Worthless Crap from Aug. 06

7/20/06

An aqua-blue-green luna moth with white spots on its wings landed on a shower tile before I could drop my quarters into the shower timer, so I hesitated before stepping into the shower stall until the luna moth could leave, the rear of its wings with lobes as huge as fins for aerodynamic guidance, for flying higher than the other moths battering the screens to circle the lamplight or bumping againt the window panes so loudly one is lead to expect larger moths to appear, each wing broader than a single hand-span carrying a body capable of breaking the window glass. Moths who rival monarch butterflies in their replendence, too large for their wings to be inhaled, large enough to suffocate. The singed wings must smell of calico fabric and unused scatter rugs, nestling among old clothes and their secrets.

***

In the rummage sales everyone rids themselves of their old globes, the paper segments depicting quadrants unpeeled from the pasteboard and steel surface, the names of republics dated, the countries smaller and smaller, some of the borders dotted lines, failed states not written off the map yet. The story hasn’t ended, and the globes with their wooden degree rules can be spun idly in the carports or upon folding tables. It’s quaint to have a map of the world as it was, the end of history as we know it.

*****

8/5/06

A lady-bug who fell on the laptop near a green LED unfolded sword-like wings, diaphanous as window-screens or steely as pins or jack-knives, from beneath its innocuous and charming shell, black dots against an orange-red, that splits apart once the lady-bug flies, in Britain lady-bird not lady-bug. They love the attics they infest, but don’t bore through rafters with the persistence of termites.

6/17/02 (more worthless crap)

The vestibule of the bedouin tent was large enough to stand upright.
But the pup-tent I raised on the lawn was not high enough to stand in.

Although the cross winds that blew through the flaps inflated it.
Healthy crosswinds keep the apartment cool, by summer standards
Night is cool as day is hot: nothing on the ground absorbs the heat.
Can you imagine actually living in a tent in a KOA campground?
The subject changed to the Ellis Island website.

Somewhere on it were my grandparents in their teens.
I sealed the tent except for the breathing hole, square skein
beneath a sky without the irregularities of cloud, no sunset-pink tinges.

I wondered about the tents of the bedouins embroidered with camel hair, cool as cathedrals with nothing on the ground to orient you
except the sun-track. And unzipped my Coleman pup-tent.
The virgin smell of glue and plastic smelled like pine cones.
The heat made the lawn thick and irregular. A Chinese adage says
no wrong place for grass –
a week of fog, then rain and sun had made it run riot.
It seized the land,filled the desolation with irregularity,
like raiders who prey on oases: grass isn't native.

On the website was a record of my grandparents
and the port of departure through which everyone passed,
unless they passed through Hamburg. Grass seized desolation.
The spelling of their names in the record is irregular.
Closing the tent I inhabit a sterile, geometric form.

The sky without a vestibule is a square net of nylon,
and without clouds, a kind of desolation hangs
like heavens of golden hair decorating a Bedouin’s tent.
On a fair day grass grows with the fury of irregular cells,
raging with the irregularity that thrives on decoration
deserts that were grass, until cattle ate the tender portions
and the goats ate the brambles. If a tent rises there,
it is from your bare hands crossed with bridle marks,
a craft that rests with confidence in desolation
raising a tent woven with the respite of a dark interior and the planets.

2/05 (more worthless crap)

The icon of the teddy bear’s a virus.
Delete the teddy bears on the screen.
Search through all extension files for him.
Delete any files with his extensions.

Reboot and run the antivirus software.
Quarantine or fix corrupted files.
Update the antiviral doctor regularly.
Do not open unknown messages

with strange names in the address box.
In the subject box, how familiar they seem.
They pretend they can increase your size.
The girls they offer are made of light.

How their protean aliases change.
Some of them are from the places
You’ve clicked on animated maps,
Your cursor faster than light speed

Channeled in fiber optic cables.
How fast you move above Cambodia.
How much sooner you arrive at home.
The videocam reveals pins of light

Above an ordinary parking lot.
Are the strangers forging their spam
In cubicles nearby, or in strip malls
Abutting the Oriental massage parlor?

Getting them requires your credit card.
Scammers, their fustian phaseology
Tripped on itself, will give you money.
They need your bank account number.

To a folder relegate the unfamiliar.
Scroll through the subject and address lines
Or just empty, or block the address
and wait another day for the next one.

