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.