Poetry

1968: For you, sitting in a barracks in Okinawa, the war is over. You are quiet, as if experiencing silence for the first time. You don't know what to do. Stare at your hands. From the barracks sergeant you obtain the name of a place where you can be washed and massaged. You go there…

Steal your sister's presents. Swallow pieces, ride her bike, ride it far into the grove. Show her you've discovered all her holy spots and watch her try to find another, deeper forest: everything she's kept from you is yours now: these frilly private things, this tiny book of screams.

for Chris Benfey Before sleep last night I lay there in a reverie over L.A., and dreamt of it all night and put off getting up for fear it would go away. All my fears of flying dissipated at the thought of cruising in the air to Los Angeles. I was happy there. I said…

When you were a child, on hot, drowsy. tropical afternoons, in a secret hideout at school you peeled and sucked mamones, gnawing the sweet, fleshy pulp, remembering stories of how addicts of the fruit had been asphyxiated by mamón pits blocking their windpipes. So each mamón was an invitation to ecstasy and death (mazard berries…

Gone to seed, ailanthus, the poverty      tree. Take a phrase, then fracture it, the pods' gaudy nectarine shades            ripening to parrots taking flight, all crest and tail feathers.                        A musical idea.                                                      Macaws      scarlet and violet,                                    tangerine as a…

I hear her splintering like the seed inside the pine cone, the furious grease inside the smoke and speed of the fire of our bodies. The hard red seed of her, her pink nipple, her penis-husk, her odors and hairs, her molecular dust, her dream file, her first and last word, her undiscussed déjà vu's,…

Awe-inspring cliff, white desire. Water springing forth from blood. Let my form narrow, let it crush my body, so that everything is one: slag and skeletons, fistful of earth. You drink me as though draining off the color of my soul. You lap me up, a little fly in a tiny boat. My head is…

for R. H. After visits to his hospital bed where sickness slowly played a jazz garden in his head, I watered leaves and stems to a green brilliance, troweled back the influence of weeds, things I'd do for any friend knowing what is temporary. Just days before his release the leaves grew brassy, stems decidedly…

Excuse me, Sir, if sweet words turn to silver bullets in bad light where industrial signs stammer VACANCY all night over peep shows and fortified wines in the eye of the most liveable city. But you see this overcoat won't release me though winter's 5 months through and I'm sick to death of the mouthwash…