Shofar

A toothless old  veteran squats behind a dumpster,
attempting to knot a bandanna across his greasy forehead.
The air is a sliver of glass and the daffodils
have sucked their bugles in like skittish barnacles,
waiting for April to stop being such a bastard.
As I shiver at the bus stop, an obese woman with a black eye
smiles at me through the window of the Lebanese restaurant,
where she sits with a man in a fishing vest.
Their fingers tear apart a beret of pita bread
from the basket on the table as they wait for
their wet shanks of lamb to arrive.       
I spy a hawk floating in a puddle but when I raise my face
to gaze directly at the bird, the sky is blank.
Charlie Parker's trumpet blares, muted and mournful,
from the open window of a dented Cadillac
stalled at the traffic signal. I don't know what
to do with myself these days. I have nothing 
of interest to say. I ride the bus across the bridge
from one side of the river to the other,
to the end of the line and back, dragging the pen
across the page like an animal pacing behind the fence.

Should my bleating windpipe get slashed,

the body of this sacrificial ram reduced

to a wheezing and deflating fleecy sack,

I pray that someone will unfetter one

of these hollow horns from my skull

and place their lips to the corkscrew tip and blow,

conquering the sudden silence with 
a single note

Bathysphere

Down through the chaotic frenzy of the shallows,

past the congested coral maps,

through darting quicksilver traffic, through the matted net of sea grass,

this is where the music drags you:

under

using 
composition as a cacophonous anchor, 
a chunk of discord sinking like an iron lung through the murk,

trailing a necklace of tiny glass beads behind it

as it plunges down 
through pages of algae, 
down through miles of blue glass turning gradually black.

A mushroom cloud of silt puffs up
when you touch bottom, not that you can see it
-you only feel it whisper against your cheek,

a billowing hem of silky dust, followed by 
a slap and a thump.The lights blink on, 
the underwater nightclub lit by

toothy, illuminated ghouls that float 
like paper lanterns through the murk.

In the glow cast from their luminescent bellies, 
you can see, not the Titanic's band
but a jazz quartet of sub-aquatic maniacs.
Witness the bass, tilted like the hull 
of a sunken ship, with fingers crabwalking

up and down the mast; the twin saxophones,

encrusted with barnacles, their diving bell cavities 
creaking and honking with underwater pentatonics 

to summon a herd of crustaceans 
that thunder across the ocean floor,

rattling their armor and lashing their antennae wildly about.

Your ears grows accustomed to the pressure of the deep,

picking up faint screams of feedback echoing off a distant reef, 
a tape loop bellowing from the blow hole of a leviathan 
rumbling past on the rainy avenue upstairs.

The drums bang tsunami numbers, mocking the rumble and rush of the tide,

followed by a long moment of the abyss’s crushing silence
before rattling and banging like an endless avalanche.

Strange papery creatures pulse and flutter to the improvisation,

but finally become so sluggish and dense they can barely move.

A gaping mouth in the rock hisses,

snoring in its sleep, belching bubbles of gas.

Its lips are rimmed with wormy hairs, undulating gently,

the sea floor populated with sucking tribes of polyps that feed

on your improvised dreams 
well after the music has faded 

and the divers have returned their instruments

to those ominous black cases, giving a tug on the line,

hauling everything back up to a trawler on the surface.

Emerge slowly; take some time to acclimate, 
to prevent yourself from getting the bends

as you ascend the stairs and step out into the night, 
accompanied by the clamor of car horns and crowds 
which, now that you hear it, actually sounds
a lot like music. 

(Written at the Blue Monk during a Sunday night performance 
by the free jazz quartet Battle Hymns & Gardens, 3/04/12)

Pith

Hack a path through the fields of never-ending 
ever-growing rodent teeth 
swerve to avoid the carnal resting-place 
hidden in the tall grass 
tiger trap scattered straw grown 
damp with sweat pressed flat 
the underside of every leaf teems with secret appetites 
squint through a lens of dew to peep 
on teenaged girls posed cross-legged on the frilly bed
reading encyclopedias and almanacs 
waiting for the dye to frizzle their scalps 
distraction swivels your head in the grimy dusk behind you 
just in time to catch the egg-sac delivery truck
belching black clouds of exhaust 
the lights click on in the store selling neckties printed 
with kachina dolls and totem poles
a metal cup hits the wooden floor with a thunk
the park is still unlit at dusk 
still crowded with bronze statues of parasites 
I crouch walk hunched over using a pine limb 
to scuffle my tracks behind me I waddle 
into a tiny cabin made of toothpicks and sparrow bones 
behind the outhouse a tall man throws 
his loose-jointed limbs out across the crevasses 
leaps our of focus over chasms and ravines
his starched white shirt splotched 
with scabs of various liquids long since dried my glasses slip 
from my face and plunge down the well 
where they get stepped on by the barefoot child 
who lives at the bottom 
the plushest moss covers the hardest stone 
I finger a pin for each of your eyes 
a pickaxe scraping at pockets of cartilage
your last thought stumbling down the hill 
flung along the path of ever-growing rodent teeth 
curved chisels gnawing tunnels 
through the marrow of your mammoth bones 
narrow passages flanked by guardian worms 
and splinters flinging open those unhinged doors
those uselessly flapping gums
those creaking gulls

