An American Papyrus: 25 Poems

Steven Sills

Copyright (C) 2002 by Steven Sills
The author may be contacted at: Steven Sills s_sills.geo@yahoo.com
  • Post Annulment 2
  • Earth
  • Bar-Room Buddies
  • The Retarded
  • Houston
  • The Politics of Herb's Woman
  • Brumfield
  • Oracion A Traves De Gasshole.
  • Come.
  • A Gentleman's Right
  • Transitional Mendacities
  • Man of Coal
  • Maddog.
  • Becky's Demon
  • Where, Oh Where, Did The Mall-Lady Go?
  • Savior-Searcher In The Bible-Belt
  • New England Washing.
  • The San Franciscan's Night Meditations
  • The Philosophy Of Rita And Herb
  • Estivation
  • Mid-West Hymn of Aten
  • McConico
  • Beauty Shop Motif
  • Sculpting of Winds
  • Post-Annulment

  • AN AMERICAN PAPYRUS: 25 POEMS
    by Steven Sills
     
     

    Post Annulment 2


     
    Afferent, the city bus cramps to the curb and brakes
    through
    Solipsistic muteness
    With an exhaltation startled and choking.
    As the sun blazes upon the terminal's
    Scraped concrete
    The shelved rows of the poor men
    Hear the sound die on the pavement
    In a gradual dying echo.
    A cigarette succumbs to the voice as
    Carrion brought to life; all the tattered people
    awaken;
    And a man spits toward the tire of the bus,
    But misses.
     
    And as he watches his own spit vanish
    From the hard crest of the world,
    And silently scrapes his lunch pail against
    A corner of a metallic bench as if expecting the pale
    to bleed...
    And hoping it would bleed...he tries to remember the
    angles
    He and his wife stood to project
    The intermingled shadows that both
    Had labeled as their marriage.
     
    He enters the second bus:
    Its coolness sedating the skin that
    Overlaps his troubled mind.
    His thoughts pull together
    Like the light, cool flow of the air conditioning.
    He feels a little pacified.
    He knows the shadow's intangible depth:
    Its vastness having overpowered him these months
    Until he could not reach the logic that told him
    To find himself outside its barriers.
    As he stares out of the window
    He wonders why she has left.
    How could she have left without indication
    When he has remained angled toward work
    So that he and his wife can stay alive?
    In the bus window he sees his diaphanous face—the
    windows
    Of the Hilton, where he has a job in maintenance,
    Piercing solidly through its head. He rings the bell.
     
    The idea of her not home, and legally annulled
    From his life—her small crotch not tightened to his
    desperate
    Thrusts—makes him feel sick. He gets down from the
    bus.
    He goes to work. He suddenly knows that being in love
    is not love.
     



     

    Earth


     
     
    I use her earth to plant my seed—
    My limbs twisting around the collective molecules,
    Trying to dig in.
    Only the obscurity of my body
    Presses so fully that it is neither
    Body nor bed nor the intersection of both,
    But euphoric traction;
    And then, planted and repulsed,
    Only the seam of backbone minutely faces her,
    That bed of earth.
    With all conscious force
    I breathe the aloneness that intangibly defines the
    Air. I swallow its ambrosia
    Of depth and ask myself
    Why I ever married the woman.
    There is void.
    Then a hollow answer calls my name and says “it was
    time.”
    I realize myself in movement, parting the scene.
     
    I use what has been planted for the reaping—
    My suit tucks me into its structure of cotton;
    And soon a building will be again the structure
    Around men of cotton suits, pushing a product.
     
    Lost, I drink my coffee alone on the stoop.
    She had asked to fix me breakfast
    But I would not let her.
    My miniature is one and black.
    I drink me in when I am not
    Pressed by the coffee's steam.
    Cars' casketed phantoms of people
    Chasing up and down Dunlavy Street of Houston
    After something—their whole lives after something—
    Come and go from consciousness like respiration.
    The people plant and reap.
    Who can count all of their
    Insignificant names?—
    Animals that are not created sensible enough
    To propagate unless lost to frenzy,
    Caught in structures without meaning.
     


    Bar-Room Buddies


     
    We Mongoled Human experience.
    We pushed it into our mouths
    As the crisp pretzels of which the shape became salty
    dust
    At our tastes: the crispness of life,
    And we Mongoled human experience.
     
    The tequila, that Sandras or Cassandras, or whomever
    it had beeen
    At the moment of malevolently blessing our heated and
    Maddening consumption, was what we left
    Our wives for; and then hardened ourselves on
    The springless cushions of the sofas of our friends
    Whom we eventually forgot the names of:
    The wetness of human experience that we Mongoled,
    And felt the bladed emptiness
    Of stomachs that could not consume food
    On mornings after. But the Angels of bar rooms
    continually
    Appeared before darkened stages where, in front of
    guitars,
    We played. They apppeared at various stages to the
    weeks of the years.
    They came, silently whispering themselves off
    As Sandras or Cassandras;
    Stared up at us for two hours; and disappeared.
    The reappearance of their light enamored us, and we
    left
    And followed but found bats that offered
    No shelter, and often caves we could not fit into
    Or were forbidden from entering.
     
    We invested our capital
    In the Silicon Valleys of this great nation.
    Third-world bitches, in factories, became sick for our
    chips.
    We held power.
    We bred metals and bought the ownership titles
    Of properties, but could not find a home of the world.
     
    We married again and brought forth children
    Who were duplicate strangers of ourselves.
     


    The Retarded


     
     
    Legs clamp around the rim—
    The whole seated body sticking slightly
    As moaning howls come from his
    Paralyzed mouth.
    It is after having
    Put him to bed for a nap, and then the pot,
    That this woman who would dab the bile
    From his bed like one who napkins a spill from
    A tablecloth, does not clean away
    The substance behind the smell
    Which predominates over the bathroom urinal
    And aggravates his senses.
    No woman to do these tasks,
    And then to rim her hand
    Under the butt;
    No woman to drag him from
    The pot,
    After she has had his body bent
    Toward her for the wiping,
    And flop him onto the bench
    In the shower; no woman...
     
