39 - Suburbia, and Every Home a Lighthouse

Houses under a moon are vague.

In dim pulses, restless ghosts aether beat against windows

making us omen-readers all, who pass them on return

from day labor to this necropolis of light.

Somewhere in fabled despondence this scene

was a metaphor of exclusion; the bright interior

outside me, and thought warm, full.

But domestic glow correlates with nothing definite, save

for these soft adulteries with easy feelings

against a frigid night’s withholding.

The spirits are opaque, as blinded windows

and I discover my longings in the meaningless Morse

of TV lights, practiced as a hotline psychic

at embellishing eager leads.

I live in a broad circle, this its paranoid nadir —

the bright, regular pulses so much like a signal

made for a passenger of dark, heart sparked

to the meaninglike contrast that cloaks its own

being nothing in particular.

38 - Going Lightly

Do you remember that famous Christian book about cults?
On the cover spun rainbow waters in a down-drain spiral —

America the melting pot, or, an oil slick was in our sink but it’s going away!

What were we doing on the rim of it?

What was I doing, learning how subtle variations in the gradient out

from pure light all end in the same darkest gone-away?

We were prodigies of collapsing space

forgetting pipes to waterways covering two-thirds

of a planet made just for men, who don’t swim far.

We were forging the ways our bodies go as minds move —

that is, self-limiting, or, why I can’t now unfold all

the crushed wax-paper skies above regions I belatedly see.

The weight of our bones in the world is decided early.

And even as I’ve strained to widen my eyes

for the dim of unholy wilderness I know

the being-in-it feeling is no known quantity of light.

Others muscle in pressing-going through the friction-real;

I stay thin air, where solid things vanish.

37 - Passing

Footbridge west, in wire sheath shooing suicides to privater places

The air is close in agreement — go!

Souls of bleached stars transmigrate earthward as

Fools gold flecks of east hill homes electric test the resistance of viscous night.

Lawnfronts studded with grenade-weight cones

The rot bombs of spendthrift flora, I heft

A good palm-feel and sap-swell

To launch them, plant air in the sedentary fog.

Posters all-over-plastered in town tell me

Find your inner light!

There are so few places, any more.

I catch an errant breath of redwood pine

But it diminishes, like a teacher.

36 - For the Bird Who Carries and Lightens

Stone beach a bed

bird spreads pebbles

to ease

the weight from heavy places

in the piled-up day.

Sleeps on rock, too tired

from evening-out

our crushing castles

to fly home.

Feet in the night clutch

at daystones ferried

place to place,

even dreaming.

At sea height

the beached are beautiful.

Jellies light and stars

stud the ocean’s coronet rim;

drowsy eyes the dazzle

washing fin and feather

in the watery ink of

all the hard light-lines

unpainting fade of

land to liquid

at the sun’s egress.

Plume sighs little billows

bird on warm

rocks heard the water

helping him

equal the beach.

It smooths the sea glass

for his soft bones,

sending shell-gifts up

as shields from the deep.

35 - Borderline

There’s a mad devil at my center,

drives me out to my fingertips

and feet to live gutlessly

by touch and taking. I press

my hands on anything to keep

nerve fires alive on the outskirts of

my bad neighborhood heart. I

empty pleasures into other skins,

fluoresce along electric spines

and ride the spin of rooms

adrift in foamy wash of spirits,

slip through bends of typeset notes

on truth and fictions

overstating certainty in black.

But dark is fear of not seeing

what roams about in here.

They say my empty

is only God-need.

But it’s God threw everything

of use out, put up fences, and now 

there’s a mad devil at my center

rattling the ribcage

that keeps me out.

34 - Eating Spam for Dinner Again, Looking Out into the Yard

Divorce brings all manner

of truth to light; a plant

can become a corpse.

There lay Charlie Tree,

a Norfolk Island Pine

older than me and raised indoors,

mom told him daily she

loved him, told him

he was a beautiful tree.

