How to Capture a Firefly

for Ms. Sidney Rosenthal

The box must be built
three degrees of separation
around your target,

to whom your assistant
will speak of panopticon
and games. Go then

to that place
of the afflicted and damned.
His home will be there:

he holds hands
with those you loathe
(Was that you, straight-maned Aspasia,

camera at the ready,
when the shadow people
flitted past your subject?

Did you see them as he traced the names
of flowers his mother grew,
near your vast map with its

keyhole-shaped route
outlined in the window
of the still-gutted

office beneath the parking garage?)
Three years later
some tape remains

tacking a scrap of paper
to the glass, the only trace
left at Golden Gate and Larkin.

Now let him leave
your cupped hand
to dart about and shine that goddess light

throughout the inside
of a hollow marble bust
of Eros. Be advised

he remembers well the ride you took him on,
and could to this day remind you
what the two of you talked about.

You may just want to button him up
and never let him out.

The Marine Colonel

Shall we divide Canaan
or are we Alexander
in India, swallowed
whole by a sea of humanity?

It subsists in humid
forests, dwells there
without a thought
for our Macedonian might.

Do we slash and burn
or sink as in a sand pit?
A courtesan of the old king
spit a wrapped crack rock

At my feet when I turned
to greet her pusherman ass
at the entrance to our camp
on Leavenworth and Turk.

Fearing the Reaper

The poison arrow

pierced the veil

one too many times.

The hyenas take

you now, young man.

Will you sit and cry?

What will you? Oh,

What will you do?

Run your brain dry

While their cruel

laughter, laughter, laughter

Echoes morning, noon and night?

The Sky Today

October daylight
flows through me
a crisp meltwater
stream peppered
with leaves, brown,
orange, red and green.
The word is woman:
power transparent.
Bent mountains
dissolve under her
through eons.

Delusions of Insignificance

A gift recoiled from:
the ears of the curious
set to the door
at just the wrong time.

When my feral side
gives them a what-for,
they repeat an ancient
hatred of me.

I am garbage, trash
to my denialist audience,
who entertains itself
thinking I think to know what's in store.

Gets Kicked Only When Down

Is it all you thought it would be?
All you dreamed of?
The spider queen sits
fanning herself
in her papa-san throne
bamboo, a web of silk.
"There is nothing else here --
why do you look?"
I said you said I had to lose something.
Perhaps my self-deception
cast out of its nook.
Drop the act and be free.
See how long this took?

Game Run To Ground

Samsara to Hell
with Virgil I fell
and talked with a man
upturned headfirst in shit.
He gurgled a reply
when I asked him why
but I ignored it
to ponder my own sins instead.
Enemy in the mirror
he is jealous of you.
For three years
he marveled at what you do to you.
When at last he failed
to match your skill
he picked up a gun
and said, "Fine
I'll just kill you
and see how it's done."
Snakes in the grass
should not seek one out;
when they do,
they mimic a human shout.

Animal Sinlessness

Costume changes and consequences --
I am saved by my enemy's
lies he tells himself of me.
I correct them compulsively:
murder versus suicide,
the Ides of March
have thunder thighs
and never stop heralding
their approach.
The man-size cockroach
my charge swore
leapt out at us
hissed to disappear
behind a Cheshire grin.
Gunfire and the din
of inexpert punishment:
Am I the final teacher of insults?
The only adult
in a room filled with children?
Anguish and pain
as delectation.
Is hope writhing
in the bottom of a box
the sociopath stores his masks in?
Pandora snaps it shut and swoons --
I've yet to see a man on the moon
and too soon knew the lash
interstellar travelers in a flash
wielded; they stopped short
when this white trash done sung his tune.
How many died upon being told
that help is on the way?
"No pun intended,"
sneered the man
who put those victims
where he should have been.

Obon

It's festival day: paper
lanterns strung above
the hall. Names
are recited, children
fidget in the pews.
Oshoko, incense
and candles for those passed
on into the Pure Land.
In the kitchen, starched
ladies in madras
aprons ladle somen
into bowls.
The altar gleams with gold.
Sandalwood wafts through
the dojo as an old man
clasps his hands --
gassho. He bends
his shining bald head in prayer.

Tenderloin #4

Perhaps it's a point of pride:
the ability to look another in the eye
and say, "I am who I am,
no more and no less."

What goes before the fall?
The know-it-all boy
in t-shirt and scarf
sings a song on the brick

Pavement of the sidewalk.
A choral response from a playground
rings out through the town.
He flashes the devil's horns

And thinks, "Rock and roll."
The King in his own head
knows he rules this life
with neither scepter nor crown.

Of Songs and Sirens

Existence screams out,
the void which is not.
An echo, to silence, replies,
"You are wrong."
He totally denies
his removal from God
and says he is closer to Him.
Awareness is more grand
than the twisted place
between one and zero.
Are there infinite riches
or tombstones for muses?
A boy crowned with stag's horns
may be tamed with psychic machines --
a cylindrical brass helmet donned
pieces him back together again.
He descends into singularity.
A tiny pinprick, a splinter
of light, to flash once,
then disappear eternally.

Alzabo Suppertime

They came by ones and twos and threes
to feed on the brains of a family:
a chunk out of Grandma,
a nibble on Timmy.
The whole household will speak gorgeously;
little fragments of Mom's voice
emanate from razor-toothed mouths
set in great big shaggy white heads
that whirl with fragments of souls with no choice.
Fodder for beasts, they bled.
The ursine aliens' eyes glowed red.

The Sacrifice

Dive headlong into magma-red rage.
Rock gently; a fat Jew body
floats in the Dead Sea,
big as a house, in black
knickers, black brassiere,
spitting fire as she goes.
Oh Bubbe, steal my dream
as Marines phase back
into alignment.
Rip me to shreds
with bullets for stray
thoughts I've entertained.

