Sockpuppet of a generation, 
		your fabric grown stiff by prickles of dust and neglect, 
		I use your obfuscation for education, 
		I use your flowery talk as substitute for wildness, 
		loitering instead on needless drawl of hillbilly vernacular, 
		filled with unprovable claims of royalty in your lineage and 
		sadness at standing the ground of causes you doubt with 
		urgencies inspected at random by grade school bartenders.
		

	

	Listen!
	 The World Is 
	  At Peace.
	   Nobody
	    Notices.




			River 

			The river flows hot and dry, 
			spraining the back of America's
			silent highways and graveyards.

			Unseen clocks tick times of days,
			blinking seconds to vacant streets and 
			bones of time. These nimble travelers

			live clichés of disintegrating memories.
			I dream in the power of ghostly heat. 
			I look down to see the river in your face.



Museum 

Slits cut into matchbook covers let 
handwritten notes limp free, the 
stories flipped and 
historical situations scraped on 
inferior parchment never intended for 
immortality but rising to the occasion as 
history's eyelets tremble shut, 
omitting kingdoms and forgetting the 
triumphs on a spotless course of 
jumbled families' blinded interventions. 

Noteworthy on the frameless paintings are 
broomswept trash heaps of naked density 
representing the passing grimaces of 
judgmental strangers, the talentless and 
blandly spited accusations of 
others' inferiorities which reveal instead the 
weaknesses of the accuser, 
she whose scripted path through gravity 
resembles the airballs juggled in the 
vacuous backwash of uninfluential youth, 
an unmowed childhood regurgitating its 
weedy surroundings with few heroics and 
fewer seeds of menace. 

Passages of elevator music litter the halls, the 
squinches and arches elevate the flotsam into 
painless conciliation. The uneasy stampede of 
immoral conversations boils north of everything, 
drastically north of the windless libraries and 
falsely north of the cowardly circus-hunters breeding 
hazy rubber bones for crazed and starving dogs. 

I don't know what you said to the 
strangers swinging past on the 
brittle beards of queens but the 
substance of the words was freshest in the 
hungry flash of religion that 
clapped its hand on puzzled cue. 

Pretenses and flounderings of 
celebrity virtuosics remain 
cradled for all times by the 
occupation of starving canvas, 
the importation of life's 
routine numbnesses into the 
whetted mouths of banished vagrants. 

Weedless houses, 
abandoned for centuries, draw 
crumbs and chuckles from 
sensually opened bottles of 
cheap liquor, from 
toxically cheap wine served to 
quench the thirst of a bi-polar brain, 
nourishing the diagnosis du jour with 
nothing -- nothing -- while prospering on 
Monopoly money at a beggar's casino.  

The 16th-century rainwater 
pounds your thighs and feet but your 
head and face stay clear of the 
conflicting apocalypses 
brawling across generations. 

Bodies of effortless dismay streak like 
prowlers exposed by gotcha journalists and 
thousands of hidden cameras, 
cameras blasting mundane failures and 
wasteful exertions into the 
public places of starving joy. 

Everything is public, I say. 
Everything is public. 
You cannot agree but you do anyway, 
passing around the noseless faces from 
textbook history for 
dichotomous inspection and the 
limber ridicule of India rubber smearing 
blobs of erased history across the 
palaces of your wandering empire. 

Dreamless lineages of inspiration 
perspire along the nodes of education, 
nibbling on flimsy commentary of 
jobless law enforcement constables 
thrice revealed by a soup of 
decrepit pages from ancient manuscripts 
dribbed and drabbed from 
failing co?dination of 
papyrus and forest fibers. 

The delirious timbre of anxiety 
labors its path through 
infancies to retirement, 
funded by granite-faced women whose 
faces hover over the dial tone, 
rising from the comical friezes of 
paper currency, those 
whores of decision-making, the 
riotous gluttony that eats itself. 

Our comprehension of matters diminishes so we
amuse ourselves with babytalk, 
gibberish words and nonses invented to 
impress the tourists into thinking 
we are not Americans. A senseless hoax of 
invigorating mental acrobatics used to 
mutantly generate phony words and 
intellectual-sounding pablum. 
"Lifker mux cruftian bloot nimp?" you ask. 
"Fra curia! Jufted plavaw pooz nomanarth, 
broster doil," I reply. 
You rise to the challenge, as the 
gibberish jousting continues. A 
Norwegian family stops to stare and listen, 
thinking they hear something 
comprehensible in our bravura showing of 
verbal fabrication. In the 
seconds to come we find that 
nothing remains of what we said. The 
vestigial limitations of communication, 
inaccessible to the human mind, are 
roundly exorcised from their shelter by
spontaneous ejaculations of 
carefully unplanned humiliation. 
All that we discard is gathered up by the 
vacuum cleaners of cultural commentary, 
re-appropriated into visually coherent but 
linguistically meaningless jabber that 
rises above reasonable discussions, 
blanketing libraries and houses of debate with 
suffocating fragrances of unknown rot, these 
blundering turmoils of repetitive word matter 
spined by multiple backbones, covered by 
strata of a newborn's thickened flesh. The 
festivities spread to cloudless passages of 
sweaty rain, those ruggedly noiseless terrains whence 
worlds are frisked and fondled, where 
screaming infants inhale hurricanes while 
living like prisoners in topless pits and 
longing for the remote comfort of a 
crumbling black hole. 
Empty horizons inspire more than 
glittering skylines. I say this, and 
you cannot agree, but you do, again, you agree. 
How do these infinite trails of 
microscopic adventure void the bullion of 
jumbled gold left greatest in value by 
bullish grins of red and unrubbed venom? 
How does the date resolve to 
algebraic tranquility if the 
hot-voiced lecture climaxes on the 
blushing violence of spoiled cream? 
Ask not the hungry pastures of 
manufactured villainy, for 
blindness lingers on the 
stools of the coolly bulleted list of 
your life stories. 

