what is this?
this drumming
is not possible. this saxophone
repeats the impossible again and
again:

sound. unexpected
sound. heroic
sound, except heroes
are not conceived of here and
sound is alleged to be
impossible.

if there is a path
among the planets, this is
the map. instead of eyes,
use ears. instead of logic and one foot
after the other, take monstrous glowing
leaps, let distance be taken to task.

we exist everywhere at once.
space is a lie.
the lie of cold empty space
allows our detachment.
there is no
interstellar space, only misunderstood
presence.

a road is an object that doesn’t move.
we move. we open our doors and then
make a difficult road our excuse for not moving.

but when horn and drum convince us,
when we step out upon it at last, we will say:

who are these giants, these heroes, racing ahead of us
among these gargantuan stars?

south dakota is wide and empty.
i once had a friend who swore it didn’t exist,
because he never met or heard of anyone
who had been there. it was a private joke
in my circle of friends. i knew it had a history,
but that’s all I knew.

now i know more: that it is sparsely populated,
that it has a legislature and a governor, that a rapist
or a molesting relative there has father’s rights, and a woman
has no right not to be pregnant.

i hate writing this type of poem,
in fact i won’t even call it
a poem, it’s just a cramp in the heart writ large,
it’s just what i always do,
begun because i feel superior to south dakota tonight,
and this is my puppet for public view.

so watch my hands do the dance of the poet
enraged. watch my mouth say the right things.
then watch me turn my back and go home to boston,
new york, chicago, san francisco…

the truth is i still don’t know south dakota,
its open plains, its frightened men and women, its self-satisfied
and triumphant public servants and their supporters;
and i’ll stay away from south dakota, i don’t want to know it at all,
that wide and empty place,
i’ll deny south dakota
until south dakota comes
to me.

SNAKES ON A PLANE

I woke up tonight after a nap
and looked at myself:
fat again, in limbo again, still medicated, still
underemployed. Smoking again. Drinking
too much, and snappish and boorish to boot.
Tomorrow’s my birthday. I’m nearly 50.
The TV and the magazines tell me
it’s all Snakes On A Plane from now on —
you know, where you’re waiting for something to kill you
and you’ve got nowhere to go.
So why for the first time
do I like what I see?

Maybe because of this:

There’s a black dog in the corner who keeps
looking at me. Right now, he’s chained up
and there’s no drool, he might be asleep but
with eyes that dark it’s hard to tell.

I know this dog.
I’ve known him for years. He doesn’t bite like a snake —
no quick nerve-freeze, no sudden fall —
no, the dog clamps down
and holds on till you’re dragged to the ground,
and he’ll follow you around all the time waiting
for his chance to do it.
I used to worry about that.
I could care less now.

The way I look at it:
at this age I’m well into the second half.
Whatever bites me, bites me.
If I get depressed, I’m skipping the suicide
because there’s isn’t all that long to wait.

And if there are snakes
on this motherfucking plane,
motherfucker, please — at least I’m flying.

it was nothing, he told himself,
nothing, not his fault. misunderstood intentions,
misread words. too many long nights of wrestling
with unseen things. the weight of expectation
was too heavy for either to bear, and there was no way
for them to bear it together. he kept telling himself that

all the way through to the fraud and the agony
of delivering the news that he was leaving.
though he thought he’d let her down gently, so gently,
she walked away stunned,
undead, red with the betrayal.

but afterward he bulged with guilt he wouldn’t admit
was there, and when the blood had cleared
he ignored the forensics,
even though that was enough to explain everything
if he had believed in the science.
he kept telling himself that it was nothing,
only nothing, even though the weapon was his,
even though the fragments matched his weapon, even though
everyone could see the splatter all over him
when he stepped into the light.

my furniture hates me.
my rugs are conspiring against me.
my love for the plaster is sadly unrequited.
my papers sell my secrets when my back is turned.

in the middle of the night i am drawn awake
by the sound of the wardrobe breathing.
the clothes i have worn for years
slip off me no matter how tightly i fasten them.

i came into the world naked, squalling, and alone.
everything i’ve owned reminds me of that fact
at every opportunity. there’s too much of my life
in my stuff and now i can’t get it back.

my friends are noncommittal
when i tell them this.
my girlfriend has taken to kissing me
only when i keep my mouth shut,

so i’m stuck with the company of inanimate things.
i ask the ridgepole, up there under the roof,
do i even matter to you down here? it remains silent.
it knows the wrong words will bring the house down.