    She sits, cigarette limp in her mouth,
    Thinking that the day has almost ended.
    And the stars she stares out at
    From the living room of the group home
    She remembers are other earths limping
    Half-free in the grips of other
    Dying suns.
     


    Houston


     
     
    In Houston's summers the gods
    Use the clouds as urinals
    For three minutes daily.
    In Houston the Boat-People
    Come from planes.
     
    Inner-city—intermingled and alone
    Like its green Buffalo-Bayou
    Strewn only in the imaginations
    Of those who run along it briefly.
     
    A mile from the bayou
    The settled imagination of a
    Nine year-old Vietnamese girl
    Allows a mangled brown horse
    To elongate and flatten out
    To the reality of the rolled up carpet
    (All because of the rain).
    She feels the wetness now beginning
    To seep into her clothes;
    She raises herself; she sees the old Cuban
    Walking from the house with hands
    To the sky, as if to make the heavens appear a little
    longer
    In the manner that the downtown buildings,
    From Dallas Street on, by their
    Stories of windows draw down
    the sky's enormity from measurement
    Both extensive and inadequate;
    And she follows him.
     
    Apart
    And yet they both think about the Vietnamese
    Teenager with curlers in her hair
    Who yells “boo” behind doors
    That are entered;
    The Cambodian boy who
    To the view of the Montrose area
    Pours on the bare shrubs,
    And then strips and pours upon himself,
    The water from a hose, and that both animal and plant
    Glisten in the sun
    As if they have been greased;
    Falling into Houston's world of high buildings
    From the descending planes
    While hoping that the big world would
    Not overpower their memories;
    And the Cubans, in house #2 always yelling of “Miami.”
     
    They believe that Cambodian refugees
    Always clean house #1,
    That Africans never clean themselves,
    and that Laotians often pour rice down the drains
    Causing the faucets of the house to stop-up;
    And that the welcome-center Manager
    Does not care to bring over a little clothing
    And a little food or take them on little trips
    To the Social Security Office or the doctor's office
    Past 5 p.m.—
    But of different seconds in that minute,
    Different lengths, and various perceptions.
    She remembers the ugly man
    In Vietnam that ran from the police
    And then a scar around his eye
    Opened from the clubs and the blood
    Tried to escape him completely
    As the body attempted to pull itself
    From the street, and could not.
    He remembers thinking that the
    Cranium of an old man is always heavy
    On the neck, and that his
    Is becoming like this.
     
    He desires to clasp the gate
    That is around the Hispanic cemetery
    And watches the cars on Allen Parkway, below,
    Curve and toward the sun
    Become a gleam moving endlessly
    And instantly gone.
    He desires to arrive there and
    Read a few tombstones
    Before and after watching.
    She desires to imagine horses
    Carrying her away from here to the West,
    And other horses following with her family behind.
    She desires to follow the Cuban that she fears
    Since he is moving away from the refugee houses.
    There are no horses in inner-city; and
    The Hispanic cemetery cannot be found
    To souls wanting to rest there.
    “Este cerca de calle Alabama?”
    He wonders,.
     
    The rain stops. The hammers and saws
    peel their sounds from a roof.
    And he notices her steps
    Despite the stronger sounds; halts;
    And glances behind him as shingles fall ahead,
    While wanting her to completely leave him
    And wanting her to come with him.
     
    In Houston's summers,
    At certain areas, shingles like
    The god's shit falls from housetops
    And the dung dries in the air,
    Flattens, and ricochets to sidewalks.
    In Houston Cubans pack
    From refugee houses
    And plan to fly away into America, and depart
    Far from the Castilian hot-dog vender
    Of Herman Park waiting for
    The thirsty and hungered
    And those ignorant of what they want
    But know that they want something
    And so come to buy from her
    Who wants people to come to her
    For more than the chips
    Because the hotdogs are overpriced,
    Who formulates
    That she is unskilled
     
    And that a computer course would answer it all;
    Far from the Netherland psychologists who
    Stares at her ebony reflection
    In Rothko Chapel's dyed pool;
    Apart from others, and no-one, all
    Pulling alone for humanity to both
    Come and go from their lives.
     


    The Politics of Herb's Woman


     
     
    Waitresses lightly frisbeeing out
    Dishes of breakfasts
    Catching glimpses of Colonel North's
    Photos on the front sides
    Of customers' papers and
    Formulating judgments
    Of rebel or martyr
    From an appearance
    And a few words that
    Drifted in when the
    Hands relaxed plates to table mats;
    Farmers wishing the seeds
    To suddenly open to be plucked up faster
    So that they are not
    The last ones laid in
    By their hands;
    Little “third-world” nations of people hoping
    For the great debtor nation to continental-drift
    To bankruptcy, painless and alone;
     
    And nearly empty of thoughts—Herb's woman, Jeanie,
    Behind the Ellison Building standing
    With concrete drilling its stiffness
    Through her soles.
    There had been a time—
    With face raised from her age-smelted pose
    To the ever firm stories of that building—
    That she would think of receiving
    her paycheck so she could
    Go to K-Mart and have something.
    But now years on top of each other,
    Uncountable to her,
    She continues guiding
    The few of the masses of cars
    That turn into the lot
    Where to park: in winters
    Conscious of the visibility
    Of her cold breathing,
    And summers with the scents
    Of greased telephone poles
    And sights of light gleaming off
    Car windows, she thinks
    Of buying old junk from garage sales
    For her yard sales, with the same prices,
    So as to recall the sounds of human voices
    Other than her own.
     


    Brumfield


     
     
    His job was a novitiate where there was no operator's
    manual
    With which to have faith in, and no rules
    But to move with the dustmop pushed before him
    Along the empty corridor, and then down a staircase
    Where he could descend to more passive depths in
    cleaning.
     
    At home he would smell the odor of his bare feet
    coming to him;
    Would see the blue under his toe nail that looked like
    marble;
    And these would be dominant sensations
    Though he would be vaguely aware of them.
    Beneath his bended legs he would sweep his hand
    To capture a fuller scent as his fingers would flick
    To capture a fuller scent as his fingers would flick
    His unshaven face. Then in his only room where the
    bare mattress
    Was lain along with his leather jacket
    And the dirty underwear cuddled around a clean
    toilet—
    Where the Rosary hung on a wall
    And the guitar leaned in a corner—
    he would do his push-ups.
     
