2001

AREA Q

We'll be together someday soon;
Compare See you tomorrow! I pack my bag,
Set the alarm, stare at the ceiling til morning.

Walk into the street and a seed sprouts.
Belief on the face like the name on a bus:
Across the street seven strangers face south.

How people used to wait: As prepositions --
Behind the control gate, down the penstock --
And then another part of speech, eventually
Eventually eventually spinning the turbine,

A stick out your tongue attention I thought
Only existed in the clinic. The doctor
Walks by an open door. The selectric
Continues its tattoo. When children sleep

A bird stands in the library parking lot
Pushing from its diaphragm Not yet not yet,
The excitement transmitting

To every window's potential greenhouse --
An ivy tendril waves, grips the brick
A foot away. Your call is important to us.

Factors that extend subjective time:
Having nothing to do, uncertainty,
No explanation, a sense of injustice,
Being alone -- tomorrow's central planners
Visit this mock theme park to study
Reactions to environments controlled

To avert anxiety, or as may be, accentuate it.




[This poem was funded in part by a grant from Chris Sullivan]

2000

CONCESSION SPEECH

The arms race under the moon
And over the window

Has placed a stone under the tree
Rabbits visit one at a time

Stay a while now
And as you stoop to look closer
Crush these herbs in the grass

The grey and green afternoon

*

So much of human stupidity
Obtains to fear of being typecast

All I want is to build a robot
To climb inside of
And take over your world

*

Once inside the cell wall
The virus becomes a factory
For producing more viruses

These then set forth
To take over more cells

Some viruses resemble
Nothing so much
As microscopic robots

*

The rabbi has a sense of humor
Do not make him reveal it

*

I don't know why your pants are ruined
I don't know why is his attitude toward me
I don't know why I am still alive
I don't know why you say goodbye
I don't know why I didn't come
I don't know why this woman was arguing with the police at the ticket window
I don't know why I was targeted
I don't know why I still store this stuff in my head
I don't know why you brought steam into this
I don't know why you don't want me
I don't know why I need a blog
I don't know why Nintendo's new controller will be so great
I don't know why your women aren't satisfied
I don't know why the sky is so blue I'm bored and
I don't know why
I don't know why everyone is so high on experience
I don't know why it happen or how it happen or when
I don't know why you're talking about Sweden
I don't know why with me everything takes so long
I don't know why I love you
I don't know why I get this error

*

The volume, turn down the volume
I can't bear to hear this
He won and he's going to say he lost

He thinks he's going to win by losing

I don't mind watching
But I have to have some room
To dissociate

He could be saying
"My name is Fluffy!"
"Attached document scanned for malware"

He could be saying
He was briefed on this outcome June the year before

He could be saying
It is our duty as citizens
To accept the will of the people

In fact I would bet money on it
Money with his face on it
I'd put money on his face
Cover the screen with money

And then go forage
For what I don't know



[This poem was funded in part by a grant from Nada Gordon]

1999

Whatever dreams I may have had about
What goes where and why and how I now know
Are part of the general

1998

And what is meanwhile
But the pure entertainment
Of a great and luscious
Cause --

1997

Double tangle double
Wherewithal of the starpark
For now is a file

Now is a document completely

It stares and starves,
A voluble sparker
Most of the time, but now

Now is this wan and pared back
Recitative of heartbreak

You can see in its glare
It is cresting from insight
To steely and mournful resolve

If it could make any sense
To be afraid of the present moment

A wise person would be forgiven
For doing so, o paregoric

1996

Please concentrate on the blue glow
Emanating from the base of the prism.

1995

The face of space
Is turned toward Eldon.

A guarantor expects
Nothing less than fidelity.

Now, as the tribe's war
Dwindles into cribbage

And kinetic energy resumes
Its shelf life as potential,

I veto the use of turmeric
As "chapsaffron"

But am intrigued
That it may prevent cancer.

1994

Desk boot of fray trees, o ram filter
I stylize a chute for nog.

That sounds dirty.

It is not.

It is music
To the peeress
From Pyongyang.

She studied music.

It was at one point a career path
For royalty, the arts. They were.

The examination table
Is at the end of the hall.

A fiddly dime space pays your mist.