Pocket

The wind presses against my cheek
with its cold, flat blade. It feels good;
I'm stifling in my clothes, overstuffed 
and bundled much too tightly.
The sky is ice white, the sun flat and blinding.
It's so quiet that every ordinary sound
seems to intrude like footsteps 
outside a sacristy. 
It's a day for watercolor washes, 
not words; for soft-focus photographs,
for the gentle interrogation of hands
silently questioning the shadows 
of one another's bodies, growing familiar 
with the slopes and crevices,
tobogganing along the crests and gulleys,
seeking out the warm places in which
to curl up for the remainder of the winter.

Chinatown

The world is rubbed until it turns translucent.
The clouds enshroud the remnants of the sun.
I pause and press my palm against the window
and gaze a while before I head downtown.

*

The bus’s motion makes the raindrops quiver
like beads of mercury upon the glass.

Our breaths accumulate to mist the windows.

As we exhale, the city is erased.

*

I stop and wipe the moisture from my glasses
beneath the awning of a restaurant.
The captive lobsters pummel my reflection
like drunken boxers swinging taped-up claws.

*

A string of ducks hangs in a butcher’s storefront.
The neon bastes their plucked and glossy skins.

The wind cuts rippled notches in a puddle,
that world in which we dangle upside down..

*

Lethargic koi float through the upper stories
of skyscrapers inverted in the pond 

until the pouring rain dissolves the buildings
and melts the orange fish to blobs of gold.

*

A bulb’s transparent flesh grows brightly blinding,
its incandescent skeleton aflame.
The rain unveils the city’s hidden mirrors
that echo every street lamp’s sunny claim. 

*

Steam rises from a grating in the sidewalk
and cloaks the souvenir shop in a fog.
Its window crammed with swords and waving kittens;
good luck and blood go strolling hand in paw.

 

*

I pass a mural she once posed in front of,
a phoenix stretching out its flaming spurs.
My camera lens was wet and wouldn’t focus.
Our coals extinguished, yet this beast still burns.

 

*

A girl steps from a car with tinted windows,

umbrella spreading like a bat’s black wing.

Her swaying backside hijacks my attention.

My mind folds up. I can’t see anything.  

*

The brass pole in the strip club gets a rubdown
with disinfectant by the owner’s dad.
Above the bar, a TV surgeon rips off
a nurse’s scrubs inside the x-ray lab.

*

A crow attempts to lift off from the gutter.
A carton of lo mein swings from its beak.
He hops and flaps, ignoring all the traffic,
can’t fly without abandoning his feast.

*

Entombed within a twilit basement tavern,
I gorge on fish and chips and gargle gin.
Unearthed potatoes, fish dug from the water,
and juniper exhumed, buried again.

*

Last call here in the underworld seems sudden.

Old Charon’s cab tools aimlessly around.

Poor Orpheus returns home empty-handed.

I’ve missed the last bus out of Chinatown. 

Cricket

I loved that upside down pentagram on your back,
your broken glass smile, your centipede leg eyebrows.
I loved the way your tongue darted out to lick the grime
accumulated between my accordion ribs, to sponge
the damp wormy hollows scooped by my chirping lungs.
I loved the way you tore into the living,
then daintily dabbed the corner of your lips 
with your spider silk handkerchief.
The way you slathered my arm with honey and mayonnaise.
I loved the way you snapped me up
as if you were the gecko and I was a cricket,
brought home with my brothers in a plastic baggie
from the pet store. I loved your wintry warren: 
the icy columns, the prickly pillars,
the ravine bristling with frozen thistles and waxy clumps of fungus.
I miss that furry mouth, that foamy proboscis.
I miss the nights we spent with our faces stapled together
and our tangled genitals slathered in slowly-drying glue,
all our legs entwined beneath the sticky branches 
that lay in wait, hoping to entrap that fat white grub of the moon.