    Most of those early mornings some train
    Would pour its breath to the weeds
    At the edge of the tracks, losing them
    In sound and mist of a voice
    Screaming out, alone,
    Through the cold and the living.
    His arms would tremble
    With the body weakening, and then demobilized, to the
    floor
    Before the count of fifty.
    Through the fogged condensation
    Of the upper corners to a window
    He would glance up at the train—
    Each car imagined as the girlfriend, Cindy,
    Or the seminary, which he never
    Grasped or rejected and so
    They slipped away;
    Or his mother, who with cancer
    Began to close herself off to him—
    Grasping one of those trains appearing at the time
    With the familiarity of two strangers
    Who recognized each other's desire to remain such.
     


    Oracion A Traves De Gasshole.


                   (Patron Saint of Respiratory Therapy Workers)
     
    Saturday. All the same:
    A silvery grey
    Thin and undistinguishable
    From skies to parking lot
    In exact shadow; and he finds his car.
    The lid, laced in rust,
    By the turn of the key,
    Parts the grey as it pulls up;
    The grocery bag is dropped into the hole;
    And the ground beef slaps down on the floor
    Of the trunk as if a second slaughter,
    Its grounded nerves convulsing it
    A couple of inches nearer the oil stain.
    That meat, in body, that last moment
    After consciousness has severed itself;
    Skin peeling under the fur, hidden,
    But not from the last hot beams ahead
    Of emerging dusk, becoming crisp
    And then soaking up the hot blood, as the trachea,
    With the last of the air drawing in,
    begins to fold its walls; and he could imagine it
    Like he could imagine, from unexact memories,
    The woman, last night
    At the hospital, whom he began to like—
    her body pulling cell by cell
    Apart before he had a chance
    To finish the rescue with the hose
     
    Descending the nostril as a rope,
    and then flushing out mucus.
    He gives the ground beef an air-born somersault to the
    bag
    And closes the lid that is connected to the vague
    light bulb of the
    trunk.
    The Gasshole's reflection on the trunk lid
    Is lank and curved; the appearance of his face
    With its facial tip of the nose and its greased
    Separation of hair like a wet muskrat in a metallic
    reflection.
    His face moving away, he sees an old Hispanic man
    Who walks from the area of cars carrying two bags
    Of groceries in an embrace that could be
    For weighty children; he thinks “The senescent,
    Carless, careless baws—turd! A campesino!,”
    And he envisions himself as that: having to pull out
    the thorns
    That pierce through his tennis shoes as he shovels
    scattered cacti leaves from out of the back
    Of the pickup to his animals;
    And living in the dry ravine surrounded by houses made
    of wood
    That had been patted loosely together like adobes,
    beside
    The families of the kiln workers
    Who with him eat out Land's blessings
    And piss and shit out onto her graces,
    But himself happily not knowing the language of the
    Mexican people...
    Himself not wanting to know the language
    Of any people that his sister, Cindy, and college pal,
     
    Dave Broom-Up-The-Butt
    Echo.
     
    He does not wish to think of them
    Or the vaginas that are not his to put on
    Or the illusive woman who would be sick with him
    like a child lying on the sofa in fever and hoping
    That in the shadows on the wall and the
    Passing sounds that are concentrated on her mind
    One will bring deliverance—only placing the
    deliverance
    On him and yet loving him for himself
    Beyond that need. And while unlocking the door of his
    car
    He feels that the recreation in life is also a
    routine:
    A routine of sharing and parting,
    And at the end one is grounded and tossed
    Before the validity of his own
    Perceptions is resolved. But he is alive,
    Now; and he will put away his groceries;
    Read a chapter of his Biblia,
    A cenotaph of the dead..
    maybe a verse; think of forgetting mass
    and mailing in his tithing
    And to veg' himself away a few hours
    Before he would have another night
    Of throats, lungs and
    The air of the masses.
     


    Come.


    (Camp Wonderland for the Retarded, Lake of the Ozarks)
     
     
     
    Grabbing the already read letter,
    Slipping out hot and wet
    From the bare mattress—
    Like Sweet Pea's turds
    Right before
    His psychomotor seizures,
    Only without a softness to stub myself
    Into—stiff and hard I drop
    From the cold rim of the bunk
    (Even if I awaken
    The idiots below).
    With non-syllables and vowellessness
    A pitch that is language enough
    To keep this man, Jim,
    From wherever
    The unassimilated disappear
    Howls “He does not want me here"
    While its flesh of Jim beats the plastic urinal
    On the walls barricading a pillowed head.
    The joke is on him this time...
    All over him for the next hours.
     
    The letter's impression
    Writes and rewrites in my mind:
    Come, my sister calls to our father
    Like Ronnie's suppositories butting back.
    Only suppositories are meant to do so.
    Come, she speaks to me,
    And the shrink
    Shall put in touch
    All that he did to us.
     
    Tripping over Keith's mattress
    I step out in humid silence
    And wipe my cheeks.
    Two cabins, beside ours, simultaneously fry
    Bugs in blue, electric lights.
     
    Keith, a crippled rocking horse of autism,
    Scrapes the feet of his vibrating body
    To the bench where I sit.
    Sit, Keith; go back to bed, Keith;
    Go to the bathroom, Keith:
    In this camp I shape the minutes of his life
    To some acceptable pattern.
    He rubs his hands together
    As if trying to spark fire
    For the inhabitants
    Of his imaginary world.
    Stop that, Keith, I say. Sit, Keith.
    Keith sits: There is no coming out
    For him after twenty years
    This way,
    Or perhaps for me.
    The pale gas lamps are strewn around
    A small area of limbs
    In a corner of the sky—
    All but patches are aflame
    Like a roof of a tent around
    The stakes, ready to break off
    And fall.
     
    Rock, Keith,
    As the sun is stroked
    So far into the lap of the night,
    Suffocating and as good as gone.
    The folding and unfolding
    Of a crinkled letter into squares;
    The imagining of the counselor
    Of cabin four
    And what a pulse would have created
    If her head had drowsed
    To my hand on the back of her seat
    On our way here;
    The general silent howling of “Come!”—
    Keith does not cripple to this.
    He has no sister that calls a stranger back
    To erase and draw back
    Them both.
    He does not say “come!”
    All hours.
    He comes.
     


