maggots & fire

maggots will take you for what you are
unless you go the way of fire.
we're none of us christian anymore:the body
intact on judgement day?

who among us thinks the flesh will animate
& dig up out of earth as trumpets
tootle in the sky?no one here,not you,
not i.wash yourself with fire when you die.

lines

anachronism

it's hard getting woad into a line now.
saranwrap fits the time more neatly.
paint on my cheek as blue as my heart,
sealed in plastic.fresh as a wound.


...............................


eye surgery

such a pleasure,my new plastic lens.
ready for gunplay on parnell bridge.

lines

i hadn't been in church for so long
i feared i would combust,begin
speaking in tongues of fire.but
we weren't there for god.you
were there for music,some
stolid irish slag,burl ives
for the 21st century.twas
a long way from tipperary but
i enjoyed the call-&-response
warm-up,a european attempt
at gospel.watching berliners
try to get down,heh.& you.
i enjoyed you.

integrity

who's making literature out of this madness?
who is pouring the concrete of diaspora into forms
that can hold it? who understands the warp
of the brain that composes in psychosis?nobody

i know.

lines for national poetry month composed abroad

another nutter mutters
at your dress.you:animosity
in drag.i love you,hag.
were you ever young?i never
was.i'll put a bluetooth
in my ear & natter through the day.
we'll ride the 83 to kreuzenfeld & play.




.............................




the casual laziness of american lines:poets
who never learned their latin.it makes
for lazy causality.new york school I'm
talking at you.& beats & brutes &
whoop-de-doo.

neo con

houellebecq punks the world with pretense
of nihilism,jesuit in skunk's clothing,will
'rediscover' a grand old faith soon enough:
a few old men in dresses will pretend to care.

shuffling

what fools these corpses   :animated
for a time,wind up the ass & tongues of air.
at some point it's all just words.your flesh
a word to me('love'),your hand in my hand.
that sparkle at the edge of things:the reality
of orgasm/or medications in confusion.
let us medicate upon these things:the code
of anti-anxiety,anti-oedipus rewrites our lives.i
don't know what/we will be/when we emerge.

rip

you've stopped alarming yourself:siren on the rocks.
it's impossible to lyricize your death.
foolishness of 'the gated community'.safe,
fortified with alcohol,prescriptions of sundry
sort & gunz.gentlewoman.i'm not blaming
the victim but wish you hadn't gone back
for your clothes.wish you hadn't embraced
false security,hadn't wandered through
a pretty maze,with a well-alarumed fool.

unruly/unholy

acolytes of no-futurism
pourers of language
mixers of sand & water.
the earth is hard.fingers
press against concrete.
we are post-hope.
the real is ephemeral.
the eye in the sky is not a god.



.....



i'll write a lengthy screed on 'manifesto',now
a vilified word,& why 'conspiracy' is now a joke.
or i'll visit my provider & confess
to dark thoughts.we have a pill for that.

lines from 'unruly/unholy'

memento sum mori

you're all going to die.before that happens,some advice:unleash
your skull with fermentation.grab hold of desirable bodies.
reproduce.don't forget:clothes make the manacles.

.....

encomia

personal names will be given in the old norse font.
tresspassers will be shot.
a penny enslaved is a penny burned.
destroy the world of the other then shoot them at the border.
walk tonight in your neighborhood:bring your torch.
london's burning.

.....

unholy

my enemies have joined the church.

i would be on the side of the antichrist
if i believed in the antichrist.

i'll fall in love with this pope
when he acknowledges the church
is a dress-up scam:hocus-pocus flimflam man.

your texts have interest for the folklorist & the philologist.
the rest of us would do better studying math
& music.

anyway rip,steve

we drank so much.remember that?of course
you can't,you're dead now.you've been dead
for 20 years.explains a few things,like:
why you've been so standoffish.why
i never run into you on the street
where you seduce me into a three-day drunk.
i thought of it as bacchanalian,tho
it was more construction-worker
sleaze than divine.fucking heroin
anyway.dead in the bathroom
of a chinese restaurant in tacoma,washinton.
very pnw way to go.if it wasn't for
the fucking heroin you'd probably be dead by now
anyway.rip.

unruly lines

no,in the beginning was the written word.
no oral culture could force on us
the totalizing crush of one true god.that
takes lines,ruled,copied,transmitted
by pinched men with little pointy sticks.
in the beginning was the written
word,the tyranny of text.the word
made flesh on little lambs,vellum
& a stylus & the need to tell
the wild creatures what to do.

lines from 'unruly/unholy'

i should have taken up painting.a stroke of red
on a white canvas justifies the ways of god.words
are thin air,nothing intrinsic about them,meaningful
only in a context on which none of us agree.
.....

formal quatrain

how is it possible to despise so much & still function?
dyspepsia abysmal,lying stommick coded for misery:anything
can make me stop reading a poem now,the word
'nonillion',a sly slant rhyme,the latin names of plants.

.....

things got so much worse when i quit drinking.
i've been thinking about a whiskey barrel,a keg
of hope,100 liters of forgetfulness,a tomb.sacred
wine:i assert the possibility of communion.
we can allow the legitimacy of one another's subjectivity.
we can,but we seldom do.