NOTE: Over on the gotpoetry.com forum, where poems are so frequently misinterpreted, someone called this poem “cute.” Am I missing something?

o is for opiates on my
hip, just for kicks.

d is for drink, drink
all over my lap and belly.

s is for smoke,
the color of her eyes.

l is of course for love
that comes too easy,
a young trail i’m nonetheless
holding to as close
as if it were a meridian.

g is for a gold rush,
the hope of easy street, the fine wares
of gangster and greedyguts, and g is for
groaning under the weight of pretending
that i expect something to go well.

s is for spill and sorrow,
second guessing, susceptible.
c is for cleaning up
stains left on the floor
no matter how c for careful i am.

a is for afterglow,
abstraction, absolutes.

i would someday like to say i’ve run the gamut
from a to z,
but there is so much left to do
and what’s already done spells nothing
i can even pronounce.

right now, z stands for zebra,
and i can’t see how a zebra might fit in here

except that after all this it might be good to be a zebra
running like a fire across the grasslands,
doing things without overthinking them,
never doing much of anything alone.

This stems from a misreading of a label in a car window, advertising “Superflo” gasoline.

SUPERHO

About the name: she came up with it
in an off moment. Not that she liked the label,
or thought it applied to her or anyone else, really;
but after years of being ogled by teenagers
who caught her in midflight all spangled and
skin-tight, after selling her image
to the pinball and video game merchants,
after trying to make a living fighting crime
and only getting noticed for tits and ass,
it only took a last-straw leer and a bad joke
to make it stick in her head for good.

She thought about changing the costume to Juicy Couture,
changing the persona to soccer mom from another planet, modern woman
bitten by a radioactive feminist spider — eh. Stick with
the tried and true, she decided, and let the bastards
think what they want. I’ll keep at it my way,
maybe kick more balls than ass for awhile
just to make them a little more wary of what they think.

Soon enough, she started skipping the superhero meetings. She cropped her hair
and stopped talking to Ironman, that condescending prick.
She never went by the bar anymore, missing out on
the locker-room jokes and tips for dealing with
parallel universes — hell, she thought, I’m in a parallel universe
every time I step into a room with these jokers.

On a cold day on October she hung up the leotard for the last time.

These days she sits around a lot. She uses her powers sparingly —
turning back time, for example, to get to the video store before it closes.
She watches a lot of movies and wishes she was Katherine Hepburn, sometimes,
but mostly she’s happy — takes lovers when she chooses
but more often sleeps alone and loves it, lets the catalogs pile up untouched,
and never, ever, thinks of her name.

two old men walk in front of me,
discussing a recent robbery.
one says, this is why i never carry money,
i just leave it in the liquor store.
the other one laughs.

i twist the earbuds deeper.
somebody rich sings a rock song
and the neighborhood disappears.

some of my poems
are written for
other people
but
mostly my work is
written for
tony brown
age 19,

who owned more knives than underwear
and wore them more frequently too.
who smoked dope in public
and butts on the sly.
who thought love was the permit
sex was the license
poetry was the ride of his life
and she was the road he could drive on.

i write for him
because i know i cannot stop him
from getting behind the unsafe wheel.

what do i want to say? i say:

i do not like you much.
you’re too sure of yourself
to ever be a real artist
but i know i can’t stop you from trying and
in the effort
you’ll make a splendid wreck
of a man someday
i hope
(i’m still waiting to see).

the love thing won’t get easier
and you’ll get bored with sex your way
so let yourself listen across the pillow
and you’ll learn something about both.

i have nothing to tell you about the knives except
that they will not save you
but salvation’s overrated
so keep them near to hand and sharp
and carry more than one at all times
so your confusion under pressure can be
as complex as possible.

as for poetry:

things will happen.
you’ll write about them. sometimes you’ll lie, sometimes
you’ll tell the truth. people will hate it, love it,
and kiss your ass either way.
pay no attention. for example,
i do not like you much
but i think some of your poems are ok.
neither fact should stop you from writing.

i write mine for you now
because i fear you, because
i can’t look you in the eye
and tell you the truth:
some of the poems were ok
but you were scrawny and stupid and cruel and painful
while you trying to make them better.
you made the poet at the expense of the man.
it is why she left.
it’s why you were alone for so long.
it’s why you kept writing.
it’s why you keep writing.
it’s why you’re still looking for the right road.

i will not bother to ask if you understand.

your neighbor rubbernecks
all the time, staring at accidents and
dreary folksingers in coffee houses.

you know this because
you watch the same things.
neither of you ever talks about them.

curiosity makes some cats thrive.
you see him looking at you looking back at him
and it makes you both feel good:

a voyeur as seen by another voyeur
always looks as alive and healthy
as a shark in a deep sea tank.