Still gave him up.

Dad dumped him

under the backyard hedge

of his bachelor pad,

a new duplex

with sliding glass patio doors

for easy viewing.

We watched him,

being dead out there,

thinking about why

custody is called a battle.

33 - This Is What You're Supposed To Do

There are still half-feral cats

in the back gnawing dog food

poured into dented tin trays,

still the pool table, drab felt

chalky, ripped and piled with

flashlights, shoeboxes of papers

bolts in zipper bags, nickels.

There is still wood stove heat

slow-burning the empty

kettle’s thin copper base on top,

front door propped a crack

and drying enormous wool socks.

There are still endtables piled

high with library paperback

mysteries, lent VHS tapes in crates,

baskets of junk mail, all

addressed to “Loser.” There

are still two separate beds

in two separate rooms, still

that proud solid pine carved

stopped clock and fine

undisturbed fur coats on the rack.

I am still seated at the kids’ table,

twenty-three years running,

and I find a turkey bone

in the stuffing you assured me

would be vegetarian this year,

so I could still eat something.

I’ve never yet heard you

tell my father you love him,

but everyone, even

my aunt’s butch girlfriend

and those damned cats

get fed when they come.

32 - Help Yourself

Drunken, the soil

throws up its worms.

Guts-raw, glossy coils

thrashing the walk

knot my stomach,

reaching me.

I choose one, pinch

at his middle, lift

and learn how the most

vulnerable ones rage:

shuddering, snakely whipping

to punish the air

that exposes.

Forgetting myself, then,

I was actually afraid

I am like this.

31 - So Insulting, So Enlightened

One year, my sister and I

subjected Christmas mythology

to empirical testing.

“Sign here,” scrawled on

cardstock, “if you, Greenie

the Wonder Dog, who we love

so so much, are truly real.”

Then a hand-dotted line,

the length of a linchpin.

Folded over, addressed,

blessed with a gold star sticker,

scotch-taped to the pebbly wall

above the obligatory cookies.

We’d play the powers that be like

cheap psychics fed false

leads on how to flatter us best.

Come morning, bypassing presents

we opened the card to find

our stepfather’s scrawl

dyslexically confirming

the existence of a recently

invented flying dog.

We frowned a little at the gifts,

realizing they had been sacrificed

to the idols of magical thinking.

We both got just what we wanted.

30 - Passer Aux

God fell the morning we kids found

a baby starling on the lawn.

Stepping close cat-softly

our gasping pupils gulped

the light off thick grass

swelled with verdant juice,

arrogant to outdo the absurdity

of a bird in the dirt. Everything

was strange. I pictured

his feet black roots, feathers

shoots and fronds of night

and scattered white seeds

for planting flight in Earth.

But silent, hurt, and sunk in

adolescent bloat his downy

starscape a wilt of absent heaven,

stolen on the descent.

Order: passeriforme, passeri

same as those penny-sparrows who

never fall without the Father.

We tucked the little aeronaut

into a shoebox bed and blanket,

cradled as the car flew to

wherever white-gloved

ministers could right this

blot on invincible birdhood.

We couldn’t stay to see

if he would fly again, though

they all smiled nicely

in that lying way.

Who is responsible for flight?

Where does it go when birds die?

De passer à travers ma vie,

passer aux oubliettes,

mes passereaux infinie.

29 - I Turned My Face to Funerary Skies

The hermit moon is sheathed

again in midnight’s sable purse.

Stars pinprick dull and depthless points,

frail phantoms comforting starved eyes.

My let breath stops short, goes nowhere.

There is just the fact of night.

In darkness past, I might have prayed

my heart into the hot rapture of bats

roiling smoky through the shapely,

generous black. Following echoes of

my own cries. But I’m no longer lofty.

Bent, I read the blank book of moonless dusk,

soul a cool bone cup to hold night’s ink.