Plastic Rosebud

"Take your punishment."
I am punished for wearing
my punishment too well,
the flogging scars blended
under buttercream layers
of Jezebel foundation.
I bear up under the years,
and the casual and too quick
see damage yet to be wrought,
merely because I thought
good might happen for good done --
inconsequentiality
laughable to the silent ones
whose eyes gleam,
red berries in the sharp holly.
To incur anger
for contending that those
whom we call simple
may be the wisest of all!
I am well, and that does not sit well.
I am superfluous, a vegetable
in a garden among many --
a mirage to those
in an unceasing search
for fresh blood,
for the meat that steams
in Spring morning air.
They mentioned seeing something there,
then shook themselves from me.
Imagine, if it consoles,
my branches laden with frost
lacquer and diamond shards
killing my blossoms and buds --
the beauty in extremis
may gall, but is it not enough
that this year, too, may prove barren?
Leave me still then,
among the others.
I will shatter with them
when the storm comes,
and leave to our tormentors
a world of splinters and scoured air.

Rosemary Encircles the Virgin

There is a heart.
The flames around it grow higher
and hotter with each word heard.
The girl says to the boy,
"Give me back that one."
As he says, "No pun
intended; there is no point,"
his hands blister
and burn. He turns
to her and she takes it
(she is unscathed) to the rosebed
where it belongs.

1898

Eunice Nethercutt was once a man
with forearms hard as oak paddles.

She lugged boulders rough as sand
from Colusa through the delta. On saddle

she could out ride any savage brave.
At the mouth of the cerulean Bay she baffled

Chan, who sold coolies. By Sutro cave
she freed thirty Chinese in armed battle.

Eunice Nethercutt once was a man
'til she met a dude who ran cattle.

Phantom of the Opera

Drape me, then, in black tulle.
It will trail at my bare feet.
Nothing underneath
but eye make-up
and gold teeth.
Parade me down Eddy Street
so I, dressed like André Leon Talley,
may finally meet,
the ghostly shapes
who speak yet refuse
to be spoken to.

Television

I

I bow and scrape
and bear a cock-eyed smile,
my saffron robes
and shaved head
as false as my prayers.
I slip behind you
and knife you from within.

II

A Spanish telenovela
in lurid color:
the tangerine walls wobble
as you slam the white-trimmed door.
I clutch at my decolletage
and turn my rodeo clown face
to see who's popped in.

III

"You owe who money?"
I take a drag from my cigarette
and back my high-gloss ass
out of the room. I close
the glass double-doors in front of me,
then run like Hell.
I'm not the only one.

The Thought Police

The cheering crowds,
my Mussolini grin--
the verdict is in:
guilty as charged.

Some dude's big O
is the gaping hole
in my brain --
in pour large

plastic bags of sin,
black and pungent as shit.
I am filled with bullets --
traumatic intercourse,

Fed and bred like a Folsom
piggy. I smile sweet
as any pink pansy,
a game laugh in the wings.

The psychic dumptruck
driven by stoners, sits idling
as I spring from a compost pile
and sing a song of love.

The Disillusionist

At thirty-three he was too old
to wear but shirt, tie and slacks
and, on Fridays, jeans.

He would sit prim
on his nun's twin bed
and call, "Bullshit shenanigans."

Burning cigarette in hand,
he broke the mold on his head
and took the men out to lunch by 10.

"Why do you always ruin our fun?"
exclaimed celebrity-voiced bugs.
His reply was silence and a smile.

What the Voices Gave Me #7

"This psychosis has the most," offered the shopkeeper of the mind.
Although tradition tells me it is Hell that bedevils me,
is there not a yet larger pattern encompassing
the men threading punchcards through my head?

It was not Charles Babbage who said, "We are parasites
on your brain," but a well-meaning onlooker
tasked first with killing me, then with piecing
me back together again. I merely suggested

Lemonade from lemons -- symbiosis from parasitism --
what orchids adorn my trunk? White and red, a unique
array of spots on each frill-bearded face
bereft of repetitive slogans, awed into silence

By the greater beauty around them. Bacterium
in the gut of a creaking old man -- the colony began
when Edison first flickered into incandescence.
Who knew his birthday was the same as Saddam Hussein's?

A normally restrained warrior, assigned
to the thankless detail of monitoring me
broke into song, like a friend -- I, whom Satan
spit back up again and again and again.

Burnout

"All right, kids, let's hop on the e-ride."
And I bend and groan like a brontosaur.
I'm burnt out, for real, for sure.
No more okama Scheherezade,
twirling my veils
and spinning tales
with my Absalom-smokey
glass bubble pipe.
No more gaslighting, guys,
no more voices,
no more twists and turns.
No more hot potato talks.
It's time to go kids.
With not one more silhouette
will I shadow-box.

Auf wiedersehen, adieu.
Au revoir, Pee Wee.
Adieu to you and you.

Gynecologist's Lament

Now both feet up in the stirrups, girl.
With your index and middle fingers
spread that rusty cooter.
I'm gonna spray it out,
make it fresh and tidy
and -- Whoa! Girl, whatchugot
we call a maneater.
Oo-ee, a period piece
from Tupenny Lane --
Hamburger Helper!
My bloody Valentine
looking like chopped watermelon.
Put her meat curtains
on a respirator, stat!
Oh Lordy help her!
Is her rosebud rough or what?
I damn near cut myself on that wart there.
Oh heaven help me!
Wouldn't be surprised
if vagina dentata were next.

Epitaph

A prim remembrance,
unspoken on arid summer winds,
etched on a brown sandstone boulder
a child's two hands could bear:

"He wrote in water."

A memory alive only
on the kind lips of those who forgive,
and unknown to those
who were strangers.

Canto et Respondu

Many tried to figure me out
so that they might ride me.
I shall be as the Sphinx
my back rough granite
under your feet,
my head turned
from your hectoring voice.
I do not deign to meet
your gaze.