    A Gentleman's Right


     
     
    He must have thought
    That there was some covenant of the old
    That bound each to move around it
    In a square orbit.
    he was fifty now, so there
    Must not have been any question:
    Lessen the speed at the train tracks;
    Stumble his car over their ribs;
    Swerve closely to the drive
    At a slower pace, and hope
     
    That where men dodge the bumping
    Of their tails from Parks
    For a private club,
    That one would come
    Out from the doors, partnerless.
    If not, he would have
    To go around the block
    Another time
    Like other old fags before—
    The railway crippling with
    Its iron in each return raising,
    Cracking up from the skin of the street;
    Limbs of that bar's tree
    Waving down (some
    To the windshield), warning.
    Thoughts that the energy of youth
    Had some pivotal focus
    Made each imagined man to him
    Like a lollipop,
    but the parks would not do:
     
    There the man with the smashed fender
    Might be obligated to 69
    A winner without a face—
    a drag race ending in the winner's backseat,
    And on his tools which would rib in.
    And inside that bar where women snuggle
    Away their faces in equality,
    And where men rotate hips on the dance floor
    Like an earth's axes...this would not do:
    For there were no friends to affect
    Mutually and faggishly in embraces;
    And the young and sensitive
    Were Oriental and fonder
    Of the cigarettes
    They put in their faces
    And the beers that suddenly appeared
    Before them. This would not do:
    Mouth-hugging the earth
    On its bulge of life
    Or moving to songs
    Where the dances never end.
    He was an old fag and must retain
    A square orbit.
    It, at least,
    Was a gentleman's right
    And in accordance with the
    Manner of the fags.
    The block was long.
    In the shadows and oblique actualities
    He felt its length. His stomach tightened
    In fear of the length.
     


    Transitional Mendacities


     
     
     
    No, the supremity of having been split off from
    A larger entity by being spit out
    From pussy lips while
    Reeking pain and havoc
    Like a living tongue pulled
    From aperture and den
    Is not sign enough
    That he is meant
    To be sustained
    As an integral part of the world,
    Unique and indispensable.
    Thinking about how much longer
    He will need to play out the day
    That issue is not his, and never has been.
    “The job was done"
    He could say, later,
    After the storm.
    Hand-limp,
    His broom dance sweeps
    Upended under an empty park bench—
    Dirt caught under
    The tongues of his feet—
    So his paycheck
    Will come in the mail
    And become bank figures
    He can suck from
    To keep he and his woman
    Housed and fed, and well enough
    To legally rape each other in embraces,
    Forgetful of their lives.
     
    The man has a son,
    and stands nights
    aching behind an assembly line,
    Sleeping the days away
    While his son goes to school.
    The son thinks his father
    Is thoughtless and dirty
    And his mother a grease-bitch
    For marrying him.
    The son grows up
    Between his college books,
    And begins to put it together:
    A society of men
    Wanting to take a variety
    Of stimulating produce—
    Though some were more the makers
    Than the takers;
    The image of rightness
    In a man putting his hormones
    To the making of a company
    In a family; a family
    That needs a provider to survive;
    A man honorable and trapped
     
    And there are nights
    He awakens, gagging at the
    Sudden thought of a man
    Next to him
    Who had engaged his body
    In a lower form of sharing.
    And he wonders if embracing a world
    Of ideas can be done
    When all things cannot be believed;
    If humanism is
    Energy vented
    To avoid futility;
    And what grossness
    He would have to justify next—
    All on those nights
    When self-perspectives
    Are swept under in change.
     


    Man of Coal


     
     
    You knew it was coming:
    Twenty-three years and the mine
    Would notice you one time,
    Photocopied.
    A voice below bellows
    Your name, Dave,
    Into the settling air of coal dust.
     
    After you shut off the engines
    And descend beneath the dragline's skeletal
    Nose which canopies like a skyscraper on
    Its side in mid-air
    You confront a face
    You cannot see in the descending sun. Shadow-still,
    Enormous might engulfing over you
    To the height of
    The dragline's triple-tank wheels,
    You see him—
    The heels on his leather boots
    Locked in the train-track grooves of dirt.
     
    As he hands the notice to you
    Its stiffness shakes
    In your calloused hand.
    You know that what is left of the day
    Is becoming cold; and despite the smell
    Of dirt there is a scent
    Of watermelon in the damp air,
    Although you do not know it as that smell
    Or that there is a smell at all, really.
    And yet a faintness of some half-knowledge
    That touches its weight lightly in your mind
    Drags itself into places you cannot touch.
     
    Pulling out of his shadow
    You think of how you might hand
    This sheet to your wife
    Like a child presenting to his mother
    An award from school:
    Your wife screaming laughter of relief
    As she hugs the paper to her breast;
     
    Or how your strong hand might sweat
    As you pick up the receiver of the ringing phone,
    Expecting that after saying “Hi"
    That one of your college children's voices would end
    The conversation there
    For you to hand the vibrations
    To your wife—but instead
    That child
    Congratulates you
    For no longer destroying the land.
     
    The noon hour whistle
    Vibrates the walls
    Of the hollow heavens
    To the cab; the thermos-well
    Of soup, sitting on your lap, you cannot see, but
    You feel its stillness
    Stagnating and absorbing
    The contaminating minerals
    Of the tin, walling in the contents;
    And still you want to turn on the ignition
    To finish out one more complete day
    In the twenty-three years here
    Of hard work.
    The quandary then snaps, and you escape.
    When out of the valley you enter the truck
    And close the door—
    The second time harder, and it latches.
    You turn the key
    And the truck bounces to the highway.
    You stop at the sign;
    Stop the motor while
    Still on the dirt road;
    But in the end turn left, again,
    Home.
     


    Maddog.