10/9/05 draft (more worthless crap)

Were your typos tracked, you’d write lovely, not lonely.
Emphasis on dove, not done. Rock doves, not well done.
Pichon Spanish eat. Rats with wings? Surrounding
Lorn Nelson on his pedestal, his family being Nielsons
Or Nilsens, certainly neither Nissen as in bread or Nissan.
But Nissans were Datsuns. Done and lovely column one,
dove and lovely in another. Between govern and gone,
but sieve and purse-seine? To leave is not to lean,
to love not lone, or lave or lane. Pave the street,
don’t replace the pane. Read one through another.
Oval, not onus, nor anal. Imply the birth canal,
Not colon. Cove, not cone. A shore removed
From central thoroughfares, not a funnel
The diameter of which increases the greater the distance
From a central point of departure or destination,
Not a water-body where most find respite.
But shore or shove, which will it be? Shorn or shone.
Push comes to shove, shove sandbags against the flood,
Levees unlenient. Lavings, not lanes, water shoves,
Sandbags or barriers shore up against what shoves,
Removes, resettles, restructures in arrangements unloved,
Alone. Sand-grain, gravel. Engrave, ingrain, or grate.

2/25/05 draft (worthless crap)

Do you teach, paint, travel, preach, or weave?
Or teach privately, or weave stories while you paint,
Or do you travel, weaving yarns based on your itineraries,
Which weaves up the coastline to Peru and Australia.
You vagabondage teaches you about the customs
Of tribespeople unexposed to hair-dryers and cotter-pins.
Your wandering weaves an irregular path about the globe.
Sometimes it is a drunken man’s saunter, a ballerina’s twirl.
You teach privately the methods of releasing chakra-energy
These tribespeople taught you in their palm-leaf shelters
While you collected all their orgone energy on the sly,
And packed it in a little book no thicker than a ring finger.
To the converted alone do you preach these doctrines
Of energy release and of living? With the paint-brush
You weave another itinerary, among the jack-fruit thorns
And the Venus fly-traps. Your own backyard
Is wherever you happen to be standing, a point
On the itinerary, but hardly the end.

Fratricide (to Wright Express)

The boy who mowed his father’s lawn
becomes a man. His Alfred E. Neuman acne
dries and soon his toothy grin ossifies,
learned for girls and yearbook photographs.

When he mowed his father’s lawn to Styx
little did he know he’d mow the master’s too,
some Boston refugee, away from the rat race
just down the street, tossing a coin at him.

Mr. Moneybags, mutters this adolescent,
seeing red or Daddy Warbuck’s coat-tails.

All summer circling grounds in a tractor mower
he chews away the sweet ends of grass and sneers,
as he – freckle-faced Archie, Alfred E.– behind
the grin (shit-eaten, learned rigor mortis) pondered:

Those secular dukes muttering about emissions
swishing their vintage Chardonnay in their mouths
will be no more. Those diamond-studded emigres
I will depose, squire with trailer-trash,
and mark what’s mine with monotones more pungent
than any piss-stain, rabid strain or pedigree.

Their dreams I’ll fuck up with developments alright
grinned this Archie who let me go from the position.

OLD (A Touch of the Marmoreal)(01)

To bring the chain of being back
and to quell the plant kingdom,
rebel angels soaring over fields
to fructify or ionize in haze,

so that spores and mites
wouldn't rise from basements
with the ease of migratory birds,
that their mandibles and spurs

wouldn’t be so transparent,
as glass-bits, glassine sand-fleas.

To summon the allergens,
and herd them back to Pandora's box,
and to deport them.

*******

Floating dead homunculi,
pollen who seek the proper host,
sprinkled on the candied surfaces of vehicles,
gold alluvium channeling through curb-drains,

thick and crowded as the silt of deltas
with wing-bursts and the bellow of oxen
and from the runoff, a fetid, vegetal smell --

and though I know you are without malice,
nonetheless I was much luckier with water.

******

I watch for their mirages.
My arms thrash the shoreline,
silt scooped by dairy farmers
before they sold the land to Brahmins.

That I leave before the Caterpillars
fill the hole whose side I try to find is urgent.

A hole the size of a pin-head
in airways enlarges for legions
to trespass, by means of this elixir--
microcrystalline, in aerosol, suspended
the label’s print in emergency blurred--

I think of water-agitated friends
who stand around or dare another to jump
while aqua vita soothes the airways
or think about the bronchioles replaced

by poplars crowding human figures out
with the groping histrionics of dancers.
How pitiless the thickening of the trunk,
soft conifers sucking rainwater up,
hardwood holding water life-times.

