BABY BIRD

The spring has many roller skates.
Places to romp in the torn apart
skies. Highlighter highs. Strips
of sailboats. Fennel pollen

and other kinds of pollen. Words
you erase from the air as you speak
them, and mean she, or say he
and mean Alaska or machinery

for brewery. Then the woodpecker
of firearms and the report
on Thomas Jefferson or
hydrogenated breakfast cake.

Also the sardines of waterworks.
The pancreas. The collections
of gleaming and the milk questions.
Will we ever make it to the end

of this hallway you suggested,
meaning will we ever avoid it.
Will we in the zilch-ery of shard
light and countenance fork over

to the chrome and displacement
the joyous squelch of bikini. The body
in the seedpack. Zinnias it says
and then laughs and then says

uncontentiously we welcome
all the feelings of scrambled
buildings, the park with its taciturn
tourists and purists. The history

of coming to hold. To solder
the sun, to shoulder
the worm, to look and see
only the speed of the earth,

someone in the blank
who's already filling in,
someone looking forward
to the ribaldry of summer.

__

CRISIS HOTLINE

Too much in my dreams
to get into with you, but
it's cooler this morning
since the front went through.
And during the round night
with its long full moon, I inhaled
Melatonin and Tramadol and ate
Hatch Chili Pepper Carnitas.
I learned again to tie my shoes.
I learned the difference
between a minute and minuet.
I listened to The Breeders live
and Dexter Gordon recorded.
I got inside a photo booth
and Jesus wept. Convulsively.
Obviously, this is all out of order, but
the white supremacist
with a nail gun and an AR-15
was eventually dispensed with
by the authorities after a chase.
No one was taken into custody
or Heaven. There is no Heaven,
despite my previous calls
for one. There is no god
in the usual sense, but Emerson's
Oversoul seems a promising
alternative. I think I must be
Guillaume Apollinaire or John Clare
burning upon a sour wooden ghostship
for the moment I eventually won't be. Maybe
I was the AR-15 or the nail gun
to the lost soul now dispensed with
so assuredly, The End. Once upon a time,
I learned language to begin, but not—
or so it seems—very well. Now, the keys
on the keyboard fall fine against the gloss.
And what is the gloss, but a strange protective slime
I believe's up my sleeve where my heart
is hiding flies. Consider me a tangle
in an astronaut's disguise—
their flashing eyes, her floating hair.
And let the sky beware beware.
It's possible tomorrow
I may breathe twice. But today
I'm a snowglobe on the wings
of an asshole. I think
I meant angel.
—Please hold.

__

PENETRALIUM

Inside the inside, something is
glowing, and inside that
is an even smaller inside
where the heart should be,
but the heart has gone
dancing with its hands
in a mirror, and in its place,
which is always a little
irritated and sensitive
to the changing weather,
is a charcoal grill in flames
(because left unattended—
and which explains the glow,
but not exactly all the rest of this
or the restlessness),
and inside the grill, or
welling up out of it, is the cry
of a newborn grizzly bear cub,
who is thinking inside
its bear's mind that this
life will be a struggle
for eggs and cream
and warmth in the winter
and sleep through
every harshness in a tent
of dreaming campers,
who have kettle chips
in a bag that are spilling
out between them. Meanwhile,
we have finally reached
the sanctum sarcophagus
and in it's a tiny jade rhinoceros
that someone carved a long time ago,
and someone else acquired
and placed here for safekeeping
with all the ideas about
the invisible/indivisible insides
of things and what they
might be imaginatively,
because reality's a trap
or too confusing to make
sensible when the surfaces
cover the greater depths
in ruddy spectacle. To do good
in the world, or to love,
requires soul, and inside
the soul the spirit of tomorrow
where, as always, I will go
into the future a little distance,
but today I will wallow
in the mystery of that
and what I might regret
in the end when shadows take me.

