1773

Lately I've been working out ways
To put extra pressure on myself,
To tense up at the slightest variation
In the population of the elevator,
Hold off on slow-dances until after
The film editor is splicing a zamboni
Where you expect the push-broom janitor,
Daffy Duck coming onstage to crickets
Where moments before, hella boffo.
I could join a gym, of course, or
Spend entire days in the dictionary
Steeped in darjeeling's tannins,
A mandate for alkaloids secretly
Regulating this hyper purpose.
No one speaks this way. I don't care.

1772

AMUSE-BOUCHE

I miss the moshpit pushed to the side of the bed.
The hard and fast rules, the business,
Walking across town the baby's hand in mine
Gave me anxiety Rosado barely mellowed.

Who doesn't love to hear about anxiety.
You wouldn't be too wrong to wake from dreaming
Into an amusement park sluice of Rioja
Eau de post-Auden thanks a lot Timex hubbub.

Those feelings are in their way good luck.
I don't even need a communion wafer
To feel the need to shout "y'all suck"
Fade like a docent when the hedge fund calls.

1771

TRANSPARENCY

Don't pull me
Any more directions,
Vista-boy,

Chuckle in my doorway
At the expense of your grin.

We have a job
And the job has us --

Lunch comes looking
For weather worth
Cooking, the door
Comes swinging
What you're bringing.

1770

EZRA PASS

Twenty blocks down Third Avenue,
The sun shines off cars --
Rocks in a slowly running stream.

1769

Hype
Is
Short
For
Hyperbole.

1768

Pink boards line the green room.
In the middle of the afternoon
A tall glass of foam. A muffled boom.

The excitement you feel is coiled
Into a tear -- soon, home!
Gerard Manley Hopkins' phrase: shook foil.

Make the way by sound. Make the rounds
From the high light art class
Down to the surgical theater dome.

The sandwich comes with a pickle.
Time, goes the song, 's a bonny lass --
How light the touch that makes her come.

1767

If you have to pay them off,
Put the cash in the correct hand.
Money makes me fall in the sleet,
Call in the changes,
Rewrite the outgoing greeting

For the miniature fan
Of the housefly making his rounds
Blowing on my knuckles --
He knows I'm playing craps.

1766

The weight of the morning
Has a voice, whispers
"Take care of yourself, now"
And what does it mean, the world
As will and representation?
Dizzy spells and paper plates,
Copperheads and poodles.

1765

The little-known scribbles
With cartoon bug eyes for a white yes
Strew the mentionable winter demons
Along the string-light lip of the volcano

Correction: caramel-thread.
Can you bear how my heart
Keeps jumping backflips to impress you?
I should have been a journalist

Or a lawyer scanning inventory records,
"Subpoena everything!" Somebody
Or everybody by proxy needed Michelangelo
Never to have committed a joke,

You'd have to be thickheadedly utopian
To read Ozymandias as a riposte
To power and not a more general memento
But alas, consider the author.

1764

Part of the fun of any speech act
Is knowing when to play along or not
With the expectations of
The other party. Fun, in this context
(As in so many others), is a code word
For reserving the right to control:

What we exchange when we agree to hang out
Are emotional nerf coupons
Good for the light on the prairie
Or if you prefer a validation stamp
On your "I'm only co-opted ironically" button.

Sincerity is a desirable quality
To find in the person who vows love for you.
Someone sincere with everyone they meet
Is an admirable case indeed, especially
If they aren't being merely polite.
Don't bother to search for an antonym;
It isn't irony, in any case.

If only we could free the preoccupied as easily
As someone whose coat is caught on a thorn.

1763

The pumpkin tools mixed in the bookbag
With the pizzicato from all the umbrellas
In the Revised Standard Edition
While I was moving from the abdominal crunch
To the lateral raise to get away
From all the a cappella groups in dire need
Of monitor amps and loving before
The wilderness came scavenging the pavement,
Oh it was intense as the chicken
Flying through the open screen door
The fit of pique propelling it unclear
Of motivation, white and soundless places
Ask me to write a song of the good hood,
How midnight always asks for my ID.