1993

You better watch out
You better watch in
You better believe
It's butter

The weather in here
Is making me hazy
It's driving me mad
To be all alone

In German, ohne abstand
I think means
Distancelessness
As in, intimacy

You better
You better
You better
You best

1992

Every dream is

Diary entries

With a key on a ribbon

Carry me inside you

Said the bird

To the stars

What's in it for us

Said the great unknown

To the fish in the sea

Abstraction and narrative

Went off to sleep

In a little leaky boat

They came back

On a wooden book

The fire flying along

In the air beside them

The golem rose

And the zombie zinnia

Came looking for life

In the darkness

And the dish

Went into the bushes

Up to a kind

Of better than good

Oh take me to Russia

Take me to Venice and Peru

Just don't tell me

What comes next

1991

The desire to hear
What you're up to
As a tale of glory
Is so strong in me
I go running to have
Something to do

I keep my head down
And my face clean
My mind stays busy
I think the world
Of everything
You do and say

The waves crash
Over the mountains
The sky falls
Into the trees
The birds land
In your hair

The words all
Get back to work
The sun feeds
The great bicycle
I wake up from dreams
Of group therapy

You so and so
You in such trouble
Come here right now!
I'm paying bills
Sun on dirty windows
Tell me a story

1990

I am leaving leaving behind behind
To inhabit this great parenthesis
This asterisk this esclam

I am leaving leaving behind behind
To stay here in the center
With my sixth magnet sense
And the difference between a good idea
And that without which I cannot live

This without which we are zombies
We are in the state of not-yet

I am leaving leaving behind behind

1989

The code words
I put them away

And the handbooks
For self-defense

I forgot how difficult
It is to make a mix tape

How the heart feels like a bird
After a hard run in the rain

What else
Oh you know

1988

So I misread the bongos
For a double malarchy. So
The peach donuts were
A camera dustup, the wild
Vervets' impeachment dreams
A nono worth reheating.

It came up through the ducts
That the doxologist, you see,
Was a marionette fetishist,
And that all the patient
Pleading with the contraltos
Was a speechless giggle code

For a certain funambulist
He'd turpentined into dayjobs
And bessemer refis. They had
What is commonly known as
A "thing." This was back when
Information had use value

And private information
Even re entirely licit if goofy
God I hate this word proclivities
Still had the lustre of cash.
You know, the kind of room
Your eyes have to adjust to.

Have I told you today how much
I see in your eyes? The problem
Is, the word-eating world keeps
Imagining it wants that fluffy
Chiffon deposition machine again,
And so, more beach volleyball...

In any case or casa (miso
Is for lovers) we sped right through
The tribute to Special Ed and
Dismantled the "capstone gerbil" --
A rock formation, ahem -- something
That only happens in poems nowadays,

No matter what our crime writer
Giant syringes meant by the dayglo
Water coolers, mostly it was get up
In the a.m. and bitch up a violent
Face full of anomie for the road.
Why truss a capon, y'know?

Couldn't comparison shop his way
Out of a blister pack if you
Cased him up in pine and fed him beer
From age two. That prototype cuddler
Dinged me on the way to his
Enchilada freestyle, and my response

Was to urge the senate to consider
Sanctions. Now I'm prepped for
A new style of fighting. Try.

1987

Starbrite as gum acacia
Pretending to be Romeo
The lady's smock
Name date of birth ssn
Devalues nothing at all

And it is
And it will be

The analogy sign comes on
And the studio audience
Turns in its carkeys
O rose of sharon, o tarragon

This crystal parallel
Enacts husbandry without screens
Without the frozen
Classification system
But unless you're in a Bergman movie

The sliding door
Can be used for very little
And of that, me too is
Hardly the worst option

1986

Travel with me
Through the world of television
And video lighting

Insert link
Insert blockquote
Check spelling

As we tour the amazing new
Apple Store
With Rita Moreno

With just five months left
On its multimillion dollar contract
The cryptosporidium

Has to be thinking big --
Or rather small --
If it wants to maintain

Its profitable stalemate --
One of the best-lit dramas
On television

1985

What is tax-exempt may also be tawdry.

Self-fulfilling self-analysis. Self-addressed, self-loading (not loathing).

An ogive in the offing, Oistrakh and the ogdoad of okapi listen to each other.

The lanky landowner languishes in the language lab, lanolin on the lancet.

Cover the cylinder with a cymbal.

Castigate Castro no more.

Stigmatize James Stewart, then stick him with stichomythics. The sticker shock alone will take sticking plaster.