    (Or Death to the Barbie-Dame Image)
     
     
    You said that it happened—that day you ran away
    From a self you buried underneath the ice-packed snow,
     
    All those cold years ago—when your last friend, then
    Had put an end to the Gabriele whom I've never known.
    This
    Friend, like yourself a Barbie Dame, became totally
    lame and
    Withdrew out the door when you needed more hands to
    keep
    Your epileptic roommate
    From smashing her head on the floor.
     
    Gabriele, held together by the stitching of hate—
    The plastic-eyed polar bear with the stiff arms
    That the factory of the human race mutantly created—
    This time it will be you who shall feel the wall of
    artificial
    Fur ripped from its threads, and your stuffing falling
    out.
    For a little maddog on top of four joints
    Makes a person see the unsealed human fragments
    That had been smoothed over in time
    Like a million and some bone fractures
    The milk of approval had swum into and covered over
    for looks.
     
    For me fragmenting came yesterday when I saw a welcome
    mat
    Iced over and yet I entered:
    Your house was hot and your oven smelled of baking
    meatloaf
    Although you had said that you could not be
    domesticated.
    And then I saw your bottle of wine
    Standing at attention before two glasses.
    The pledge that bowing to anything or anyone was
    wrong...that people
    Were only needed to gain the most bare
    Of physiological and psychological needs (pitstops to
    being
    human)—this was
    gone.
    Gone with your hair brushed and your skin smelling of
    perfume
    For some other man than me.
     
    Come on Gabriele, the gal that used to chew tobacco
    and
    Spit it into an empty beer can...
    The gal with the deep dark-ocean eyes...
    The maddog gal, grip that wine glass now.
    For Gabriele, you smile at everyone with meaning
    You are as together as a feather when a hurricane is
    in town,
    And when the hangover's over and your own insight has
    Fragmented you from a million pieces to a billion,
    My stiff polar bear arms
    Shall poke and not embrace.
     
    I sit back at this party I am hosting—
    My back firmly pushing against the back of my chair,
    And my head and eyes cocked.
    You all are the performers this time...
    And Gabriele, you are the main attraction,
    Attracted, after this night, to the omni-present sense
    of your
    Smashed self; and me—
    Sensitive little me in no man's land
    Where no man wanted to grasp me from...
    And no woman—
    Mended back together in thy survivalistic polar bear
    image.
     


    Becky's Demon


     
     
    “Something happened.
    i don't have those visions anymore.”
    And you believe with a mind like Papa believed with
    When i told him i could see things
    Clearly before they actually
    Were.
     
    His back and forth pacing from those same two
    windows—
    Which had been like a toy soldier powered on a human
    battery
    With a three minute's stand at one, and then the next,
     
    Suddenly stopped. For i was different. You anointed
    me
    And cast me out. i was alone. You caused me to hide
    Beside a pitchfork in the shadows of the corners of
    the barn.
    Yes. Papa stopped. His eyes moved. i'd never seen
    his eyes move
    Before.
    They stared down at me. My child's eyes
    Below—and he aimed his for them as a fisher for prey
    in clear waters.
    i backed up behind the pipe of the kitchen stove..
    But with one stretch he reached his arm over
    Like a bear's paw that in force comes down like a
    Redwood.
     
    my knee aching as if broken, i crutched up
    From the other side of the room, beside the door....
    Then, bending on my knees the next conscious second—
    Feeling the blood of knee caps sticking to hay and
    dirt—
    Seeing the sun poke like sticks through rafters and
    cobwebs—
    Thinking i grabbed a hold on the sunlight which could
    Lift me
    Up like a rope; but grasping the pitchfork—
    Raising the pitchfork—
    Pitching the pitchfork—
    After hearing the creaking and scraping of the opening
    barn door
    Plowing
    The top soil of the dry earth. Thinking: he would
    never kill
    my shadowy corner.
     
    II
    And in this plush chair of the Bishop's office i sit a
    decade
    And a half later—a Salem witch of the west explaining
    her
    Dull, trembling self before three Mormon men bending
    above
    me.
    But you don't understand me, as if anyone ever has.
    i had psychic abilities. But you don't want them, so
    they're
    Gone;
    And i'm good. i no longer believe, Bish'y, that I saw
    Benson
    Dying
    And Yourself rising above the
    Twelve.
    But You're still scared of me. You only want to
    anoint me
    And cast me out. You only want me to hide in a barn,
    And belong to shadows.
    You call my abilities a possession of a demon.
     
    Papa doubted i could see; and you see me as perverted.
     
    But you do see that i see...
    That i have something with some power.
    You and the Missionaries lay your hands on me...
    me who left my Protestant roots so as to be rooted in
    your
    Family.
    You put your cold hands on my forehead,
    Trying to vacuum out my psychic abilities,
    Which i tell you are no longer—
    Trying to take away my saying that i'm okay...
    i'm good. Speak to me. Don't cast me out and leave.
     
     
     


    Where, Oh Where, Did The Mall-Lady Go?


     
     
    They wanted her to drop her thoughts
    As naturally as her underpants fell, after they were
    Over the hips, so the steaming winds of her daily
    showers
    Could clear her of encroaching stain
    As she had been cleared away.
     
    They were a function, ignorant of their thinking,
    charting
    Charts. She felt she would have to ignore these
    doctors and
    Nurses in the mental ward.
    She would have to ignore the pacing patients
    Asking cigarettes from her.
    The hall was rectangular.
    Everyone moved rectangularly.
     
    She would go to dreams of past realities
    Where she was watching the shoppers' reflections
    As they passed mall's little fountains—
    Different types of people-reflections but all silvery
    In the still of the waters,
    Happy and part of the lives of the mall.
    She would imagine herself sitting on a metal bench—
    packages of her new clothing pulling on arms and chest
     
    Like the recalling torpor that came more easily
    To her lower legs; the weight of the mink that arched
    Her aching shoulders more like a lady;
    And a small sack of chocolate stars
    Touching her upper neck—
    Wondering what packages her fellow-creatures
    Bought to be brought home and to whom
    They brought them to.
    And then, as the locks of solitude clicked in her
    consciousness,
    Came the wondering of where, oh where,
    Did the Mall-Lady go?
     


