The Terms

For the past nine months
I have shared my body with this city:
allowed the ground’s tremors to rumble
in my chest, the skyscrapers to steal
the sun’s warmth from its rightful place
on my cheek, the heavy air to weigh
my lungs with curry, musk, and garbage.

For nine months I have incubated
in the small rooms of Harlem, Dumbo, Hell’s
Kitchen. I have relinquished my unfettered
right to the sky, accepting the airshaft
and a stolen Central Park afternoon as enough.
I have learned that no space is mine alone.

In the springtime, expecting to come to term
as the perennial flowers do, I found no change.
No great labor to render my body my own again.
No epiphanous pain that ends in joy,
No sudden, primitive love for her.

So I boarded a red bus like a tourist.
The second story retold the city's face
as that of smirking gargoyles, stained
glass jubilation, and proud topless mermaids.

Why did she never reveal herself to me
when I came offering full devotion of body
and mind to the Bacchus temple of her boroughs?

Today I checked my map often and thought,
I am a stranger in a strange land.

This city answered, now we can begin.

Squinting Without My Glasses

This crazy moon lights up like a kaleidoscope,
I see moving constellations in the dotted ceiling--
Orion's belt unbuckles into Cassiopeia's upside-down head,
and I make the Seven Sisters sun sick from their own light
that they burn and combust into something
that looks like my first grade teacher--
and soon the pupil of my eye has reached its limit
and I can't see what's waving in my face.
It never touches but the motion makes me sneeze.

the violet hour

he speaks the liquid grammar.

the tumbling syntax of a bartender

with bitters in hand, playing shakers

like instruments and separating 

a raw egg in a single hand.

he drains it into stainless steel,

the violet hour come round at last

shaving the peel in silence

off an orange

like a scalp.

thin, taut skin – an open blouse

bares no extra fold of flesh 

across her freckled 

synthetic chest.

it is as bare to the world as 

she is barren,

wrinkle free like warm cotton, 

fragrant and washed 

by others' hands. 

                          this woman avoids

the brown liquors 

(they cause wrinkles).

"a vodka drink," she says.

"with pineapple juice

and you guys usually put something special in"

a manicured lawn for hair: 

fungal blond foil highlights

Singer threaded eyebrows.

thin lips let drip her flat free words

she talks of metabolism

factual as politics:

the dirth of annualized ingredients,

the danger of calorized drink obligations,

actualizing her asset-backed securities

from a spineless barstool

while somewhere in a far off bungalow

sitting on its own in an acred lot

or underneath clean sheets

the ceremony of innocence 

drowns.

at least we all agree 

that the proper word

for what's slung round her neck

is choker.

Pantoum For The Day Before Easter

The day continued like clockwork –

Boring, and yet too intricate to explain;

A world passed underneath as we missed

An invisible struggle too quiet to hear.

Boring, and yet too intricate to explain,

The day continued like a clockwork's

Invisible struggle. Too quiet to hear,

We missed a world passing underneath.

Soup

Last night I dreamed of spilt pea soup.

But I did not drink it. Instead,

I carried it, sealed

in a a thermos.  

Or was it an urn?

I couldn't say.

The vessel was smooth,

metallic, and cold,

and stayed closed, 

tightly.

I kept the soup pressed closely 

to my chest, 

like the ashes of a loved one.

And I cared for it just as deeply.

What did this mean?

What was I mourning?

The loss of something

profound?

Or, like Scrooge,

was this simply a case

of undigested food,

a "bit of beef, 

a blot of mustard"

a phantom

"more gravy than grave"?

This seems likely,

because, in the morning,

I woke hungry.

I slaked my yearning,

with Rice Krispies. 

A food my grandmother derides

as empty.

But with each crackling,

snapping, spoonful,

I felt fuller,

if only for a moment.