Had you time to open your eyes
the human figures would have been gilded.

Wave to the dresser mirror while there's time.

11/11/07 (Words for Richard Cohen)

11/11/07
When it couldn’t be more self-evident except to fools or Frenchmen, when a monkey could have painted it, when a monkey painted it but the art dealers swindled us, when there were no longer lies upon which to base one’s heaping calumny upon the numerous actors who it can be granted had not mastered the details although they had grasped the whole vision and its urgency as well, when they don’t deserve the abuse of the rabble, the abuse of habitual complainers and whiners and naysayers who are contesting that all’s right with the world just as the public intellectual crippled in his perch will never fail to do. Because the adversary will never cease, never will the adversarial cease his complaining that no one listens to him, never will no one listening to him cease to be adversarial from a deeply felt need, never in a million years in which time hominids could speak well-rounded and balanced silver sentences and dress in periwigs whereas at the beginning of that time-span they could bash the skulls of the macroceros with large rocks the stonemasons call dog-killers and grunt in monosyllables or make with their narrower mouths the onomatopoiea of babies about when they struggle upward from the crib, never since a visiting alien civilization explored the cooling globe before it congealed into gas and liquid and cells of heat within globes within whirlwinds, never since extraterrestrial storms on the calmer waters, never since the emergence of amphibious species resembling catfish or mud-skippers crawled upon a slime composed of algae and unspecified unicellular creatures possessed with the uncanny ability of inhabiting frozen wastelands of karst and glaciers or tropical swamps crowded with the sword-like blades of primitive sedges rooting far beneath the carboniferous tars upon which the wings of dragonflies struggle to no avail, never since the hardwood forests, uncut and crowded and the tops of trees cloud-like, but green not white clouds, with billows bunched like broccoli, a man-made hybrid of rabe and cauliflower courtesy of Mr. Broccoli who sired the producer of James Bonds films, but who sure wasn’t a member of the new adversarial class who grouse about their lack of power from their academic perches but who fail to breathe in the air of the hoi polloi, only for them the atmospheric nectar of those higher ivory tower attitudes: how powerless, complaining, like baboons from tree-tops, like hominids alienated from monkeys yapping from vines, exposing their big teeth from the tree-tops to ward off a defter adversary, the golden-crested monkeys happy with their continual and unspoiled prospects of cracking nuts and shellfish open, sometimes suspended from branches with their stave-shaped tails—what defter, more masterful instrument, whereas the hominids still struggle with the very digits of their hands, their slender, hairless, double-jointed hands: look, the hominids are complaining in the trees again. It rankles, the proportionality.

I’m a journalist maybe, but a sinner? I hate the sin but not the sinner, but for some, that’s not enough, and for far too long for my taste, I’ve shuttled between the cooling globe and the brooding upon the waters and the creatures isolated among their trees or their towers, but even the arthropod can complain about the sinuous appearance of the mollusc, or the baby bear about the kangaroo rat, and the latter about his truly marsupial counterpart the rat kangaroo, and how symmetrical the ecological niches producing such anomalies that must be stomped out with bovver boots.

5/14/07

Certain tropes or descriptions you don't repeat
because they do not contribute to the meaning,
along with images extraneous and unsurpassing.
There are similes that are dead ends. And metonyms
that are fenceposts without palings to be fences.

And there are lines in print that I refuse to scold.
As if these lines were offspring with a shorter life-span.
Going nowhere, already buried in paper and ink.

Hear whose name who lies in water written.
Here whose water lies his name. Whose name lies.
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
Here lies water, whose name was writ.

Bludgeon, blunt axe. Eric Bloodaxe--stand up, please!
So all can see you. Your mother would like you to call.
And your papa wishes you well.

He was, however, impaled on a stake,
still sending best wishes from over the Carpathians.

He continually complains of discomfort,
and we're looking for a homeopathic therapist or acupuncturist.
Who that is however should be beside the point
(no pun intended, but what is the point?)

By the time you land a deal, the songs are stale,
as ossified water, if that makes any sense.

Stale as water in which particles of half-digested bone meal
float in ethereal gestures.

We hear he was impaled on a stake
so we are sending our condolences.
We'll be enrolling our grandson in pre-school.
Band practice will not be cancelled.