I remember that 
callow flourish.
it happens again 
at times. 
Not the frosty 
"lover at war" nonsense 
but the image of my 
bare legs, 
trailed by sparkles, 
articulated with 
fantastical detritus to 
reflect the 
movement and the 
ambition of my 
progress through 
this world.

Mother and I went to dinner at a loud, crowded place.

We confirmed our reservations and walked down a circular staircase to get to the dining room.

We got to the bottom of the staircase and entered the dining room when mother realized she had left her purse upstairs, probably at the reservations desk. She panicked a little, turned around and slightly pushed me out of her way as she rushed back and started running up the stairs.

A few steps up the stairs she looked up and saw a man holding her purse, holding it up and toward in her in an affirmative manner indicating that he knew he had her lost property. All eyes turned toward the communication between mother and this man, a brief feel-good moment.

Mother indicated relief, and I felt it as well, that waterfall of assuagement that punctuates sudden panic, a spontaneous and un-orderly sorting-out of what will happen, who will have to be called, what plans will have to change if certain articles from one's carry-all suddenly go missing, or if they fall under someone else's control.

The man with the purse gestured to mother that he would toss it down to her. She held open her hands, smiling. I knew, instinctively, that she did not appreciate this, this somewhat risky act of throwing the purse, but that her gratitude toward the individual for finding and offering to return the purse was enough for her to compromise and allow him to return it in the manner of his choosing.

The act of him throwing and her catching was a clumsy ballet, not one confidently entered into for the first time between strangers in a crowded room of onlookers.

She held her hands up in anticipation of receiving the purse. The man tossed the purse down toward her. Her hands barely had time to close when the purse struck her in the face, knocking out her false teeth. The purse simply came down faster than she expected. She was still smiling in gratitude and relief that her purse was found when it hit her face, knocking her smile asunder, and shattering it.

All eyes, aghast, turned toward the man who had gone from good samaritan selflessly returning a lost item to a virtual attacker who appeared to have assaulted my mother by throwing her purse at her face.

He seemed apologetic, but snarkily so. In fact, by my estimation, he was not apologetic at all. Mockingly shrugging his shoulders, he instead basked in the lingering, prestigious glow of one who found another's object of value and returned it for no reward. He put more value on his good intentions than on the buffoonery of his ill-advised manner of returning the found object.

Mother retreated to a space away from the crowded room and away from the puzzled gawkers. She re-adjusted her false teeth and re-appeared, taking my hand as we left the place, briskly climbing the stairs, never to return.

That was the first time I knew my mother's false teeth existed. She never mentioned them, not even in the broadest vaguenesses. The closest allusion I remember was mother simply saying she had bad teeth as a child. It was well into adulthood myself when, through some stream-of-consciousness or other, I deduced that mother must have had a complete set of false teeth since at least her 40s, if not earlier and if not for virtually all of her adult life.