A Collaboration

Crickets chirp
But it’s too late for me to
Eat them.
I might get a bellyache.

i can't do long

it is the season of shorts

Holy Terror

“All miners name their mines after their wives,”

so complained one wife to her husband in an old

story from the Black Hills during the rush, he complied:

today an antique store carries the name in Keystone,

the home of Mount Rushmore – once Paha Sapa,

the sacred hills where Lakota boys would camp

to dream of the Great Spirit, Wakan-Tanka,

and in the morning wake in a holy land

that by night had made them men – Holy Terror:

a joke to the miner who did not have to watch

the bounds of holiness collapse into wear, or

rock-blasted into the faces of men who taught

a country to walk too well before it came

to the borders of a land, and a god, and their names.

Stuck

If you're writing a poem and get stuck,

and you try and you try with no luck,

you can keep your mood fair,

and try hard not to swear,

or write a limerick and say, what the fuck.

In re: Can Animals be Gay?

Note: Reference is a 10 page NYTimes article under the above title, which can be found here.

Darwin, Darwin, man of birds
wrote a book of many words
describing finches, tortoises too,
a book that’s since caused much ado!

‘Teaching theory!' Masses cry,
‘Is blasphemy that doth deny
creation’s certain spontaneity
by hand of our benevolent deity.

And furthermore!’ They humph and scold,
‘Old Darwin’s theory’s full of holes.
It can’t explain the cell’s complexity,
nor man's desire for safe sex-ity,

It has no answer to our query
on the queers, and their cashmerey
decadence! It can’t be true!
Harumph! We will boycott the zoo,

the school, and other institutions
who push these spurious conclusions.’
And that, my friends, is how we lost
this battle: to an albatross.

I've got more poems in my poem-maker than poem-makers can make poems.

Shutter Open

When I see the half-moon, I want to slide
the dark away with my finger like how I broke
my father's camera by placing my finger on the lens
and forcing those shutter eyelids blindly open. Slide
and click, shutter open, to reveal such a solemn blank
face. I saw my reflection, waxy, smooth and irritating as fog
on a winter windshield, and I broke my nail on the image
of my face, and so I dragged my thumb to make it disappear.

People People my People People

Where oh where has my little
god gone? Where oh where can He
be? I was told He was in everything,
in every leaf of grass and every whisper
in the back of the Synagogue reflected
His mightiness.

We were once called a stiff-necked people,
but we have gone soft and well-clad.
Necks become stiff from the act of sticking
them out too often, from righteously placing
the body before the machine. The office chairs
at Goldman Sachs and Fried Frank have round supports
for the lumbar and neck, to keep them supple.
It’s the ones with the stiff necks we watch for now:
Madoff, Wolfowitz, Leiberman, Libby.
The best among us lack all chutzpah,
while the worst fill their mothers with passionate tsurres.

Where oh where has it gone, this God of mine?
This God who taught me to love a good argument,
to favor David over Goliath,
to count myself as my brother’s keeper?

My Rabbi asked me once to prove that we are the chosen people.
I could not, because I did not believe it.
He opened his laptop and typed the words into google,
and hit after hit revealed it to be true: the Jew.

Simple Pleasures

Fuck cars,

Fuck poles,

Fuck parking lots.

Fuck dings, 

Fuck dents,

Fuck parking, a lot.

Fuck buttons,

Fuck thread,

Fuck holes in my shoe.

Fuck Sting,

Fuck The Police,

Fuck "Synchronicity II".

Yeah, my car turned too slowly,

And my clothes are all wearing,

And my deskmate has headphones

That he never thinks of wearing.

But on a day like this

When I can't catch a break,

At least I can end it 

With a coffee milkshake.

The End of the World

came and went with little forewarning
and less recognition.
A car in Rogers Park failed to start
and measured
tragedy
distracted everyone as last year's actress
died from an overdose. March 25th
was the same as March 24th in almost
every way, except
warmer. We took our coats off
and sat on the rocks
overlooking the lake and did not
speak. We watched a leaf
for metaphor's sake. We napped,
exhausted
at being meaningful.

National Poetry Month

Begins NOW.

One poem a day.

Or at least a sporting try.

Enjoy!