It’s Different on the Border

It’s different on the border. Things happen here that don’t happen anywhere else and, really, since the borderland is neither here nor there, not the U.S.A. but not quite Mexico, the kinds of things that happen here can be said to perhaps not happen at all. How can something happen if it isn’t happening in some place? And, since this isn’t really a place but the place between two other places, how can things really happen if they happen in no place?

Out there in the desert with the big empty watching and waiting near the ruins of what used to be, miles from anything and I can see that if there really is a line dividing two nations, it’s worse than invisible and it’s locked up on a map in a book a thousand miles away from here and that magic invisible line has nothing at all to do with the snakes and the starlight and the tarantulas and the people and the wild dogs and the nobody-really-knows-what-else moving back and forth, across and over, up and down. This is all for the good, believe me.

If I was you, I wouldn’t be out there, but if you was me, you would. You’d be parked in my 1975 Ford F-150 on a dry hill among the brushy gray bushes, the black outline of a new moon hanging among a thousand million million stars to illuminate the landscape enough to see how dark it really was.

Out there, things are moving. Some of them are animals, some of them are people, and some of them have to be classified as “other.” If I’m quiet enough long enough, long enough for the motor to cool down and stop ticking, long enough for all the things I scared away to move on, new things that don’t know I’m here come by. Sometimes it’s an animal, a skunk or a skinny mule deer or even a peccary, and sometimes it’s a person, some skinny brown man or woman or child big eyed in the night or sometimes even La Migra, a broad-shouldered white man with a rifle and a badge. And sometimes, you know, there on the border at night under that black moon, sometimes it’s something else entirely that moves through the brush and close enough to smell until suddenly I don’t even want to know what it is anymore or what it could be and I’m just very very quiet until it goes away.

During the day, out by the vague ruin of a failed ranch melting back into the earth or out on the long dry flats, deep in the termini of steep-cut canyons or high on a windswept promontory, I find all sorts of leftovers. Rubber tire sandals and plastic water bottles, dry bones and fresh feces, the brass casings of spent ammunition and old horseshoes and the charred carcasses of motorcycles, blood soaked altars of haphazardly stacked stones, inverted forged iron crosses draped with garlands of plastic flowers and dried fingers, the skin of a young woman stretched out on a forgotten section of barbed-wire fence dividing ranchland long without cattle or cattleman, sacks and bags and packs filled with the strangest things, all sorts of weird stuff like underwear and drugs and a thousand snapshots of someone’s family and money and dried fish and jewelry and five hand-carved wooden dolls: a mommy, a daddy, a little boy, a little girl, and a baby.

As often as the wind here carries the odor of cactus blossom or the dusty tang of a rainstorm coming up, it carries also the miasma of gunpowder and blood, of sweat and fear, of semen and rotten meat and iron. As often as a coyote howl or an owl hoot breaks this still air, so too will the screams of women and children fly out across the desert to disappear without echo or consequences. Names whispered in the darkness, supplications to deities both conventional and obscure, lost children wailing for their mothers, mothers crying out for their lost children, a full variety and variation of shrieks to convey indignant pain and horror, pleas for mercy, petitions for release from torture, and soft begging for the kindness of swift murder all dissipate in this borderland atmosphere; they spread out unheard over a landscape unconcerned.

I’d been tracking this fellow quite a while and I had a pretty good idea what he was up to. He seemed the type. He kept moving around, setting up an ambush, waiting, waiting some more, moving again, setting up again, waiting. I kept him in my sights, watching with one eye from, oh, I’d say a half-mile away. He had no idea.

But he knew what he was doing. And about the fifth time he set up his little ambush, he caught himself a brown girl. It was slick and it was sweet like he’d done it a hundred times before; he just stepped out of the brush and slipped his big old knife under her chin and that was that. She dropped her pathetic bundle and her plastic water bottle, and she kicked a little bit as he lifted her up with his other arm wrapped around her waist, and she lost one of her rubber tire sandals. I was watching this through the scope, lining up the shot.

He half carried, half dragged her back into the brush where his kit was laid out and ready; he had stakes already in the earth, lengths of rope ready for her ankles and wrists, and duct tape for her mouth. He got her down, tied her spread-eagle, taped her, and kneeled down between her legs to start cutting away her clothes. I got the shot and his head disappeared, all bone and brain and tooth become a variated mist traveling fast and away. The neck stump fountained thick towers of blood until the body crumpled across her right thigh, spastic movements rippling through its limbs. One shot, one kill. The earth disappeared what poured out of the body.

