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The melting icecaps leave the high country Coughing up white blood & hair dryers. Mountains are bought out by pyres & bones & Regurgitated mummies bound in ropes of black hair. Dams soon will empty their winter-mad snows. Glaciers mop noonday sun from their solitary brows. Mass polar layoffs turn vast tundra to swamp. Slaughtered alpine diamonds hocked for salt & sand. The alabaster breakers of peaks drown in dust. Crystalline waves burning antiquitous air conditioners Smell cathedrals of wind that break in their throat. Iceberg lungs collapse into sky bombs arrest. Water with its suitcase of thirst weeps On its long barefoot walk to the sea. Not even a whisper is heard from the last blue dish Shut up & dying like an aviator. 21 February 2001 |
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The rabbi hid his bone cancer from the congregation. After a year he realized there was nothing to be done. He had consulted the books of learning to see If it was alright to tell the people on the Sabbath. His health was gone. He would have to resign. Instead, he spoke of the One Hundred and One Rabbis Who called for the sharing of the Temple Mount. Far and wide, he was known as the Dancing Rabbi, Using it as a prayer that no name be soiled. The people gathered tightly round him So that it was impossible to know If they danced or grieved. He cleaned out his desk, met his wife at the car. Together they rode to the store & bought a can opener. 22 January 2001 |
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I understand that I was only invited to be human Beneath clouds stabbed by bees, smelling the silence of Crazy star war junkies never finding what it is they love In the eerie dead quiet where the road disappears. Immaterial worlds plague the closed casket of lost changes As the lives I knew pile out of the tiny harlem tomb of myself. I’d not been promised that I’d clean up my self-created catastrophe In time––who’d want to have an impact on anything anyway? It’s the little things––the somebody stopping & everything else Going on––even sorrow, blameless clown, isn’t mine to fear or These jezebel last chance visions of busy streets jammed with Millions of FBI agents leading Suffering away in chains. There’s no rewind on my tape deck, only planet wheels lit by rolling blackouts of sunflowers tattooed to alchemy. Why would you want somebody to point you in any direction? If I could, someone else could lead you into sinking sands. I undress in front of the armed police & show them my green ashes. In a broken corner a beaten heart makes ready to fly without a name. I served the snow & flames of spring, but don’t belong to her. The eyeless face of dust looks out where the road disappears.
6 February 2001 |
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The mind readers on the corner usually always guess wrong, But they knew your man gave you a shotgun on Valentine’s Day. So we drive that firebird around these mountain curves at 120 On an empty tank of gas, talking nonstop about those flowers That never arrived, chased by fortune’s worthless sleeping pills & the naked leaves of all we have abandoned.
I don’t know why she keeps her dresses in the refrigerator–– Little spring outfits for running around in transcendental February. There are seven gates & danger tape around her mango tree & the moonlight falling across her neck shines over the icy river That benefits a hundredfold anyone who sees her Putting on the luminous. Upon the waves that lick the black mouth of love Her cinnamon shadow lingers in a vacuous grotto of dragon tracks, Remembering a long ago purple sky at the treacherous pass Of merit & transgression––where no thought conquers nonexistence Within the snakeskin tent as we dance till three Between fearsome bodies & the dying of the night. 17 February 2001 |