BLEAK TOTEMS

Anonymous asked: everyone's dying to know when you'll post another poem.

Me too

Anonymous asked: Re: 8/22/12; I love the setup of the opening paragraph and then the subsequent acknowledgement and flippant ignorance toward modernism. I have no real idea what this poem is about but it reminds me of the beautiful subjective selfishness of early love and youth. That all of the prior accomplishments of technology and discovery before your birth are summed up with 'some epochal flashes later' is great. It also brings up those reckless, drunken moments, but I am out of letters to write with.

Thanks for the comments and compliments. You’ve picked up on what I was summoning, i guess… as in, hyperbolizing for the sake of it, especially regarding our timeline of existence and the entitlement of love—often in youth but hopefully not exclusive to—in which one feels entitled to hyperbolize. And fun.

During the golden age of time,
Heirarchy birthed
the first person.

Some epochal flashes later.
And you were born,
and then I.
Hence then, everything has
got more beautiful.

We sucked all the bountious
darkness out of the night heaven, leaving
a blazing yellow
hole in the sky.
A galleon lurched on volcanic stew,
smoke soaks wide leaves
at sea.

Here burns misery, our limbs
wither and drop,
I love you.

Time you know
keeps moving on from
tomorrow to yesterday
weekend to week
sleep to

1.
Vapor is curling from the manhole
like a snake from a basket.
Rain curtains the windows.
A girl made up as Mussolini–
twenty medals across her chest–
waves an Ethiopian flag and goose-steps
to martial music on a flatbed truck.
Behind the wheel, a man in whiteface
wearing a fez whispers sweet nothings
to a blow-up doll of Brigitte Bardot
in a see-through raincoat.
The charcoal sky, smeared purple,
is crisscrossed with sailboats.
It’s springtime: from Inwood
to the Battery, the crowds
are restless, tossing confetti.


2.
How many false prophets will shamble
from furnished rooms today
to preach the Gospel on littered corners
or thump their Korans in caged windows?
Last night the planet Mars,
ascendant in the west, burnt
a pinhole–ruby-brilliant–
through a curtain of storm clouds.
A girl in a see-through raincoat
was murdered on East Fourth Street
by a panhandler with a mandolin.
His hair was dyed chlorophyll green
and his purple cape was embroidered
with sailboats in a moonlit expanse.
Speaking garbled Ethiopic, he confessed
to the police, but insisted
(through an interpreter)
that it was a crime of passion.


3.
It’s the month of suicides.
Everybody wants something
and nobody knows where to get it.
Or why it would make any difference
in the long run if they did.
A man in a green fez and purple soot suit
has tacked up a photo of Brigitte Bardot
in his cell in the Tombs;
he claims he’s a political prisoner
writing the true history of Mussolini’s
invasion of Ethiopia in 1936.
Outside his barred window the streets
of Chinatown teem with angry crowds.
A girl in whiteface is strumming
a mandolin in the driving rain
and singing love songs in Italian–
as if her life depended on it.