A good day at work
Me and the computer were humming perfect
call-and-response
the phone rang opportunity and not too much
and we shot right to the last second of 4:59;
it came and went,
me with it
I was walking down the hill to the train
post-work cigarette badly lighted, uneven and wet
the hill itself slick with greasy slush and me too
and at the bottom by the warehouse loading dock
I saw a vaguely human blur shoot straight down and flat
with a truly dull thud and a series of muffled clangs
violently pulled from my line of sight
The old Chinese man was a statuette that had toppled
neither of us could speak but he understood
I was helpless as anyone
when I touched him and sped back into work and dialed 911
I slid back down the hill, snuffed cigarette in pocket, unbroken
and there were others. Sirens, already, were flooding us from all sides.
The others restrained him and I checked the
scene:
A garbage bag full of cans feet away and a cane that had
somehow walked itself into the street.
The rain dropping cold onto it all
and his blood pouring from the back of his head and through
the nooks of asphalt under his body and heading,
determinedly, into the street. As if it belonged there.
And the fire engine and the cop car and the
ambulance pulled up.
Did you see him fall? Is he bleeding? Is
he Chinese?
(As if the Chinese fall more than the whites or the Hindus?)
Yeah, he’s Chinese.
We just saw him.
Yeah?
Yeah; twenty minutes ago. This time,
he’s going to the hospital.
We all hung on and waited and counted
imaginary pints as they poured into the street.
These guys were good. They had him strapped onto a carrier and his head bandaged
and we couldn’t move either.
Then they rolled off.
It was darker now and we looked at each
other’s obscured faces and moved along.
Nothing to see here.
I re-lighted the cigarette
– it burned nice and even and tasted like pure life – and headed to the train.
He was speeding to the hospital in full
regalia. Me and the others broke apart.
Unaffected.
But I’ll be damned
if he wasn’t waiting in the warmth of that train and shadowing me
Home.
Accountability Gospel
For better or worse I’m a life-long
sucker
for the man up from the down on his luck.
Redemption tales sound like choruses of
angels wish they could
when they come from a guy who’s tried to howl through his mirror
You can tell a woman she can’t know the
desperate bewilderment
of being a Man
and she’ll laugh in your face
and that’s Valid
and you’ve got to suck it up, and
breathe it out in an otherwise humanless room
where you’re both lord and devil and both of you are lonely and ultimately neither
You’re following your better self
who’s got you hungry
dangling a carrot while you sing work songs
Some are field-recorded and transcribed for broadcast
many more are lost
as they merge, never heard by mortals, with the calmer particles of a sane world
But the very real god of Accountability
hears all
and is starved for offerings;
overflowing with gratitude, willing to trade sweat and tears
for a human currency
raining like gold coins
when you kill in his name.
Ah
Out on the porch
cigarette glowing in the dark like a fire reflected in an owl’s eye
cold
I hear two groups of sounds
coming out into the black, sharp as knives
one couple fighting
and another coming together.
Balance.
For Albert Speer, My Father
Like firing a slug through a blue-green
cloud
and hearing a scream
No guardedness
just direct access into the voice of his psyche
If you peeled away the skin and muscle and
bone from a man
it’d be what’s left that does the talking
The ego torn out from him like vertebrae
and he can only tell truths
This is when
he joins Humanity
and dies
The beauty in an ugly thing
Standing naked, looking old
in the bathroom
shower running
waiting for Warm to override Cold
There's a moth
flapping in little stupid circles
Not even thinking,
I clap
and he drops into the open toilet bowl like a pebble,
then floats dead as a paint chip...
My palms come away clean.
One extends to taste the shower:
Never
Hotter.
Bring in the dog and put out the cat
Christ isn't clearing this driveway
and Buddha doesn't have a handle on the recyclables
If the Cosmos is taking care of business it
does so imperceptibly
all right
Everything's waiting to fall, each speck
in the sky is dying to catch fire
I put all my stock into the burn of
a shoulder muscle
and the goodness of the last drop
Everything routine is holy
everything unholy is holy
Work, food, orgasm, the vivid daydreams,
the mindless rut so real it has a flavor,
every speck on each minute
dying to reborn every day;
There's your God.
Legs
The sun is a dripping ball of tar
and the parking lot shivers like a black creek,
the air only as alive as Christ’s physical heart
This was and is their routine. Their place.
She sits in front of him on a parking curb,
him telling stories as she holds the lunch tray,
the heel of one foot on the asphalt, the ball of the foot,
needlessly, against the black rubber tire as a wheellock.
Or maybe she’d be clipping his toenails
as he half-heard her compliments,
half-thought of a day, maybe one like this one –
simple, hot, uncomplicated – maybe not,
a day some twenty-five years ago
when he had youth and legs that worked
He gets by. She’s here, the girl, and
as they go back to the home’s entrance she can barely
match him with her long-leg stride
(He had a faster motor rigged into the wheelchair;
he knows a guy)
and it makes him keep going faster, and on:
To have her fall back a bit
to have her at all
She’s got a heart bigger, more
tireless, and fearless than his
or mine
She’ll be there crack of noon tomorrow
as I’m walking by,
grateful.
The zen kill
Never heard the voice before, but when the
words entered his head
he knew who it was
Get off of that floor.
You can’t sit forever.
He uncrossed his legs and stood
a blank for a mind and the chamber loaded, live
The voice said, You’re looking for
me and you found me
in a loud whisper that shot down the hall and wrapped tight around the corners
shooting straight into that empty mind
bouncing like a ring droning in the cup of a
bell
He took off springing towards the voice
light as a cricket on the old floorboards and faster than anything
Rounded the corner
Faced the figure
of the Buddha
eyelids down and relaxed
sitting in his own way
He let the killing pour from him and the
Buddha died
draining away into the floor like steam in reverse
Heading back, away, he caught sight of the
spider plant hanging from its hook
reached in, touched it; it was dry
So he watered it,
Sat back down.
Zephyrs
are, she says,
westerly winds
usually warm
and feel silky on exposed skin.
One of her favorite words.
At the moment she says it her whole body is
clear as windowless space
and I see her
and she's just as knowable
as she is unknowable.
An optical illusion designed for the mind's
eye.
A pleasant problem.
A moebius-strip.
One of my favorite words.
How not to inherit the Earth
It’s a good joke:
No man understands no man no
woman understands no
man understands no woman, etc.
You just go on
I’ve got about as much heart
as a Dumpster filled with egg whites
but some things you know
You can be a hair curling
around a burning light bulb,
you can be the kerosene on the rag that will turn Town Hall to flame and then ash
You can walk through the blizzard
or stay home
You may be the low, poor man on the totem
pole
but when they say to put it down
on the line marked "Occupation"
it’s your hand that holds the pen
If you’d only surprise them
they would in turn step back and let you
pass
in awe
of the only mind they’ve run across who
seems
to get the joke.
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