the helpless messiah

you:catholic
you taste of catholic.
what you have determined to be true.
or will the messiah step in front of the s-2 train to lichtenrade?

lines jan. 16

gentle centrism:the most radical
of positions.drowning in the dirt
of new words:treason(in the bones
of the state)mud,the paste
of the dead,smeared
on the face.something broke
in the seat of the soul:alarmism
becomes him & tragedy
has a nuclear face.

shouting in the mirror,words
scribbled on the glass
in lipstick the color of blood.

line, jan. 13

i'm a matchbox in the rain,but
the storm hates no one.
twine wrapped around 2
popsicle sticks:the beating
heart of the world snake.

dugin calls for young
fascists throwing time
bombs.my head
is a time bomb ticking
backward to explode
the boy i was.

here in the wild the dirt
is wet.

..........

guide me

guide me to your smooth soft breast.
feed me cake as i stare at the ceiling.
let me nibble that crumb
that one
from your fingertip.

trump world notes

handel:i hear
a lament.louder:mask
the rage-sonata inside
the tv.
music.music.save me.save
a fragile spirit.

this violin will play
as we are led away.


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

i take issue with the hatred
in the hearts of men.



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

i can't stop watching as the key
is handed to
(dear god)i can't
stop watching.

Glitz Wins

In the brilliant light of this perfect fall day in Berlin it makes more sense.  Two weeks ago I was explaining to a German friend why Hillary Clinton was assured a victory in our upcoming presidential election.  She was more qualified, she had a coalition that included all the groups Donald Trump had personally insulted, her email "scandal" was overblown and didn't resonate with a majority of Americans.  He listened politely, then said, "No, Trump will win.  He is a showman.  You know, the glitz.  That's what America is all about."

The sun right now out my window this morning after the election is as brilliant as a klieg light, and I realize that of course my German friend was correct.  To wit:

1. Reality TV is more fun than reality.  America votes for fun, every time.

2. Melania is glamorous. Bill looks terrible these days.

3. It's really tough for a party to win three terms in a row.  America's attention span is too short for that.

4. America remains proudly anti-intellectual.  Trump comfortably speaks that language of conspiracy theory and willful ignorance.

5. It's easier to drive home and make stick one "scandal" (emails) than 100 scandals.

6. Trump says he's a multi-billionaire.  Money is the final value that matters in America, now and forever, amen.

I was absolutely wrong about this election, partly because I couldn't see my own country and its values, or lack of values, as clearly as an outsider like my German friend could.

He added one more thought, after stating unequivocally that Donald Trump would be America's next president: "You won't have to worry about him.  Your country's system of checks and balances will keep him in line."

One hopes he's right on that one, too.

lines june 8

what is the reality of a poem?why
the long face,blue donkey,why
the balloons?we floated above the onion
dome & shouted to mayakovsky,to marx,
to danton on the other side of history.heads
rolled for the right to grieve.heads rolled
in the right direction,downward
on the map,tho you know,poem,& i,
the map is not the
it's not the

still,it caught the blood of royals,turned
to ink by divisions of diddlers penning
apologies for aristocracies washed
away,the tonnage ot text devoted
to the few thousand dead of the terrors,
scarcely a word for the millions
who came before,robbed & raped,
maltreated,murdered,mulched
beneath the ermine cloak of probity,
what is the reality of a poem

modern fascism has no ezra pound

saints must be poets for their memories
to last.myth-
                 making needs song/
modern fascists:you don't get this.
your ugliness of language
is your doom.


our best hope is our wit.

lit brut

the neobrutalism of the plastic
pistols on the graves,the siege
of mecca & the death of cowboys
in the snow,the anthem
of the marchers in the street &
pipelines bursting at the seams:we
stumbled into this,a clean,well-
lighted hell,& every plaint now ends
'we have a pill for that'.

for a friend & teacher dead now 30 years

still working out the act of making,the process,
gerald.remember when you taught me
how to carve a villanelle?form as curio &
artifact,like string quartets or rock
n roll,but now we have this pencil,all we have,
this scrap of hope that somehow something
from your teaching will return.maybe a dirge,
a memory of your face,a pale rider on a yellow
horse,remembering how pretty you were.your death
can't be contained inside a villanelle,or any poem.

here lies my friend,my teacher,whose last words
were a muffled laugh,a whimper of despair,
an ironic 'oh god' like a prayer.

lines may 25

a sex memoir in a block of prose would be easy enough
to swallow:i remember the eighties,& youth.a few
brain cells survive the sonic assault,the alcohol,
cocaine,aluminum can hash pipe fun.i remember
you,& you,but decent recollection & honesty
do not coincide.you women who shaped me in your hands
& licked up my lies,i think you are all still living & deserving
of peace.

