The News is Better as a Joseph Heller Novel

(from notes discovered in a notebook)


Noone weeps
anymore. The bombs go
off—percussion
for the raging
song—and we’re stunned.
Noone weeps.

In our fantasies and
nightmares, we’ve journeyed
through aroused skin,
to the heart of
the city’s heaving
lungs, its weathered,
concrete bones—
we’ve sipped coffee
watching the setting
metamorphosis of death.

On the catwalks,
we’ve rated this year’s
sleek fashions
and in the fashion
quarter—we’ve seen
it hawked in history
superstores—
retro/retro/retro.

The bombs go off
and noone weeps—
it’s just this season’s
colour.

If you say you’re living a poet’s life

I sometimes wake in poem-time / a certain iamb of olive oil and eggs / and history
stretched nineteen inches of CNN / announcers like world criers chanting
insane mantras—destruction and desire and the fire of the human engine enduring.

Fresh-cut chives and ground pepper / comics / the obits in the morning paper /
Gordian politics supporting a sliver of wealth / arms reaching through coffee steam
into tai-chi moments / the fear of evo&devolution / a dancing asphalt pearl—

elocution Mrs. Manners of the failing sun and sea / oh let’s not touch the hem
of so much empty eternity. Poems come and go with each changing mood
of an autumn sky / poems come and go and never say, goodbye.

Pine Trees on the Escarpment South of Tobermory

here where the river froths icy over
bear bedrock even in summer’s cyclonic eye—

here I wonder what dreams the bent pines might have—

if they dream about equatorial winds and the burnt
coffee odours of strict summer days—
do they consider life between lukewarm waves
slipping down the zipper of another ruby sunset

or are their imaginations as frozen as a January morning
which groans and creaks like a factory manufacturing
precise stamped metal parts for refrigerators, trucks,
weather satellites and fine French guillotines

perhaps they listen for the distant drone of saws, the rattling
of chains; perhaps they wait patiently
for metamorphosis, for release into another purpose

perhaps they pray to the god of tables, dressers and studs;
perhaps they wait for their cryogenic moments as bookshelves,
wait to emerge again and again, as though considering themselves
in the mirror of what they are, they’ve fallen into endlessness,
these skeletons, these bones that ignore death

Stalker

Between the mother
and the child,
there is—what?
Genesis hijacking
the bedroom
and the boardroom.

I never cried
for revelations,
never wanted then.
Yet consequences
creep like stalking
lions, knowing

that no matter
how large,
the kill is a matter
of time.

When America

When America went Latin, the Hondas slipping
between Fords and Chevrolets hummed Mediterranean.
And trash talk dripped mucho manno testoster—
one voice, one mantra.

When America went Asian, food was a flood gang,
drug and under-aged and naked against
fifty-plus stars waving in a Louisiana wind,
staring down the gun barrel buggers of government.

And fat slowed down the human flow—fat flowing
from house to ghetto, from want to empty restaurant
to dreams in the respite of fat dreams under a fat sky
sinking into the fat minutes, hours and empty days.

When America ran on empty, only tough words
remained on tough streets, empty-eyed and large and dry
wind whipped flags into a political frenzy and a solitary
rat slipped through the empty halls of sacrifice.

concrete surfer 

Time the pacifist
wears a black coat—
something torn from the back of old
disaster—rumpled with death
and the dust of lost civilizations—
the dust that never seems
to settle long
and time the lascivious
lecher preaches at each
crooked corner—sings
lullaby’s to dour clouds belched
from the throats of hope.

Time hangs out, time hangs out
with gypsy history
and they drink,
exchange strange stories concerning
the most recent uprising
of deluded ants.

September's Susan 

Side yard spider 

Three towers stand in the field like deserted buildings. Nothing stops time and change. 

On the Block


The time of teflon ideas has returned. Once
out of fashion, now sliding from each word.

And in the silence, the world escapes me, events
dumped on a table in an inaccessible corner of

what art I thought I had. These last years,
there has been little glue. Now there is none.

And like a mendicant on parliament hill, I hear
the words, the endless words and have no faith.

A familiar trail this warm September morning. Spider webs are everywhere, as though there is just time for one more hunt before cold October jack-knives down to this world. My mind is still on things further south. When I went to save this file, the immediate title that came to me was, eye of the storm. 

Blues One-Ten

I suppose the sun sings ballads
to the clouds, a conga line weaving
to the twilight bar.

And buildings nod to trees fanning themselves,
planning themselves into suburbs,
barbecues under the stars.

The dimensions of a heart
are found in the flowerbed,
chatting up sober roses for a lark.

How could anything exist without us,
there to orchestrate and name
each petal and leaf into flame?

I look at the waters of New Orleans,
too placid after the rage of the storm
and wonder, how could it happen—

it wasn’t dropped from a plane
or shot from a rife,
it wasn’t legislated after too much debate—

it isn’t the aftermath of an insurrection,
it isn’t the demented plan of a despot
tearing the world apart—

this is the result of an earth being itself
against all men wandering
across the shelf of history’s misery.

Speechless

When words fail,
I feel as though
I walk through waves.
Events wash back and forth
across a world
where each breath
is only the illusion of movement.

Though sunrise and sunset
click by like miles
and mountains disappear
into the night to rise as meadows,
the wind which moves
past my body, the wind
which trawls clouds, the wind
which is a blender—that wind
is the same wind
that has always been,
though events once washed
over me now recede
without gaining distance
from the fading footfall
I drag across this beach.