It's my prerogative to contradict
myself in my stony head.
The game is not in my bed:
it plays itself out
under my derisive nose
as the Sun sets red and indifferent
to the West,
where dunes of tan African sand
kick up and set haze

On the horizon.
You stamp and wheedle.
I will not budge.
Throw your hypodermic
needle to the pile
of scree you climbed
up to get here.
You will not nudge
me from the eternity which teaches me.

Ooh Snap!

Helen of Troy was ugly as sin,
with a face that launched 1,000 ships
away from her.

Survivor of the Pious Lie

Jester or king?
I would be fool
ether way --

"Hierodule, assume
the position." Wrists
crossed over my head,

My chains are gold,
lustrous under
sodium lights.

The wet pavement
glitters in the night.
I am sold

For six pence,
my former owner
none the richer.

Caveat emptor:
I hold tooth
and claw

In clenched, blooded
fist. When I fall
I will not remember this.

My most frequent
prayers express
gratitude without sound.

But sometimes I beg
that all those lost
may yet be found.

Outside the Gates of the Tower of Babel

Prometheus Burns
flies by the gibbet:
Ravens hop in the cage.

One pecks his eye.
The next caws a reply
to a word he never said.

And when offended,
Mister Burns's skeletal remains
click a witticism

From a chip clipped
to his rotting brain.
The words all gone, he's naught but rags and chains.

Elevator

Alone, I press my cheek
to the wall's
brushed steel.

Is the cool, smooth expanse
now? Is it real?
I may be comatose

3,000 miles away --
Maryland or Virginia,
some strange state. I hope

Not, but wish to keep on
stringing this silver thread
the dead may follow home.

Take them, please,
and forgive these men:
I have seen

The white hot glare:
the furnaces of their souls.
They were cold

In their words to me,
but I can bear worse.
Boys will be boys --

Puppy dog tails and dark eyes
that glitter like ice.
I remember to you, oh God, the evil

on which they broke
attempts always to break me,
but finds me tempered instead.

And have they not loved,
and been loved? Your loving eyes
beheld the children to whom they read.

I pray you warm their beds
and receive them.
Thank you for their strength. Amen.

What The Voices Gave Me #6

She said I'd limited myself
to picking up the pieces.

But what shards! Cobalt
blue, iridescent and bold

Yellows that shone
from miles away in a boulder-

strewn desert hot with shame.
We do not apportion blame;

it does not solve
a problem unsolveable.

These little fragments
chipped off lives

from which to make new lives.
Mosaics cemented

on your mother's brick
patio, somewhere in a Texas

now jarring and alien
to you -- you, accustomed to

modest olive women in chador.
These girls back in the world

are brassy and loud.
They make you blush.

So I, your little faggot sidekick,
will show you something crafty:

a pattern guided by Allah, quietly
made of brilliant splinters in a shaded garden.

Our secrets will be ours,
between us and the heaven that awaits.

1999

We slow-danced at the Giraffe
on gleaming parquet floors
under gold-white chandeliers.
Captain and Tenille by the pool table
"Do that to me one more time"
before we hit the liquor store.

Amador

Essence of snow,
its cold ghost:
an endless rush
of vast whispers
tells the pines what we know.

Nettles and cones
black and damp underneath:
guilt for the wounds
a foe incurred
breaking himself on me.

A memory: blood and shit,
the liver and guts
of a two-point buck
steaming in a bucket
in a garage that sheltered my youth.

I have heard of a land
so thirsty, so hot with jealousy
the dead -- so many --
became husks of corn,
broken by men whose orders

Will never stop breaking them.
Silence reigns where they weigh
a man they don't know --
he speaks to them
past the chatter of crowds who hide him.

Angel of Death

"You warn people who are about to die!"
he told me as though I were an idiot.
I may be, bald and issuing a silent scream
across a Nerdrum bleakscape, a cape
of mangy fur draped over my exposed shoulder.

I gloat, however, too much to be that slave
who sat behind the General in his chariot
and issued mortal warnings to humility.
It is sin to take joy in puncturing another's hubris.
Yet it is folly not to find satisfaction in life's work...

Dr. Smith's Little Prick

Oh, the pain, the pain! I do exclaim. I punctured my pinky on a thorn from a carniverous space tree. No, you nincompoop, you ninny robot I do not want your ghastly probes among my innards, the way that cabana boy's was at the Gold Coast. Oh, he and young Tony Perkins in Silverlake. Oh, the pain, the marvelous pain!

How my back ails me. Oh William, my boy, dear boy thank you. How I needed this gin. Oh, ack, too much vermouth. Don't "sorry, Dr. Smith me." You! You would last minutes as Merv Griffin's houseboy. Penny, my dear, be a lamb and fetch a fan. This heat is dreadful and has dropped me into the darkest doldrums. Oh, my back, my poor aching back!

Carillon Tower Murder

Looming white in the blue January rain, it is so "Buck Rogers," bound by rounded rectangular arches and odd gutter streaks like blaster scorches. I am Colonel Wilma Deering, reporting for duty, in a skin-tight satin flightsuit and helmet fit for Esther Williams. I stand on the round retro balcony. We attend the after-party. I slink in gold lamé Halston, one sleeve and a hole in the side to flaunt my belly chain, my henna hair ironed. He grips my shoulders with tan, Courvoisier-ad hands, and turns me. My flute spills a sparkling rose trickle; it tumbles through the railing... He kisses me full on the mouth and pushes. My eyes return to the wet pavement; it rushes upward. These bags are heavy, my fingers numb.

Subway

Plaintive notes from a two-stringed
Chinese violin wend their way
through box-like corridors underground.
A well-dressed man views his reflection
in polished blue tiles. The clang
and clamor of a crowd rise upwards.

