

                        of wild pink and jasmine

or drift to the singing of orioles –

            the joie de vivre

                        a world above

their tithes of scuffing,

            their blind wanderlust

                        through pebbles and bulbs.

no one wants to admit it but you just

might end up one day in the wrong

place at the wrong time and some

evil shit rains down on you

and maybe you get

crippled or blind

or plain old

dead and

not one soul will give a good goddamn

because they can soothe them-

selves with a wrung out prayer

about wrong places and

wrong times, when

even as they’re

thinking that

they know

that everywhere is the wrong place

and every hour is the wrong hour

and that bad breaks don’t seek

you out; they’re always there

waiting to swing into action

like a traitor limb you

didn’t even know

you had

I was often guilty of library theft. I stole books to save them from the way other people read. What’s said in English appears quite small and can be smuggled out easily. Books with big titles speak of pleasures which crack at the end of a rope. Blind windows in between the shelves. Photos of a mind recalling a word. I learned to slash hours off my reading time by pronouncing words faster than they could pronounce themselves. Faraway and foreign. I sound better when you write me here, instead of when I’m being written there.

When I landed they threw me a blast right there on the field. A coin-fed calypso band, doughnuts, and a guy called Fancy Pants who brought some stunning hashish. But a feeling of horror rose up in my soul. And clouds of darkness compassed me about. I had never flown so far by myself before, and now all the miles came back to me. They blew across my chest and lashed at my face. Without a shield behind which I might lurk, I was a bull’s-eye. So I sat on a chaise lounge and hid my face in the mask my hands made.