I took my sky hammer &
pounded out a few choice
clouds, cirrus and I don’t know, nimbus
as in a god on earth
moving in space as a great auroral mist
a god who beholds the sparrows 
washing in the dusty gravel
of frankford avenue
giving me cause to rant or
giving me means to roll
ride with me in the shadowy afterworld
beyond the spider of a doubt
along a sidewalk littered w/ leaves
don’t be plain, said the cloud, find
the ornament that please you best
or elsewise, sugared in stars
go on and rail in a useless manner
against the inevitable dawntime
people of the dawn
come up drumming 
and beat on a pillow even
if a drum is not available
happy fortune, fortune has come round for you again
in this pocket world of a minor horned god 
I balanced my lunch 
in the arms of my ancestors
thomcord grapes and weeping cherries
they were my arms
lackadasic in the sky-sky-sky
holding their sky hammer
as if it were the baby buddha
and I thought, if there was a world beyond...
I could become one of those assholes 
who gets their sugar from fruit
and regard the one who points out my faults 
as a revealer of treasures
and regard the one who points out my faults 
as a revealer of treasures

if s/one is mocking let it be tender

                                 for T. Peterson


so what if the magistrate calls you dude
for all the petrogaff in helsinki
what is the idles, the ides to you
the hottest month on record


if s/o is making a mockery
& yew liable to get thwarted
one needs a quiet room
who hands out thir fucking pronoun paradigm at parties??!!


if s/o is mocking
let thir hart be tender
harted. if one can be
not-deformed.

elegy for kari edwards

                                for memorial at Zinc Bar, 23 June 2007, NYC

		I am your sugarplum fairy commodore in chief.
			—kari edwards

		conturbabimus illa.
                                (Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus 
		[let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love])
			—Catullus V.II

damesirs of fishairs
princes reginae
I don't need this botheration
guilded toe in a gendered pension
embedded narcissism
skirts can or could not be worn w/


intentional disgrace
getting oh-aff
I sleep where I sit
gog and magog
ope myopia


sweetness and delight do
it for sidney, as starlover did rue
on star, thir mistress cloying
the lack, with thir poesis toying


twill never hurt
regina prince
alack, areft
locks beset
candle agrove
a buck in a corridor


as like with likeness grace the tongue
and sweets with sweets cloy them among


conturbabimus illa
let us confound them


beasts implored and character impaled
agathas breast in a 14th century pincer anon
7 heads w/ 7 comings on
horns on their horns
wings at their feet and at their wings


well you have three seconds to live
bespeckled apprentice
freckled daylily
a penny uneasily
pleaded myrtle


iron bootblackening
at the speed
we levatate con
there is no missus
I am among


limbed elms
colluding with doves


nor tide nor tail
angels w/ svelte angles


the rub and tug goils
languid as jersey
too early for supper


etc was their pimp
and whatever their sucker
shitslinger
master cleanser


w/ corporate coffee
and torture pâté


my present page
in l-l-livery


old glut
of a beast's spleen
the glory over
lordling socked ajaw


nassau ablog
by fairly a sweepmate a swoopster
bedevilled in gullet
swashbuckld by proxy


homosexuality eh?
red river andaloos
funny albeit friday
all the dork-rock


gender suggests
we levitate avec
held captive
patrón, bothermonger


ah myrtle
why sie is taken
my mind
impertinent parasol


glossy wit promise of salt
caint leave thir cellphone alone
ipode eterna
satellite viscera


muscadetted papillon (that one)


strident
17 stallions
with horns on their heads
and horns coming out of the horns


a papillon
that one


a buck in a corridor
conturbabimus illa
let us confound them


all ridded of giggling
anthropomorphia aghast
DL in the bowries 
the tee hee ambigenuity
of amputee-wannabees


googling tee hee
silly faggot
dicks are for chicks
dicks are for chicks


wicked hee
to bury my heart at
my heart was in my knee

last swan of avon

socalled swan of avon
n/t but a beaurocrat
buggering the buttercups
goy from the waist up


now soldiers're the ones making offers
and fucking caravaggio posters
maybe the artist had bothered about melancholia


suddenly xe finds xemself walking down
some dark corridor


california was truly the promised land
for a minute there
video marlboro
to show us


shoppingcart in dingy water
and then turn melancholical


sign reads no squatting
switchd on the cathode ray
at yr coronation


the bomb droppd w/ regular monotony
leaving us wanting


        a to zed
dampened a grid


satyrical deliria
pan's ballet
in a black tutu


who have the inclination
but even whose   necromancer—
firelit but dried—
—commandeering meadows—
protests were pathetic

Related Poems

What’s Broken

The slate black sky. The middle step
of the back porch. And long ago

my mother’s necklace, the beads
rolling north and south. Broken

the rose stem, water into drops, glass
knobs on the bedroom door. Last summer’s

pot of parsley and mint, white roots
shooting like streamers through the cracks.

Years ago the cat’s tail, the bird bath,
the car hood’s rusted latch. Broken

little finger on my right hand at birth—
I was pulled out too fast. What hasn’t

been rent, divided, split? Broken
the days into nights, the night sky

into stars, the stars into patterns
I make up as I trace them

with a broken-off blade
of grass. Possible, unthinkable,

the cricket’s tiny back as I lie
on the lawn in the dark, my heart

a blue cup fallen from someone’s hands.

from “Inserting the Mirror”

 

Is it possible to know where a word ends and my use of it begins? Or to locate the ledge of your promises to lean my head on? Even if I built a boundary out of five pounds of definition it could not be called the shock of a wall. Nor the pain the follows. Dusk cast the houses in shadow, flattening their projections. Blurred edges, like memory or soul, an event you turn away from. Yet I also believe that a sharp picture is not always preferable. Even when people come in pairs, their private odds should be made the most of. You went in search of more restful altitudes, of ideally clear language. But the bridge that spans the mind-body gap enjoys gazing downstream. All this time I was holding my umbrella open.

 

 

As long as I wanted to be a man I considered thought as a keen blade cutting through the uncertain brambles in my path. Later, I let it rust under the stairs. The image was useless, given the nature of my quest. Each day, I draw the distance to cover out of an anxiety as deep as the roots of language. I keep my eye on the compass while engaging the whole width of the field, and whereas, to others, I may look like a blur of speed from one point in time to another, I know I am not advancing an inch and will never arrive. Even if I could arrive the mirror would only show the other mirrors I have set up at every stop to catch the spirit of passage.

 

 

It rained so much that I began to confuse puddles with the life of the mind. Perhaps what I had taken for reflection was only soaking up the world, a cross of sponge and good will through the center of the eye. But to describe the inner world, you know, by definition, even the patient definitions of psychology, is impossible. Hard to know if it can be lived. Revoked edge of water and dry land. A falling fear. The sudden color of a word. But it’s the sky, pale gray, abundantly thrown back from far enough behind the eye, as you imagine an image, seeing earth in every direction.

Quiet the Dog, Tether the Pony

        A lament for Don (1958-2011)

Gaze     gaze      beyond the vermilion door

Leaf      leaf       tremble    fall

Stare blankly      at the the road's      interminable end



Reduplications     cold      cold     mountains

Long     long    valleys          broad    broad     waters

Tears     are exhausted      now    shed    blood



Deep    deep     the baleful courtyards     who knows how deep

Folds on folds       of curtains

Gates         trap        infinite      twilight



Walk     walk        through     waning meadows

Steep     steep        toward       ten-thousand Buddhas

Knuckles     blue     on the balustrade



In the land of      missing      pronouns

Sun     is a     continuous     performance

And we      my lover      are      nothing