Cyclopean

It is true I have tunnel vision. I see what I can be expected to see. An old man, I have one eye blue; one is gray. One is for the ridiculous, one for the sublime. Appalling brown-streaked skies take me, and the land, wreathed in smoke, writhes miles beneath my feet.

Cigarette Bitch in an Ashtray

Cut to commercial
cut him in half.
This laser beam
should lose his legs,
wheat from chaff.
Men throng the streets
of San Francisco
and clamor for blood.
They will beat
his torso with a ton
of bricks -- their
only way to fix
a break with reality.
The evil Doctor E
and his piebald following
of the sober and coldly crazy
miss several beats
on their arrhythmic, unmelodic tour
of the lower forty-eight --
maybe they meant to,
maybe they didn't.

Equestrian

They shoot horses, don't they? Yes,
a lot -- not so much for broken legs
as when they backtalk. Trash bags
ride Mister Ed, who floats like a mote --
Brownian drift, then through a wormhole
and out the other side

To the jeers of average Joes.
"By the by," et cetera from heads
on a talk show. It's way worse than you know.
This sour nag pissed off plenty
with that razor blade on her tongue.
As for the anonymous "them":

Inapposite others with buttons to press;
they scattered her awareness
as a price for failing to focus
on her own reflection, which they tried
in vain to give. Their stabs
sprayed snow off the car hood.

Like A Gold Thread In A Western Shirt

I stink like horse dung
and muddy geraniums.
I love that stench,
to smell like a man
arms bronze, back tan
sweat on sweet salt
rivulets trickling
down past shoulder blade
where an interplay
of muscles tense and twitch.

You Said It, I Didn't!

Do they sit, patly made up
in a cable access studio
under a popcorn ceiling,
a perforated cubicle wall behind?

Or are they in a bunker,
headset clapped to a sergeant's
Cindy-your-time-life-operator head:
"Sir, look at these response times"?

Or are they, hands on lap, instead arrayed
around a carved oak table,
bowing heads and whispering past
candles and fog machines --

A seance, perhaps? Or do I hear players
informally dressed and reading
from a script or ad-lib
in a room soundproofed and black?

What The Voices Gave Me #5

So said Crazy Horse
as he stopped mid-Market
to found a gentlemen's club:
"My confession booth has
a hole in it, and a video
monitor which takes dollars."
Good Catholic girls
turned bad, running from Dad
the cop, applied eyeliner
and danced in red light.
The Indians were killed long ago.
Careful, Six Pence:
don't move a muscle
we are refining your soul
don't you know, winnowing
out what ought not be there --
the better to render it up
to heaven. Everyone else
thinks us angels
(naturally, that's everyone
in our circle, not yours.)
I see sparkles
that don't belong --
Fragments of glass
no doubt. We want
them out. (Our
wants outweigh
your need; our whims,
your life.)

Windmill Trail

What a balm to tread green grass.
The fresh-cut smell banishes winter,
though you can tell (barely, these days)
what month we're in: the hollyhocks
are as tall as a teen girl; they sway
awkwardly, waving elephantine leaves.
The sea recedes but no one heeds
tsunami warnings. Sun glints off the sand.
Let's take refuge here beneath palm ferns
and count their spores. "I've always
hated lawns," you whisper...

My Thermopylae

In the near future
my battalion of stormtroopers
bearing lasers
will dwindle
to 300 men
in wool chitons,
swords upthrust,
some grumbling
out the sides
of their mouths at me.
One will bear
me as a shield
to receive
in the belly
the bronze speartip
of our shared enemy.
My body may be one of many
blocking that pass,
that breach
to the Persian camp.
If so, may I tumble
out the other side,
knocked on the head
like Rahab
dizzy hooker
to tip off a guy
for a cigarette.

Ritual Sacrifice

Am I too late
to immolate me?
The pyre's stacked
wood and packed crates
by townspeople --
men and women and children.
It is topped by a chair
and sits on the parking lot
at Turk and Taylor,
behind barbed wire-topped
cyclone fencing.
Right inside the yellow lines
on black asphalt:
empty space
soon to be filled
not with cars and Jeeps
but people on foot
Filipino and white and hobo and dyke --
all those I love,
laugh with, and jeer --
peering up at my tear-stained
face as I sit tied
and burn with blue flame
from within.

What The Voices Gave Me #3

"We just made a mistake, that's all."
Folks, this is no rascally rabbit.
You've boxed Holly Golightly
"Breakfast at Tiffany's II:
Out To Lunch."
This time it's personal; the trapeze
artist arcs up over the safety net --
life support celebrated
by a wickedly delicious, red-lipped nurse,
inebriated and desperate to get back.
She shall with red-lacquered claws
rip out my red, red heart
and step on it
with attitude and gratitude
for after all without that
how could she define herself?
Now I've got mine,
the Universe in a clear
baggie in my pocket.
Let's watch the wall's fall
It's time that I was humbled.

Saturday Morning Confessional

Littlest blooms exude
the strongest scent.
Fine lavender takes hours to pick.

For a dollar I bought
a zipper-topped,
Sanskrit-printed tote bag
featuring matchboxes.
I told the hungover blonde
party girl hosting the yard sale,
"In celebration of my becoming
a bag lady -- in ten years
I'll push a shopping cart."
She laughed cigarette smoke.

More like one, though,
and only if I survive...

But I didn't want to depress her.

Deja Vu

Once more through the hopper we go,
to pilot spaceships through sulphur snow
and cavort with elephantine, red-eyed
grubs who wave thin black tentacles

As we go home by way of the quantum
indeterminacy box. I was farmed for this stuff!
Soon, soon, the laser beams, criss-crossed,
will grid through and chop me to bits...

Oh, look! Is this a chunk of knuckle
from a previous excursion? He said
he'd packed my body seventeen times in ice --
usually a bullet is how he would murder me.