    Savior-Searcher In The Bible-Belt


     
     
    I can see you in those dry moments, then
    As clearly as if I were there: staring at the cracks
    Of the white ceiling above the bedpost, wondering if
    You will slip down three flights to the outer darkness
     
    Like your ex-Mormon roommate, here. Your visual mind,
    Against your will, probably thinks about your squirm
    That a few moments ago squirmed you of your juice,
    Wiggled her skirt back on, resurfaced the lip-spit
    Crackup in her concrete of makeup, and wordless,
    Walked like a princess out the door.
    As the last of the ecstatic vibrations tides you in
    the rear
    You arise from the raft of the mattress.
    Then you cover up your nakedness,
    And move to the light of the living room.
     
    And then I actually see you, Don, in the hour that you
    had told
    Me to step back in. You are bending over the
    end-table stained
    In the blood of wine. Sunlight, stripped silver from
    the grey
    Clouds, pours through the window to the table.
    To your right a nine of swords card of a man pierced
    in the
    Back gleams as it walls the card of your future
    lovers.,
    And the redness of Doctrines and Covenants to the far
    left of
    That table also looks pure in the light.
    You do not see me. Your mind is racked in screwing
    the pack
    For an answer. You turn another Tarot Card
    In the order your destiny is to be read.
     
    Your sad eyes look up
    And your languid voice says that you are late
    For your meeting with the local Bishop...
    A meeting to straighten up your fucking life.
    I laugh! In bitterness that shakes my intestines, I
    laugh!
    Another hillbilly man
    Has lifted his head above the rest—a foot up from the
    jug—
    And has blown his breath into the air
    Which 'naps another young and fragmented one
    To the call of being holy.
    But before you arise
    You turn the gleaming card of number four—
    Your eyes in a more motionless trance than before.
     


    New England Washing.


            (Mental Account, Some day of Gorbechev, 1987)
     
     
    Another hour.
    There is no circulation
    Beneath the steering wheel for my feet.
    Outside myself
    There is the last of the sun at dusk
    But like the conquering Hsuing-Nu
    Pushing themselves beyond a
    Great Wall and through an eternal
    Gathering, it is hardly felt.
    There is nothing great to trouble me
    And nothing substantial descends on my senses,
    Giving me thoughts other than the fact I'm thinking
    nothing:
    Only
    A flock of birds in the corner of my left eye
    Blend down with the grey skies
    As if the fence barricading
    The farm land does not pertain to them;
    Thoughts of the center line
    And not going over it.
    Days of Gorbechev, the radio speaks of,
    But not his nights—where, one time
    He may have smashed
    A big, red cigarette in an ashtray
    With an action stiff and slow;
    And as he stood up the mattress of his bed may have
    Raised to touch his rear, again,
    Like a quick and soothing give-me-five handshake;
    And opening a window of the embassy
    To escape the stuffy dryness
    Of electric heat to his suite,
    He may have let the cool American air
    Attack him with the smells and sights
    Of its diplomatic car exhausts,
    Grey and orange from street lamps
    And store lights...and how
    The nation breathed for once as it moved.
     
    The third: road; cows, like islanders;
    Multi-tinted bladed fields broken by acres
    Of forests and pastures; a black-sun scene with
    Car lights; a vision blurred and pebbled
    Through the windshield—
    A truck passes my pinto;
    Muddy water slapping its face;
    Its stick eyes smoothing it
    To a duller complexion.
    It isn't yet Christmas
    And I am going home.
    My parents one day drooped
    In front of all, and were old—
    We should be having much to say...
    I, thinking like them, with
    The mind of the world,
    And us smiling unhappily
    And speaking none of that:
    But a lot will be said.
    I am a bum.
    One of their hearts shall give in
    And their marriage will be a farce...
    Even in car accidents the married
    Die separately. And then the widowed
    Mother, smoking the cigars of her husband,
    And coughing them as the husband had done
    But in the apartment of the son, might
    Visit away her life: I would
    Bring her there, thanking God for a reason
    Not to try hiding all of me in some pussy
    As in daylight the main part
    Goes into underwear.
     
    This is their town
    Far from trays with saucers
    And plates and spoons and forks
    (Sometimes hardened in scalloped potatoes
    Or bent) and knives and glasses
    (Glasses sometime with folded bread inside)...
    But forever coming down the belt for the
    Dumping and washing...the trays that disappear
    In a square hole and come out clean
    Will continue regardless if I am there.
    Men fuck virgins; a child-worker
    Is born and all is holy.
    There is nothing great to trouble me:
    The rains that drop and drift next
    To streets in gutters, take away
    Smashed Pepsi cups and beer cans
    Without intent, bound God knows where,
    But out of sight.
     


    The San Franciscan's Night Meditations


     
     
    When I am at a dead-lock
    In your rear and the
    language of my body
    Will not come from
    The third element of the soul,
    What am I to say?—
    'ALL BUT ONE DEAD:
    Mexican immigrants celebrating the
    Stowing away on a 120 degree boxcar
    With urine in their stomachs,
    Acknowledging capitalistic thirsts...
    Sigue sobre pagina”..
    Double hubble
    The peso is in trouble
    And to Mars
    America plans
    Jumping over the moon,
    And all this has disturbed me!”
     
    The night is full of impulses
    To live and to run and seep heavily
    Into its dark robes of
    Silence and morbid rightness;
    And as I, again, try to thrust on dryly—
    A log without a river traveling it
    To the product of lumber—
    and hope to create love in
    The smackings of night,
    Like anyone else, I know that soon
    I am to apologize for lack
    Of an ejaculation,
    And will promise to have a counselor
    Tame me to the exclusion of
    All but work and lust.
     
    Sounds of people
    Kicking around the
    Night of early morning
    Beneath my lover's window;
    And I withdraw under the sheet,
    lying flat with the dead moonlight.
     


    The Philosophy Of Rita And Herb


     
     
    Staring fixed at the rows
    Of flowered
    Wallpaper a pale gray
    In the dark efficiency—
    The three walls still absent
    To her consciousness
    As a shadow of silver lightning
    Fades the greyness
    Of one portion in her view—
    The “schitzophrenic” lifts
    up a cigarette hidden behind
    An ashtray and the flat ground
    Of ashes on the table, which
    Skid and resurface with her
    Hot breathing. She thinks they are
    Continents drifting, and herself
    Upon them.
    From feeling stiff and pushed under—
    Numb to the point of a corpse—
    With insecurity enough not to remember,
    Even, her ABC's, Rita runs into the night
    Where outside of a window
    She blesses the workers making
    Colonial bread.
     