Stones Are Lightning, Gold the Sweat

Are there no stones in heaven
But what serves for the thunder? Othello 5.2, 242-3

Lightning’s the line-graph on the spreadsheet
of the clouds that, down-trending, strikes home
like cannon-shot or stones. It’s a spasm
man tries to anticipate with artillery –

Franklin’s lightning-rod, however, was pre-emptive,
the cheapskate. Secretly he thought
thunderbolts could alchemize the stones,
give each corpse-cold* Puritan his gold-hoard.

Lightning wrecked the house of false composure
descendants built, their daughter’s singsong
shattered as she retracted hands from any metal thing.
Lightning taught the fatality of the touch.

And as he mopeds to the brothel for children,
a tourist judges Ankgor Wat a load of stones.**
Unbeknownst to him are golden thrones and turrets
the Khmer Rouge sought to overturn with thunder,

since gold that neither greased the wheels of trade
nor alchemized the stones beneath could only char.
Gold, thought certain cultures, was the sun’s tears.
Other cultures, wiser, thought it was the sweat.

* Emerson on the Congregational Church, heir to the Puritans
**details digested from an article on child prostitution in Cambodia in The London Independent (on-line)

To You (03)

It was meant to be tiny,
Which means convenient
And to fit the schedule
For which it was apportioned.

It was meant to be compact
To fit into a space
Smaller than the one required
by the brain to count to four.

It was meant to be didactic
With easily traceable parallels
Hard-wired in its verbal system
So that meaning didn’t overflow

Into uninvited areas
Where there might be problems
Where there might not be tools
or special “plugs” to fix it.

Diagnosis: Retinoschesis

In one photograph, they wear sweaters,
and in another, pointy Santa hats.
Poor vision doesn’t make me see them.
Truly doubles, they are reassuring,
on the wall, the twins of the optometrist.

He fires air-jets in my eyes, and spins
sets of lenses while I read the alphabet,
which, he echoes, make vision better.
The tiniest row of letters seem Cyrillic.
Where does the other language start?

Soon the consonants become vowels
then a numerology too remote to count,
except one character, hooked like chaos,
symbol for Saturn, presiding over lead.
He asks me: circle, counter-clockwise, east

to west -- to my right the twins are happy.
They lean in an identical direction.
Wearing matching sweaters and caps,
they’re nested in another like dolls
or cosmonauts packed in a Soyuz.

He diagnoses blisters under my eyes.
They lie beneath each one like chaos
cradles a planet -- a chaos that pools
to sea or teary source or Murine deluge,
space without circumference, a mess.

If the blisters grow, I will see shadows
or blinding white flashes of epiphany
but neither walk nor drive--that’s why
when things are black, the squiggles
reassure me: blood vessels, he urges,
gelatinous, packed, outracing thought
or UFOs in grainy 16 millimeters.

But when I rub eyes, I see sunspots
that augur heat-blasts. And do not look
at sunlight say voices. The flash itself
will float on water -- as creation floats
on a ridge of bone or razor-back of giant,
or a flood of tears, the final source

for this anointment dilating my pupils.
How appealing the steel-rimmed glasses
as walls within the eye-store wobble.
They will hold my head like barrel-hoops.
The assistant reminds me don’t drive,

advice I disregard in open country,
the constellations undisturbed by traffic,
where twins are archetypes, not twins
of the optometrist. I fail to see things
but as dotted lines, suggestive, bare --

too remote to scrutinize, unlike sunspots
my fingers press on this wrinkled microcosm.
The sky suggests a bow, an arrow-shaft,
or limb attached to torso nebulae barely clothe,
or things I can turn off, blanks refuse to fill

like metaphysical things, or like chaos,
which beneath appearance, isn’t really true,
because what’s underneath is really ordered
on a microscopic level -- those squiggles
for which lenses or tea-leaves are needless

make sense, being neither magic, nor UFOs
nor private, like palm-lines, birthmarks or scars.
They’ve been allotted to others as eyes have
or identical twins, those circling peas in pods.
If vision gets too terrible, can’t he lance them
with those ruby lasers used for rifle scopes?

