Poetry

           An Interpretation of the Paintings of            Robert Rauschenberg            for Ray Kass      There is a bird in a box,      the wildlife caged                  but all around,                  the life of the painting,                              wild      wild,      painting with disordered letters,                  the ordering      the dis                  ordering,…

One of us would spot his horse, same white as his mustache, and word traveled on warm air. While he solicited orders at doors we stole pears from his cart, that battered gray board flatbed held together by luck. He was obsolete as promise. His apples felt firm green and his cherries were loaded with…

Outside the barracks of the city & the fountains of the suburbs lit up with private yellow lights, kitchens of self, bedrooms of despair, women in white slips pulling down shades, newspaper blown down airshafts like dead souls. Inside the park trees drip green in the dark, unseen lilac flows, pines zig zag, birches rear…

“You’ve got yore head up yore ass and it’s a good thing you got a cellophane navel to see where yore goin’,” says some dude by the jukebox. Many of us have learned this is not an insult. His vision is crystal clear: one part Roadrunner, two parts locker room hosanna, one part Donna in…

“I never could stand you too long,                              don’t you know,”      a definite blockage                        concrete application. The Graces are three Negro                        bims walking down Columbus Ave.      or a woman’s laughter from                        Shaker Heights or Santa Barbara.      He never could forgive himself,            …

“I’m so tired of empty promises I could just blow up,” she said on First Avenue where you knew it was spring because the sirens sound light-hearted, and Holly was drinking her Campari with soda. Personally, I had a Bullshot, and drank it like a man personally on his way to the gas chamber. But…

There was nothing left to consume except epsom salt and water and, as the box of epsom salt was labeled USE EXTERNALLY, we knew that we were taking a chance. But, we mixed the salt with the water and sipped it down. Immediately there were vomitings, followed by some deaths. However, the act was not…

Each face strikes a different hour in the heart Days last tolling will be your’s (Its profile’s panels on which are sleep-lacquered eyes The golden flights and returns of an unblemished wound) Like a blind person reading smoke signals, I touch The face foretold as your’s (It’s like a boney honey in the sunset, pale…

1. He is kept circling airport after airport, while his woman goes through the atlas, alphabetically. 2. They were married in the fall. 3. He loves her and gives her a ticket to prove it. 4. They are beautiful as a football team. 5. This is not a roman-a-clef. 6. Lake Michigan never makes a…