It makes me feel especially…it makes me feel really…it makes me feel full to be able to do that, to look at someone from so far away and to point and to reach out and take his head off from a half-mile away. I doubt if the girl even heard the sound of the shot that killed her attacker. He sure didn’t.

All the way walking over there to where the girl lay draped with that fellow’s corpse, I was not doing much more than enjoying the feeling. By the time I got there, my breathing had mostly calmed down and I kicked the body off that girl there all splayed out in the dirt. I took a few of the fingers so I could add them to one of those upside-down crosses I liked out in the desert. Without the head, though, the body didn’t have much left in the way of trophies—no ears or nose or scalp—and I sure didn’t want anything to do with his pizzle though I know some folk what don’t feel the same. They’ll cut a fellow’s business off and do bad things with it. That girl was all big eyes and little squeaking noises behind the tape.

I stood there above her looking down and still feeling that good full feeling inside me.

“How you doing?” I asked her and she stopped making those noises. I could see all sorts of things going through her head fast. She looked up at me and past me with those big brown eyes; she looked all around as much as she could but there wasn’t nothing else there but me and a lot of blank black sky.

I squatted down where that other fellow had kneeled before and I picked up his big knife. As I started in to cutting off the rest of her clothes, I was talking to her the whole time, talking soft like I would talk to any frightened creature no matter how badly it was suffering, and I kept talking to her like that as I started to cut away much, much more than just her clothes.

Lesbian Picnic

"Hey, these are fish sticks!"
she nearly screamed.
"I only agreed [to picnic with you]
to come on this little excursion
because you promised me treats.
Cold [Mrs. Paul's] fish sticks disgust me.
You must take me home."
I had no more chances.
My heart had been devoured
but for the last time
and I would think no more
of the ring hidden in her lunch,
her calm pleasure had she found it,
or how I could have licked the breadcrumbs
and grease from her fingers
and how that jewel might have cut my lip.

Sank You, Missa Smiss

The mud of Shaanxi is extraordinary and during the autumn rains, when this Shaanxi mud flourishes, we grew intimate with that particular gumbo. A combination of the highly acidic rains and compacted dust (loess), the entire landscape becomes gelatinous, adherent. Roads especially and those unpaved, country roads we bicycled on weekend outings even more especially had long stretches of truck and hand-tractor churned puddles too deep and thick to ride through.

Wet or dry, the soil itself, this aforementioned loess, is sterile. Four thousand years of continuous, unbroken, intensive cultivation have left most of the province's arable land long ago leeched of nutrients and about as fertile as broken glass. It, the soil, functions as a hydroponic medium through which the farmers deliver fertilizer (human and animal wastes) and water.

Sufficiently compacted, the loess may be worked and the tradition of cave-dwelling in Shaanxi stretches back to the early days of the Silk Road and forward (or, actually, back again) to the terminus of the Glorious Long March when Chairman Mao headquartered in Yanan.

Brief days of October sun tempted us beyond the city and we trudged through long stretches of bleak farmland, from village to village, mud-spattered, pushing our bikes through shin-deep lagoons and in the villages, hanging from the trees in the villages, long garlands of yellow corn drying. Great ropes of pale husk and golden ears looping over every branch and from tree to tree and every household wall and roof and eave and gable (and god, I'm going to say it) "festooned" with corn.

At the Foreign Language Institute where I teach classes in conversational English to second-year Tourist Industries students, our main goal or, rather, my main goal, this semester is to master the sibilant "th" sound so elusive to Asian tongues. With this in mind, we begin each class the very same way. My students have seized upon this exercise as routine and, I think, find comfort in it's consistency and predictability in what, I think, they otherwise find a chaotic and confusingly spontaneous classroom environment. Their normal courses, those taught by regular faculty, are structured around rote learning. We, the foreigners, have grown accustomed to seeing our students around the campus memorizing their other textbooks, literally committing entire volumes to memory in anticipation of the final exam which will ask them to duplicate selected passages. There are no lectures, no discussions, no quizzes, no experiments, no laboratory, no papers, no tests. On the first day of class the "professor" distributes the textbooks. On the last day of class the "professor" collects the textbooks and writes "pages 145, 215, 232" on the blackboard. The students do their best to regurgitate, word for word, the indicated text; the "professor" collects the papers and grades them according to accuracy. Of course, this or any other academic work counts for only 40% of a student's final grade with the other 60% consisting of political attitude. My classes as well as most other foreigner taught classes, tend toward the Socratic and veer sharply away from the Confucian/Maoist tradition. At first disconcerted by the spontaneous informality of such a class, the students soon enjoyed themselves. Instead of droning out the lessons from a workbook, we would converse and practice vocabulary usage and pronunciation. We invented dialogue together, asked and answered each other's questions about idiom and culture, we made up bilingual puns, we sang pop songs together; the shy students would blush and giggle and bury their heads on their desks; the bold students would stand and with theatrical gestures declaim the Declaration of Independence.