Woe Is Me

You emptied my nest.
My marbles all rolled
into the street --

Small and large,
shot through with green,
cobalt blue,

Cat's-eye gold --
one for Grandma
down the hall,

One for Archie Bunker's
skeet collection,
another for the neat freak

Tweaker in 214
whose big plastic scoop
will collect them all in the nuthatch.

Scratching Post

"You can do this shit with your brain?"
A few cry. "That's about all
he can do," intones the Thunderbird
marionette socialite
with cocktail and mink coat.
"That's what he thinks,"
she snorts.

I must demur -- "I am
admittedly talentless. I can twirl
my nipples but cannot move
from where I'm rooted on the floor.
Both feet are nailed there;
the only chore I can perform
is as a lawn jockey --
furniture for you."

To The Evil Genius, Doctor E

I think before we allow you
to collapse the phenomenal universe,
we'll flatten and vacuum-pack you
to a thinness below the Plank Constant,
an eternity airless yet aware
in a nil-box designed by God
your hell the size of a quark
zipping from lead wall to lead wall.
Searing plasma in a magnetic bottle
is how we'll open you every Fall,
ripping helix from helix
in each strand of your DNA --
we'll piece you back together again
and promptly let you fade.

Responsible People

Stormtroopers catcall "faggot"
from down the hall. They are resplendent
in their white epoxy, black joints
and angular helmets. They sing
their thoughts through my door,
and style themselves the Blood of God,
stoning us on the street
for fucking other men on two feet.
Or they kill an addict set up
by a Southern belle character assassin
as the one who screwed her son.
She jockeys her SUV
from soccer practice
to Munchausen-by-proxy.
Time for a beheading!
This one showed some ankle;
That one, a stray hair.
This one sleeps in infected bedding,
and that one just sits and stares.

Fellatio

Sitting like a bull in the heather,
warm wine and Vetiver
scent the thick brown locks
of his hair. Hot damp breath
on my thigh--
his wide green eyes
stare into mine.

Rum and Cigar Smoke

Much love to Rhodessa Jones.
I felt I'd rolled up
in an orange jumpsuit
out of an upturned laundry hamper
and into my faceless enemy
(who must exist
because I can hear him.)
Take a bow, Mr. Way
before the storyteller,
her bust in a glass box,
an army of tale-weavers
set on her brow.
Personal summer, power surge
a throaty sistah growl
"I've come for your chickens!
I've come for your hogs!"
she hollered and danced
with her shadow women
and for a night
exorcised my demons.

What The Voices Gave Me #1

"You may yet become somebody."
Picture Ginsberg or Ferlenghetti
reading at City Lights.
You'll marry an heir,
sport an harem of guys.
In an opulent mansion
in Pacific Heights,
men will fan your face
feed you the greenest, sweetest grapes.
You'll be a white male Martha Wash
You'll wear embroidered velour capes --
not die unknown and unloved
a solitary, mud-encrusted glove
crumpled in the gutter.

Butane Tears

Lucifer admits his sin
and hams it up, playing God
with a thunderous, overcast sky backdrop,
bellowing with a wink and a nod.
I still wonder why I am here --
track marks my price of admission?
A little thing, all admit.
But the perils of Pauline
are a tedious routine
and I no longer wish to skip
from lumber mill to quicksand pit.
He heckles me from the sidelines,
his harpies chiming in beside him,
but at least none of my neighbors
scowl at me and spit.

Dashiell Hammett Lane

I saw through the eyes of a beast
and his rider seemed cruel to me.

The beast tripped to his knee
on a broken sidewalk. His hand shone

dark red, blood on the palm.
I awoke to voices in a nursery.

Alamo Square At Pierce

The pothole makes a lake bed
oval in the gray pavement.
It's filled with brown, dried
bits of pine needles
and islands of bark and eucalyptus seeds.

Mist thickens to the West,
a dishwater-logged cotton batting
draped over the canopy
(dark green, the hunter's hue.)
The white sun sings yellow

and blows sand off the hilltop.
Four poplars in a row to my left
susurrate, but keep their secrets from me.

Nefarious Characters at 5:00 AM

"Whatchu doin?" he asks,
punctuating his boldness
with a cigarette drag.
Is it effrontery?
It is a free country --
he may ask, I may not answer.
Is he casing me, an assessment,
or does he like what he sees?
He is dark and pitted
his gravelly voice
sure of possession.
"Snipe hunting," I reply
and move on.
So does he,
tossing me to the fog
of morning, a discarded
wrapping or scrap
he for a moment thought a dollar.
That takes care of that.

Global Positron Emission Scan

Envision it this way: our consensual psychic hubbub
as a flare-like constellation of neurons firing -- each cell,
a human mind; every second spread across days.

The crackle of wildfire, a glowing haze on Gaia's neocortex,
she herself a paramecium dwarfed by a desert
of astronomical proportions devoid of life. "We are billions

Of kilometers away," they say, but they
are fellow humans, and we know their fondness
for hyperbole -- it mirrors our own. Some still

Insist a man pick a side, but God put you on one,
and made you smart enough to know, shadow
or light, we are not in a fight; but all of us

Together form a fluctuating whole. Planet-wide musings
and moods find finger-holds among a myriad parallel
universes -- tendrils, strange dendrites, locking and unlocking

Around instances of time. Arcane plans find root in bizarre cruelties.
"I really want you to take a bullet," demand some from childhoods
sweet, fat and happy -- themselves unscarred. But I digress...

Faith is not misplaced: He corrects the errors our free will incurs
and has put in place his contingencies -- I bear
the burdens I can and you bear yours.

And at times we share: voices carry and dreams intersect
among continua elucidated by Planck, the Mandelbrot richness
of meta lives comprehensible in relation to Newtonian absolute space.

