Minaret or Muezzin

The illuminated eye atop the tetrahedron
is where the whim-driven eye alights.

From the minaret calls the muezzin,
There is no god but God,
the masses kneel to pray.
The authority of years
in his great gray beard
and in the tea-tongued
timbre of his voice.

Children love a human pyramid.

One boy,
smart and strong and shy,
secretly relishes
his accustomed spot
on the bottom,
dirtying his pantlegs,
his arms and shoulders
trembling with effort,
his back dug into
by adolescent knees.

He is listening
to the laughter
of the prettiest girls
as they scramble
toward heaven.

DMV: A Shadow Dance

The line in which I wait
exudes a late summer stagnance,
a stinking immobility.

Yet, here, where California
boldly dips its greedy paws into
the lint-lined pockets of the people,
amid a whirl of named and numbered
forms which would titillate
the most dispassionate
and ennervated bureaucrat,
some unsought stimulus,
a waft of body odour or perfume,
the cut of some strangers jib,
some delicious deja vu sends me
( a dutiful donkey ambling
after the dangled carrot)
toward the recollection  finer
of a (probably post-Bergman) dream.

Someone was, calmly,
some Norse tongue speaking
and I could, crazily, comprehend.

The voice was tremulous
with bewitched resignation...

" Your language, I must admit,
remained intact throughout.
It never veered. Not once.
You remain wonderfully wrought,
free from any encompassing,
defining or predictable positions.
It's truly artful."




The dream heroine's
reactive mouth revealed little,
something delicious, perhaps painful
played and lingered at the corners,
having escaped or successfully seduced.

Returning to the tedium
of State levied fines and fees
I shuffle forward a foot
and wonder whether
I'll ever leave my Platonic cave,
the carefully guarded,
shadow-throwing fire that
keeps the sickly rime at bay
and simply walk out
into the blinding sun?

Ode to a Whitefish Leaking Peckersnot*

She wakes with guts aspazz,
her abdomen a cacophonous cavity
of envenomed wrenchings,
dreaming of worms and vermin.

Her head a hapless knotted net
of last night's details, nastily nettled.

Nothing which is foul escapes the
webbed pentamers of her savaged senses;

an overflowing ashtray; a dirty pane;
a garbage truck's hydraulic heavings;
a glass pipe; three dead lighters;
a drained Jim Beam bottle on it's side.

A thick sex-musk is in
the air and on the sheets.

Horking up a gray-green goober
from deep within her smoke-scorched throat
she spits into a weary wastebacket
next to which a torn and leaking
condom mockingly lays.

* copywrite Willie Smith

Good German Steel

Odd, the way truth comes
round undbidden,
seeming acontextual
in the instant-
it's revelatory, cool clarity
appearing in the later
luxury of reflection.

The point in this case
was my unabashed nudity
in the morn-lit kitchens
of my last two lovers.

There, in the buff,
making coffee, doing dishes,
or admiring Solingen cutlery
I was laughed at for being brazen.

Peculiar, I think,
that women in their
late 30's, divorced,
of a certain professed
sophisticated romantacism
should spread there legs summarily
yet be astonished and abashed.

So that, long left,
the months already quickly leapt
between the then and now,
Spring acome so green, naive,
I cannot help but wonder
about the sharpness
of the knives they wield,
to what it is they cleave,
myself having been
so cleanly cleft.

A Wisdom Owns Our All

Moments escaped
from the grubby clutches
of the fear-fucked mind,
it's silly, bilious projections
of a false inner insufficiency.

Instantaneous instinctual linguistic refusal
of the arcane and of the exclusive.

Flashes, single notes sung out
among a rush of shifting echoes.

Green shoots of the possible-
for you, for me, for all
who paint without the lines,
can not stay straight,
stay safe, stay quaint.

Skinny Dipping

As if potential of right combinations,
(at worst maudlin, pathetic)
an inexplicable fire to fashion
(at best) merely clever,
aesthetic turns of phrase,
were a thing natural
as the wheel and bank
of arctic terns above ice-packs
afloat in a shit-strewn sea-
not the exhibitionist urge to sing,
stand wholly shorn and tremble-kneed,
an uninsulated, raw-nerved thing
surrendering to impulsive electric deliverance.

Alembic

Sometimes I get a great notion
to jump in the river and drown.
-Led Belly

The fish longs for the ocean in which it swims.
-Jelalladin Rumi

Exhibiting an exaggeratedly imbalanced gait
so commonly encountered
in those who’ve suffered a great and recent loss
(or are simply schnockered)
our phlegmatic anti-hero scuffles
along overly romantacized
(and outright slippery) cobbled streets,
muttering mongrel French curses
as a festering fear wobbles upward
from multiply dislocated ankles.

A lupine keening shines
in his moon-mad eyes,
drives the passersby to
children’s games with sidewalk cracks.

The oceanic impulse arrives
with quasi-tidal regularity,
an insistance, a turbulence,
a current of fragmented phrases.

Tortured and tensive
flees he toward the occasional,
sensical stream best explained by
fluid dynamics or the theoretically possible
statistical outliers stumbled on by simian typists.

All unsettled by the erratic energy,
the sediment suspended in his mind’s mouth,
partially repulsed and wholly hypnotized,
he lopes and lurches knight-errantly,
resigned to amateurish alchemical conjurations
and deliriously half-baked hopes
that some any thing from his peasant pen
might tear away an hereditary shame,
coalesce into a honeyed fluency,
drop a delicious, concentrated dollop
beneath his fevered, waggish tongue
and quell the quixotic, sicksweet ache
of soul-sap rising through a lonely gorge.