    An old man in a cowboy hat, Herb,
    Is saddled on the wooden railing of a porch
    To an apartment complex: seated there beside a
    remembrance
    Of a young woman like Rita.
    And in the spitting fumes; bad-muffler sounds;
    The rocking phallicism in radio music of passing cars,
     
    He feels he has to move or die
    And gets down
    To his pickup.
     
    And Rita, upon dawn and upon the end of rain,
    Walks the streets again after tiring,
    Ready to go back and confront the curfew-conscious
    Group home, and the “zero” on her record full of
    Zeros. She worries about carrying in her womb
    A mini-Herb with scabs of grey hair
    And little pot-holes in his tiny face,
    Though she is still a virgin.
     


    Estivation


     
     
    Weekends in Tranquility Park—
    With the downtown buildings, hallways of giants
    clustered,
    Exhaling the coolness echoed
    From the rectangular mouths of doors
    Opened and closed by cityers—
    A coolness came over my thoughts
    The way lack of wind contains
    The hastening of Yosemite's flames.
     
    There, diurnal and punctual, she crossed
    That small area of grass, fountains, and cement
    Which were generally buffeted more fully by sun and
    adjacent
    Sounds, moving the park more than Bush and Dukakis'
    Presence. “WALK” was always lit when la chica
    Approached the street, carrying her library books.
    When would she, artificial and pneumatic,
    Who like Houston's miniature stop-lights
    While going to work, veer my movements
    To slide off a plane ticket and be led
    Through and from burning Amazons
    And green-house climactic changes—
    Through wasted ozone and my own depleted life—
    The breath of her mouth my only nourishment.
     
    Masking tape
    From hurricane threats
    Remains at the edges of windowpanes;
    Palm trees, below, are hybrid to cement;
    Thuc Nguyen's business report figures
    Blend and bury themselves as distant sounds;
    The staff meeting and this cigarette industry are
    gone.
    Slid off a plane ticket caught in life's winds
    Restless No friends for real
    All wanting something from me
    The outside world has nothing
    Except life-ending amusements of
    Sex to escape void
    The dead have some solidity of truth
    About what happens after life
    Even if they are not aware of it,
    And the rest breathe in fables
    Everything is surely unchanged in
    Springfield, Mo., where I was raised,
    But none of it is mine
    Nothing is ours—humanity drifts along
    And intersects briefly in alliances My friends
    Are co-workers whom I must expire
    My life with civilly
    As we light cigarettes
    And bitch of no new raises
     
    When would she pull on my arm
    Tugging me thoroughly into breaking glass
    Of the 12th floor conference room
    To fall, putting me out violently,
    When I can no longer dream
     


    Mid-West Hymn of Aten


     
     
    Aten, where it is throned on the television beneath
    the window,
    Sees above and below and says nothing:
    It enjoys the woman secretary and the road constructor
     
    Who from opposite shifts of the sun
    Come to it, the cat;
    Follow the roaming in its mansion;
    Pensively laugh as it clings to hundred dollar drapes;
     
    Feed it holiday popcorn on the throne;
    And close the drapes that the cat, Aten
    Had opened by its tugging,
    And will open again:
    Opening below
         Where the woman, statue of her liberty
         Wedged in a mud layered hill of snow
         Ankle-thrusts
         The tilt of her body after a moment of standing
    still:
         Face looking in the trash receptacle that her
    flabby
         Breasts rest on the rim of and point toward; head
    bowed
         To the tin; And mind distinguishing between good
    and
         Bad trash. Her hands raise from the snow-blended
     
         Mixture to push back the hair that was intimate
    with trash.
         She raises her head and glances up at the sky
    that
         She had noticed a few seconds earlier; and
    wonders
         Of the person who would throw away a nightgown
         And wilted plants, dented but unopened cat food,
         And scattered baby pictures—
         But the cold wind pushes further into her rashed
    cheeks;
         And she drops the gown before she can mentally
    conceptualize
         The woman's possible image She digs further
    and...
     
    And opening Above where
    Two crossing jet
    Had each made an element
    Of a cross in the skies—-
    A third, now, and the
    Heavens appear to play
    Tick-tack-toe with their bad arts,
    Or do not know how to push out caulk neatly
    When hoping to seal out the heavens.
     
     


    McConico


     
     
    Through the hazy waters
    Of his hot bath, looking, he thought
    That his woman's pubic hairs
    Should naturally have come out
    More permed like his,
    Regardless of her color.
     
    The door being shut and locked
    With a rifle in front—still he heard
    From the living room a forum of senators'
    Televised voices discussing laws of limits
    In openness and freedoms
    And ramifications. He did not understand—
    As the mirrors steamed, dripped
    Down from the air conditioning's touch, and resteamed
    When it shut off;
    And when he wondered what home owners
    Had used the bathtub before
    And what disease might be
    Dropping from the cracks around the faucet—that
    The fags would push down the American way of life.
    He did not argue that if they were isolated
    From the mainstream, their liquids might get off on
    any
    Products as they worked for the cost of their
    isolation
    In, for example, a barren region of Texas;
    And that the isolated would, by the testing of the
    Virus, be proven witches
    So there would not have to be witch hunts—
    No, he just felt their destruction.
     
    And he thought of his woman
    In the bedroom, waiting, and became
    Forgetful of anything
    But the desire to have her.
    They had that freedom. The American constitution
    Said so—-freedom to live and breathe
    And fuck and fuck..
    Fuck so hard that the penis would
    Knive through the condom
    And spray-paint the man's name
    On the dull walls of the vagina.
    They had that freedom—those inalienable rights—
    Her to be banged and to squeal
    To her friends that she was in love
    And him to white pussy
    And a gal that he could call his own...
    His woman. And if the initial M got ready
    To graffito-crawl his way out—
    A problem for the rest of their years—-
    She could erase it, not remembering it
    With any more significance than
    Having clipped a broken end
    Of a fingernail. She had that right.
    Her man said so, and so said
    The American constitution.
     
