Classical Music

I first knew classical music
through cartoons and movies.
When I first heard Wagner's
Flight of the Valkries
sailing naked from the radio,
I could only imagine flying monkeys.
It was the first time I heard
the rattle of the brass and the clatter
of the keys, and from there
the breath of the players
and the whine of their chairs
shifting on the stage.
I could hear it was a made thing.
There was a mind that heard it first
before any instrument rose to meet the mouths.
Why?
He he imagined a fleet of flying monkeys?
I didn't like it then.
I wanted to see
the monkeys fly again
and rip the straw from Scarecrow.
What else could I do with that music,
imagine my own brand new evils,
animated by the lucid, cinematic
effects of the unfocused eye?

Ambition

The sky is blue again.
The clouds are white,
painted with a dry brush.
It's the perfect sky
to put over a circus.
The train cars right there
look like elephants.
I look like the ticket taker
but I'm on break.
These two smokers look
like the barker and the fire breather.
There's a new guy today
and we all tell the same
stories again and laugh
right where we should.

No, the circus doesn't stop here.
Not in this town. It doesn't stop
tomorrow either. Always
not in this town.

Manifesto (April 1st, 2007)

Let the greatest minds be put to this task:
the vilest emissions of the human mind;
the bloodiest tasks ever lodged in the flesh
of the cankered body of human history,
that ever-convalescent ancestor of us all;
all the suffering that ever stopped time for one
beautiful soul and emptied it of humanity
so the pain could replace it all, all
for the love of an idea whose time had come—
let them put it all down in verse.
Forge again the dark manifestos,
hammered with every word set ashine.

Poems have done far too little harm
to be taken at their word by us all.
We need our Jesus with a whip.
Let the best words be as bad as their makers.
Let beauty reap blood from us all.