How easy
could my rhythmic crusade
shift its wooden blade
and slide the steel and double-hone
through fleshy her
as grimace lost bewilderment
in those dazed eyes and fingers
tremble with the why
“Oh!” now and all of it quite over
though she still stands steel rod straight

with blood across the floor,
a tidal wave for ants,

and her tight gasp, the “Oh!”
as fingers scrabble for
the handle boned

and once it starts my knife
now moving Mozart-like just wants
to go on. Just wants.
For once it’s breached the kitchen
it’ll leave no witness wants

the blossom underfoot to grow into the liquid
moonscape that was once her Eden

shiv that shivers deeper, deeper, gullet down

forgive, us Lord, forgive us now
to soon slip on linoleum
with all its growing rose gold red
so cheap to drink

a million dead, two million, three-
if it isn’t them it will be me –

so send us on our merry way
as I recoil from licking all her salty
ocean fading splendor down.

Have I sunk so deep into this drowsy pillow’s
Aztec strategies
delivering
the most beautiful blue virgins
and their dancing never to be lovers
into the cornfield of my wrinkling elbows
so some dragon’s teeth won’t decimate
my rows of yellowing,

sublime in this cowardice
that dogs my growing deaf ears
and shades the darkening glasses I wear,

scrabbling together wealth
beyond the boldest medieval kings
(and as useful as suburban Joe’s
broken sprinkler head)

to simply rest on the bones of the bold green
that should have come?

Instead of this dry battle cry of bloodied fabric,
wasn’t a changing of the guards to have begun?

Doesn’t the ocean know, the traffic light know?
Don’t I know?

Every letter
I’ve written’s
a lie, love.
Every love letter,
ranting letter,
letter of apology,
letter to explain my actions or inactions,
they’re all
lies.
Every “I
love you—“
whispered,
written,
licked—
every one’s
a lie.
Even this,
my love’s
a lie.

I’m putting on the red dress, Ma,
and heading back onto the trucker’s lane

to spread my legs (all hose pulled tight
and bra that pushes me toward heaven)

to do my due

and give a few (the tired and poor)
a swim along this once pure shore

(my closest pal the crack boy down on
his scarred fours who sells the minutes
on the city’s parking meters just off Fifth
at half the price).

Negotiate. I know my job, for everything’s
negotiable and what remains is that small
moment in the hay

where I must always
give my heart away.

I wish you a happy birthday.
Birth you on this day here. For you dear.
Just you. You! I wish you so happy on this day.
On each day. On everyday.
Wishes for birth of an everyday kind,
every minute birth, second birth,
deep as contractions. An infant and cake kind.
And icing. And candles.
Every instant those eye flames more guttering
and gathering as each year’s cake breathing
brings mothering kind more here
than fear and pain kept here when we see
what goes on here as each birth
that’s born anywhere turns to so unclear
until in the next breath
we undo the hard death
and reborn the infant and mother and father
on each day and everyday
the moments of birthday,
a kind day, a wish day
on your day,
this birthday.

Go back to the Sphinx, please,
or to Babylon where it was
sorted out quite plainly
with the perfect
of the mummy, wrapped
museum linen still,

still preserved on
Eighty-Fifth and Fifth,

a glorious Rembrandt still,
still life still gleaming,
beautiful in leathery limbs
of Midas gold and granite pure
redeeming us from

all this horror.

Give me, please, the perfect
of the eye lid just before decay sets in,
or dazzling Keats with his perfect urn
of lovers frozen, ultimate in truth is beauty foreplay.
for I will not go down, sir,

not into this horror.

Make us all immortal. Make
us worth a dollar or a million
dollars. Or a billion. Not this

heartbeat rotting ticking
of my dying dancing
look out at these reeling fingers weeping
gleeful dumb and instant dreams
so fluttering leaf down,
ruining the endless molecules
of spilling unthought
breathing us the nothing that’s
accomplished here but animal,
no!
I will not disappear

into this awful hurricane

so make me TV here forever
and for cinema purists caught
in magazines deep stored
in backlit wily files.

I will not just leave
this perfect place
without a mark.

I will not
start to leave.

You cannot make me do this,
no you can’t! You will not,
cannot, will not, cannot,
ever! No!

This sweet dimness
that invades me—
saddles me, rolls me
in cotton and files me away
with ancient morgue signatures
affixed to my clever white socks—

hopes

that no one will notice
how slipped away I’ve become,
comfortable (spending the rest of my days
as a detainee, squirreling tunnels
of escape under my arms),

but occasionally an inexplicable sun comes out
(no relation to me) revealing the blistering earth
with its nasty aroma of coffee and foamed milk
and I’m handed cherries
and sat beside an insistent child
singing loud, unintelligible songs.

As Elvis Costello baptizes
the radiant morning,
blaring with the South Road sun
(my SUV windows up against the Yukon wind,
the oil of an Arabian child’s blood whistling
this empire’s chromed wheel’s glory forward)
I see her dancing.
Dancing!
A pining child with her pockets
full of daddy’s jelly beans.
Dancing
a ragamuffin’s dreams of flour
for a thousand loaves of bread.
A pine tree.
Dancing!
Jiggling every pine tree
needle of her Christmas joy.

And if it’s only a mix of Caribbean hot currents
and Arctic winter blow
then why aren’t the other trees dancing,
stamping their roots to my English rocker
as our two countries throttle through
bombs and blood and casual facts?

Why does so much else sleep
while this child of wood whiskeys
across my wrinkling face, dancing,
as if she’ll never feel the axe.

like a whale
giant and useful
beyond machines,
rising
and I almost see him
in the waves
out there
parallel to where I
usually beach myself

(a small blanket of
primary colors
sunglasses,
a book
I’m determined
to finish)

and then he’s gone
back into the fish highway
I might have seen
a flicker of

and I‘ll brush
the sand off both hands
awake from all this c
oppertone of sleep a
nd sigh my way
into the trembling dark

where there
is out there me
to be
somewhere
something

a witness of

The heart is a muscle,
its message methodical,
pushing and pulling,
a Viking at the oar
in full battle regalia.

It’s no mistake
it’s attached to love.