I will bring up the rear and my dearly won terabytes will form
an incandescent white spray of quantum code --
an informational geyser falling back into many

Reservoirs of thought. When you receive of it your parts
otherwhere and elsewhen, chances are I will by then be dead.
Forgive me my failures, and let my smiles be as embers from a
Cro-Magnon hearth.

In The End

And when they come:
pod people to carry me off
and tear me up,
then all walk away, one by one,
sweet nepenthe-like
as though they'd never met,
confused, unable to get
why they'd gathered to begin with.
Just my luck:
probably not.
Ockham's razor
severed the hydra
at the trunk --
that's me in a box:
Venus de Milo
toothless, eyeless, dumb,
my limbs now stumps --
nothing but a brain
to regurgitate
its memories down to every crumb
of information and chew them like cud
until true silence comes.

Weird Science

"Chips, dips chains and whips." I'm no Kelly LeBrock of the pillowy lips. The eyes that peer from behind mine -- is there a line queued at the psychic machine which shoehorns in another's mind to feel what I feel through my skin? I am a panel rattling loose from a human Arecibo dish: an array of brains networked to link with the Ophiuchi Hotline. In the shower, under hot water I itch where wings should be and bitch at the consequences of failing Kuan Yin and Francis of Assissi.

Monsters En Route

Unclear what path I took
otherwhere and elsewhen --
today I walked Sixteenth

North of Mission and beyond.
All the while I failed
to see it. Until I die

I will remember the sky
was that precise blue and none other --
a faint smear of cloud

above the ornate cream
stucco edifice
of the basilica.

Father Serra's Indian slaves
may sometimes have made do
with the miner's lettuce

Such as that I plucked from under
bent and rusted cyclone fencing.
A forager, I ate it and saw

Pogroms -- boxcars stuffed
with Archie Bunker's bêtes noires.
Our future now pushes a shopping cart

From the Martin de Porres kitchen
to Eddy Street. Normally
I am conscious of conversations,

Of the faces who pass me
but today I saw no one,
occupied as I was

By bits of me echoing
through the singularity.
Light another snipe snapped up

From off the sidewalk.
Smoke while pondering a future
when humanity is ruled

By the shadows soon sure to
escape the event horizon.
We will become an ugly thing, then,

Feasting on our afflicted and weakest.
Fell monsters are coming
and I am Cassandra,

Braving fatal gunshots to tell
others who, like me,
were blindfolded

By the men who drive us South
past Devil's Slide
to that dead seaside town called "Perfection."

A Part of My Sum

...Or am I a smear across the eleven dimensions, a parabola described with multi-hued fingerpaint? Certainly I am too slippery to twist; I bend yet do not break. Already I have shattered uncounted times, my pile of dust showing precisely the patterns with which God colored me -- it fell in the exact size and shape He made. What a wonder it does not wash away in the rain -- obdurate as stone despite its transience...

Trannyshack, 2007

When Gilgamesh, resolute and comely,
welcomed the tumbling highball
Heklina let fly at his head,

He knew it was time to go.
"Please, please, no more diseased-hooker jokes,"
he said, "no more penicillin tune-ups.

"Let the hepatitis alphabet song
be sung by Marty Magdalen,
two-bit temple whore,

"Who's seen his share of gin and gore.
Go forth and sin a little more,
and be snappy about it."

The Overly Scrutinized SRO Shuck-&-Jive

Down from room 227
where Mary tut-tutts
hottie-tottie Sandra,
down past where a cockroach
could fuck a platypus flat-footed,

I found the tweak monster there.
He said "Beware!" as a jeweled
lure, his white, top-heavy body
arrayed in wide mirrored eyeballs,
each crowned with a frosty lash.

His stare, his glass pipe,
and a myriad harsh voices
laid me bare, this boy in a box --
profane ritual, an indeterminate
sacrifice on ice.

(It's a well-known fact that
the balancing act of observation
alters the object observed.
Less noted is the change
in the observer.)

See the downward-turned
mouth full of three rows
of sharp teeth, clacking,
"That's what you get."
He hands me my crucifix:

The passion of so-and-so,
bludgeon him with sticks
and crown his brow with thorny Choice.
When he passes by, spit,
and fix him a hit.

Penultimate

Simple as A-B-C,
it's the principle of the thing.
Razor Blade Boy saves the day
and rides a poison arrow straight

To the heart of the matter.
Who would be watching
little old me? And who
would be watching the watchers?

Quantum indeterminacy -- that damn
man in a box again.
Is he full of holes or isn't he?
Is he Archangel Michael on speed?

Or Christopher riding Eyore,
who bucks and spins and when
that morbid jack-ass
looks back he sees

a legion of bed bugs, every one
giving subtle shoves
to nudge him closer
to their reality.

Sucker punch -- the game
is a fix. Another hit
and he might remain
golden or lose a turn again.

"I like this guy. I like this guy."
"I don't like this guy anymore."
Freezer burn or Gillette -- the best
a man can get.

"Cowabunga, shazaam." "Really?"
"Yeah, really."
"Maybe, we'll see."
Great. Now put it all together.

For a day you'll be King
of the covert commandos,
an effigy to twist and burn
and unleash Armageddon.

Boy in a Box

Echoes and reverberations.
Caffeine buzz of pipes,
adrenaline in the radiator.

Threat, promise, epithet.
Help is on the way.
Every choice is yours,

Every choice you make, wrong.
No matter how you slice it
in the end you have to die.

(Silhouettes of souls:
a reminder: "Desperate times call
for desperate measures.")

Tenderloin #2

The stench off Ellis at Hyde:
Rotting onions and shit,
putrid, profane
and sublime.

Banisters glint dark like daggers
oiled yet unwiped.
A Pyrex pipe in a gutter
crunches underfoot.