I do not remember what happened. He stole things. He cheated in school. He had pornography. I followed him. I cheated on tests, copying his answers one by one, not questioning them. The answers, as my mother quickly observed, were nothing but alternating "True" and "False." a 20 question True-or-False quiz for which DT provided me answers, answers which I devoured in panicked ignorance, failing to notice the pattern. 1. T 2. F 3. T 4. F On and on, for 20 questions, a column of letters and numbers. He stole things from the school library. Evidently, so did I. But when I say I do not remember that is not a vulgar attempt to dismiss or disassociate myself. The incident is simply not clear in my mind. It was in the library. Mrs. F., the crabby librarian, collected library fines. Some of these fines added up to considerable sums of $1 or more. My anxieties about library fines stretched back to the evacuation, when I was able to get away with not paying a library fine on account of our family's early release. I don't remember if I owed any library fines in the 3rd Grade, but DT showed me where the money was. Mrs. F. stuck the money in a book, or so I believed. It seems like most of the fines were less than $1. A stash of money collected from library fines would likely be in nickels and dimes. That is, unless Mrs. F. converted the coins to bills from her own pocket. That is how DF explained it to me. The presence of those bills, though, was erotic. Not sexual but sensuous. Opening a book, a book that looked no different from the others but which DT knew contained money, opening that book was 3rd-grade sexual to me. I was nervous touching the bills, nervous as the first time I undid a woman's pants, nervous as I tasted her for the first time. I held the bills with my fourth finger, imagining that finger was safer than others, less traceable. Or perhaps imagining that these special sheets of paper demanded special attention and unusual means of handling. Days passed, and somehow it was found that either I had the money, or DT had the money. I don't remember having the money, though I might remember lifting it from the book. Did I keep it, or did I hand it to DF? Was there a handoff of loot somewhere outside the library? Whatever the case, someone found the money missing and I suspect that whoever that was had little trouble concluding who took it. The library, a moon-like terrain to youngsters, was but a tiny room to adults. I don't remember taking the bills. I don't remember getting caught. I was called to the principal's office. I do not remember who was present. It may have been Sr. H. or her substitute, but whoever it was was erased from my mind by the presence of a man in a business suit. Wearing a suit and tie and coming from some place other than the school he asked me several questions, smiling opaquely, a half-grin, the type some people do not realize they exhibit but of which he seemed readily aware. When I got my passport made, 30-something years later, the woman who handled the transaction had that exact grin on her face. She made mundane comments and I saw her face and chuckled, thinking she was smiling. She was not smiling, and I promptly stopped laughing, remembering that man in the principal's office. The situation may never have been as serious as I imagined it. I was being investigated, interrogated, cross-examined. The principal indicated that a specialist was brought in to ask me questions, and by specialist I thought she meant police officer or private detective, though I am not certain that I knew what either of those things were. The nun said to me "This is (unintelligible)." The she turned her ass toward me and mumbled "He's from the (unintelligible)." He was sharply dressed, pristinely, even, his nose sharp and his hair dark. A pin glittered on his lapel, possibly an American flag or some sort of patriotic symbol like a Statue of Liberty image, or maybe just the torch which Liberty holds in her hand. I sat in a chair and the man knelt over slightly, maybe leaning against a table or the principal's desk, asking me about the money. DT had told me what to say, but I can't remember what he told me to say, and I can't remember what I did say. I am pretty sure I said that he and I were in the library, looking at books, when we happened to find one book with money in it. We didn't know what it was, or why it was there, but we took it, assuming the Finders Keepers rules applied. To have brought in outside help for this investigation suggests something more than a few dollars was at stake, but I just do not know. Maybe that was just a ploy, though, to scare the bejeezus out of a little kid by making him think that the CIA was brought in to investigate and prosecute the case of a few dollars stolen from the library's fines. To me the few dollars felt like millions, no not even something as concrete as "millions" but like an ungoldly amount of money, incalculable precious tender of significance that transcended its value. I could barely contemplate the amount of money, which perhaps reflects in the fact that I don't remember how much it was. Is it the first money I ever touched? The first American money? I remember the Asian currencies, and I probably was encouraged to hold on to a few of those bills as souvenirs. And certainly I had seen or even handled coins by the 2nd or 3rd grade. But this money was dark and foreboding. Something about this money was dangerous, and not just because we "found" it. DT knew the money was there, I think. He saw the librarian stash it there. He directed me to it, and made me steal it from the book before giving it to him later. I can not remember if I told the investigator that we were just looking at books in the library when we found money in one of them, or if I told him that DT had set me up. It is hard to imagine how articulate I could have been, but the school year ended soon after this incident and DT did not return the following year.

	I am looking at 
	America through its 
	throwaway memories, 
	its unsearchable lives.

bullions of gravy in a 
lump of home
swinging on 
electric hazel where
a chandelier of candy melts.

records need to be kept.
	who records the 
	mash of scents 
	tangling in your hallway? 

	who records the 
	emptiness in your freezer?

who remembers these cudded words? 
dig into the phlegm of your mind.
expect garbage.
expect combat.


    







listen to the drain
listen to the drain
listen to the drain inhale
    

					Time wasted is the
					truest form of death 
					among the living,
					shut like a coffin in the
					sex-washed wind of the 
					purple night.
						10.10.15







How often do you read the
letters I never sent? Those
silent bulges of history? 
10.10.09




		For all this drizzle the sourness reigns in 
		blemishes left by you, the corners of 
		defilement and imperfection mocked by
		old jokes, inanimate objects punctuated with 
		dank nuances of your judgments, life's 
		porously invisible lunacies chased by laughter
		continuously down the centuries, the
		same as on these spots in times still current,
		times as connected as today, times
		always alive to you because you listen,
		because you wait for the messengers who
		made no appointment, you listen for the 
		neighbors long moved away. You are
		looking for the meaning in the common
		stairwells, lamp posts and municipal 
		mysteries of tireless infrastructure, the
		grain of your attentions vacuumed away by
		passers-by seen and invisible, drawing 
		chalk from your fists to explain the 
		continuities of detritus, particles of industry
		sternly lurking in the metal fences, the
		hovering tangle of cables inhabited for a
		century by voodoo childhoods in the 
		permanent passage of stillness. Your eyes
		follow the travels of strangers, your legs 
		trace their paths down alleys and forgetfulness, you
		look for answers in the objects they ignore, your
		sounds unheard in continuous evaporation.
		10.10.01