To write, again and once again, the joy

of a black and indifferent heaven.

28 - Fluid Offenses

At dinner, sat in a high-backed wood chair,

trained to gulp tepid milk silently.

He coached me to open my throat so the drink

could pour down without resistance,

no deep inside churn of wet gush heard,

taught soundlessness so no prim ear

could tell that I did things to live.

Swallowing was the first way I learned

that my body, traitor, was an unfit home.

I would also learn, later, some other ways.

I sat by the bay, listening, all the water safe

out there and my mind became an ocean.

In nautical lore, the swallow is an omen

a sign of the shore, to follow for harbor

by cries from their velvet brown throats.

But I, I in my wood boat flung far from the earth

knew no birds could find me to sing.

For the roaring wide sea sprawls

and swallows my edges and anchors.

27 - At the Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary

They sell dried yellow corn in

fifty cent brown paper sacks

taken past the concrete embankment

on down to fowl pondside, where

goose beaks bicker on

my corn cup palms,

hard plastic tong mouths of need

pinching kernels, me.

I, five, am flushed with an eminent

sense of importance.

We kids learn on these educational trips.

My grain-grown flock would do

anything for cheap gold

magic beans. And I

made them eat off my shoes.

Learn, and repeat.

Back home, my father

would dangle Circus Peanuts

over my head, saying

“Dance like a dog.”

26 - The Sacrament of Depression

The lull draws down our pious bows

to lie with dying incense, let the cloy

of unwash weigh us low in a droop of undone space.

Heavy with turbid midday’s wine and idle

in thick, a tame god’s granting

foolish prayers to bathe in substance.

Now I am here like air in bread.

Homesick for the whisk of passage

censer swing alighting gusting’s kin.

But all smoke settles, remains.

Was the world ever thin enough for we

who live in going?

This hollow now is some death,

the inert ferment robbing body, blood.

25 - You Only Get What You Give

Girl knew she would have troubles.

The church handed her womanhood

on a silver platter. They said:

“Make sure everyone is served.”

24 - Empty Circles

Once, hunters thanked the patrician frailty of beasts

for their takeable flesh.

We punched the bloom of exit in buckskin hearts

shucked the husk from souls

exhaled into the mouths of leaves.

Or wherever we imagined they went.

But we are choked in ghost-thick air

laden with refugees from presumed pardon.

Where are the ebon eyes of the dead as they die?

Where is the skin that bounds off the wronged?

The jelly of tomatoflesh slips from its hide

a boiled heart. And on the cutting board

a tap head weeps off wet beads of seed citrine

strung with clusters of soap’s hollow pearls—

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, forgive this too.

23 - Follow Your Natural Bliss!

My family raised me a skeptic of disease,

an atheist scornful of diagnostic gods,

and Hippocratic demagogues who would ensnare us

in fear of a treacherous body.

Infection’s perfidy, we knew, was cheap suspense

like any flimsy drugstore paperback,

like Gideons’ gift to weakened travelers.

We respectfully knew not to lambast the medical tradition,

but it wasn’t ours for use. It belongs to foreign realms,

where holy books of clinical narrative knit up the parts

of anatomical mystery into ethnic motifs:

Avicenna’s Pahlavi patterned roots,

wax cloth animalcules of Leeuwenhoek,

Vesalius’ woven Fabrica Corporis Humani.

Artifacts of the culturally early.

Enchanted modern minds still literarily tour the halls of Kos,

but remember this asklepeion has met Atlantis’ fate.

Too much love for myth bespeaks the folly of

malingerers, of fools.

Wise folk put those mad compendiums away.

I huddle in a bedsheet tent, flashlight turned

to pale my face, to mimic death’s angelic visitation,

my body transformed into a text of fantastical plague

I will read after dark and in secret.

One hand to my chest to catch the shudders

of elaborate coughing, such hellhound barks

that rattle my bedframe’s brass knobs.