VIAGRA BOYS AND SHAME

Suddenly orange pine needles
cover the driveway, and my head's
a little softer from the volume
of last night's Viagra Boys show
at The Woodward on Main.
Shame played too, but, I'm almost
ashamed to say, we left before
they even went on. My ears
were fried and concussed
like a medieval bell ringer's
after Viagra Boys exploded
Cincinnati's dumbass light festival
and tore my heart to shreds
with "Ain't No Thief" and "Punk Rock
Loser" and "Sports." I had forgotten
my nicer earplugs again, so I bought some
of those squishy orange foam ones
at the venue, but they make everything
sound muffled mufflered muffeletta'ed
so of course I took them out during the first song
and the music was glorious, but I'm paying
for it today. I'm not sure I can even stand up
straight; the tinnitus is so overpowering.
My hearing is slayed. But also, Viagra
Boys were just so totally of sleeze and
angularity—a meat-packing plant
of starry-eyed detonation devices,
and I know no one wants to think
about calves' livers liquified and sprayed
against the moon, but that's what it was like.
And I also know that nobody wants to hear
about a show they didn't attend
by a band from Sweden with a really stupid name—
a band most people have never even heard of—
but the craziest thing is that Melanie was with me
in the pit for the whole set, and in the twenty-six years
we've been together that's never happened,
not once, but last night it did,
and we were both jumping up and down
blotto and bewildered by the Viagra Boys' singer
Sebastian Murphy, and his eyes, which stare out
asleep and awake all the time, a little too urgent
and a little too drastic, and we were sweating
and beer-soaked and out of breath, so weirdly happy
and alive in our fifties. Maybe I'd had a few
too many, or maybe, in truth, I haven't ever
had enough. Also, I almost got into a fight
with some Viking-looking dude, who was wind-
milling everybody. But that's
an even less interesting story,
so I'll spare you and let Mel tell you
how it really was when you talk to her
and if you don't talk to her, you'll be spared
forever. You're welcome. To me, stories
about shows and near fights are even worse
than telling someone a dream
where you're peeing in a trough in a barn
and feeling sort of icky about it, and
then, in the dream itself, you wake up
in an unfamiliar house with narrow winding
staircases and people standing in doorways
who you don't know, but you know
they are your housemates, and
you still have to pee, so you go
into the bathroom, which is a vertical
rectangle with a white tile floor
and a drain in the middle, and
you think about Lilies of the Valley
and mandarin oranges and you start
to pee again, but the icky feeling comes back
and you wake up a second time, but now
for real and you're in your own house
in your own bed, and outside it's still dark,
and nothing's wet, so you're relieved
in that sense, but you still really have to pee,
and you're singing Viagra Boys
under your breath, what a fucking great band
you keep thinking as you go. The music
unspooling in eternity.

__

RESIGNATION PROBLEM

First, I wrote twenty-some-odd lies
just to scrap them. I meant
twenty-some-odd-lines, but
who's counting. I guess
I am, and also the people
who monitor how many copies
I make on the machines.
I resigned today my contract,
but somehow it kept showing up
"re-signed," so now I'm sitting
rather anxiously by
my living room window listening
via my hearing aids to the birds
and thinking they sound
great again all over America,
which for Walt Whitman
was Leaves of Grass, but for me
is a Lyrical Ballad of global capital
churning out the souls of the damned,
like an ever-growing clutch
of snakes, all balled up and ready
to be snakes, the way the streets
are on fire like streets on fire.
I didn't make that last simile up. Brett
told it to me, quoting someone else,
so now I'm an echo of an echo of an echo
who's deteriorating. And I don't mean that
only metaphorically. If I told you
all the things wrong with my body
you would wonder how
I'm still something more
than a puddle of blood pudding,
and I would wonder if I should make
an appointment with my doctor,
but then I think, at least I have a doctor,
so that makes me lucky enough
to not make an appointment. Obviously,
I don't know what I'm talking about.
And I don't know if this is serious.
What I do know is that I'd love
to quit everything. My morale
is awfully low. So many others
have found a way to move on,
but I am with the snakes on fire
on a planet on fire, a cancerous knot
in the wreckage of a star, waiting
for the courage
to sever.

__

"Baby Bird" and "Crisis Hotline": The poet Dean Young (1955-2022) was living in Cincinnati the last nine months of his life, and we were writing and sending each other poems via email every morning. "Baby Bird" and "Crisis Hotline" were two of the pieces that I wrote and sent him. On Sunday afternoons we would get together in his apartment and read each other the poems we had written during the previous week. It was akin to a very informal workshop/poetics volley, or a reading series with one reader and one audience member, where both of us were standing up, pacing around the room, shouting out/about the poems, suggesting edits, and warbling--with great joy. "Baby Bird" is (about) learning to fly--sort of--and was written in early spring 2022. "Crisis Hotline" was written in the summer of 2022 when Dean was sick with COVID, the illness which eventually led to his death on Aug 23rd.

"Viagra Boys and Shame": The concert referred to in the poem took place on Oct. 14th, 2022 at the Woodward Theater in Cincinnati, OH. I recommend checking out all of the Viagra Boys records, but most especially 2022's Cave World. My favorite Shame record is 2021's Drunk Tank Pink.

"Penetralium": See John Keats' famous Negative Capability letter of Dec. 21, 1817, "Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge." The poem is also a sort of Russian nesting doll. Check out [The Keats Letters Project] for some terrific commentary on many of Keats' letters.

"Resignation Problem": In the poem "Brett" is the poet Brett Price and he was misquoting some lines from Pablo Neruda's, "I/'m Explaining a Few Things". My "quote" is a deliberate obliteration of what Brett said.