Three Poems
Cocainey Air Conditioning
1) Dream who is the bed whispering sweet nothings to?
Yo tengo tickles.
2) Dream what glockenspiel just sent me a text message?
Wall street: Robin Hood in reverse--rob from the poor give to the rich.
3) Dream when did that Knish e-mail me?
He looks a lot younger than his hair.
4) Dream where is the unedited refrigerator?
My tongue is a horny supermarket.
5) Dream why is the air-conditioner so cocainey?
Because even on an empty stomach you’re still full of shit.
Trademark Infringement
Quitting while you’re ahead is not the same as quitting.
-- wiseguy credo
Success has got enemies
that will expectorate on you.
So the only find to way out
is to way out.
On three hours of sleep it would be
up to us to have to leave dreamy.
Paper; quill; ink: anodyne.
I took care of the parallel
universe why shouldn’t it
mollycoddle
me? Why shouldn’t it provide
an infinity
of attempts at upending
a miracle?
As a bullet fidgets through
an individual’s head
spaghetti (code name: corpus callosum- see Brain illustration) does it
record
a victim’s parting thoughts?
Engage in brain conversation?
[Galatea entreats: Pig male, Lee in?]
When you sculpt something you can
call it whatever
you’d like: tambourine, Aphrodite, glockenspiel. For example,
Civil Rights is an uninvited herring
bone suit.
Estuary to the Atlantic always
buzz me from a [n]unpublished []umber.
Believe me,
they know that even if
they don’t
know me. I am a busy man, I don’t
got no funeral to go to
anybody’s time,
to be the after the fact
accessory to a gurney hernia.
Do you think
I need to witness a stray
dog and pony
show
when I have to
unkennel
a hundred kilos
. Then, wax eloquent
about how
my tongue is
a pink jungle
with a Chiang-Kai Sheking account?
A Blaze’s Nude Orb
(For my niece born the day of Langston Hughes' centennial 2/2/2002)
Three times three days the scarlet tip of the cream-
colored matchstick hissed against rawhide splint.
One-legged track star, dashing on his carrot top,
quickling so sprintly the cuff of his thoughts fire caught.
In flagrante delicto. His own gold medal, he is;
A fiery baton, which inscribes heat on the crocheted
bone of a penny candle. Periwinkle its color. Or,
picture a magnifying glass, a Lalique funnel strangling
sunlight: two bundles. Eyes invite the blindness. From
its huge, bald heart, to a crimson nib it takes cubed: two times/
two times/ two/ seconds of sixties/to incarcerate
a knuckle of sunshine. Cradling a blaze’s nude orb, a blue
palm shimmies above wax. During the square root of eighty-one
days a spigot of air ferments, bursts for six/ times ten/ of time’s
minutes. Names stitched on parchment. Sardinian
eggplant wounded, scooped. Withered, then anointed
with Bacardi: fill the empty, then empty a feeling.
Bequeath pulp. Drip, drip knits
the Sardinian back to itself. Sultry, wax congeals. Donning
a royal blue hanky, at death’s pearly gates, the Sardinian
visits February. Infiltrates Oya’s moments. Orisha. Burnt
copper rind. Corbeau tresses. Mung bean. Guinea hen.
Tongue. Kojak at death’s trap door. Fondling
a Palomino’s tail, she scolds tornadoes.
Divvies birthday cake and candles, with my niece born one
second: on a second: day: of a second: month: in a second:
year: of a second: millennium. Rub “0” from “100,” echo
what’s left/ between them an “X,” which sometimes means
TIMES. Do this. To them: this equals a century from Langston
Who’s skin immigration. Add a day. Damn. So much for
the weary blues man chaperoning my niece’s pulp to his centennial.
She, a New Negress whose nugget brown body parallel parked
two times/ three times/ four hours. Tardy. She, a throbbing bread
box slithering through time’s hairline fracture. Light betrays
light: a decrepit, crescent moon was once a halo palming her
mother’s womb. Galileo Galilei. Beyond Harlem’s Renaissance
—my niece decreed rebirth birth’s afterbirth—cares little for the ways
a century’s 20s roar: turning 29, 75 Octobers ago, when it senses
itself slipping away, a decade learns to murmur: time, a cheeky lion,
downsized by laryngitis. Holler back! No. Whisper. I hear you. Just fine.
A now new: 02/02/02 + uno + uno anos. Headstones – below, their world’s
perpendicular to vertical; backsides, the arch of a huge, useless
foot; peanut heads: immaculate heels; polished coffins: Oxfords that won’t
unbuckle --assess their neighbor: Stillborn. Succulent. Insist, “no
matter the season you’ll always don the same frock;” swear, “that’s
no sapling just a left leg planning an escape;” warn, “you’ll become an ex
-pert at innys while small talk, spats and cirrus clouds, trample you.”
Fingers insist themselves beneath snows
of inches-- silt, last night’s sky huddled under a palm of horizontal
stars. What your digging: deep evening unwelcome to the after
-noon, so as you toss last night’s sky skyward imagine abandoning
a pet giraffe on the Serengeti. It only knows how to eat mimosa
leaves from human fingers. It will not dash from the jungle’s
monarch. It will sashay back to its owner’s Dar Es Salaam railroad
apartment, ring the doorbell with its jugular. Rupture December, bury
a deep so wish it holes a poke in the abandoned palm of an iambic sky.