Feed the phalangist pfeffernuss. (Phallocentrist!)

Madison Avenue's magic lantern is a magnet for the Mae West mafia.

Gravid, graveside, the graymailer tugged on her greatcoat as the great ape by the gravy boat turned the gravitational lens toward her.

1984

What to do with these ones for whom the word stupid
Is not just the shotgun waved round the room
But the liquor and the bassinet and the portfolio?

1983

A wave of love for you just knocked me off my chair

I will love you and love you

I will reach out my hand to you in the noise of carhorns and merengue and pull you close by the waist

I will call you my museum of everything always

I will call you MDMA

I love you ecstatic exalted sublime

I wish you were here -- there's an enormous cloud sitting off in the distance

It's a beautiful walk from there to my place

I'm buzzing but the buzzer may not be working

There's a raccoon rearing on hind legs twitching its nose from behind a short fence

Let me stew you some tomatoes

As long as I keep moving the overtones don't jackhammer my skull

I am waiting for something very very good

My phone is like, what, I'm a phone

1982

DINNER AT THE PRECIPICE

God, doesn't it sound romantic?
But there we were with our sandwiches
Waiting for the abyss to "look into us"
Which, by the way, it doesn't, except

In a grandiose metaphorical way
So beloved of smartypants
Who can't be bothered with actual math.

1981

Hey, what do you think about this
As a name for a restaurant:
FOOD EXPLOSION

1980

The power of one person talking
Is the cloudfall, the prying
Stayaway plays against type
To emerge from the jelly with
No news like the secret police.

The miracle presence blows a kiss
And proceeds thrown by now
Into decal collecting, patches,...

Every moment could be scrapbooked --
This tame woodchuck, for instance,
Could be taught to hold the ribbon.

They ridicule our nation's cuteness
Because they fail to grasp
Its intrinsic role in our survival;
It is precisely these exploding
Hamster parades protecting our wealth.

1979

A reader writes
To worry whether
I ever revise

To see again
To put the words
Back in the jaws

And say for true
For cerrtain
Something borrowed

To every wedding
Of feeling indeed
The world is

The twelve watchers
Who make something
Out of nothing

A jury of compare
And what light
What conversation

Can we go back to
But this one?

1978

THE WAY TO KEEP GOING IN SAN FRANCISCO

The vases in the Brooklyn Museum
Someone made them
Make a vow to the pinched clay
You will enjoy the sound of bubbles popping

Whispers
In the hallway
Promise to enjoy
Aggressive feelings

And necessary adventures
Such as breathing in a library
Somewhere out of town

Remember what it's like
Being pinned down
By butterfly wings

Generally there is a lot of remembering involved
A lot of reaching for the next monkey bar

A certain kind of music
Specified in the stage directions

Everything moves very slowly
Because everyone converges

The freshets
Of daylight hurry
Huggle muggle
Into the inverted basin

Practice the way of non-attachment
No, I take that back

1977

It is possible to forget
Who is speaking, to whom, and why.

It is morning, cold,
The sound of construction

Short sentences
That remind you in your fingers.

Get up, circulate,
The moral hazard of the office

(Mutually susceptible to envy)
The word ghost

Cuts off your anxiety
With a bird call

1976

Hate and the bottom drawer
Celebrate a truant.

They take him down to the docks
To invest in spigots.

Running with shyness
Into a barn, a river barn
Filled with orange-lit sand
For the road crew,

Each shot lasts two to five seconds.
Each feather is colored hairs

The urns on the sill
Have an opportunity
To take a seminar on syntax --

It is raining on the fire escape,
It is raining on the firecat.

1975

GET FREE

Can't say this about
The minute the flowers emerge

But every utterance
Is an announcement of force

My head is down
The better to batter your frame

1974

There is another presence
And they aren't do nothing
Nutrients... the pines

Stay when you go
And play clay adios
As we grind up
The sunlight for cocoa

A rabbit curls up
And a lettuce curls up
And the fire
Purrs along the edge
Of the science section

That scum importance
Dating in Hollywood and Washington
Just give me a feeling
Nobody ever had
And liken the days
To barrage balloons
In your pantoums

Friendship will come to get you

1973

You can write all the poem you want
When you're a pace from Demension Command

The splurge of what you are
Takes this kind of shit

And turns it into a cavernous Chewbacca doll
That stoners come to live in

Got stoners? Try songs with freedom in them
They also work on the hype machine

Until you are a big wagging tree
Reggae will have to perjure itself

The control vibrations take a while
But then they come

And in the background, a man is shouting

1972

Echo, phase. Prose
Place, the dark
As sound effect
Takes. Clang some
Grief versions.
Fake poem. Real
Distraction
Quantities. A brother
Is a sister is
The weather
On the ether
Bottle, either or
No name
Home for the holidays.
Bite marks hair pulls
Red places white light.
Orchids of the eventual.
Prose, those
Theological
Distractions from
Someone suffering
(Toothache cures abstraction)
As suffering
Is a distraction
From what, victory?

