Poems by year: 2007  2006  2005  2004  2003  2002  2001  2000 
By series: Bridge St  In Yr Ear  Ruthless Grip

Here 2

            Emerging
from the middle of a donut-shaped dream, I rolled out of yesterday
            like there was

            no tomorrow, leaving
only now, its dinky gravity enough, apparently, to pull me out of the
            family tree,

            family of
man, American consumer army family, leaving me no parachute but
            the poetry map

            I'd stitched together
confidently, happy, careless of those unstoried pages flying
            into the future,

            written or read,
who knew, but now the genres, modes, tones, the careers are ripping open,
            I've gained weight,

            apparently, body lurking
in the weeds all the while, its endless voiceovers more familiar by now
            than

            memory,
but for outside news? nothing but echoes, read by soothing Furies
            looking straight out,

            we the media,
all other pronouns confiscated, late breaking faces making
            eye

            contact
out of the mask of uniform intelligence, brisk concern, it's
            in the contract,

            mouths fully employed,
nimble with the universal accent, undisturbed by accidental carnage crawling
            beneath

            datelines
and places, giving way to epic plots and fashion-bodies spinning
            the confected minutes

            to a timeless
friendliness, "here be epics, here be epiphanies, here be state of the art
            oceanic

            marginalities,
last month the Gross Poetic Product showed a modest increase,
            continuing the trend

            from the dawn
of history," and there's no way to turn this off, the mute
            button's

            broken,
like all the others, so much for the thought that the remote was
            autonomous, mine, that

            I could write,
and it would do the rest, this must be the work of History,
            Blatant Beast,

            Today's Date,
this morning's neural releases, which who wants mentioned,
            the tiny dreams,

            the plans, ever-huger,
are those the powers? endangered, to say the least, by their own
            tenses,

            ours,
what I write, wrote, you read, will read, with just an is or two separating
            made from making,

            breaking up from
broken open, hardly enough, but that's what there is to work with,
            sirens blasting,

            ignore them
at the risk of enchantment, and what's the opposite of that? and where else
            would it

            put us?
and before the question mark touches down echo has answered,
            Yes I

            know, knowledge
echoes from the tapes, "This planet seems inhabitable, in fact, conditions
            are perfect for

            pastoral or industrial
park, I'll get a reading on the temperature," and we're back, in the loop,
            that trick

            palm pilots
learn in their cradles, to make the world present in all directions,
            asking only for

            our spontaneous ignorance,
giftwrapped, gold ribbons, bows of burning desire, personally monogrammed,
            cut,

            it's
a wrap, the irony will never be fresher, the studied refusals of cliche more
            stolidly searching, those

            frames, these happy
coincidental hours, with in and out on the same page, vale and dale rolling
            their contours

            in unison,
forests dancing onto boxcars, each autonomous trunk trundled
            toward utopia,

            Pleistocene raptures
still burning behind the scenery, below the pages, under the pissed rivers,
            smothered

            heat
making our expressions compromised ambassadors of an enlarged continuum,
            nowhere to rest

            for the weary,
or the bored, or the teary, or the usurpers next door, behind the mirror,
            there

            are
no final surfaces, on earth, in dreams, no smooth pages on which to fix
            the just sentences,

            writing on water
turns out to be a play on words, a pun that only works because inside
            a language

            everything sounds
the same, the Federal Building says Federal Building
            on the outside

            and the cement
is fine with it, apparently, so why, legibility wonders,
            does

            sense
have to be such a pill? how many tons of therapy will it take, even to get
            to square one,

            to be able
to feel even one of those organized, sharp corners, amid the growing suspicion
            that the problem

            is one of
basic structure, that the mind's endless infoliations are only crude links
            lashing the sea

            to its name
without prior consent, or even notice, a kind of invasion you might say,
            even though intelligibility

            knows it's for
the best, articulation and pleasure will follow, they already do, don't they,
            frisking around the

            heels of power,
but there's a certain unease, an itch that anxious stares from even the best dogs
            can't

            scratch,
being emperor in no matter how many brains, no way can enough
            satisfaction fit inside

            a single body,
even if it swallows every scrap of information on the horizon, novelty
            all day

            and mood
music all though the night, plus the fantasy powers, but when they
            give you

            the keys
to Philadelphia and the people who live here, you'll find, on the same
            chain, the keys

            to Baghdad and
the bodies in the bunkers of the Federal Buildings there, and if these keys open
            any book, any

            line of credit,
what it says is there is no more sleep, no more awakening, Surrealism
            is was

            the last
gasp of that logic, its snorts issuing in apnean revolt, volcanic fragments
            the curators shelve,

            aroused but careful,
in ever sharper catalogs, signals for the bidding to go a little
            crazy,

            rediscover
its beliefs, relive foundational erotic breakthroughs, but the gavel
            hardly makes

            a dent,
the niches are too deep, only the fuzziest light sifts down, the openings
            close early

            in there,
not much to do but focus on the fleas jumping off the evening soliloquy
            as Captain Kirk,

            highest ranking ambassador
to the ego, pronounces judgment, "cooling, cool, cold, a life
            is wax,

            a singular
stylus would be good, but there's only so long to press
            into the material,

            whether you know
a language as yours or you don't," it's quite a distortion of course,
            but

            you're
not? the fractious infinites fit into people the best they can,
            or

            else
they don't, flooding the world with things, either way
            it's now,

            the moon's
full, as is the earth, its places dissolving into undesired
            triangulations, each named

            nowhere to avoid
confusion, to give all parties a fair shot at sedation, where everywhere
            remains officially

            in reach,
in the past or the future, bend those equals signs to get out from under
            the vacuum.