Poetry

In the mind there comes a moment when shadows fall back    like men from a gust of something, when the brain is light as a fly on your wrist— and in the jeweled eyes of that fly you see your own six-legged self white-shoed, dancing, being on parade— the gold tuba grown from your…

There is a danger in living; it is why we file our nails instead of our wrists; it is why we label things away. It’s why when we think of mass transit we think of concentration camps, we think of people packed like oysters in the little shells we’re allowed, the brine & hope of…

Polymorphous perverse, dolphins of both genders prefer sex-play with the human female. 1. Water begins from a wound in the hillside, a tear in the     clouds. There’s a tin cup no one cares has years of germs on its     icy rim. The water is sweeter than anything you will ever hold in    …

When we thought of the future it was wonderful & well-lit. The sky could hold anything. He chants about Beelzebub, Black Arnie & his mismatched angels, about supplicants & warblers that always tag along: a talisman against the learning the church leaves out. He is on one leg & braced, a shout that ignores its…

Through an open window of late summer evening a woman cries, Ah-ah-AH! Neighbors pause, blush perhaps, then go on with their homely chores, smiling to themselves. What do you do with this—another’s shameless, lonely ecstasy? Or your own? I put a tape of Mozart on to cover our confusion.

For six months each day at sunrise I’ve watched a woman in bright red trunks run past my window and each time I think of how as a boy I took my stance in front of the steamed mirror, my faded boxers safety-pinned proudly at the crotch and judged my body against all things that…

Love that arrives too late, untimely Eros stumbles in after the fall has done its worst, and winter fills the world with distance and with snowfall far as hearts can feel. Four crows creak in the cedar boughs, symbols that signify themselves alone since everything is what it only seems, the least version of a…

   Next door the room is padlocked from the outside; inside the children are ransacking the cupboards and playing catch with the empty Cool Whip containers and most afternoons you could’ve found me behind any one of these blue- stained doors, my girdles unhitched, my dusty nylons flagging the window, contesting the smoke rings that peel…

By the light of the Last Days— amber, a bit theatrical, a vacant lot light, snowfall muffling the high-volt hum transformers make zapping snowflakes to kingdom come, somewhere off the interstate outside Romeoville, Illinois— the proof of which can be heard— a ringing noise in the ear louder and louder until it’s a taxi horn…