Peanut Butter Blues

Two crystalline lines greasy
as donut wrapping paper.
A burn in the septum. Steady and a buzz
allowing in "You're a funny guy."
Yeah, I'm a hoot and a holler
down on all fours --
didn't give a bother
for your husband's naughty bits.

God what a bore
to harsh another's high
I'll thumb my nose, let my freak flag fly.
Your skin doesn't fit my bones
and I don't need to hurt
me and the voices could just die:

"Quiet on set and... Rolling!"
"You've destroyed everything I've built,"
said her foil in shrieking horror.
"Everything you've built?
or everything built around you
by others and not of you?"

Rain on a Tin Roof

Persephone in winter
crumples under the weight
of a pomegranate split:
a ruby geode cupped in two hands.

Her hair hangs black in curlers
made of Steel Reserve cans.
A cigarette burns from one red lip.
Patsy Cline pines distantly for her man.

Dignified Responses

A reasonable person
would look and that and say,
"They did that to him?"

"Oh my god! Support yourself,"
remarks from the wall the man
whose female partner

Had just ordered, "Shoot him in the head."
A moveable feast, they'll break
the mould on my noggin

And send in parasites to feast
on my brain. Or am I
a lunchpail? "Eating out

Or dining in?" she asked and I envisioned
a buxom officeress who growls
and places me in a chokehold.

Delusions of Objectivity

Asklepian upturned,
stick and serpent
writhing in Platonic dirt --

The idea of dust:
a cloud of brown
and gray pixels.

Foreshortened polygons
imply boulders.
The air here

is static, clear of passion,
of lust and of hate.
It is unbreathable,

Stale. Fate
is an algorithm devoid
of kindness.

Herr Doktor's notations
he wrote with stabbing motions,
cruelly. Fear

Makes no sense
in this game, but one suspects
oceans of it in the programmer.

Pirate Treasure Map

From sun-bleached McAllister
where agapanthus sprouts purple
globes from jade-leafed settings
nestled among granite blocks
(the only shade under maple trees)
walk seventeen blocks.
Thirty-three paces South, one for each year,
up and down three hillocks,
"X" marks the spot
where God has arrayed
in gutter sludge and plastic fragments
an ant-scaled scape of odd
cigarette butts and crumpled pale
eucalyptus leaves, forming
notations -- a proof
of the unified theory of everything.
If Arthur looked, he'd likely see
the Virgin Mary, with the same face
she made when warning him
of psychic vampires and mafia.
Move quick, for it will shift and change
with a breeze and a few
minutes'
time, and after high fog rolls in;
sunlight will have made
all the difference.

Ruminant Cynosure

Honey, I'm in the middle
of something. You trouble me
for eschewing the thimble
as I thread a button
on a thrift store-bought jacket,
trouble me because the jacket's not worth it.
I assure you, because it came
with the replacement sewn
on the breast pocket tag,
God must want me to fix it.
You scoff at any notion of God,
but I admonish you that I found Him,
on shelves lined with half-burned
candles faced with nuestra señora,
in a tiny plastic dashboard Jesus.
How else could I find peace
with our tacky golden Buddha?
なもきえほう is hardly enough.
God is everywhere -- even where he's not.
I do without the thimble
because I cannot do without
the several pinprick agonies its absence affords,
or the satisfaction of a job half-assedly done.
Black thread, tortoiseshell button,
fine, black and white herringbone cotton,
H&M by way of Goodwill.
Comfort in the void --
the thrill of the inability to know
whether the snooty coat-check boy
will see the hairy helter-skelter,
the black widow leg tangle
in my repair. Beware
the knots -- I am Gordian
and cannot be untied.
What a maddening world this must be
for the righteous and bloodthirsty:
no one a pure victim,
none purely perpetrator.
It's enough to make my judges
kill the jury and prosecution's
witnesses before turning their blades
on themselves. They never get around to me.
Dogs stop in their tracks
and greet me as an old friend,
tongue on the nose
and gleaming eyes.
A million minds trail down the sidewalk
in my wake, burbling like a stream
iridescent as a grease-slick
in the rain; they trail
in a geometric progression:
first two, then four, then eight,
a coruscant wedding train.
I shall descend now the staricase,
bovine, dull, wet and heavy
In this span, the bread has done baking.
A piece of tobacco alights on my palm
and crawls. I blow it off,
lest I interrupt the life
of a midge blessed with so little to begin with.
I have found tenacity
in the letting-go bag,
burlap and frayed, it sags with jargon:
"Green thumbs lack white knuckles."
Enduring as lead, porous as a volcanic island,
I am eternal, as solid
and unprepossessing as Everest, yet I've
outpaced you. And you cannot fathom
why I refuse to don a thimble.
I cannot reflect you right now, my darling:
I am and always will be
in the middle of something.

Rainbow Brite at the Four Horsemen Café

Pour a glass for him, our guest,
the harbinger of doom.

"I am the tender of weeds.
I coaxed each one to bloom."

(We are served at a rough-hewn pine table
under the summer-heavy wisteria bower.)

Our salads are of the finest
dandelion and nasturtium,

served topped by a lavender
hibiscus flower and sprinkled

with a mysterious rosehip vinaigrette.
Let us sit here for an hour

and talk of apocalypse
and April showers.

Off The Cuff

Shoots of clover and grass
fumble upwards through the cracks
in the sidewalk --
weeds always grow back.

Lickety-split: remember the girls,
the tattooed girls
bearing parcels in their shoulder sacks?
Godspeed through the intersection

Running red lights, now black
as our eyes rise to Dutch-angled
bits of skyline -- Corinthian columns
on edifices mouldered and stained

By time. It is mine and yours.
They will never define us, those men
in boardrooms and slick, gray suits.
An alarm, a love of life, croons.

Eros in Abeyance

A shadow graduates to black
among the slack folds rippling
at the hem of her dusty rose gown.

