Popular Culture

Brad Pitt and Kevin Bacon are in a boxing ring in the middle of a football field. They are both wearing white boxer shorts, no gloves, and about to perform a dance routine. I am standing next to them, looking at Brad Pitt’ s hair flop down over his face. He smiles at me before the music starts. From everywhere, broken glass bottles hurl at their bodies, and they are splashed with gasoline. We are also in a dark alley lit by fire. The two are still standing, looking over at me, though I can’ t tell who is smiling.

I’ m eight years old and all the rooms
of my father’ s house are larger than life. Two days after my
first divorce, the only landscape I know is simplified, bone-smooth

and

Someone’ s at the door, somebody please get the door
Somebody please get the door.

is

¿ are you
on the other side
waiting
for alarms
in a desert
of sleepless
evaporations?

¿ are you
beside yourself
in the aisles
that distance
makes shorter

than light waves
in the daylight
that pounds
a lead slab
in the soup
that the winter
dissolves?

i make signs everywhere, with sticks, stones and leaves
for those in the clouds from below the line to arrive

i don’ t have a language to speak to you with, my tongues are all fish

i know that a one is a circle, and that nothing is round,
except every corner i saw by the hearts
lined up on the spine

i know that the winter will finally be here again, and that the summer
will die and be born with its ice

Our big city is a city of big bombs and big bicycles, we hire grafters for their pretty art. To force a shoot inside a shoot, to grow an apple on a crab, to grow a plum upon a leprechaun. Dyspepsia is often grafted upon hysteria. To grow a boy inside a belly, cutting capers. Words, through grace, are grafted in our heart and the orange bears a greener fruit that blossoms as it swells. With imperfect grace from that perfect grace from wherever that perfect grace may remain.

sometimes the deaf
hear better than the blind

some men
when they first
heard her sing

were only attracted
to the flower in her hair

You see them on porches and on lawns
down by the lakeside,
usually arranged in pairs implying a couple

who might sit there and look out
at the water or the big shade trees.
The trouble is you never see anyone

sitting in these forlorn chairs
though at one time it must have seemed
a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.

Sometimes there is a little table
between the chairs where no one
is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.

Nonentity’ s birthplace: a front yard sweeps
its dirt clean. Devil hopped up the oak tree,
devil-take-the-profit seized
a jay in the twigs by the feet, wings buffeting

this child’ s cheeks to rhyme. Leaf of gift
box tissue folded over her pocket comb. Hind
pocket kazoo. Won’ t somebody please start
something other & oddball soon,

narrow her down out of folly
& trivia to destiny? But Whynot the tortie cat
flopped an irregular sunny patch,
wriggles & rolls & revives the blissy fits of ignorance.

and then there are the one-hit zombies
cursed to an eternity of Monday nights

who runs our music does not make it
controls manufacture and marketing of rhythm
schemes on and fixes the charts. it’ s polyphonic
from the dark of the chitlin to solid gold dawn
doublecrossed over

a love come down

after the plunge
sloshing around in limbo

that too sweet gospel splash