Ghost Dance
There’s a soul in every stone,
a heart in every hallowed place,
a home in every hovel
groveling up terraced rascal flats
worn by wanton passersby
there is, there is
A trailhead stemming from David’s first and
final stone, tempting the ghost wrought from eternity spent
pent in Goliath’s temple
asleep, asleep
only gasping in Träumerei, unkind
to Hispaniola, to the Congolese,
in man’s fireside reflection it only
dances
waltzing in that same Sitting Bull style,
that same mazurka, marching in twos against
threes from those same stone walls of
Dachau
wherein those same souls walked the Earth
with soot and sand etched in green-grass football
David knew that stone, and in that Cartesian epithet
He was the stone
He was the stone
Its path inscribed on Leibniz’s Turin Shroud
in walls of plaster, alabaster, and
sheetrock,
in mutations of that ancient form,
that DT, shaking in delirium tremens
that same Salem hysteria
that same Johannes-Passion transfigured
in Eichmann, in Mengele
that same ghost
that same ghost
that same ghost
whereupon limits are never reached and
souls never end, sipping cups passed from
lips pouring words in every ear, whispering
“there is, there is.”

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Electric Zoo
Glass-blown
Bluegrass
Fast-cash
Lose fast
Staph kills
Catskills
Ten stills, film change
Spare tired and bow-tied in Hallmark kiosks
Offkey keynotes note: O’ Lamb, begot to rot
In Jazz-June
Soul-saved sooner than lunar caldera provided
Under the tablecloth we all grovel united
Knighted boot-soles stomping souls soulless in progress
Korova loonies snow-crashed in tantric Iceboxes
Stockhausen stock-houses packed with sold-out soul-food
Blowzy beneath zephyred Goodyear Zeppelins
Wicker-basket pickings in wicked winter
Hinterlands glow regardless
From neon and crimson candelabras
Wired glowworms warming the electric zoo
Lowlifes still plague the darkness
Naked prudes streaking
Strawmen pulsed in hourly cadences from Our to Amen
Thereof, the inclusion of all men,
under binary suns
and Linux-based Burroughs
and Apple-soft Edens
under silver-spun lamplights
illuminates heathens
Absconding false playwrights who belong to the dilettantes and dogs
Folded, in full disclosure
Gazettes under Folgers paperweights
Beneath fluorescent floodlights four-wide in foreclosed arthouses
Pale quartet as viewed from the lectern
Lecture halls forever empty ensconced in plastered Papist walls and concrete stalls
Daffodils uprooted for strychnine orchards
Orchids ordered in windowsill quincunx
Five-counts, fivefold five-four
Brubeck
Boomtowns looming overtop bustling dynamo
Boardrooms belly-up on bantamweight four-posters
Brooding in bedlam breweries
Bored in Dionysian doldrums
Rummaging through East-village villas
Forthright fortunes forbearing four-story 404 smokestacks
Fourteen-by-fourteen for lowly twin and four-piece kit
Kitchen baby-blue since Baby-Boom
Room reserved for blazed-out drummer boy
Twenty-two
Eyes set on sold-out sets
and cloudland sunsets
and moonrise beauties
and Bandcamp greenbacks
and soon-to-be-student debts
Snuggled under two-pm angelfish-pipe hashish
Smothered sloth neath Slothrop plunder
Sunken-eyes and red-top granny-knit nightcaps
Tiptoeing round red-solos and torpid tourists just hours before
Nudist luncheonettes in stock-Corvettes
Nuked near-new Mu Shu
Glue-thick TruMoo perched placid on porched patio
Two Newport 100s hunkered in puckered pink-lips
Crumpled pink-slips all disarray in waning day
Hit the hay

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Rigaudon
Ping forth beams of white contrition
Untidy my bedsheets in brazenness;
And the wrought scales of penance
Bring Osirian pitch to cravenness

And maul your tigerskin floor,
And reel your plaints ashore,

Do no harm to your bodice
(The cover is a handlebody
In watercolored greyscale)
The ugliest shade of shale;
I palpate your ilium, ever bawdy
And treasure a lonely goddess

Mauve sun mires the heath
In dying flowers; the breath is kissed
The palace shines within our mix
The windows catch the brine
And in our palms, betwixt
Ten tendrils, twenty knuckles
And your nose ring buckles under
The rugged weight of wafers
Tubed around tongues as lifesavers
Cavorting in between flavors
And scents of mildew under the floors
Do you remember what you’ve missed?
Betrothed in an iron wreath?

She, the genius of sex,
Erotic jest as timely concord
Every caress a noumenal clang
Each slang a subject conquered

A Frenchman asks me
What the space at the top of the stairwell may be
I say to him there is none
It is where you stand before you shove;
Where you throw yourself down
On a refrigerator box
Damp
And, God willing, grind sod into your teeth
Rinse your fingers, dry as dust
Before you die in the heath
A lovely bough, plump with snow
Characteristic of forty years ago
Metasyllabic structure in
One, five, one –
Nothing ever new under the sun

Tumbling thyroids hum nothings
Sometimes rummaging through veins;
All, aplenty, central to the line
A twisted ventricle bursting
A herniated brainstem, no longer jabbering
Two cerulean lips, no longer babbling
And Clabber Girl
Stacked high in the pantry
A pleasantry: a snatch of sleep
A rush of blood brought to whirl
And the arid tundra blankets, epitaphic
On the border islands
The shorter arm is, truly, Sapphic

Meningitic toddlers toying
Plastic playthings
Parochial oglers; one short of
A murder, on hay strings
They will never see the day
And that which it never brings