poetry is dead,or should be:

words are sounds freighted with ideas.words
connected form commands.'bend over.fetch.kill.'my
words are words of liberation,but everybody thinks
that.some words create beauty/called
poetry.poetry is dead,or should be.
these are lines of tension.

paris 1968

badiou marching contra pacem,hand-in-hand
with mao & plato/sartre hawking broadsheets
on the street/tel quel spinning candy
in its turbine:where is their world now?i
spy it in the library between the shelves
of shite,glimpses of another country:some-
where there's a city built on seven tasteful hills.
somewhere we will meet.

lines may 20

the marks & drips off the edge of the canvas
were more interesting than the picture,
according to the artist's statement.she thought
about hanging the dropcloth but no,she took pictures
of the dropcloth & made a video destroying
first the original canvas,then the dropcloth
then the photos of the cloth.we watched the video
at the kunsthalle near the rathaus in kreuzberg then
went out for espresso.
                                   the watercolors
on the wall of the bakery:figures.one,
an old woman with her walking sticks
like a cross-country skier,i had a hard time
with her at first but by the time
we were finished with our coffees
my conception of the world had normalized.
i had grown fond of the brutal little woman &
considered buying the comfortable,
unremarkable watercolor
for 30 euros,unframed.


.....



the asian store down the alley in steglitz
where we bought rice noodles & cilantro
& the vietnamese woman's english
was better than my german &
we filled your backpack up with rice
papers & bean paste & mae ploy chicken
sauce & outside the sun shined,was
that a dream?my eyesight had returned,
the operation at the charite putting the world
back in my head for a few more years
& i would make dinner that night,able to see
the rice papers as i rolled them up,
no longer cooking only with my fingertips.it
wasn't a dream though it feels like one
today,here,on the other side of the earth.

lines may 19

we saw the heads of presidents up
on a rock & walked around
where custer lost.then pecan
shakes at stuckey's.
my memory
of america is straight
& gray like the highway
across that flat banality.


..........


we have a pill for that,the blood
that runs like current through
the wall,the sound of other voices
& the call of night.it can be fixed.
stillness without practice & peace
without victory.

lines may 18

the problem with this picture is the border
where it ends.


.....



lines written in blood on the streets of athens
lines copied from the foreign affairs' contents page
lines without borders
lines without tenure
the call-&-response opening ceremony of the 1000th international
lines whispered in your ear like my fingers between your legs
lines in the water catching hell.


.....


text has been tight from the beginning when
we pressed the word into brick or tiny-printed on papyrus,
impressed,compressed to save space.vowels dropped,sensible
enough,who needs them?but you have no authority,you
ancients,you

have no authority in this text.



.....



while baking bread with tesla & arguing the future
of a common currency with soros i saw the future
of fascism like muscle under a skin of stone,flexing
in response  to the matron of maastricht:blood
inside that smooth white rock.

lines may 16

anthropomorphize yourself:leave the animals
out of it.they're not here to speak to you
in secret code,the eagle has no opinion
on the justness of your coup.respect the blood
of the lamb by not spilling it.humans:
get over yourselves.

lines may 12

stained glass futurism,hershey bar
colonialism.europa we will rape you
like a cow:mytho-magic dulles
bros,from frankfurt into gitmo

we've trained our black sites on you.
i smell a new world odor.


.....


spray paint.whitewalls.interactive
sensors call your phone.smart-
gouache.tactile.metabolizing
sulfites in the wine.critics.
bunched up.finding words
to clarify your dream.patrons.
outside.
             looking for the stars


.....


the decorative.the gestural.the knife
in my sciatic nerve.the shoes.the self.
the giggle from the far side of the room.


.....


beauty:is
discredited
in visual art
only at the level of idea.
the plastic arts
exist
in the world
of ten thousand things.

but words are dull,ideation
a soup of gray
in the bowl of your head.


.....


the non-motif,resistant to convention,degree zero
behind the code,the black word on the white page,
the spark in the brain struck:bells in the distance.

lines may 11

rhymey slangy singsong limey:your
'meaning torqued by artifice'
spangles on the page.like
similes.smiles.smelly emojis for the formal
set.i like larkin as much as the next white
male but:he's dead,his time has gone.mine,
too.

.....


when it became too painful to read poetry i
took to reading criticism:the best lines pressed
between blocks of pleasant prose & then
it(or i)became a bore to read the books
of criticism & i took to skimming reviews
of books of critiques of poetry.i have never
been so well read.

lines may 10

phenomenology


1.

everything i'm reading reads like everything i've read.
all the charms of sycorax are messing with my head.

2.

i was a genius before all the drugs.
i climbed a mountain in my skull.

3.

no matter how forcefully i push this mop
i can't push it through the wall.