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Ginnesburg is not dead, I think.

 

A sad sad sad sign of the times:

he is writing email titles

for the smut peddlers

 

Strange lines, soaring lines,

devised to sweet talk their way

past my firewalls:

 

 Sperm anchorer cloaked at night

train swims into the tunnel too small

running leapfrogs sheepdogs

argot orb midnight juggler dance

 

There are lessons in this that I quite like.

Poetry is everywhere

Inescapeable.

In the last place it has any right to be.

 

Like a weed. Or a nun. Or a two year old.

 

I am, however, put off.

By the way it has been finally spelled out,

The mouse has let the cat out of the bag:

 

Sex lies one click beneath our words. 

Broken

 

“But every conversation has to break

 

somewhere”

 

Those are the words that were laying in wait,

enjoying the camoflauge

of the rest of that poem

and all the other works on all the other pages

in Poetry magazine, dated May, 2005.

 

They were patient, those words.

 

They were sitting improbably

gathering dust

on the shelf of a Good Will:

They were propped up between copies of

 

Johnathin Livingston Seagull 

and Reader’s Digest Condensed Version of Call of The Wild.

Those words were counting on my wife

knowing me and loving me enough to see them and bring them home

 

I don’t know if they were waiting in ambush,

soldiers at the ready in a literary Trojan Horse

or if they were silently huddled with party hats

and those annoying noise-makers, and presents,

full of self-congratulations at luring me to their surprise party

 

But whatever it was I know this:

those words were waiting for me.

 

Every conversation breaks for me, now

whatever that means.

 

My interchanges with everyone eventually snap with the finality of uncooked spaghetti.

Did they always? Do everyone’s?

Did the broken halves of all our conversations fill up the world like the packaging of preprocessed foods?

 

Maybe it’s only me.

Maybe I break those conversations by expecting them to be broken,

and so, along with those conversations,

I’m broken, too.

 

 

Armistice

It is nine a.m. and I am thinking about what they told me:

From the Zeppelins it looks like

 

a tremendous dragon raked his claws across this countryside.

It is the month of November, and I am reflecting:

It is different here,

 

There are those siren songs:

screaming duets told by the artillary shells

and their intended targets

Two hours to go. But:

 

It is different here.

A boquet of every sort of foulness

the tang of the poison gasses

the pools where blood and vomit form the broth of a shit stew:

complimented by the animal naked stupidities:

11/11, eleven o’clock. How clever:

 

How shall I catalogue them all?

There are men far away deaf dumb and blind

There is us here following the orders

There is me here following the orders

They thought long and hard about it, an easy way to remember the time to avoid the confusion.

 

I wait for the whistle and throw on the gas mask

I take my stance and tuck my rifle into that forever bruised space above my hip

I try to kill them before they can kill me.

I trample my dead friends where they form a bridge over the barbed wire

I celebrate the camaraderie of the warrior now.

Then: Armistace.

 

We will pull our bayonets out of our opponents’ guts

but We won’t wipe off the blades on our filthy pants legs

We won’t ignore the chunks of unspeakably-colored flesh that fall by our battered boots

We’ll turn around together

We will walk back to our homes

Broken, all of us broken

the land broken and our hearts broken

But not in vain!

This was, after all

the war

to end all wars.

Under

Bits of scalp

And lumps of flesh

Mar the reflective chrome.

 

The jolly orange-yellow

Of the long body is dented.

And strained purple-brown.

 

This

Is the bus

Which people

Are thrown under.

 

It is, of course,

An abstraction construct metaphor.

 

But nontheless.

The driver,

With his mediocre hygiene habbits…

Grins, and shows his almost white teeth.

 

As someone

Lets you down,

Turns there back,

Or stabs you there…

 

As the wheels approach

You try to not wonder what the sound of your skull being squashed will make.

Instead, your last reflection:

 

It’d be so much easier,

If you’d been simply

Hung out to dry.

At the Wall

They have gathered before this wall,

It was a nondescript wall.

In the art wing.

 

Half a world away

They are gathered by a wall

 

Now there is a piece of paper.

And an old coffee can

Into which a box of fresh, new markers was placed.

 

There was God’s dwelling

And now it is all rubble except for this.

 

Squares and trapezoids of print

In the unlikely, bright colors

Have been blossoming on the page all day.

