Ask Me Again Tomorrow (Lick the Knife)

An old man staggers onto the bus. He is tall and walks as if he is actually a midget balanced on the shoulders of another midget hidden within the folds of his coat. He has dark skin and a full white beard and wears a floppy black hat. He looks like Uncle Remus, or a reject from a Flan O’Connor fable. He stiffly lowers himself onto the seat next to me. He smells like a mixture of cologne and smoke; not cigarette smoke, or wood smoke, but the smoke of something that wasn't meant to burn but did anyways. It takes a minute before I realize that he doesn’t smell of smoke at all but of ash.   

*

Two young guys get on within a stop of each other and start yelling to each other loudly across the aisle.“How’s things going with whatserface, that chick from Digger’s?” the first asks.“Chelsea? Get this. She's moving to Kenya to work at this baby elephant orphanage. She says her job is to sleep cuddled up right next to the baby elephants so they don't die of sadness. Can you fucking believe that? I mean, with all the problems in the world today and she’s worried about baby elephants being sad? How fucking selfish is that?”
“That’s fucked up. She was pretty hot, though. Dude, this is our stop. Pull the thing.”

*

When the two kids get up, the old man leans forward and asks the porcelain-faced redhead in the seat in front of him what she's reading. She plucks out an earplug and says, "What?"
“I said, what’s that you're reading?”
She flashes him the book cover. “Harry Potter.”
“Oh, that’s garbage.” He shakes his head theatrically. “That’s absolute garbage. You shouldn’t be reading that. Hey, let me ask you something. You twenty-one?”
She nods.
“Good, then I can talk to you.”
“You talked to me before.” The girl has a high-pitched yet scratchy voice, not at all what I imagined.
“Oh yeah? What did we talk about?”
“You drove a cab in Phoenix.”
The man rasps with laughter. “That’s right, ’83 to ’85. What stop you getting off at?”

*
 
I pull the yellow cord and step off the bus and stand on the corner, waiting for the traffic signal to change. I notice a girl crouching in the storefront window of the yarn store, painting the fake walls white with a stubby roller. Milky plastic crinkles at her feet. It looks as if she is on display in some aquarium or zoo. She has an ass like a bird, an ink black ponytail, brown socks bunched up around her ankles. Her shoelaces are untied. I look down to make sure that mine are not before I cross the street.

*

I cut through the city park, which has for a month now been filled with tents and tarps and homemade shelters of the protesters. Cardboard signs jut out everywhere like tombstones in a colonial graveyard, Sharpied with slogans like We Are the 99% and Two Parties No Voice, and one that reads Keep Shopping Everything is Under Control. A kid is twisting and pinching balloons into animals while a crowd of kids in hoodies and a couple of bike cops watch. A pit bull pants at his owner’s feet beneath a bench. When I get to work, there is a message there from a friend saying her second youngest son was shot to death by a federal agent in a McDonald's in Honolulu at three o’clock this morning. I can’t believe my baby’s gone, she writes. To think I was dancing last night. I’ll never dance again. How can I go on.

And the day, the day, the day, stretches its claws but does not pounce, satisfied to gnaw on the thing it has already got trapped between its paws.   

High-Voltage Aviary

Safe beyond the chain link fence and barbed wire
loom the jumbled components of the generator.
Like an evil scientist's inventory, or
Soviet dream-house of the future,
the pieces stand, seemingly at random 
though their placement is actually well-planned,
 rods and cones and boxes strung together
with miles of thick cables, and painted 
a uniform non-color.
Above the low whirring rises a cacophony of chirping,
so clamorous I think it must be a recording
looped from loudspeakers to keep the birds away,
like the plastic owls strung beneath the eaves
of an amphitheater. But no, as I look closer, I can see
the bobbing of a head, the flicker of a wing
-birds by the hundreds perched on the wires, the transformers.
With feathers the color of metal, they remain camouflaged
amongst the machinery, performing their symphonies
conducted by some invisible baton
here in the orchestra pit, their electric nest.

49th Parallel

West of Montana Street and due east of Denver
in what used to be an all-black neighborhood
stands a statue of Paul Bunyan, the patron saint of Portland.
Oregon, that is; this city whose name was decided
in a coin toss, then shanghaied and dragged from Maine 
across the Great Divide.
Though he stands thirty-some feet high,
grinning like an idiot, he fits in
with all the other Stumptown hipsters,
with his facial hair and flannel,
leaning forward on the handle of his ax.
It’s just past noon and I’m waiting for the train, 
watching some kids put pennies on the tracks,
and I follow Paul’s gaze to where it rests upon 
the Dancing Bare -the sign of which is helpfully festooned
with a crossed-out cartoon of the other kind of bear, 
you know, the animal, I guess to avoid confusion,
as if customers might expect to find
actual performing animals rather than just
human women taking off their clothes.
The door opens and out steps an angel
-that is, a small blonde girl wearing a halter top
and a pair of cardboard angel wings
spray-painted white. There is glitter in her hair.
She squats on a milk crate and sucks down a cigarette
beneath the banner advertising Amateur Night
and six-dollar rib-eyes every Tuesday.
It’s a trite image, strictly freshman photography stuff,
but Paul can’t seem to take his painted eyes off her,
and I can’t get her out of my head as I ride south,
past the string of old motels -the Viking, the Palms,
and the Monticello, its sign lit with a picture 
of that famous presidential residence, whose facade 
displaced the buffalo and the Indian on the nickel,
though we must be at least three thousand miles away
from Virginia.

Ithaca 1999

I helped heave the barber’s chair into the back of the pickup truck
of the couple who had driven all the way from Connecticut to haul it off.
When they drove away, we slipped back inside the split-level,
with its rose and honey sponge-pawed walls,
where, comically aproned, you cut the crusts from sandwiches
of clotted cream and watercress in a parody of English high tea.
Your spaniel zigzagged across the pasture,
cornsilk ears fluttering like banners behind her.
I slept heavily in the ocher guest room beneath the cow skulls
and mirrors framed with cedar, strung with knuckles of garlic.
That was the last time. The next time
the leaves were turning scarlet on the mountain
and you would throw back the curtain to show off the larder
stuffed with cans, the water purifier, the flour grinder.
Canisters of lamp oil. Bottles of vitamins. Cases of bourbon.
You don’t want to be in the city when it happens, you said.
They’ll be chopping down telephone poles for timber.
The hands of the crossbows counted down the hours
from their pegs above the galoshes in the closet.
Not a barrel in sight, but box upon box of cartridges.
 

Found Visual Poem #3

Found Visual Poem #2

A story about monsters (and the people who love them)

Every city is
a labyrinth,
and as we
weave our way
through the
intersecting
streets, we
sometimes bump
into our fellow
prisoners, all of us
hoping to get out
before Asterion,
the Minotaur,

catches and
devours us.

 




The name 
of this particular 
labyrinth
is Los Angeles.













Improvisation  
a novel in verse, an epic poem in prose