Poetry

I caught it and screamed for water. Someone carried a pail, I plunged my hands in. The water boiled. I wore violet gloves beaded with glass. Now what do I do with this water. How can I pick the pail up, where should I set it. How to turn doorknobs and enter rooms and not…

Certain habits can seem miraculous in the thoughts of the dispossessed: to have chosen your own clothing from stores and then your closet, to have shaven yet again in the mist dulling your bathroom mirror— such are the dreams of the homeless. . . I rarely consider my fingers or tongue until slicing or slamming…

He holds a slender cappucino cup As still as anything I see or feel. He licks the chilled lime soup line from his lips. I lie about my name and where I'm from; I'd never tell him anything I've done. Without talking, he seems a dream of want. I look for splinters in the picket…

(sonnet from the German of Georg Heym, 1911, freely translated with apologies for the anachronism of using the modern world ‘gulag’ in line four; its purpose is to suggest certain modern analogies with this pre-1914 poem of tsarist Russia, even in such very specific details as the slave labor camps “beyond Verkhoyansk”; today the “abominated”…

Somewhere, maybe in the spirit, effort is trying to remain lost and unnoticed when truly it is the substantial: carrier of bells and evenings, light crisp and unnecessary hugging a wall. A black wall which children shriek at and hit with sticks—no point but much effort. A man stands up, his house is a desk….

One of the laws the pseudo-commissioner decreed: We were to plug our memory sockets Into the damaged main-frame he kept locked In his dungeon. With the flick of his switch, Worlds began to crumble. Or so we thought. And in these quasi-desperate straits Only one person could save us. He'd need A pack of radar…

I wish we were our furthest father’s father. A clump of slime within a warming swamp. Living and dying, fertilizing, bearing,      We’d ooze our essence, numb and damp. A sprout of algae or a sandy hillock, Formed by the winds and heavy with earth’s clutch. Then quits; even a pond-bug’s head, a gull’s wing      Would…

drifts near the ceiling above every head, one Ma per son, daughter, and grandchild. You have a yellow Ma, Mother, like a lightbulb in a cloud. She's looking at you with a kind smile. She's taking it and taking it. With every Ma there is a Pa to dish it out. You have a yellow…

A pencil is stuck in your back: manifestation of a common practice— doll torture (the flip side of pinning flies). It's this evil innocence we worship in you like a golden laugh. Idol of tacky teenage-hood, devil's workshop of poo-poo magic, R. D. Laingesque schizophrenic peeing on asylum wall, or writing a name in shit:…