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.