The relative high ground of a village somewhere to the northwest of Xian seemed a good place to rest. We leaned our bicycles, wheels heavy and caked with plastic mire, against a loess-block wall and stretched out in the warm sun, rubber boots heavy and caked, a crazy pattern of corn webbed above us.

Soon, as we knew they would, they came. First, an old man in a ragged blue Mao suit, he was wearing agate sunglasses and smoking a thimble-bowled pipe. He stood before us, puffed twice on the pipe, and rocked on his heels.

"Ni hau, laodz [Hi, old guy]," somebody said and his lucky, bushy eyebrows rose behind his stone lenses in surprise to hear us speak human-being speech.

He raised his right hand in a gesture much like a royal or beauty-queen wave.

"Hhh," he glottalled at us. "Hhh."

A couple of kids, little toddler-aged kids in brightly colored quilted overclothes, were starting to creep closer and closer. The old man was probably supposed to be baby-sitting them or something. A woman in grey trousers and a white blouse came to the door of her cave house and leaned out to look at us, to wipe her hands on a pink towel. She yelled "Foreigners with bicycles are sitting against the wall under Auntie Lo's big tree!" back into the blackness and pointed at us with her chin. She went back inside.

Someone pulled out a camera.

"Keyi? [May I?]" that someone asked the old man.

He squatted down on his haunches to be on our level and pulled one last lung full of tobacco from the tiny pipe. He knocked the ash into his palm.

"Hhh? [What did you say?]," the old man answered, clearly still disconcerted by both our arrival and ability to use language like people.

"Keyi zhao-xiang ma? [May I photograph?]," someone tried.

He smiled a gap-toothed smile and bent his head between his legs, shaking it, and he couldn't believe we were there in the first place and in the second and third places, we talked and wanted to take his picture. He looked up and away, still smiling, at some corn.

"Hhh [Sure. Why not? I guess so....]," he answered and somebody took his picture.

We drank some boiled water from some canteens and the kids were getting closer, getting louder and gigglier. Soon, they would be right in front of us, pointing and laughing, screaming "yang gweidz! yang gweidz! [foreign devils! foreign devils!]."

"Nice corn," somebody said in English, exhaling smoke.

"It's feed corn," somebody else said. "It's not for people; it's for their pigs."
"Really? Could you pop it, though? Would popping work?"

"I don't know. Is popcorn the same as feed corn? How do you say 'pop' in Chinese?"

"Probably 'pop' or maybe 'pa' or something like that. 'Corn' is yu-mi," somebody else said. "Maybe 'pop' is like 'explode' or 'blow-up.'"

"Okay," one of the first ones responded. "Ask this guy if they blow up their yu-mi and see what he says."

The old man shifted his gaze from speaker to speaker as if at a tennis match. The kids were delighted and squealed with amusement to hear the sounds we made and used amongst ourselves. We were as a flock of noisy birds or a troop of singing monkeys to them.

I got this job at the Foreign Language Institute sort of through a back door. I am supposed to be a student here in the People's Republic of China and taking special foreign student classes and taking special exams and educational field-trips to educational points-of-interest on weekends but that didn't last more than a couple of weeks. We stopped going to most of our classes most of the time and, instead, began to explore in ever increasing radii, the city of Xian and the surrounding suburbs, villages, and satellite towns.

We began to make friends among the other foreigners at other schools and also among the Chinese themselves, those bold enough, foolish enough, or desperate enough to risk association with Westerners. We spent our evenings inside the city walls within the fetal Xian nightlife at clubs called Art Salon or Peace Cafe or Friendship Gardens.

It was through these friendships and the friends our new friends knew that several of us got jobs as teachers for the quasi-legal, back-door language school inside the city. Our night classes, held in a mid-school building and organized by the family who are employed as caretakers, are popular and command high tuition from the adults who wish to and can afford to learn English. Our students are engineers, doctors, People's Liberation Army officers, cadres, and bureaucrats who wish to enhance their career opportunities during flexible periods of history. The same connections soon led to a more officially sanctioned position at the Foreign Language Institute.