1971

The fact is he took some nice pictures of himself
And told a story anybody'd want to know. A dream
Of being a rockstar, a talkshow host, a surgeon --
Anybody knows these are plausible wishes up to a point

And at that point -- a ferry dock, a helipad,
A green room, the Senate -- you need the help
Of people who understand more about these worlds
And therefore enjoy being part of the system.

The shorter the sentences the wilder the dreams.
If it was unclear to him what alien was arriving
His passionate belief in our eventual abduction
Was the rhetorical equivalent of a shantytown,

Plywood, tin, signage, oh and the wiring --
He was going to stay dry and have power.

1970

MACRAME

The except questions
Take advantage of my poor lower register,
The hum a half-step higher
Fucks up the consonance
And what I was happy with one way
Gives me what they call an appreciation
For what people do all day

1969

Sometimes it is important
To do everything wrong
Talk uncomfortably about
The sex thoughts of insects
To your parents' friends,
For example, or pile up
Several boxes outside
Your boss' office --

Now the impossible perfect
Version of yourself who
Ruins your dreams can stop
Paging you at all hours
And you can finally discover
The penguin room
At the zoo down the street.

Here, here are my shoes --
Feel free to barf in them.

1968

Take tooken
By the back brake
O victuals
The eleemosynary
Is a terrible basis
For happiness

Ovals
Peering
Into the cavity
Distaff, that
Cresting pfennig
A styptic
Temerity

No

What is sound
Is clicking

Is faith
Is popcorn

The machine will leave
On its own power

And what grew there
Will, eventually
Spring back up,
Pale, flattened,
Emollient

1967

What the air force can't decide for you
Will be reckoned one pumpkin seed at a time
Said our eternal belief in the efficacy
Of a power greater than our own. Call it
DDT, call it Spongebob, call it
Bacterial decay. No. Be real. It's
The name we save for the day all feeling
Shimmers the whole neural map. Say it.

1966

Sometimes the urge to write
Is actually the urge to clean windows
Or flush the transmission.

Sometimes the crush of language
Toward the front of the heart's horizon
Is a miswired parcel of dance instructions.

Sometimes the words that want nothing more
Than to be skritched on the stretched screen
Are jamming frequencies, you know,

Taking the white linen in strips
For a stagename theology takes
To get the thrill days no longer provide.

1965

The proverb of these pick-them-up
Machine dog interact like a decimal
For when o fits may gall yippie
Claymation ergs... voice those overs
And glue down the bases,

The syndrome the synod lipsyncs isn't
Something to playstation about,
Corona without a creche, wrinkles
Of friendly smiles cause Topeka
To bougie out and THAT is the freedom

Certainty collapses, in place
Of a why-not hello we get clucks
And it's all connected, all or nothing
Cigarette meth bending the light
Around the dictionary elves

1964

Miniature robots
Like to think about
Peanut butter.

They drill through
The fire-tubes
To aerate the cloud.

Thoughts of fats
Occupy their heat sensors,
Free them to perforate

At peak levels.
Cats watch them from
Under sedans.

Oblivious, we
Mourn the inner ear
Of our youth

As recess leads
To another infestation
Of the swingset.

1963

AVVENTURA

Softly, he insisted
To himself,
The peculiar conditions
Love requires
Enforce their perimeter.

Some quinine slap-take,
Some shouts across backyards.

At some point
We find ourselves
But that doesn't mean
We get caught,

O Nadia Comaneci,
Who's going to argue
Destiny with you?
Play a round
Of ping pong, maybe...

These are the twigs
Birds bring, playing
"Global catastrophe,"
A popular game places
With satellite tv
And no roads --

When I say it's love,
Let the young fame
Burn its papers
For the newsreels,
Let the feeling catch
On what pulls it along.

