No one wants to hear about it. So keep quiet like they taught you. Good, good.
nothing to say
leaning on cold iron railing
and remembering the time
sensei picked me up by the neck
and hung me for an instance off
the ground.
the feeling of head separating from
body and the dark hands like rope—
and then drifting off in memory time,
with each failed picture overexposed,
monotonous sepia tone photo
with pensive lookers trying to strike
poses and coming off as contrived
with fake looks of inflated meaning
and hair too-perfectly flung back
over bare foreheads and cast down looks
of playacting deep thought with
trim beards and hats and tired
cookie cutter stances mugging for
camera shot.
thrown away in piles of forgotten
memories left by the bed near
drawers full of unread novels.
standing at a party with
opposing lights, casting moods
on rooms and people crowding
and talking in flits of conversation
over beers drowned out by wailing
sax, chugging cherry wine
on
windowsills, precision camped out
on
brick carpet, picking
tiny bugs from the grass grown
long with unrealized duties of
maintenance and lack of sunless nights,
turning brown, each blade flaking
off in tumbles of dried plant,
dying quickly into the dirt over
the roots of the withering green.
eating Chinese too many nights
with paper forks and straw hats,
blowing tunes on an old recorder
and singing made-up camp songs
about Alexandria and her baby Antiochus,
singing in the stables on a hot
July night with mint julep and
submarine sandwiches, nightmares of the
horrid Holy Ghost waffle house,
baking brownies when the night watch
has given up the vigil and the crime
spree sprinters put on hiking pants
for a short walk to the station
with axes and brandishing hunting knives
with dried deer blood and grimaces
through a tulip flavored beanbag chair
and sickening thuds of the whacked flesh,
running through the street lamps
when tiny corsets stop holding back
and little people with big thoughts
and smaller fingers pick locks on
the horse troughs with deft wrist
movements and the flicker fire flare
of a movement too fast in the stillness
of the gutter eats through the glass window
and bursts in upon sex orgy to the
tune of Ayler and many sounds
bumping walls and leaving fingerprints
for the disturbance detectives to lift
and run at the central computer with
files of immigrants and little white
lies upon which the flag was hoisted
and with which dirt was moved from
the Grand Canyon to Peoria with toothpicks
and subway cars.
the subways cars stopped running the night
Memphis died sprawled on the iron
tracks with electric lines rounding her
neck in its gripping falsetto squeal.
she died from asphyxiation and mild
indigestion, the train was a coincidence
and a mischief to make matters worse
for the cleanup crew comprised of
uniformed jumpsuit workers with
blue face masks and grey eyes and
purple Mohawk wigs made out of
cat hair and spit from the mother
of the child that once could.
“finally,” the poet said wearing a smile
of utter exhaustion and the possibility
of being born again upon a day with
a brighter sun and more avenues for
the discussion of maybe not being alone,
“for once my job here is done,” and he walked
on knowing that he had not said anything
once again and would always
be the failed poet
who never would and
changed into the silence
machine that was the perfect description
and became synonymous with his
name and the children born in
white-lined hospitals would be
branded just as he when they
would refuse to talk about the restrictions
of a running narrative or could not
think clever, witty things when
pressed to be engaged.
they were marked and sent to the
antipoet’s camp where they could be
taught to wear smiles and enjoy
carpet rags of conversation
decked out in the haze of alcohol
covering the minuscule midnight
of the lighthouse perched on the
distant city shore—
this was their task, to become one
with the rolling pigsty and enjoy
that lot and park in it everyday
in shiny automobiles made out of blood
and swear words uttered by swollen
pig lips wrapped in oily bacon
on top of languid pigeon feathers
and the possibility of slipping off
into an oblivion made out of catapults
of slimy objective-based learning methods
developed by people who were
never children, but who roped cattle
out of the womb with lengths
of pubic hair.
the poet only wanted one moment to burst
out in colors improbable and finally
prove that he had the capacity for
being a normal boy and not a wooden
puppet with the personality of a rotting
cardboard box in a swamp—
precision standing on tile floors
and the impossibility of finding
her when the tables had been cleared
and walking was the mainstay for
the evening when the indoors were
turned out by angry waiters with
dishtowels and bills.
the subway stopped
with a piece of old Memphis
hanging from his hungry teeth
and bleeding down his chin
the bright light eyes looking at
the solid concrete walls and
old Memphis dripping more—
the awkward mess after
the meeting of iron rail.
and it’s always how it ends.
the most beautiful song in the world
will now only remind him that he need
but buy a yard and find a horizontal post
hitch his horse neck to it and hang out
for an eternity and in heaven most likely
will there be only parties with inside
jokes so old not even the saints pick
up on them.
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