Amorphous (9/15/03) (revv. Jan 09)

The clouds have accumulated for a storm, as if the sky
Were loaded with potential electricity, with banks
Of storm-clouds and air-currents, wending above and below
One another in ribbons, which the meteorologist’s arrows
Seek to clarify or pass through, but can only confuse.
They are convoluted as brains, have minds of their own,
The cumulus, the cumulonimbus, the thermals, the spaces between them.
How sticky clothes can change one’s mindset overnight,
Continual discomfort breeding the urge to transcendence,
A thought of non-attachment the thought of cool antipodes,
Underground groves, walls of water from a waterfall,
But were you about to freeze to death on the tundra,
You’d curl around hearths, fireplaces would feel huge as cathedrals,
Which are forests you’ve never seen, every column a tree-trunk.
Piss off you declare to the crow who caws on the power-line
The elaborate patrols and surveillance for roadside carrion.
The owls perched on buoys looking for river-rats that joggers
Choose to ignore closing in on their requisite mileage
As men would a hole-in-one on the golf course, a game in which
they are, to say the least, covertly competitive.

My Kenneth Fearing Stab (10/05?)

Self-centered, self-absorbed, euphemism for selfish,
Preoccupied with markets, with new properties, with
Turning the properties over on the markets, with yields,
And with dividends, and with average daily balances,
With deposits and withdrawals, with investment patterns,
With setting oneself up for life and with providing for
One’s future and the future of one’s family and one’s estate—
surely one can counter-argue this is healthy,
Better than being a flagellant or a bomb-thrower
In a crowded theater or pretending to be the last of
the courageous men in the world, a total dope, a blowhard?
He had maintenance issues said the guy with the ponytail
Whose sincerity was undoubted, who didn’t want to impose
Heavy trips on anyone, but wanted to show how caring
He really was, how he’d like to give everyone in the room
A hug, but there isn’t any time what with the schedule.
All I really want to do is show how much I share among
The human community, this circle, me and you, you can call
Me by my first name, I am also executive director, chief
Vision officer of a small firm specializing in enhanced
Digital telepathy, not that I wish to probe, disturb
Your personal space, your circle, which I do not confuse
With the circle that we have—together, us—not one or two.
But I might add, not so much as codicil than as admonition
That like all of us, you also have an issue with your fathers,
So as my young wife has had her first child how deeply
I ponder this, whether at work, or on the way to work, on
My custom-made Italian racing bicycle with its frame of
Pressurized carbon on which I’ve rode to work and cruised
On coastal roads, through cities become consecutively smaller,

Until they are those cemeteries with slate headstones from the past
Fenced in with wrought iron, where the uncut grass waves
Its chaff to the gun-metal sky, and a rain is about to visit
this old mill town, and I lie perfectly awake, day-dreaming
but a voice urges don’t be so indulgent, keep to the ground
for the people, the people here, my audience, mon sembables,
my consumer, target audience, sole patron, mes amis.

Post Office Lounge: rough draft from '03

Cookie with a spiral of cinnamon
Sugar crystals planets congealed
From rivers of honey
The cinnamon from jungles
spiraling in the cookie
From plantations watered by rivers
In which mothers launder and unbind
Hair contesting Rapunzel’s
Cinnamon that doesn’t grow on trees,
languid as the air it clouds—
Money more likely from trees
than the spice of a cookie
flotillas carry to your doorstep

And how the cookie crumbles
in the toothless laugh of a package handler
after he dips it in a Pepsi foam
throwing his head back [with a hiss].
Nature abhors a waste of air


[Orpheus taming the beasts]

In a painted bestiary,
the Himalayan tiger lives beside
the eucalyptus-chewing panda
nudging him with a silver paw.
Behind two giant penguins tower,
stare through the vanity mirrors
of the postal handlers’ lounge.
Perspective is generous, peace this window.

She devours microwavable mini-pizzas
at the table across. With her around
no chance to change the channel
from the soaps. She's on contract.

in the washroom, beyond the sorting machines
referred to by four digit numbers, zeros gratis,
farther even than the thousand-yard stare

go beyond the walls containing our life
in epistles or Kraft-paper packages

from loved ones or strangers with gifts
The networks dissolved in a glass,
that's how the cookie crumbles
The one with Afro and the saucer eyes

12/3/06

I folded the kibbles of rodent poison into foil, then closed it up into a plastic sandwich bag, then placed the bag beneath the kitchen cabinet. And then I washed my hands of the matter. Twice I washed my hands in the evening. How many trees are felled to make these flyers crammed into my mailbox? Peeling content from the envelopes is like shucking corn. Once I was asked to pull the silk from the kernels but to keep the ears on, but I refused because it was too time-consuming. Better to eat the corn raw from the cob than to be precious. It would have suited me to pull the ears back, tear the silken strands from the ear, and toss it naked into the fire.

