Poetry

for the Wu Tang Clan and 1992 Shaolin’s flowers, imperial and ready for slaughter. Bobby Digital wears the wings of the only saint he knows. Come blessed angel with your skull-cup of blood. Enter this chamber with your black sword and a streetcar full of flagging desire. When the children ask for water, give them…

The Day of Pentecost came without the usual ladder of tongues. The     spike, driven through our white-bread boned shirts into our bare melon hearts, remained dry. The locusts, slung low in     the trees, remained in our breath. The prophet, robed in wind, remained lost in the wilderness. The     scarves about our heads. Something like a butterfly kissed the…

that spins too fast and then we get erased. The red and yellow leaves tickle at first, then burn all the way down our throats when they fall. Who will grease our arms for the ones we love? We release them to white bedsheets first, then to a blanket made of earth. They slip through…

Read it on the Greyhound back before I saw Bogart in Marlowe’sclothes,                before the old man bought the Buick,                before he changed to dust,                before my mother scattered him along the highway to Lake               Mead beside a scrubby desert tree.                Before I didn’t buy the whiskey,                before I didn’t hoist a glass,                before I didn’t tell…

from the balcony of footpaths speak of the black horse & the dead rider how old the mirror is which brings with it spirits like tracks filled with basil from where you stand sing an antique song let your arms veinless hang by your side wait for the gypsy who took your life away you…

(Where the woman in the iron lung breathes out every person she’s evermet, a big breath, like it’s cold and she’s pretending to smoke.) I said     I’m dead you put blanketson my iron lung    said Must be cold    you’realways cold    Dead I said again   you saidThat won’t stop youfrom stealing…

Dear, neither of us has anymoney. Let’s saywe leave that field open, as inwe don’t complete the form. I see nothing heresays it is required.Maybe this is the other kindof field. Grass, etc. That makes sense to me.Dear, neither of us has anymoney. Let’s saythere’s an Adirondack chair, the affordable plastic kind.Maybe those are rubber.Maybe…

The boss wears a white vest a white face through the hole of a whitevest the boss keeps her body heat in the white vest 700-fill-power     down power down the boss the boss keeps her power her power is down     todaythe boss’s new boss doesn’t like her the boss’s old boss doesn’t like her it doesn’t matter…

If only our children were colts, and sensible enough to be good at one     thing.Running. Jumping some. Looking adorable.They would deserve our devotion.Think crepe myrtle, nudged after a brief rain. Think zealots. Think     ocean waves, if we’d enough sense to give them unique personalities.Everywhere you look, willfulness. Bountiful willfulness.And these days it’s the children you see playing…