one night you stay up late to stare in his window
and catch him with his hands around his own neck,
twisting himself like a balloon animal.

perhaps he’s exercising? no —
he does not stop
until his head snaps free.

it bounces out the window and lands at your feet.
“don’t pick me up,” he mouths at you,
eyes wide and pleading,

but you do,
so now you’re stuck
with each other.

it was more comfortable before
when all you both had was a view
of disasters. now, it’s personal.

the only taboo you both had believed in
was the one that said
to never be touched by what you saw,

and now it’s obvious
that you’ll be carrying him around
for a long long time.

the greatest horror of this great horror
is that you suspect that everyone
is watching.

the dead give us our lives.

think of your memory of
a beloved aunt’s house full of junk.
think of how it was the source
of your lusts:
for oily wood, like the handle of your dad’s hammer;
for your mother’s china, linen, knitting needles;
for a hero’s baseball, pistol, top hat, signature;
for the sharpened rocks of unremarkable, forgotten nomads.

think of who you obey
in your moments of strain: lovemaking.
the first kill. a confrontation
with contradiction.

think: whether you are rebel or meek servant,
when did you ever do anything
that was not given to you to do
by some ghost?

it couldn’t be darker.
the light at the end of my cigarette
looks like hope instead of death.

i am again staring at the keyboard
with no idea what to write,
knowing only
that writing seems like a good idea
in a night so black that
a promise of cancer
seems like a beacon.

it must look different from the outside:
there’s water and wine here,
a lover sleeping nearby
with a stillness
which reminds me of a moment
before a door opens.
daylight is not far off,
and there’s a poem forming on the screen.

the breathing in the bed
calls me, but i will light
one more cigarette before i go,
giving me a quick dose of
my other chosen poison
before i turn back toward my life.

imagine the hard-luck man, brown
from drink and tobacco, reaching for the pencil
to check off the keno numbers, then dropping
his dollars on the moment when the TV screen will show
his fate: lose or win, it’s a great moment while he’s waiting.

or picture the son of the same man, cracking the books
and studying for the physics exam, mind slipping toward
the tabs in the bottom of his sock drawer, calculating
what he can take, how long he’ll be flying, equations,
formulas, and what time can he spare from the one
before he must give time to the other? deciding, he falls
in love with the notion that luck is with him now and always.

for the next door neighbor, it’s all good. the cats
won’t eat her for at least a day yet. she lies on the floor
and luck holds the swinging door closed against their yowling needs.
in the moment before they push hard enough she is most beautiful,
face at peace, hands at rest, quite still inside at last.

there is no chance like the present. better still,
there is no chance except the present. the moment
of waiting. of all best worlds existing at once. of luck
being not a possibility, but a birthright. of life and death
and remission and subterfuge in the name of happiness.
of the dice coming up divine everytime.

it is never perfect,
that first kiss, that first
touch, that first glance
when you walk into a room
and notice each other for the first time.
everything is flawed.

somewhere in your past the earth is shattered,
or a wind is playing hard devil
with human life.
every first moment
holds your broken places in it,
and if you convince yourself
that it is instead perfect, you are certain
to be crushed someday;
and the same is true of the one
you are looking to with such hope.

we are all filled with error. we all grope toward
some kind of correction, hoping
the next body erases
the feel of the last from our hands.
it cannot happen.

grow past it, knowing
the cracks will never disappear.
only you can live in your past,
but anyone could be your future.
if a glance, a touch, a kiss
pleases you, accept it
the way you want
to be accepted:

as if this moment
was all anyone needed
to know you;

as if, right now,
this moment was all you need
to know them.

My father always called it dingo logic:
a ragged insistence on looking
for holes in the fence.
(As far as I know, he was never in Australia. He watched
a lot of nature shows; maybe that’s where it came from.)
I thought of it last night watching her:
redwrapped hips, blacklight lips
that made me shine when I moved toward them.
I moved toward them as often as I could knowing
I was getting nowhere, but I kept looking, and yipping,
because it’s what my dad taught me to do.

Afterward I sat up late, a tad drunk,
reading Maxim.
When it comes to love and conquest,
that magazine shelves doubt, scorns failure. Every woman
is available, it says, every woman waits for you
to fill that startling vacuum that opens when a man
is not in her life. All you have to do
is smile correctly and be sure of your cock,
and the fence will fall.
With my head full of that type of forced charm,
I have run the length of that fence for years at a time.
My dad, my books, my TV shows tell me
there’s a hole somewhere. I salivate
on cue, pretend to instincts I keep reading about,
tell myself I’m a lone wolf when I’m really a yellow stray
looking for a dry bone. If this is dingo logic,
I do not understand how the dingos have survived.