Gleaner's Cafe, October 5th, 2009

"I have a dream of acting once" like Branagh
 knowing the punchline and stretching

the nylon web across the cafe eaves, spiders'
plastic cling and vine lashed gourds

peering at the sunmap of an asphalt yard, Sketches of Spain
leaking from a subwoofer and honey and tea stains on the door.

The R5 Local to Thorndale, October 5, 2009

writing's not loud enough
I think I'll beat a hole in the wall

I'll smoke and quaver my
soul absence and I won't

care if it's bad, I'll just beat
until the paint flakes off

I'll percuss and wail my soul prism
in the dark world of rorschach fists

I'll crack warble and wail
I'll be a being beating machine

Julia Waits for the Bus, November 11, 1996

It's cold and Julia
has burnt toes,
rorschach apple
face. Joints where skin
flakes a red
pain.  She doesn't

like it much, can't
muffle properly,
huffs air through
pillowed lungs, blisters
organs with frost.
So cold!  She rubs

flesh to flesh, denim,
wool.  Her feet are
mausoleums, white
winters where something
now petrified lived.
.
"I'm walking on
rocks," she thinks.
And watches the empty
dogwoods fondle each
other, tongues a freeze
crippled thumb.  Her body
lemon-hued

like a breathing season
leans high action on the
stop sign.  Pluck
her tendons right, they
echo like a rings of an
old age--harmonics
of the bus that never comes.

Clark Park, Sunday.

I found a bluegrass band in the west
of a sick city.

"I did it! I'm responsible for slavery!" yelled
a white man to a black man, finger raised to god.

He laughed, and the men talked
heavy around him.

Hickory smoke and the smell
of burnt sugar.  The trash fire heaved

tin and plastic. The strings of a banjo, and smoke

passing through invisible bands of sun.  A boy
holding his mother's round arm, and an old

woman watching the kids play.

Dear Miss Gwen: A True Apology

I nicked your name 'cause it has a ring.
Fantastical moniker.  A disclaimer to any
and all readers: she who bears the name is not

a Wifi Aphrodite or a walking Yawpster,
but a better friend than either.

showhite.

Plummage Oo.

Decadence. Oh.

Pan. mmm.

Thick full mama

in a Christ dead land.

Jesus. Mother of God

of none. A bone is

a bone. A body sand.

So cloth

butterflies gnawing at the selvage

of a seamless wedding

dress. Digress. Moan

of ushers-

or pallbearers, or moldy

brides in corners, crow’s

feet caught beneath a

fire iron. But rolling

in Platony, singed fist-

so well, black-eyed, reckless.

Paradigm revolver,

bend me over,

chastise,

bad, bad mother.

Never.

Dust. So wet.

Meticulous after

contents. Sideswept.

Brides wept. Toes

splayed, eject red. Or

blunt stick, suck

cell river.

I take this man-

I do, forever. Whole

soft wet dead ruin black

overwrought. Fetal flaw,

some shit hollow. In sickness

sin wake suffer. Save me

brother. Bless me father.

Amnioaltar. Deadmother.

Woman is Boat is Woman

I’m jetsam delighted—

pitching ass hull, crew shitting

off port bow, scrubbing navel deck.

The Saltire strung up

woman vesicle—

white-tipped waters,

a passive Union Jack.

Tidal abjection pooling

by a knee—

I am the vessel of this voyage.

Mammary stern-black,

fetid behemoth, aweless.

In bird’s nest belfries

Monocle-Eye says

dawn’s sky is red—

the great white whale is dead.

Climbing down the rigging post-sublime,

post-Kubla Khan,

post-opium, and even

post-dreams.

But goodness still happens on deck—

We look at stars, we talk, we make fires

and have willful sex, all of us

communing as gods.

And beyond constellations,

we speak of cosmology and

the movement of infinite strings.

The Dutchmen’s keen-eye machine

says straight on ‘til morning, says to die

would be awfully big so close to shore.

Death is the only adventure, gears

stuck and dust from the mainland besides,

the Promethean flame dies,

dies.

So a half moon whore. Copulates

nautically. Goes down pridefully

and graceless in all waters hailing

from the sea. We feel ourselves

in space between our shores.

To Gwen Hawkins: An Apology

A petal breaks in Washington

Square I am flat-backed,

maple-like

I see your hair and bared one arm

across the sea.

It is spring where we both are

it’s northern and hot

I write to you Amazing Grace.