    His shift in Toastmaster
    Had for that day ended,
    And so now he could rest in waters;
    Focus on the bubbles that rose
    When he farted; and let the memories
    Of the entire day be released to rise and fall
    Like the steam.
    He would have to scrub himself
    Good before going to his woman:
    She understood money
    With its charm of a cocaine high—
    Although the need for dominance
    And the breaking of rules
    Made her love him
    Who still did not supply her with all of her needs—
    But the composite smell of the factory and the drugs
    That he sold after each shift
    Would lessen the good feelings that made
    That understanding.
     


    Beauty Shop Motif


     
     
    Taking the boat two hundred miles
    With her Ozark loving husband
    Not having the key
    And why I don't use
    The hair dye she prescribed—
    The one I had bought from
    Her last time—
    I say, “Yes, Honey"
    And watch her lips through the mirror speed on.
    My back aches in the chair stiff as a board.
    Have I gotten as old as this?
    Have I started saying, “Yes, Honey?”
    Conscious of slight pains and discomforts—
    Words as silent racing of lips.
    Another shampoo is ground harder
    In the grey hair of my scalp.
    The long gray weeds that grow out of it
    Will be chopped off another two inches more
    Than what I asked her to do.
     
    In a room of old women, like me,
    Who let the buzz of dryers
    And loud beautician speakers
    Keep their minds active from remembering,
    My bored and wayward eyes
    See in the mirror
    (Now seated in a once empty chair next to mine)
    A young one:
    Her fidgeting body willfully captivated;
    Hair held high and hostage;
    Curlers stiffly tightened;
    Bulges diluvial by Cylenderic Bottle
    Held ungodly above her head
    And squeezed by gentle but firm hands
    Of a male beautician—
    And I remember that the noxious liquid
    Dribbles under Cotton Crowns
    Around one's head
    As the eyes water from the sting
    Of this thing called love.
    Somehow I want to warn her
    Although she may not be a stranger
    To being whitewashed
    In a man's liquids
    And the click-of-the heels logic
    Of women, as if
    One's whole damaged life
    Can be bounced from a mirror
    In and to all women
    Like an SOS.
     


    Sculpting of Winds


     
     
    It was as if certain people came in. Those disliked
    were
    Disregarded and the rest kind of circled in and out
    But at the time in and a small period out were
    associated with
    And considered part of that person's reality by
    himself
    The way a cat brushes against certain familiarities
    Agreeable enough as it goes for its meal,
    And so I befriended places.
     
    Saltillo in Mexican mountains when the land shivers in
    shadow
    And the sun stretches through the air and beyond it
    With an intent to overpower what is closer to man—
    The River-walk and the Alamo and between both where
    A Philipino in green shorts eats the grass
    Where sidewalk and road intersect. There is a city
    where I
    Thought I could find myself less lonely,
    And so I have returned home. Snow embraces
    Springfield's earth to its death.
    Under the sounds of the rolling drips of water in the
    gutter
    I am frozen, though fingers tearing apart the wet
    leaves
    I pulled off from a tree, wishing they had been
    Dry to grind and become the physical appearance of the
    wind.
    Cracked and peeled back from a boot a portion
    Of the snow is removed but refreezes more heavily
    On one area of the dead. I stand as an outsider
    Imagining myself to allow a job section of today's
    newspaper
    To become the thoughts that crash along in the mind of
    the wind.
    I need money but cannot find anything worth doing.
    To change from a person to a commercial function to
    eat...this..
     
    This day I shall sleep away
    As the night. In Springfield, Mo.
    The Great God may also await for his eviction.
    Two hundred Indians in Houston bow down to Krishna as
    the gates
    Men lock around him are opened and closed.
    But in Springfield he probably awaits,
    His red-sock feet on his sofa
    As the furnace blows
    The Soviet flag on the wall before his feet.
    His walls may have many flags,
    And his mind thoughts of glasnost and communism
    Intermixed.. impractical thoughts
    He must sacrifice so that
    He can exist together more easily
    With the community of the dead,
    Unalone.
     



    Post-Annulment


     
     
    Afferent, the city bus cramps to the curb and brakes
    through
    Solipsistic muteness with an exhaltation startled and
    choking
    [People are play-things in one's reality! One must
    look
    Into other eyes or he'll be reminded that he is a user
    too]
    As the sun-god, Aten, blazes upon the terminal's
    Scraped concrete—its graven image—
    Making the place an Amarna,
    The shelved rows of the poor men
    Hear the sound humbly grazing
    Through whispered reverence over
    The glass-speckled pavement
    In a gradual dying echo,
    A cigarette succumbs to the voice as
    Carrion brought to life; all the tattered people
    awaken;
    And a man spits toward the tire of the bus
    But misses.
    [Religion is a lie! Everything is a lie!]
    And as he watches his own spit vanish
    From the hard crest of the world,
    And silently scrapes his lunch pail against
    A corner of a metallic bench as if expecting the pale
    To bleed...and hoping it would bleed...
    He tries to remember the angles
    He and his wife stood to project
    The intermingled shadows that both
    Had labeled as their marriage.
    [Marriage, that sanctified legal rape, fosters
    The child-man to be a destined societal function
    As he grows up in the family unit]
     
    He enters the second bus:
    Its coolness sedating the skin that
    Overlaps his troubled mind.
    His thoughts pull together
    Like the light, cool flow of the air conditioning.
    He feels a little pacified
    [Come to thyself, human, the refuge from lies!]
    He knows the shadow's intangible depth:
    Its vastness having overpowered him these months
    Until he could not reach the logic that told him
    To find himself outside its barriers.
    As he stares out of the window
    he wonders why she has left.
    How could she have left without indication
    When he has remained angled toward work
    So that he and his wife can stay alive?
    In the bus window he sees his diaphanous face—the
    windows
    Of the Hilton, where he has a job in maintenance,
    Piercing solidly through its head. He rings the bell
    The idea of her not home, and legally annulled
    From his life—her small crotch not tightened to his
    Desperate thrusts—makes him feel sick.
    He gets down from the bus.
    He goes to work.
    He suddenly knows that he is not in love.