1962

PERFORATION

A guess pleases impersonal space
With its rudimentary docile amen.
It looks deep into the weekly gross
And makes a judgment the wind tunes.

The machine of every summer
Reminds insects of park benches.
Every twenty-two minutes someone
Gives and is given the world.

1961

ASTORY

Without the chocolate
A provable universe
Devolves into me-too
Crayon armadas all avetch,

As in, the terriers
Are loose in the pachysandra.

The problem becomes
Scraping together
A methodology worth
Outlining to mom
And justifying
To the primae donnae --

Supposing this burdensome
Question mark o'er the heart
Evaporates unconditionally,

The external stimuli
Obliterated as casus belli
By a fit of each-one-teach-one --

This music we call home
Would still want
And want and
Want

A place to practice
And invent itself anew
A la the physical sciences.

1960

The goalie
Develops
A resistance
To adverbial
Phrases

Moog synthesizers come in monophonic and polyphonic

The noise of love
And the thunderstorm
Are equivalent signals
To God in his batcave

Even now a dream
Wants to announce

"Attention shoppers..."

1959

SUNGLASSES UNDERGROUND

The people on the train
Reappear on another train

The couple kissing
Through the bars
By the turnstile

Fitful studying fitful
Listening fitful

Looking into the distance
Located seven feet away

Each one holding a breath
Holding a self in an egg carton
A gold or orange seashell

The number one hit song
After a hundred thousand weeks
Is still the Bible

Due to an earlier incident
This train will be making
Everything all right

1958

We think a lot, here in the shed,
About what is lightning garble street
And what is play of the autumn noir.

The face of the actress
Suddenly illuminates
The choir.

Over in the journals they are speaking
About miracles of sixty years ago.

Funny animal, the gift of rhetoric

The challenge is to diagnose them.

1957

You know, I very rarely think about having a penis
When I'm listening to music or watching tv --
It's just something I guess I take for granted.
It doesn't give me discomfort, thank goodness,
And when I'm in love, lust, or just being hit
In the face by a breast, it usually "comes to life"
In a way that gives pride and satisfaction.

Human sexual response is a taboo subject
In many social settings, and for good reason --
Arousal, like yawning, can be mysteriously contagious,
And then of course there's the problem of non-arousal
And anxiety; while it is important to be charismatic
At the workplace, it would betray poor judgment
To make of the most personal matters a public display.

And yet, we are born and develop into various genders
With such urgent needs we can barely imagine,
So much of commercial enterprise relying on the chaos
Of our communal incomprehension to keep the engine,
The sexual combustion engine of commerce, firing
On all pistons at all times. We are animals,
Stupefied and obedient to prerational schemata.

I guess you could say this is all obvious stuff.
What surprises me in all this, though, is not how seldom
I consider my own sexuality, but how seldom when I see
An attractive stranger I visualize anything sexual beyond
Kissing and petting. When I saw you it was like
Being hit by a wave. I saw myself -- felt -- fitting
Into you. It felt important to say something normal.

1956

VOTE GOAT

In the candle of a lighthouse
Lives a grown novel.
It is the story of how time
Makes itself up.

The scale, the motion of
Let me tell you something,
Oh that is a big important
Party they throw
Their bloodline.

Oh, golden toenail,
There is only one novel.
We are born, we learn
How to excavate deep space,
The rangers evacuate
The sunstage, a wind
Comes through a window.

Oh, empty bottle,
A marriage contracts
Around a social infant
(A princess, it turns out).

O lovedream and fear,
There is only one poem
Clipped and folded
Into a bookmark in a novel.

1955

The eventual reemergence of my capacity for logic
And this stiff spine, oh Robertson, it's you!
I'm crustacean for lack of a pygmy distortion
And that's how the ass gets what the ass wants --
Nearly everyone has complained of a mistaken
Telephone booth encounter with the light of day.

Nothing goes k'boom like Nothing! And so Buddha
Drops trou for the eclectic sun wind trees,
Time to renew your New Yorker subscription, Buddha!
And Fanta flowing from the crotches of elms

Oh what is this feeling running corridors backstage
In my heart, fighting past Sasquatch and mochi-
Serving furries in for a sketch on an DOA comedy show,
Out of my way, humorous costumes! on second thought
Come with me, quickly, to the surgical theater --

She is prepped and ready, is dreaming in fact
Of a soothing mint candy, its cooling effects.