Like the Bradford Pear

your white blooms drop and light—

you bow like me, supplicant to the gendered grass

we bare our feet upon

(Beside, and not above.

Temporal, not ubiquitous.)

I’ve painted you many ways

this year, ecstatic like

wine and an ode.

In Philadelphia I am

the lioness by the fountain

I am the maid in the yard I am

a bud across the pond,

poised to drop in the tide

and wash where? To your coast northern

and craggy, gray and tempting Seppuku?

I’ve split and died in the strait,

and garbled fort-da travels through

my night terrors.

Marco

and kissing underwater

Marco

the ocean sound of Scotland,

afternoons on the weathered rocks

and laying my body in the wet reeds,

or here

on a bough, the rings that name

an age, and how many years three thousand miles are.

This same day in George Square

ah Gwen, long the ivy twined

among the central tree, and I

could throw an arm and land

upon your face

(and even then not see you!)

These days I cycle my religion

embrace the drum and sing

our May Day song O

far from Calton Hill.

The drunkards on Rose Street

trip up the groutless cobbles,

sun white

on the terraced

homes of Rittenhouse,

bodies complying but

Yankee noises situating me

here. Abstraction of sound.

I promise I’ll get it right

I’ll say it plainly, disinter a second—

you tore your muslin skirt.

Dropped a paddle in the North Sea.

Smirked.

Conclude the park crawl, situate the postage,

seal and stack in mind marked to be sent,

double-take the language of my address.

Sunrise by La Sagrada Familia

Morning is

Madonna a la plaza.

Her hair is burnt

Pan power.

D’or corps tell me

I love her.

Body of Christ,

Amen.

I feed ducks

by the pond’s lip, conversely

blinding cats with my skin—

and they walk,

walk to the mother

(oh, that she should see me here

looking such a cunt!)

and my block knees pious

as Senora Veracruz on

Sunday.

I’ve my avian coterie, I’ve

the sound of bread on their lips, but to bind

Charon

with musical palms, to gift

Euridice

with the prismic throat of the toucan.

My cheeks are hibiscus, limbs

ibis thin

her mouth bud and eyes as

deferred—am I in love or

a throatless cock, sparse of plumage, de-sexed

and crusted dry?

Solar flagellation

will make move,

but I am one

and drying with her clothes, dying on her drying line.

Brittle-minded, I dream—

Round, peaceable bird, folding

linens in blackness, gold-armed

in Barcelona pre-dawn.

A Language of Afternoon

It is 3:24 on Tuesday and jerks

split jargoned caution lines-

KEEP OUT bifurcated

round the pillars of Norris Street.

Nippon Society barley tea,

napkin baskets, pastry crumbs,

cling wrap muffin tins, gutter bungalows

where the leaves lay thick and wet.

I pass skin bared to blocks,

skin stacked to sun,

pixilated world and vendors

hawking funnel cakes, confectioner’s madness

on lapels, elbows, mouths I

donate to the Red Cross Fund.

Watch the drunkards where they shouldn’t be.

Remember bratwurst and prisms,

ferris wheel by the phallic Scott

Monument and optical projections

glazing a woman on George Street.

Playing War on Cramond Island

On eve of covert camp erection

we crawled through the grass hysterical nude

uttered my god at distended base

and resurrected vestige bowels.

Caught on Cramond Island swept

by inert tides our land bridge ho

a barnacled plank like M6

road and roundabouts became an ocean shelf.

The dead fort night communed in relics

of postwar postwar talk like

troublous vinyl amyls topped off—

we writhed and read the feel good.

We read and wrote a sodium sea.

Gwenthyan Hawkins was walking yawp

incognito were Whitman’s bastards spawned in hollow
fall-out shelters imbibing

in doorjambs beneath the litany fucking

fumbling through The Complete Works crusty virgins

lusting penetration

cracked grousing supplication

venomous electroshock desire of

independent inner thigh.

Holy moth warrior splits a bayonet

at my right round flesh and flank

the disparate armies of intellegensia

a page a blade a moan or two. (poets and generals long forgotten).

Into the night post academic

regarded blocks of sky like temporal

plums and fairytale nostalgic whispered first

yawp

giggled ecstatic and spoke indifferent

yawp

Saw all the lights were out in kit and shelters

climbed on the Captain’s quarters reached barefoot

for that sweet snatch of sky bellowed

YAWP!

into the Caledonian night.