The gown falls open mid-thigh
as a dimpled knee bends, folding
over his naked left leg.

His calloused hand, burrs on the thumb,
scratches gently down skin -- cocoa butter
and cinnamon. The smell is genuine.

And warm. The old television glows blue.
Later, she will dust its wooden cabinet.
For now, a tense rest -- gods in lust.

Recovery

Somewhere off the Maine coast
may there be a lighthouse for me
to live in -- for two years,
maybe three.

There I will write letters and the sea
will rush in and crash halfway
up the red and white spiral-striped
masonry.

The skies above will pall and darken
and when I've finished my essay
on the beauty of solitude someone will
come. Or three

To carry me off in a shower
of sparks to otherworlds
and elsewhens. I will see stars then
when I from Diana flee.

"Inform Elizabeth That..."

...I would live on this little island,
flat from North to South
and from West to East.
It bears only an orchard
of apples and a statue
of nymphs of the Hesperides --
perhaps a relief
carved in a grotto
near a garden-bound hut.
Butterflies, small and yellow
will rise up from knee-high grass
and flutter above the white-capped sea.

Metaphor by a Healthy Man

San Francisco's cold
is not crisp. Maybe
North Dakota's is --
I don't know.

This flows with your blood,
seeps into your bones,
chilling cell, soul
and marrow

Where an alien life
metastasizes into a fingerhold
on the lymph nodes.
Glioma, shadows

On the brain. Men's
shadows roam across the walls,
the ceiling, and outside
the windows.

A radiation suited-figure
waves his hand, and in a gloating,
self-assured voice,
informs me that soon I shall die.

Outside Suppenküche

"Hey, Jethro
what's white trash like you
doing in a place like this?"
The jibe scrapes off me
like steel from steel
smooth as a thread in a groove.
Does it fit? I will wear it.
Does it not? I will sell it
to the unwary.

Interesting and small
a surfeit of soft gray quietude
or nothing at all.

Triptych

Sylvan in Rut

Oh male aspect of female divinity,
jump and run through the greenery.
The sons of Ares

Occupy the trees' tallest branches.
Lights hover shakily through the dark.
The breath of men caught in flagrante delicto

Tumbles out in fog. They disperse.
A sniper, as though ran to ground
by Apollo, merges with bark.

At Buena Vista park sometimes
there is a bison skin and wood tower
among the eucalyptus bowers,

and a ramble of nasturtium vines
from a certain angle becomes a boy
who reclines forever against a trunk

of manzanita. A spray of hay straw
brushes off my sleeve. I join sweet Tony P.
in his tent for tea and sympathy.

On the Reservation

Humming brings the hunters
and I zig-zag up Fillmore,
Miss Sidney in close pursuit.

My rack of antlers slows and betrays me
to friend and foe alike.
Mothers and old men

Throng around me -- she doesn't
take the shot. Robert, the King,
meets me at the Davies parking lot;

He hands me a cigarette. He smirks
knowingly to someone past
my left shoulder.

Without another word he
turns the corner and disappears
down Duboce.

A report cracks the space
my ear heard him occupy.
I live and the King dies.

Through the Hopper

Mister Mephistopholes, will there be
a videotape to show what happened
through that space under the door?

Lights shined in -- pinhole projected --
camera obscura -- Emily
hears the round-robin attack

And I feel weird. Richard Kimball,
international man of mystery
Dashiell Hammett-dashes and jumps

in fedora and trenchcoat from
scaffolding to rooftop. They later told me
he was a flasher. I was sad

To leave behind that illusion
as the dial on the god-box
turned to the zombie dimension.

Marilynn Inn to the Oakwood
to the fucking Crown Hotel. How many times
will we splice and dice universes?

The Theoretical Basis for Interstellar Travel

Engrams through the singularity --
All that is has been and will be.
Discrete quantum patterns

Echo through the subaudible.
A perturbance emerges -- the hive mind's
conversation with itself

Occuring on top of the myriad
exchanges of small-talk on the 19 Polk.
Pigeons cooing in the airwell

At the Drake -- a network distrans
of confidential communications;
the game, a Chinese puzzle box

Of cops' and robbers' utterances

Death and Voices

Will I be reconciled
with my sycophantic horde?
They must be bored with me:
I've had too much to think.
Really, it was all bullshit
shenanigans forced through that
differential engine in my noggin
on punch cards spit back out
with a stamp bearing "Moneta,"
the Admonisher, married to
Mnemosyne, who remembers
what you did last summer.
They, scissor sisters
and munchers around the box
consist of a hive of animalcules
whose canto to my respondu screams,
"Interloper! Usurper!
We have trapped you, wild bull,
though it was another
in our cupboard --
"Perhaps a raccoon,"
offered the fair-haired
squirrel to the wall.

Rahab or Mary?

Virgin or whore,
blitzing to the wrong
end zone? The phone
rings -- it is my mother.

In a dream the both of us
together descend
a wooden staircase
to beneath the waterline.

In a submerged Old West
ghost town facade
we look for seats by the window.
My mother is old

And the tables topped
with baize. Blazing Megiddo!
Man's world slides away
from the globe up top.

Desecrating Persephone's Living Room

Someone's trying to untack
the upholstery. I am brass,
nestled deep in the frame.

The frame is fir, Norwegian wood,
blonde as the leather is black --
sable manskin, dyed

Past the Ethiopian. Oh, Necropolis!
We adorn thee in Pottery Barn's
most demonaic collection:

Onyx, vermillion, and an oil painting
of the far shore
of the River Styx.

A conversation piece
should be silent; alas
they are arrayed on Chiron's raft

In pale blue satin
Restoration finery, their jibber jabber
audible to a tagger

commissioned with painting graffitti --
murals on the Matachin Towers
among the great round tanks --

A petrochemical stench,
grim and unavoidable,
suffuses the town of Martinez.