 

Much is revieled by what it is you’d like to call this place:

Kotel;The  Wailing Wall; Waqf;  or Abu  Madiyans

 

At the top,

In purple

It says “This is what we remember.”

 

If they do not rend their garments they sa:

That which they have been told to say:

 

They have gathered before this wall.

In groups of twos and threes and fours.

They are crying, some of them.

 

“Our Holy Temple which was our glory,

 in which our forefathers praised You was burned…

 

They are holding

Each other and they are rubbing backs

And crying, some of them.

 

and all of our delights

 were destroyed.”

 

They are holding

Hands and leaning into each other

And looking up at the paper.

 

Some of them are crying and some of them with

Prayers, rolled up small and tight on scraps of paper

 

They seem to know

An instinct, perhaps, a hidden signal.

When it is time.

 

They place them in the cracks

Of what remains of the wall

 

Solemnly, ritualistically,

They approach the paper.

And they add whatever it is they had to add.

 

They walk away leaving there prayers behind them

Is there a symbolism here?

 

It is song lyrics for some of them.

It is a love letter for some of them.

It is a long, rambling attempt at constructing meaning.

 

It is a long

Rambling attempt at constructing meaning.

 

Plattitude and sincerity

Rub elbows like the jock and the goth here

Rub elbows like the messages from those  who did and did not know her.

 

In my dreams I approached the wall.  I wrote:

 “Our Holy Temple, which was our glory,

was burned and all our delights were destroyed.

Early Morning Alchemy

With a twist of my wrist

I will start that water flowing.

The sink is a magical river.

 

It will come splashing in the carafe

and though my eyes aren’t opened yet

but I know the correct volume by feel.

 

The machine drinks the water all the way up

With a quiet Gurgle gurgle swallow.

it settles in the tank.

 

I Cross the kitchen again,

 it’s extra-long in the early-morning:

I reach the fridge.  Open the top door.

 

There is the blast of cold from the freezer;

grounds are not where they are supposed to be.

I swear to myself in the dark empty morning.

Before uncovering them behind the broccoli.

 

Return to the empty table before the machine.

My silver scoop is a holy object.

Filling the filter is a sacred act.

 

I depress the button.

Red light behind it fills my eyeballs

in the predawn dusk.

 

Listen? Did you hear that.

Grumblings, snorts, almost.

A whisky-swoosh sound,

the first drips, down, down, down.

They are not just water anymore.

 

Maybe this day will be worth it after all.

The mug is a chalice in my hand?

How it did it even get there?

I pour it full before it the coffee done.

Somebody will complain, later

about the drops that burned on the plate below.

 

Just a splash of cream,

then the sugar atop:

The house is so silent it makes a sound like radio station static

the granules penetrate the liquid’s surface tension.

 

I sip it,

almost too-hot, perfect.

and I am transformed.

On Administering The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment Standards to The Behaviorally Disordered Classroom, South High School

I watch them.These are my boys

and they are the dregs,

the bottom of the barrel,

those who would sooner be forgotten.

 

Truly, it can be a challenge

to find something redeeming…

To call them rough around the edges

would be to ignore the fact

that they are rough all the way through.

 

If we call them a mite lacking in refinement,

so too, should we call oil bleeding out of the ground and sticking to our shoes.

 

But they are my boys

and I watch them.

Pencils desperately bubbling, erasing, bubbling, erasing, bubbling erasing

until it does not matter

whether they are right or wrong

because the machines will not possibly discriminate

between erasures and markings, by the time they are through.

 

I can see by their wild eyes

how all my instructions

how all their work

is leaking out the deadly-sharp tips

of the yellow number 2 pencils.

 

I look over at the other student in my class.

He is not officially enrolled. And he is invisible.

He was expelled from the MacArthur School for forms of fair of Accountabality.

My secret student is not a gang member, an almost-grown crack baby, or a juvenile deliqnuent.

He is an anthromoprhism, a personification.

His problems are legion.

 

I can only hope that he has a brother, a former classmate, somebody, anybody

will graduate the school he’s been expelled from

And I can only pray

that then this will all make sense.

 

 

A Transfiguration

 

A transfiguration 

She felt the happenings deep inside of her;

Not a change but something deeper.

 

She felt lighter in a way that no scale would recognize

A sort-of evaporation.