We end this course with a binary rhythm,
To atomize our minds, pool bloods in a schism
The fission-bomb stripes the hillside
To turn dark the glassine, the clods of ochre cotton
Snuff-tins, wastebins
And your mother, the fishy bone;
And you, her last great failure –
Nothing pure can emerge from what is rotten, lest ye atone

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Hot Jazz on Ninth
Light low, night slow
Lower-town’s leftover rat-race lowercase
A starlit space for starlets
In time for lonesome humdrum
Bummed-cigarette from
“We must’ve met…?”
Before long songbirds creep in sleepless
Leaps and foggy dog-bass
Faces new, stories true
Here for brew and bud and buttoned-sneaks
Week’s checks in hand
Vineland line-leaders
Eager-beavers fevered for freed up street corners forlorn till four
Scores o’ cats sought Hot-Jazz
That razzmatazz for rabble-rousers
Furrowed brows and furloughed C-stores
Neon bulbs a tour-de-force for callow cadres
Squeezed skins in bricked bric-a-brac
Soul-sign flickers and snickers:
Liquors
Pints for pittance
Brown-bagged rag-clad
Madhouse motley hotly jaunting
Blotted broad-street a
Blue-in-green bebop
Hoppy-headed poppers and mop-boys flow free
Seamless streaming Gulf-Stream streamlined past ninth street
Midnight’s beeline for dreamtime dime-store dimes
Moonrise mania climbs to fever pitched scream
Quickened Bream-hands strum and drum up
Strung out strongmen love-stung and Billy-clubbed
Drinking beakered potions doomed
Damned and demonic as
Sonny on sunny-side slips off harmonic motion
Simple dimpled boy left bereft in night’s ocean
Top of the Big Apple’s own bundled-bearded badland
Broke boy marooned under lamp-pools
Fool’s folly when the world has run dry
A moon-drunk funk for Pierrot
Stopped to rot neath that same hallowed spot
Not a halfpenny for Jenny tending lit-liquored-lot
Stop and drop by? With the world so dust-dry?
Dry-mouthed, uncouth in dusk’s
Rusted rumbling fresco
Mesto Manhattan matte-black
Batting moon-masked eyes
Arise few mewling curlicues and
Blued out Newports porched in scorched pitch
Switchback backdrops outcrop the skies
Light low, night slow

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Perish Song
I sleep too soundly, ever buttressed by fire,
Ensconced in sandalwood-stacked pyre,
Ashes blanket every last aching chasm,
The price of birth as some marital spasm
They dance and stamp the rite so spritely,
Moonlight-black lacerations coddled tightly
What sunlit dome awaits the matte-glossen Parish?
The world may live so long as I perish

Clouded lands, riverrun with rust-burnished clay
A plumpest oinker, sleek in midsummer’s hay
Grizzled kingships tearing meat from bone
Ein Heiliges Kreuz – upon which clergymen atone
Alone in the steppes, raw from score-long droughts
The Mongol plains – hurled in Siberian bouts
Of menstrual pains and upchucked lunches
And blue-red-white flags hoisted under close-fisted punches
And daisy-chained daisies pushing daisies up lazily
Fancy sloth as a virtue? – the mind functions better, hazily…

I remember you from the Gala after the halls had been purged;
The wine glass had shattered, and your candidate emerged
And you faked the whole Waldstein till he clutched your spider-veins
And unlocked your Jawbone, hiding ass-out from tidal rains
The next day, I can’t recall, as I stopped all my leering
I lounged in the truck bed as Christ did the steering
Come, you daughters, help your brothers to grieve!
Let me teach you Dewey-decimal as children learn to deceive

But I whispered bitter nothings in your ear, did you catch me?
And I hoped to high-heaven you’d gone deaf from pure lechery
But the century-lit dams all about Great America
Whirr their taut engines in lockstep to Erika
And the mystical artists, every libertine in smock,
Decries the Hallelujah chorus: “We live on a floating rock”.
So I speak nothing of bitterness, acrimony, or cancer
As our spirits are degloved, we French kiss the necromancer
And you prate and you prattle about all that you cherish
And you’ll do so in earnest so long as I perish

Sooted chimneysweeps look down
On the mossied motorcade
Spitting in open-air sewers of Adelaide
That which was never lost to them is not what they keep
Yet avoid you, tall ladders, and lovers counting sheep

The fruit bats of Java, under starlight, abound
To strip clean the bodice
Till nothing is spared, but
All is to be found
Body of iron, soul of thermite and tinsel
One axe-split oak lectern
One Al Jolson Minstrel
One grass-skirt is shredded
By the spinsterish board
One hirsute Javanese pup
In the darkroom, she’s stored
One tumorous liver
One spasm of marriage
One protest for Greed!
And permit me to perish

I remember now, those hands
Which spoke of late passions
The appended book of Matthew…
One rarely imagines
Snails, urchins, and toxoplasmosis,
He licks clean the mousetraps for leptospirosis

Build a fence, climb a chair
Spin the bus down the causeway,
Shadow puppets for children
False whispers in God’s play

There was another time, then
Without loss of the general
Where my father stood haughty
Dressed in Gendarme apparel
On sofas upholstered with blue burqas
His playfield of conquest
The room in which we lived gave a vote of no contest
But he spoke of pure memory
With the sun on his face
As he bludgeoned those daughters with arrogant grace
Another year, grapes sour
The leaves howl nightmarish
And nations may daydream
In time, still, I perish