Z:
Rapt in wrangling(s) with regard to our dispute on immortality,
we had borrowed my neighbor’s skiff and had rowed out to
the heart of the lake without a thought for the day, which
had lost all its light and, for that matter, in the dark, we could
not see the joyful scowls, which we had, unbeknownst, skew-
ed to each other’s faces. With great fervor that went beyond
the heated passions of excitement, Dante Alighieri’s voice said
more than thrice that the soul was evergreen, phoenix-like, sem
piternal. What’s more, he had persuaded me that the debt and
trial of the body is, in-toto, nihil ad rem, extraneous and wide
of the point, and that at the nadir of one’s respective rope, when
one respectively passes from earthly frame … into the supernal,
this given event is most trivial, trite, as valueless as breathing is
to a newborn. I was fiddling with Dante’s pocketknife...

It was high time. The wind blew–inexhaustibly. In all directions. Directly then indirectly from the wild, unbound, vatic pages of a sorcerer’s spell.
The great emperor’s front door lay next to his neighbor’s cow, caught in
a tree. Not amazed. Inside his roofless doublewide. The great emperor
merely shrugged, consumed as he was by magnificent fevers or magic, scanning out on his Kingdom of Once, which–without equivocation–mostly conceded for an evacuated trailer park. Chained to the rusty anchor of thought, he sank ever so downward, according to the capsized artifacts, ruined antiques, forgotten treasures of his memory; how like in Borges’ tenebrous fictions, he had died in the third chapter but found by the fourth himself very much alive and as foolhardy as his most gallant knights, squinting like a frenzied, almost fanatical, bat into the calm of the Hurricane’s bloody eye–just...

My revered friend and esteemed colleague of ten years: a brightly decorated commander from the Military Council of Special Joint Affairs,
a quite majestic, numinous branch, was wearing his prized plastic beige-to- aubergine sombrero, which like a character out of BOND he’d won in a game of Dominoes last evening while drinking some Kool-Aid at a black
charity event for classified operators. The week before he’d hijacked a
Black Hawk off Bragg as part of something like a training exercise and,
after a couple unannounced, swoops, whips, goofy spins, masculine gestures, & 2.5 gang signs over Camp McCall’s turntable, was hit by
a brick launched out of a rocket-propelled grenade. Two days later
the mother fucker shows up wearing the wig of General O.G. Washington, having crashed landed into my kid’s tree house, at which point he decides he’s General Patton, proceeding to torch the...

The day my book of poems set to print, the entire world
bought a red pack of Marlboros or put on their favorite
black lipstick. Some might have kissed their wives.
Then climbed into a hole without the dog, a couple
machines, a few wheelbarrows of matchbooks, sardines,

toilet paper.

Workers were striking from everywhere. Out of a job from a year ago,
I just continued to bang my hammer. The most compromised spread
widely about the streets. Then deleted themselves while most traffic
sped out from Mother Earth. And so we sat out on the stoop and licked
the rain in the gutter and thought of the color of Wednesday and of a life less confusing than from where we slept with our salty, quiet pillows,
waiting for this silent red spring. I wept into all of October and soaked.

Meanwhile, the yellow submarine did not emerge, the shepherd & his pie sat coolly like two widowed rats off...

Like Batman singing along to some gospel.
But without the cape or Alfred, little Bruce
sat down like a hero at the children’s table
and poured some cold cereal and a tall glass
of bourbon through a straw then began to iron
a dead rose, waiting for his special red phone
to blow up. Like the last time, it was the Penguin
wanting to jokingly end his life through a game
of hopscotch or basketball. The stakes had never
been so high; either yay you won, you won, you won
or death by owl. Batman slapped himself silly
on the back with an eel and began to chuckle
like Santa Claus a little as he lit a Camel Cigarette
and said ‘moist little jackass. cum-bag glitch. etc… .’
before calling Alfred. But Alfred had drunk a 6-pack of
Corona and was so far gone you could go ahead and toss
him in the W.A.S.T.E. basket along with Mucho Maas.
I handed Batman my umbrella and said, ‘So!–have...

That according to The Book of Kings
the owls are not what they seem
though one might still come to judge
by playing the harbinger and (yes) entering

Heaven by ‘fire.’ It was ‘by fire’
that Elijah (אֵלִיָּהוּ) defended
the train and rite to worship
יהוה, my own Hebrew God

over that of the Canaanite Baal,
that opprobrious בַּעַל זְבוּב
Baʿal Zəvûv, or Beelzebub
for which one now swats

another juicy fly off the pink-
to-orange spotted wall-
flowers. Meanwhile, I scan
through some cemetery trees,

through the very blunt-
smoke of purple haze
and plain-old ugliness
and greed, searching

for ‘the long broken arm
of human law’ before, like
Radiohead’s Kid A,
climbing up some walls;

that the Hebrew for this word,
‘go limping’ or ‘waver’, is one
and the same as that used for
‘danced’ in 1 Kings 18, verse 26,

where the prophets of Baal
frantically dance like an Ox
...

It begins as it always begins when the mind has blown itself astray,
below the bruised ashtray of New York, New York headlines where–
at the top of a Bushwick Fire Escape as a matter of fact– a pigeon
pecks at his post, at a drill-sergeant’s pace, trying to launch into the
inside-out vacuum hum of outer space as this pigeon like Ziggy Star-
dust vacuums up our superintendent’s own dropped line of bleach
cut with what tastes for battery-acid glazed in a vile coat of (yeah)
cocaine. Meanwhile, I simply will remind my co-conspirators that–
like Vladimir or Estragon–my mind has blown itself astray for a life
that fits rather candidly like a Jack-in-the-Box stuffed in (yeah) my
father’s brown suitcase. My father’s brown suitcase, which for now
remains bandaged to a dead Ash plant. By a few fake, a few fake

plastic strands of (yeah) duct tape.

Behind the quiet red curtain of the great house
they are preparing a small blue floodplain
of damages that even now the poor empty heart
struggles to sit comfortably with, safety-pinned

to this dark exertion of days through which every
twilight your grandmother’s starch-white sheets
are thrown like (yeah) ghosts over the coffee table
and couch; the coffee table and couch where one

still might sit with a quiet harp and little touch
of gin in their teacup of poison, waiting for some-
thing to stir down the hatch then fall past the rubble

of such starless scenery.

‘War, illness, and (yes) famine’
sleep in the same bloody suit-
case that late last night I tied
to a rope and left hanging above

midnight’s loud, diminished
stroke, on the balcony
where still there are a few
gun salutes and rooster claps

as President Trump crows on
and so out of proportion; over
the bombed, epic, non-speaking
factory windows of humanity,

not taking the type of questions
that might check or think to report
his temperature, as another cockroach
climbs up the nose of my TV wall

with (yes) the long drawn out sigh
of the late-night sound turned off.

              **the** first line ('war, illness and famine') borrows from Charles Simic's poem "What the Gypsies Told My Grandmother While She Was Still a Young Girl" 

(SIXTY POEMS_Harcourt*_53).

President Abraham Lincoln lay–
like the few spliced
together horse-hair ends

of brushstrokes done by pen,
on the yellow scratchpad
of a Mr. Vincent Van Gogh–

beside not the sublime sil-
houette of his manic-
depressive wife,

but the few pubescent hairs
running up an enlisted boy’s
(yes) lamb chops.

Lamb chops, for which one hears the occasional lamb’s ‘chomp-

chomp.’