.....

there are voices of reason & tenderness.i know this.i
am not one of them,not through reason but through fear.
i am as filled with sorrow,hate,& the queer thoughts
of desperation as any other european.

.....

famine is not a subjective state of being.

.....

rhymey limey

the war on terror works for every mother's son.
the war on terror shuts your face.
it is a drone strike in the sun.
the war on terror can be fun!
hush now or you're one of them.
the war on terror is a scam.

.....

for the concept of satan i thank you,christian.
& for the concept of sin.
.....

the christian's inward eye removed us
from the world.the world of things,made
profane by the christian's inward eye.
.....

tree.sky.real things that are not your god.
tongue.breast.the blood inside your veins.
my god is in the world of things.

lines away from home

reading newspapers in languages i don't understand,
surrounded by strangers,my brain mushing
through undiscovered skiffs:the iron sky 
is familiar,the coffee in this fragile cup, too.

lines for berlin

cheering for hertha.hoping for the wurst.
vertigo on the ring train.wagner 
from a produce stand.the dogs 
seem arrogant,the flowers pale:
the women beautiful but cruel.

..........

i direct your attention to the air
around you.in that park
in 1933 a father's father
beaten with a club.overhead 
you see the sky.the eye of odin
looks upon you still. 

sonnet

we will go riding,you behind the wheel 
driving me,my blind eye focused on the sky.
we will motor up to mahlow & i'll wonder
why i feel alone & when i'll die.

silly thoughts.greek food & a glass of ouzo 
in the afternoon will lead me to confession
if not god.i'll stumble through a conjugation 
& i'll place a promise on your foreign tongue.

back to lichtenrade & my emails,wondering
who will write & how,if i'll ever see
my ancient enemies again.for now
we'll turn the music up & make-believe

(but it's real enough,your sturdy thighs 
near mine.your hair.this glass of wine).

lines

it is impossible to take
seriously a poem
titled 'europe:
1914-1918.' why not offer up
the quatrain 'holocaust'
or the couplet 'god and man'?

lines

a runic font on the skin of the earth.
tanning(hiding)stretched from tree to tree.
you see me in the eyes of the sky:a sacrifice.
we will burn for a day then die.

fascism

the golden dawn is here in amerika:rosy 
fingers of rosenberg's myth of the 20th cent:
fascism an old broom,most effective when it pretends 
otherwise.trumpism will survive long after 
trump has crawled into his mobster hole.covered
with dirt his little fingers will poke & pull 
at the minds of fools.europeans have alreadly learned:
don't call yourselves fascists

lines

don't know how i feel about dying
on a distant shore.the baltic sea 
where the thudding germans go.
does it matter tho:here or there i'll elbow
thru my poems like that old lady 
pushing to the front of the line 
at steglitz.

my weimar

a wheelbarrow full of poems
to buy a loaf of bread

markings

your lips are a tattoo of historicity,the runes
inscribed on your breast a linguistic monument.
when i feel your heart beat against my heart
i think in verse:raven's wings,a sound that sparks
an image:a v-slash against the sky.

northern poem

hanne,

under the sonne,walk
with me(and love:
the grass,the toes
that press against the grass),
moist.morning mist
and your breathing self.

berlin poem

berlin you didn't vote for hitler but you
are still married to him.berlin your parks,
flat like world war 2 filmstock,i expect a tiger
tank to clatter out from diorama trees.berlin
i don't blame you for pegida,plz don't blame me
for the drone wreck of amerika,the wedding/
funeral pictures,children dead(or alive
with death inside their eyes).

some berlin poems

your friend a pleasant old
fashioned flirt,unlike
anything we have
in amerika,our womyn
all tough until they're tender,our
men easily confused,your
friend pipecleaner thin,charming
in her summerdress,50
years old,still cute until
the talk turned
to refugees.

berlin poem

bewildered w/multiplicity i
turn off the tv
set.here in lichtenrade
watching 'berlin
tag und nacht'
admiring the writing
on the wall.a communist
graffito in my heart
prompts me to travel
east.when i met her
father he took me out
back & showed me
where the wall ran,where
the blood ran red.this
was early on & i took it
as a threat.as i take
most things.taking the x83
east to the s-2 thinking
about a new neighborhood,one
with ddr democratic
architecture tho i will
probably just end up
at the brandenburg gate
again.silly but this bookstore
nearby has a great selection
on east berlin.that's where
the dream of it all lives,on
paper,down the way
from the starbucks near
the u.s.
embassy.

some berlin poems

smoking cigarettes in alexanderplatz:

wondering which wurst
you'll bring home

which mustard:
the uncertainty of kraut

the only uncertainty:
i get to be

the moody one.
you get to cling

to me,
capuchin monkey.

here in a-platz smoking
cigarettes watching

tourists lined up
at the tv tower

up and down all day long
to look over a city

that isn't even a city.
berlin: an intersection

of neighborhoods,
interchangeable,

a legoland
of plastic pieces,

every street the same: a
bakery, eine apotheke

eyeglasses, a turkish
produce stand, but:

every cigarette
in this american pack

is the same,
too, and every cat

in the dark.


..........

when you worked at the food bank:

all that anger
pointed at you
because:

you fed syrians.


..........

i looked like a berliner before i got to berlin

that one thin reed of flesh
could hold this much bile: i've
been told i look with disdain
on everything i see: i fit in
with berlin.