English Poems

— Hoooooooo
Lay in an array of pixels
Fat, simulated proteins
Looks just like nutrition!
Acts just like an avatar!
I just wanted to give my body to
A net of guarine
Gingko-balboa azatine melamine
Camphobacter phylacter nicotine
Which hung like neuron-nectar in a cell, net of
Vatic coughdropped hairball tells the future of
Neural center where the straight lines hopped
Like a hairline fracture on a bender jumps a
Mulholland retaining wall and crashes the crinkled Vale of
Food-for-thought

The puppy must be learned of all this material.
No map of the hospital. First, the war effort.
Then, the war itself. The water makes and remakes
its walls. No persons or boats are allowed in them.

I.

Let me speak with expressive

hesitation & a feeling for

interment why even

lineate what isn’ t broken by

music let me speak with

inextricable reluctance.

I want to tear the heart

from refused convalescence

& feed it those long fronds

of river bed grass. I want to

tear the heart out of style

& put it between

utter thrall & the infancy

of all things impure.

Torn out, a flame thickens

between us as if

not right now we’ ll be

ripped from this life

His Exterior

Reader unmov’ d and Reader unshaken, Reader unseduc’ d
and unterrified, through the long-loud and the sweet-still
I creep toward you. Toward you, I thistle and I climb.

I crawl, Reader, servile and cervine, through this blank
season, counting — I sleep and I sleep. I sleep,
Reader, toward you, loud as a cloud and deaf, Reader, deaf

Bartender, make it straight and make it two —
One for the you in me and the me in you.
Now let us put our heads together: one
Is half enough for malice, sense, or fun.

I know, Bartender, yes, I know when the Law
Should wag its tail or rip with fang and claw.
When Pilate washed his hands, that neat event
Set for us judges a Caesarean precedent.

What I shall tell you now, as man is man,
You’ ll find in neither Bible nor Koran.
It happened after my return from France
At the bar in Tony’ s Lady of Romance.

Doubt not
the artist and his age
(though bald as the pilled head of garlic),
married or divorced
and even vying downstage,
are both aware
that God or Caesar is the handle
to the camel’ s hair.

I

The veldt men pray
Carved wood and stone
And tear their flesh
To vein and bone.

The idols scowl
In the brassy sun
Unmindful of
Appeasement done.

Yea, warriors cringe,
Whose tauntings dare
The regnant brute
In regal lair.

As tribal gods
The brave confound,
They bruise their heads
Against the ground.

Kennings of death
Encyst the square,
The mourners drool
And children scare.

Down in the shipyard, day and night,
The Galahads of the dock,
Hard as the sinews of basin rock,
Build an ocean cosmopolite.

The rivets stab and the hammers bite
Into the beams and plates of steel
Of the Diesel heart and the belly keel.

We,
The workers of the world strike catholic notes
On woods and irons, wring from brassy throats
Epics of industry.