1762

THE LAND OF DOUBLE-ENTRY BOOKKEEPING

In those days when the world was quiet
And all the pressurized gumbo compared
Was heat and pepperpower, a man could
Wake up alone from a dream of pine trees
To the tractor trailer trumpet shunting
All that time allows a little boy praise:

Cuneiform fantasies of business,
Eternal inventory, sales, and yes
From time to time returns. Not part of life,
No shatterlife permitted here.
Just, in dreaming's kitsch-distorted reason,
The savannah's hunt adrenaline.

1761

Say my last name
When you come home,
It's the first thing
On your red wing

Pro bono of the ozone
Freestyling, meanwhiling
Let a mayor hear you
Speak badly of Ontario

It happens to us all
It meaning radio theater

1760

Let's be less bland!
Put my right hand
On your left gland.

1759

Place your right hand
On your right mind
And you might find
Where you hit land
What you can't stand
Will be like sand.

1758

SERIOUS YODA ADDICTION

How the earth cools
Feels right up there
With mink, duck, love
And the cattlebarn
Is submerged in mist
Like it's busking
In a sauna for rigid
Children of the law.

Hey there, law kids,
It will be okay
If you let it, if not
I hear pretty girls
Find coalminers hot.

1757

When you sent me your love note
I took a walk across the boat.

"Take the fake snake from the lake,
Make and bake cake; wake, ache, shake."

I felt so good, I ran
Halfway across Iran.

"I'd bide what wide light might tide,
Shied, sighed, pied, ride, night-side."

When I looked at what your words were
I felt my heart beat like the cursor.

1756

Sing the word "free" for four or five beats
And on the fifth beat I will be there with five bears

1755

Where you come from they breathe iron.
They don't take kindly, they just kind of
Marinate on their stoops, in a stupor.
Frankly, I admire the freedom with which
They speak of everything but the obvious:
It reminds me like so much else of home.

It makes sense to talk about selling out.
If there are other options, speak up now --
Five hundred and thirty seven people
Are not too many to keep on message,
Apparently. I have a message, too.

Some reporter somewhere will find it,
So simple and free of breakable parts.

1754

Shout over me
Into a what-cake

The side of the highway
Covered with quartz

The cars go by
Like missiles

Bound for "oh her"
Buttercreme-crowned

Watching the time
Angry hungry

Lonely tired
About as safe as Texas

1753

GOETHE

I apologize for this long letter; I didn’t have time to shorten it.
— Pliny

Today I put my friends in storage, steerage,
Prayed to a miniature device for a signal
To complicate the god failings of my wide late
Innocence of the noise wrappers make coming off.

I put the boxes in the van, aided by
A Hungarian photographer named Sonny.
The morning was cool and hazy, and we both
Admired New Jersey's dirty fog. "The second time

I came to New York I had to buy a suitcase
For all the pictures I took -- 3,000." Film,
He said, is infinite -- with these digital cameras
You may as well be looking at television.

I am not a moralist about narcotics. If you're
Not driving or caring for small children,
Shepherding a democracy or otherwise
Changing life, no harm no foul. I like tv.

I hate it. It's the cell I am filing out of,
Sudden close-ups, contusions, power struggles
The penumbra of effects that halo all our days
Under the hemi-demi-semi-quavering economy.

There is a subject that demands being written.
There is a light that never goes out.
There's a frog on a loose soda.
There there now, that's a good boy.

In what we now call Germany they orient sofas.
Sofabeds must point north; divans go east-west.
These thoughts betray the strange pressure
Of a mind formerly tending to feel bleak.

Good feelings swoop up the god that failed.
The confidence man by Herman Melville.
I have always admired the look of card catalogs,
Perhaps not as much as waterfalls but then.

Why is this good feeling indestructible,
What am I to do with this persistent good luck
That makes a success of every wistful darkness
Pretending to be a ghost rabbit genius locii.

Goethe is not the subject of this poem nor
Do I intend to mock the sufferings of others
Or my own. A person arrives in a distant city,
Stands before a podium, and leaves before

Anyone realizes what a pumpkin pie the mind
Can press charges against. The person has left
The blood book at the employee toss. Giving
Lightning to the keeper of the dream camera

The person returns in time for sleep practice.
A reader, while developing a goatee,
Renders a fair account of the moods and lights
The mental strawberry lends a quiet dance.

