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.