She was turning away from who she was

into only

everyone’s idea of who she was.

 

If you could only see

the way her eyes would light up with the hope of that completion

You’d feel sad with me.

 

But atleast we would know.

No one else would know.

They would all still see her feel her touch her taste her

and no one had ever heard her, anyway, so what difference would there be?

 

She would go on, fulfilling everyone’s expectations

forever.

Perhaps it is a mercy that there’d be nothing left of herself

to know that she should have had so much more.

 

 

A taste of Heaven

Not me:

at those harps

sporting a stylish halo

walking on cotton ball clouds.

 

Not me beyond conflict,

Receiving everything I want

even before I ask for it:

Not in my heaven.

 

I used to only know what it wasn’t.

But the gift

of the last

few weeks

has been a taste of what it will be.

 

I was nearly wrung dry:

I hope you will permit me to torture that metaphor

and clarify:

the towel

of my soul

was just

barely

damp.

 

In moments of peace

there was solace

in the fact

that I’d done some good.

 

But I needed peace

to find that peace,

a thorny dilemna.

And then there was the ocean

not waiting for me

except that it was

waiting for me.

 

What deep hidden part of us

does the white noise-rhythm of the waves

awaken? Why does the salt

carried on the breeze

remind me who I am?

 

And in the middle

of the rest and the peace

we held a war council

to recover one of our own:

 

But even this brings a deeper peace

than the surface battles we fight:

I am reminded of who is by my side.

 

And the capping moment

that next time

A legacy reawakened

through its own force of will?

 

How could you know

that my own grandmother

stored up her change

for me way back then?

 

A handful of metal and lint and miscelania…

through the bank’s alchemy metamorphed…

and then changed again:

 

Whatever I wanted,

stuff simultaneously

worthless and priceless…

And so my heart tells me it will be like this

In the Great Then:

 

Rest and battle, trials and the continuance of all the good things…

But there is something more!

I will not play a harp but I will hear it

maybe we will hear it

 

maybe this is the Great Difference:

Our acts, all of them, will be the

voices, the strings, the harmony.

It turns out there is a truth hiding in that simple-scary vision of Heaven

 

We will hear it in some new way:

Earthly music will turn out to be only a castrated echo

of this thing our actions themselves will proclaim:

 

Holy is the Lamb Holy is the Lamb Holy is the Lamb. 

 

 

The Neo-Emo-Goths

Where did they come from…

this army

of adolescent

androgyns

 

Where did they come from…

with the zippered hoodies

that look like the skin

of neon zebra.

 

Where did they come from…

Probably

they identify

themselves with a name I’m not cool enough to know, let alone speak.

I think of them as neo-emo-goths.

 

Where did they come from…

Wherever it was

there must have been no sun.

They are so pale.

And they maybe played the paino.

With those long boney white fingers.

 

Where did they come from…

With these elven-waif features

and collar length hair

too apathetic for naturally-occuring color or texture

 

Where did they come from…

It must have been a place

where men only

were allowed product

for fingernails and eyes, lips and cheeks.

It must have been a place

with a surplus

of Nightmare Before Christmas

paraphenelia.

 

Where did they come from…

was it an underground dwelling

with roots poking through the low roof

where they were lined up

bony hip jabbing bony hip

where they were in a catatonia

unblinking

unmoving

until some

unspoken signal

triggered the Great Emergence

of the Gothic Groundhog Patrol?

 

Where did they come from…

Countless suburban closets

where they hung

upside down on pull-up bars

in silence

for years

patiently waiting

for the whole rap chic thing

to run its course?

 

Where did they come from…

perhaps they arrived from

some faerie world

on magical ships

with long sails unfurled…

Were those shopping malls deemed

as good a beachhead as any?

 

Wherever they came from

There is this cross generational connection

It only last a moment.

 

(S)he is buying a stack

of C.D.s that evoke my childhood:

Oingo Boing

Morrisey The Cure

Madness, Pixies– of course the Pixies

and Sinead

 

The purchased is bagged

(s)he turns to face me and ruins the moment

with a Billy Idol whiplash smile

I realize this great confusion:

Is this schmaltz or for real

Is this camp or a home in the 80’s…

When you live

in a world fortified with irony

The sarcasm soon becomes

the very air that you breathe.