"The teacher told me to go see if the nanny
Was drunk. Now none of the nannies speak to me."
We agreed to debate Whorf's hypothesis until sunset;
No more bull sessions in Iceland for me.

When in Iceland, drink cucumber vodka
And pay no attention to the glacier faeries.
Consider taking a ferry to the Faeros Islands.
This video editing software changed my life;

Suddenly everybody dismissed Rilke
As a vacuous oaf. I started wearing a baseball cap.
I took regular inventory of my feelings.
Finally, the counterintuitive genius of undershirts.

Statler to Waldorf: I never understood that
About the Muppets -- they think explosions are funny.
Then Boom! his cigar's a purple flash
And black dust on his face the next shot.

Meanwhile, Goethe riding either into or out of battle
Sees oil shining on the surface of water in a well
And is seized -- possessed -- taken with a subject
That will occupy him through wars, loves, and triumphs.

Though the optics of his theory of color
Are generally discredited, it remains
An entertaining intellectual oddity,
Something more than a violon d'Ingres.

Wittgenstein's theory of color: we cannot speak
Of brown light. Unless we've driven the Turnpike
Between November and April, that is. Americans
Speaking of color ought to blush. Avanti! Into battle!

Greatness is tedious! all these rock bands
Quoting Yeats no I take that back!
All the practitioners of a talky monologic
Kiss-me-I'm-from-the-real-world

Let's not even turn toward those tautologies
We can read by their light at this distance
Listen: "..is the art of the memorable.."
As if they remembered the first thing

About lust sizzling a crease down the heart
Or for that matter a single tender concession
No it's all blustery awkward complications
The only boldness for them is a cool disregard

For everything that could make a woman spit.
When they do set a blaze, it's their hair
Giving awful smoke -- how much they hate it
When their careful efforts at winning attention

Don't somehow obliterate all difference,
Don't automatically negate all other priorities
Or for that matter ways of achieving those goals
Other than their own. Vain vain vain vain vain,

And they announce it as if to deflect
What is in fact a valid reason to ignore them.

1752

APPS

I am staring at a computer screen.
Formerly I was staring at a manila folder
Of kindergarten applications.

It is not comforting to stare at the screen.
The screen is mostly white light.

The letters I am writing now are
Turned-off pixels. Coincidentally
I am feeling like a turned-off pixel.

What are your child's greatest strengths?
What about your educational experience
Would you like your child to repeat,
And what would you like him to avoid?

How does his experience in the family
Match the philosophy of our school?

I have some preformatted answers.
They feel like turned-off pixels.
I talk to friends and acquaintances
Who grew up here and who have
Instantaneous visceral responses
To the names of these schools.
I am supposed to complete these apps
In collaboration with my ex.

Mrs. Katz wore a scent I smelled at Saks.
I had half-day crushes, as well as
The more permanent kind. We played
Ring around the rosey, musical chairs,
And math workbook. I was good
At math workbook, except for the pages
With pictures of lengths of string --
Nobody had told me the shortest distance
Between two points is a straight line.
It came as a complete surprise.

When I asked them, as my father prompted,
Whether two minus four weren't negative two,
Suddenly I was doing math with second graders.

Driving back from a nursery school
Halfway between work and home
I put on some music. James says
Put on the song where they speak Spanish;
He means Pimsleur lesson one.

These schools run from $14,000 to $27,000.
The financial aid forms say
They can generally help families
With annual incomes up to $150,000.

Phone messages: "We should have done this last year,"
"That school only takes six kids for kindergarten,"
"Why haven't you done the applications yet."

1751

GETTING YOUR HEART BROKE ON PILES OF CABLE

Turn to face
The landscape of successes
And the burning
Wish to clean everything

To put a sliding door
In front of the apocalypse

To fuse with the process

You can say this for the robots:
They hustle for their dolor
Which they eat to function

I am going to the store now
To stock up on jerky;
While I'm out
Keep dreaming of peace and lobsters.

1750

BOOTSTRAPPING

This is in fact how it begins.