Serves you right Orville Redenbacher, no little resemblance to Kim Jong Il, only the latter portlier. Whenever that dude writes his autobiography, it'll be bound for Oprah's list. The man who knew when very young why flowers were not black, why streams did not reverse their course and why bees didn't sting when in a swarm around their hive, why cats curled atop the hoods of cars, why crows roosted in the chestnut trees in the dead of winter. He was the son of the sun , and even Il Duce would have had to bow in the sunlight--never was there such a narrrative for the national laureate to labor upon.

Perhaps your emotions clarify, become as light as the air you breathe. Or perhaps you're less morbid in your cast of mind. Cast out, outcast, the die cast, your cast hardens. Casting as in sculpture, outcast as if flung from afar. The die is cast; the dispositions have hardened. So I reify the object of my disdain until the sinner becomes the sin. Economy of resources dictates when this becomes the case. An infinitely patient being would do otherwise; that being would comprehend the failings of a personality without needing to invest itself in any kind of earthly involvement; as long as that being did not possess an individual body locked in a particular place, it could posess an infinite understanding and will to understand more.

But when Neanderthal confronted Homo Sapiens, or before that Homo Pithecanthropus confronted Homo Erectus, was understanding possible, one draped in animal skins and huddled in a cave, the other with elegantly serrated flint spears and trousers and moccasins, their only flaw being the weaker bearskin that covered them, the result of a misguided homeopathy: that what was good for bears was good for those who traveled like bears. But there was no time for understanding between species, no ground for patience. The wind was blowing the fires down, the fuel was harder to find, and the animal wealth was harder to extract from the mammoth, mule deer, or antelope. Eohippus, tiny horse hiding among gooseberry bushes, silently mocked his lumbering descendant on the steppes. The Neanderthal, back from having buried loved ones among beads and ochre, stared at Homo Erectus as he tried to assemble thoughts from fears he could not mouth.

There were no grounds for human understanding, which is based on a sympathy that is bodiless, composed from hte vapors of alcohol during Happy Hour, at the very beginning when no one is in the bar yet.

Spring 07 (draft)

Ducts moved air from beneath or moved air from above,
or from the sides of buildings, or from beneath the awnings.
Rail-cars roared beneath the buildings, stopped and roared again.
The awnings of the shops bellied with wind as if they were sails,
and the banners that drooped from the sides of the buildings
were floodlit and also bellied from the winds underneath them.

And the winds were compressed to an even greater pressure
by the narrowness of the mazes through which the wind had to pass
on their way to the sea -- or were they passing from the open sea?
Were the ducts pushing air underground, or from the ground?
And in which directions were the banners bellying with wind?

How was the traffic? Traffic roared later in the evening.
The winds from the air-ducts roared along with the traffic.
The underground was made of money, the cost of location
passed to the customer. The gold necklace on the velvet-lined collar
is from the underground also. The maze between the buildings
straitens until the wind gains greater pressure, until it howls.

10/01/06 (draft)

The bee-sting as if a splinter of glass had pierced the web of my hand,
the web of skin between the thumb and index finger.

The bee crawled into my sock as if to hide, but when I flicked it from the seam,
it curled into a fetal ball, its wings flattened against its furry abdomen.

I swatted the bee to help it along as it lie on the bathroom floor,
amid the bleach and talcum powder compounded into paste.

And tried to suck the splinter from my hand that felt like fiberglass beneath the skin,
which was the stinger that I first felt beneath the apple tree.

Why didn’t it start this way? Eve reached for the apple, or maybe Adam did.

A bee stung as the fruit was plucked; it felt like glass or eisenglass
the first couple hadn’t known before.

Earth hadn’t erupted, although the seas were made.
Rocks weren’t mixed with glassy or metallic things.
No need for gloves to pluck the fruit, the ones He said to take.

But then a little bee died to tell you something, his emissary, no bad guy.
That’s when it started. You felt a shard inside you, however small.

No matter how you tried to salve yourself, things weren’t the same.
You killed the bee for the little projectile you felt in the web of your hand,
the beginning of conflict.

The apples didn’t taste the same. You’d never been stung before.

I am the priest or pastor of the church that rests upon this story, so hand the till to me.
Charity begins not at home, but with my well-being.

Thus bee-stings begin the making of the salve a body needs.

A world could be built upon the remedy for stings, new stings could be made,
could even come from laboratories.

