sit with me, my dangerous darling.
the sea has spoken over the telephone
and the forest has wrestled with the circuitboard.
these petty dramas are abolished,
these soft pleasentries are the sum of our dignity.

who taught us to react? to take the blood of night
and raise it against the milk of the day,
to cower in cubbyholes when our agonizing rites fail,
to sweep cobwebs from our books has though
housekeeping were an accomplishment?
who can teach anything but obedience or rebellion,
despair or hope? It was in these tunnels they
call streets that i learned darkness, in this
waiting room that i learned light. But both were
false and dissapating, negligent of pure life
admist death, a ridicule of the spirit.

i walk with nervous twitch down cobblestone alleyways,
half sick of shadows and half wishing to dissolve amoung them,
sick of tradition and disgusted by innovation.
is this the ridicule of our times? That we are to
travel amoung dim scenes, ironically distant
while longing for the simple affirmation of attunment
to delicate shades, torn not only among opposites,
but also amongst the pillar of ourself? Or is this
my solitude, while you, you have drunk in the streetlights
with your arm around soft shoulders, dancing and
saying fuck-all to the wars and treacheries that
build a city street, that build a life?

It is all too much and I wish there were a simple ending,
like the glowing faces of drunkards laughing in acceptance.
But consolation is a far penninsula and conclusion is a gravestone,
set in stone like the disaster of the earth, sewn with veins
of basalt like eternity conspiring to creep into the everyday,
immobile like the tragedy of fear in the face of what we must change.

this poem is like a television show,
you don't need to know anything to understand it,
it is your uncle laughing while the dancers fall
in limelight tragedy and your mother not listening
when you tell her you were only sleeping.

this poem is so sure of itself,
cock-eyed braggart with a cigar in its mouth
and wearing one of those stupid hats from the
late 1940's that men used to wear to the office.
it is telling you with gin-sweet breath
that you will not amount to anything if you
do not do anything, it is the voice of your
drunk father beating on your door and asking
to borrow your pornography magazines

this poem is insecure;
it puts up a front of adult proclivities
with words like 'proclivities' while wetting
itself in the corner like a derelict,
this poem tried to hide its dunce cap beneath
a toupee and tried to hide its ignorance by
being loud, and inspite of itself, allowed
you to hear the intelligent whispers of the
peach-splattered clouds as they rushed over
the herring-bone of Lighthouse point, neither
threatening nor promising rain, just burgeoning
like another paranoid night before you, wrapping
around the curve of your arc with blankets of
darkness, whimpering.

this poem is not a poem,
it is a chariot for lightning cast out of the heavens
by a baleful god, the one who created landlords and
voted against Spring, the one who called you on the
phone in robot voice to inform you that your credit card
had expired, the god who gave you the guitar and ten fingers
but not music. Now the chariot brings you a rent check,
damp cherry blossoms, a new credit card, and the recording
of the first rock and roll song sounding like a burning tin can.

so seat yourself in your decision of what this is
while the audience clamors for the curtains to be lowered,
while Fifth Violinist imagines he can play drunk,
while the poet slams his hand in the silverware drawer
and has to write for a month with his left hand,
while the old songs wind across the jib of salted sailing ships
and reach you at walking pace from across the hidden sea:

You are allowed to begin.

elegy

something i dont remember popped up in the form of a futile poem;
some insipid diction maligned with a sociopath's cunning
and a pedant's flourish, telling you about my sickness,
the sickness of expecting consolation.

so i shed this paltry disguise;
the firmament of the myopic scientist,
the numerology of the bureucrat,
the mysticism of the politician.

i ruined my articulation for the sake of a highball glass,
and I ruined my health for the sake of individuality.

flourishes of courage like rose petals in the arctic,
articles of love in the fascist newspaper,
dandelion wisps in the gangrene sky,
these are what I hold on to in notebooks,
these are why I have no photo albums.

bury me in the ancient waste like any old object,
for i am object enough for you, say nothing
like you have said nothing for those before me
that you fragmented with control's power
and thus i give the fragments back to you:
laughter in the hospital, a magenta leaf
upon a pub table, and some wine stains
on the funeral suit.