I roll forward from the core
And put my feet on the rag rub.

Rag rug, blue doubt, fire window.

It is coming on winter.
I want there to be other people
In the story, I hate the astronaut
Feeling of these writerly limit cases.

I want to be with you
So much that I clean my house.

I put everything in my house in a pile
And call a van to come collect it.

Every sentence beginning with I
Will, harrowingly, try to end with me.

It is unseemly for grown men to make art.

This is why grown men make art:
You see someone you want
And grab hold of them before
Time streaks you with parti-colored light.

Time wants you to make more music.

I want the insights you express
As incidental remarks.

1749

STATS

I'm concerned.

I notice that someone in California
Has been looking at something I wrote
About once a day since I wrote it
A little more than a month ago.

Someone at a school in California
Where I know some people --
Teachers, administrators, students --
Has been looking at a note I wrote
In a bad mood
About the social formations of poets.

It is not a pretty note.

Someone I know, but I know at least
Three people there, is looking
Again and again at this note
That I wrote to explain to myself
Why repulsive behavior
Is tolerated by groups
Of otherwise admirable people.

The note doesn't explain anything.

The note, which as I say
Is not a pretty note,
Identifies the need for groups
(I call them cliques)
To absorb and tolerate what I call
Pantsleg pissing and being a droning drag.

In my not very nice note
I point out -- it was not very inspired of me --
That men and women express hostility differently.

At that point I don't think
I'd ever actually seen a poet
Piss on anybody's pantsleg.

All the same, I imagine that characterization,
If someone else had made it
About some unknown person,
I imagine I would feel abashed
And search my memory for some hostile
Territory-marking behavior of my own.

My point in this note
Was that this group agreement
To condone bad behavior
Is somehow connected to the neglect of poetry --

A non-sequitur at best;
Anyone who's been to prep school
Or worked at a financial company
Would have to chuckle --

Anyone who's read the beats
Or the language poets --

Rene Ricard or Patti Smith --

Groups are elective families,
They form and break like families --

It takes a lot of bad behavior
To push a group past what it can stand
And that is in fact a good quality.

Depression and rage, though contagious,
Cry out for treatment, not quarantine.

I'm glad I live in New York
Where I can always have enough distance
Anonymity independence what.

I know all about depression and rage
So I have those to fall back on.

I can check my stats and see who's reading.

Thank you and no thanks
On the same bookshelf.

Who wouldn't want to be part of a group;
Or rather, what does love feel like.

1748

The breakdown crew is here with your breakthrough

Love, thou would like to know, is continuous

I give in, I give out
The stop-start tickets
For the basic

You fire up the cassette drive

I rosin up the bow

And all night the gosub sings to the bosun
And all night you take the measure of my all right

1747

It's cold in the living room,
I'm reading the dials

You're huddling
With the thousand ways
Thinking through can we call it thinking
Feeling each word from your feet to next week

All my cool
Could fit on the point of my blue pencil
I have goosebumps but my head's a marshmallow
On the surface

You're Annie Lennox in 1983
I'm some of them who just want

To look into the fool feeling
With a pie pan of gasoline
And a bread bag of small bills

Fuel always wants you to bring the O2
And I am no exception

1746

She's holding the grapefruit apart
So the pulp articulates
Each nerve ending
Along the back of your neck.

1745

Shift the tiles.
I've oiled the wood
And the place
Is steaming worse
Than Paddy Considine,

That's a good car then.
Do you like words.
How about family,
Do you have any feeling
For the wishing

To please? Of course,
Of course not.
Each system is much
Like the mystery
Bogman, an ostrich

Ate the carburetor,
That sort of electrical.
The statement of purpose
At least holds a door
When you wedge it tight.

1744

These words come from on high
(Someone behind a hillock?)
And we spend the rest of our lives
Making roads of what they imply.

1743

What are you doing on Wednesday night?
Up on your toes, unable to focus,
Playing "blessing of the animals"
With a watering can and flash bulbs;
It's cool and clear and I'm hoping
Like a mythological creature, the last
To climb out of the box of chaos.
On Wednesday night as on every other night
I'm the present moment, the ink
Shining as bright as the aisle, the aisles.