And rock was made to block the plowshare, and so was glass a splinter.

Art in America (03)

Jackson Pollock committed to memory Guernica’s canvas back
hung in the Guggenheim circa ‘39, then reproduced the thought
on canvas swathes he freely cut to isolate the best of them
until, by career's end, he could afford to forget those figures,
first occasions for his blobs and paint-whips, wounded peasants.
Morris Louis later witnessed swathes of color wallow on overalls
as droopy gesso rainbows. While Christo wrapped a high-rise
in brown paper, and Damien Hirst aspired to split blue whales,
sink their matching halves in picture cubes. Christo addressed
the package to itself, then whales breached its satin ribbons
to flop in Hirst's abbatoir, gigantic, and televised at that.
What avatar transvalues their values? Chris Burden had himself
wounded in the arm, then laid between power lines and water.
Andy Warhol dropped the lady's pump he'd been sketching
for Redbook, to swish among the socialites with a Polaroid.
Someone jumped from floor five far too fast for him to shoot.
Julian Schnabel busted restaurant crockery to plaster shards
on murals buyers paid hand-over-fist to hang in chi-chi houses.
What's to be done? An Austrian has also sliced his foreskin off
for photographs displayed as art-prints in some high-end gallery.
But all that Arnold Schwarz-Kogler was rewarded for his work
was a portrait--bandaged, head to toe--above a brief obit in Time.

Who however will assemble the firing-squad for our next piece?
Where’s the concept artist who can breath life into art
through needless death? Who will get the genius grant
to displace millions? Manufacture suitcase atom bombs?
Poison whole cities with smallpox, inoculate survivors
for reality TV debuts, inaugurate frenzied religious cults
living by lashes alone? Channel heaps of cash to the drug trade?
Numb latchkey kids with white supremacist sex fantasies?
Work millions into epileptic froths, send kamikaze battalions
to the moon? Drop a thermonuclear bomb into a cheese-hole,
and who will call the bluff? Who will poison whole species
for this month’s Art In America, construct malls of mud
in the Amazon, next door to the rainforest Chippendale’s,
or spread sexually transmitted diseases like wildfire,
invent new mutant strains, clone ubermenschen porn stars,
and plasticate their remains for exhibits in corporate lobbies
or pipeline tongueless child prostitutes raised to be janissaries
on Singaporean ship containers, or bury subliminal messages
in heavy metal, urging prepubescent youth to off themselves
if they can’t kill gratuitously at will? Who can top their act?
There’s a message. Even this poem -- loose and lazy catalogue
of atrocities thought or done, imagery arbitrary as windings
through gutters -- goes on as long as you want: this just came in.

2/24/06

The kraft paper kite plunges into the kitchen garden
but doesn't bruise the bean-stalks or the squash.
The kite of sticks and strings rides the air and ripples
noisily. All edicts against kite-flying have fallen.
You can't disinter mandrake roots or other tubers
or pluck the Turkish fig before it's dried and candied over
enough to settle into a market stall, whether in a bazaar
or the supermarket's whole foods section. Certain names
for the deity may also be off-limits, entertainer's jibes
at El or Alilat. Purple phalloi of some plants are suppressed.
Even the turnip piled in the truck can appear concupiscent,
once the dirt is shaken from its rugged beard. The rhizome,
impossible to find, hops without a central nervous system.
A facsimile sent by email barely squeezes through the lines
of the telephone, reduced to dots and dashes.
The last telegram was sent yesterday,
and the cocaine-fueled raging day-trader ruined the ticker-tape.
Bring a pretty glass bell and someone is bound to smash it.
Treaties are composed to be broken as symphonies to be played.
Silence and random sounds were meant for compositions,
the space between a note is shaped like a sand-dune.

*****************************************************

I could feel the delicacy of the thing in the package
inside the big cardboard envelope, an earring for a fairy
a small fairy whose wings were spread in full flight
a pendant in the shape of a fairy dangling from the ear-lobe
It felt like one earring, maybe two, but not likely
and that maybe fairy-earrings were attached to a chain
a slender chain pouring from the hand that dispensed it
to which the earrings were attached, very delicate fairies of beaten gold
or gold-plated brass that I threw in the shark's cage in the warehouse,
its steel latches beaten into unpredictable shapes that didn't fit well,
and threw the heavier gifts on top of the earrings or whatever they were.
This is what happens to vulnerable children, with weak heads and butterfly stomachs.