Poetry

there’s a guy standing beside me
waiting for the bus

guy says
Israel is like a coffee cup

then he wipes his nose
on his sleeve

Israel is like a coffee cup? I say
how?

I should know? he says
I look like a philosopher?

the snowflakes fall
like fat angels

except...

Maria Callas is dead and Groucho Marx.
Loren Eiseley is dead. Vladimir Nabokov
And Robert Lowell and Elvis. Dead.
This is the year in the Years of Lead
When The Metropolitan Indians rioted
In Bologna after the Carabinieri shot
Francesco Lorusso. They wore...

My grandmother’s house was always full of flies.
They’d crawl across each other on the windowsill
or would be spinning out their noisy dying

everywhere―so many, you could sweep forever
and not get all the dead flies off the floor.
Downhill, in a marsh...

I’m still. That’s how it feels.
I wait all winter for the animal to die,
raise its chin, look
into time. I
lack sun and Lord Tequila. I wonder
where good comes. Here in my head
I’m a herd of one, and rage, slosh unease like brine.

_______

Mid-life, I waver...

I

Bully Billy drove a Huffy, upped the ante,
ghost rode his bike into Audi car doors.
Five crew cut stepbrothers back from the army
would knuckle punch the family puppy.

That scrapper, his out-of-season t-shirt,
the playground and the flashed Playboy...

Love flattens time.
The groceries in the trunk hyperventilate beneath the locks.
Old men substitute video games for bathing.
It’s a vegetarian act to eat a predator.
The sum of the squares of the first seven primes is 666.
Practicing disdain now...

Plot points that lit some childhoods like pier mount lighting:
the rogue, hirsute, endlessly American cop on a tryst
holding morality discharged in one hand;
that and everything I thought I was done with,
credits rolled, kaput, but nothing is done with.

I...

O wondrous one, your bipedal swag, terrestrial locomotion,
partial appendages revealed, brain a soft sponge, size
of an acorn, still waiting for that growth spurt
3.2 million years later. Your single pelvic bone, pubic arc
90 degrees too small for a...

Three fake plastic bushes per sill
in the mall promenade.
A poor man’s Platonic ideal,
like the subset that forms in my heart
for the Tyrolean girls of retail.

My omniscience evaporates
outside the subject/object divide.
Not to say you aren’t lab rats
but I...