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.

A Desire

As a long-lived animal who has seen more snows
than any of the creatures whose small footprints
stitch the ground down into a drunken white quilt
and make meetings that lie to time itself---
I'm certain to make more than love
out of spring.
I've seen thirty springs and made
love and child but my mind is made
to want more than memories,
more than more-to-remember.
It wants to be the recurring dream
of another dreamer.
The mind wants so much more than the body.
The desires of the body are in the world.

Six Recent Poems (two of them about tattoos) with a reading of one.

Doplar Effect

The blue star on your lumbar vertebrae
moved toward me when you turned around.
Did I lean toward you at near-light speed?
Or did you fall back at impossible velocities?

They say your spine remembers the sudden motions.
The mindless dive to the dirt that saves your life
is chambered in the spine ready to fire.
It takes time for youth to pool up deep enough to drip.

When the madness comes, it comes blue and truthful.
It comes dark enough to stain the skin.
As it goes, as you move away, it fades....
The past is vanishing, rapid, mad, and red.

**********

Valentine for the Hands

In a photograph of a woman's
hands
a man's
mind is free
to feel his whole body
through her.

And how close
to his own flesh could
even a solitary
man be
if not for the
imaginary
hands of a woman
ripening his body
a moment before
her astonishingly real
hands come down on him?

**********

A Poem on Two Spiral Tattoos

This is why the spiral should be on the body:

we can think of ourselves alive a century from now,
getting up from bed another day and going on
as always, in the near-cyclical way we go on.
But we know we won't. We might as well end there
as anywhere. It's just as easy to imagine
all space filled with the one winding arm
as it is to carry two on your body, one on each shoulder,
fetal and unattached, without any meaning coiled inside.

**********

Found Poems

This is one.
They're all over.
And surely someone
has picked one up off the back
of a toilet, or an un-bussed table
and read it--
and it was perfect;
they kept it forever or always
remembered it.

This poem's for you.
Keep it as a little shelf
for the one you're waiting for,
the one that could only
have been written
because you exist.

**********

Valentine for an Ill Friend

How often love and death call each other!
They must be lonely sisters.

You've been rushing from one the other, friend.

I've heard there's a place just over there
where neither one visits very often.

I don't know if that's right. But I'm keeping it in mind.

**********

After Listening to Tom Waits’s Orphans

Fifty-four new songs in my head,
and a little piece of each one is playing,
running a little strip of tape over the tiny
head of the hammer-bone in my ear.
Some have curled into little loops
linked at their ends by a single drum-thump.
It’s an audible confetti in my head.
Still I sing them under my breath.
I roll them out into full songs,
patched and glued with my own words



One is a gun in my sock. One
is a bracelet made of bullets, but
the bullets are too small.
When you pull the trigger,
they just rattle tambourine-like
inside the cylinder.



I sang some “beggars and their papers”
right into a song that once had none.
They came from me rustling their pages
and shuffling their shoes into a song
with no benches and a sky ready to rain.



A song makes the most of me when it’s shout
bounces off the broken faces
of my brain and makes a new music
in the heavy air of my throat.
Now, listening to Tom Waits again,
my songs come apart at the patches.
All my little characters swipe the dust
off their jeans and look for something to do.