I am hot in the bright with a countenance of fever,

so I prey on my health for deliverance,

honing the taboo art of summoning

the Catarrh demon for testament

to my possession by mortal ills.

They’ve denied that I’m sick for years, by now,

but I believe, I believe, I believe…

Yes, the skeptical method trumps all superstition,

and we soberly forfeit those childish things.

No Pasteurian oracle of etiologies can foretell

the body’s sovereign courses,

no pharmic idolatry procures

the myopic dreams of men.

Paracelsus’ opiates shall never

be suffered to dull the reckonings

of nature in we who are

fearfully and wonderfully made.

22 - Undignified

I couldn’t handle it, and I felt strong

enough to admit it back then.

So on the third day of 6^th grade,

I cried not to go back to school.

I’d just come there from a 42-student,

two-room K-8 church school

on Marinette County farmland,

where the playground stretched for acres,

and the sky over cornfields was clear for miles.

But Crivitz had half-lockers, chain-link fence,

each hour was a classroom change.

The rules seemed arcane, and I wanted rules,

but no one would tell me them straight.

My lone friend was a lisper, and I needed friends,

but I couldn’t hear what she said.

I complained of an upset stomach.

The counselor sat me on a dusty sofa,

made me shoot Koosh balls

at the poster of a basset hound’s sad face,

which didn’t help out a kid getting hit

in the head by boys pitching fistfuls of paper

on the third day of 6^th grade.

So I cried not to go back to school, back then,

when I was strong enough to be undignified,

in the dim inside of a doublewide trailer,

where we sat on the sofa and it puffed out dust.

And my arms flung out like bedsheet ropes,

from the window of my anxious gut.

And they hung midair an instant too long

because you had to decide if you’d catch me.

Then you leaned in, conceding to catch me.

Well, I felt our unhitched moment.

Two train cars on the frozen north rail

which ran by both schoolyards,

two train cars just uncoupled and running

together in wobbly, failing momentum.

Then one sped ahead, as the other slowed,

and no one really got hurt.

But the distance is impossibly huge now.

I felt it, but like I would so often stash

my chore allowance in several odd jars

I spent all my strength finding

hiding spots for my hard-earned anger.

So I hated the sofa, and I hated that dog

for holding my stupid pain. And then

I thought differently about throwing things.

But you kept me at home after that,

and I kept careful about being dignified,

and I learned a whole lot in 6^th grade

in the doublewide trailer on farmland

cut through by the frozen north rail.

21 - A Feeling

When all my color bled out, the white room was left,
where I learned I’m not the source of my own desire.
You gloved your fingers safe, to “take a look inside.”
I owe you this feeling; you know it is dangerous for me to be empty.
Your face, frontispiece to knowing all about me, rises close.
“My head is filled with you”
and
“This is what you want, too.”
I have a vision of that milky seed pod bursting.
For now, I am shut up in the mind of a rigid bud.

Brittling stalk of papyrus sedge, my body plied gets bent.
When you had gotten what you came for
I also took something from you.
I took the probing hand and I keep it inside;
it gives me a feeling.
And it teaches me
And it points me
To flowers grown from my white paper,
your soiled gloves left to rot with the reeds.

20 - Diffuse

I scrub my body clean with your body.

Come into my bed, get every last bit of me out.

I’ll become pure, I’ll slip backward

through pain into a million sterile holes

in the surface of the dark.

So I court your fish-moist skin’s

friction to rub me numb,

your urging weight to press me flat.

You can do as you like, these

are my evacuee procedures.

I’m laid bare for the journey as you

scuff my senses into the vagueness,

the pristine of fog. Enough, and I

mist out, through the mute scream

of a million open pores, a claustrophobic

soul sprayed particulate into the remote

nowhere of space. Molecule-safe.

I leave the place immaculate.

I scrub my body clean with your

attendant hands unknowing

I am gone into the night,

clean night.