When I started teaching these classes, I quickly noticed this "th" problem. More than any other sound , the "th" was an alien noise and uncomfortable for most of our students. The simple phrase "Thank you, Mister Smith" became "'Sank you, Missa Smiss..." on their lips and alarmingly snake-like for my taste.

The exercise was most simple: Each student was to grasp the tip of his or her tongue between thumb and forefinger, pull his or her tongue out of the mouth, and repeat the aforementioned phrase, laden as it is with the elusive phoneme.

"Thang' goo, Mitha Smifth," they would chant together, happily in unison and happily ridiculous, holding their tongues between their fingers, more rain and lightening flashing from the southwest. I would lean back in my chair and smell the wet dust approaching storm smell on the wind and listen to them. "Thang' goo, Mitha Smifth...Thang' goo, Mitha Smifth..."


We stood to gather our things.

"Women zou, laodz [We're going, old guy]," somebody said.

"Hhh [Thanks for stopping. It was nice to meet you. Please come back soon and meet the rest of the family. You kids are all right. Have a pleasant afternoon]," the old man replied.

We swung our mud heavy boots over the bars of our bicycles and began to coast down the road to the next stretch of quagmire. The children of the village followed us running, laughing, and shrieking "yang gweidz! yang gweidz!" and we waved as we left their village and the oldest among them stooped to pick up corn cobs to throw at us and some of them came pretty close.


(from Artificial Rats & Electric Cats, Camber Press, 2008. Click on the title or the cover for more information.)

Cookie In The Picture

She told me she was going shopping and that she might drop over at her aunt's house for a while; she might even stay for dinner. She had been telling me things like that quite a bit. Cookie was a liar.

I followed her until she parked our car and then I followed her while she walked until she went into a building. I went in a Koffee Shoppe and I started smoking cigarettes until the waitress bullied me into ordering. I figured I'd be there a while (knowing Cookie like I knew Cookie) so I asked her, the waitress, for koffee, another and cleaner ashtray, and a new glass of V-8 vegetable cocktail. I tipped her, the waitress, five dollars and did not see her again. Didn't expect to.

I waited for what seemed like hours and, coincidentally, it was hours that I waited but I was ready when she, Cookie, came out. I grabbed my Nikon and I was out the door and out on the street to meet her.

"What are you doing?" she shrieked but I had her in the frame and her mouth was an ugly oval when I hit the shutter.

"What are you doing? What are you doing here?" she continued to shriek and I continued to hit the shutter; I was snapping shots like crazy.

"I wanted to see a whore," I told her from behind the camera, the Nikon, and I kept pressing the button. The auto-wind was screaming and everything was green-light as far as aperture and shutter were concerned.

"Stop it!" she screamed. "Stop it! Stop it!"

I ignored her, her words, and concentrated on her image, the image in the viewfinder. The few people who had noticed us ignored us and I kept hitting the shutter, the button that made the lens open and close around the image that would become Cookie when she was printed.

"I wanted to see a whore, " I told Cookie. "I wanted to see what a whore looks like after she's whored around. I wanted to see her in the frame."

And I took some more pictures.

"How does it feel, baby?" I continued. "How does it feel to be famous? Show me how it feels to be famous. You're going to be so famous."

"I can't believe you're doing this," Cookie sobbed and she slid down with her back against the wall behind her, the wall of her new boyfriend's apartment building, down to the dirty sidewalk in front of her new boyfriend's apartment building while her old boyfriend took some photographs of her sliding.

"That's it. That's it, baby," I encouraged her. "Work with me here. Work with me."

I kept snapping, kept looking for the best angles and the good shine off her tears, off the strings of snot and saliva across her face. It was a face I loved. I made some beautiful images that afternoon, I developed some beautiful prints, and Cookie's never seen them. She's never even asked.

July Something, Maybe August

We, she and I, sat together across from one another at a wooden table set in the back yard under the big elm. Summer nights had begun and as the gloaming atmosphere blued itself toward another hazy darkness, I took an apricot from the bowl and carefully began to pull its flesh from the hard, dark stone with my mouth. Each bite dissolved into sweet juice as the fruit meat collapsed around my lips, against my tongue.

Moths flew methodical loopings against the lamp over the backdoor; the neighbors' windows trembled a soft television blue through window glass and curtain; I'm sure there was music playing inside our house. Careful, precise, I stripped the apricot seed to reveal it convoluted, shining and carefully I placed it on the table. And just as carefully, she lifted the wet seed of that fruit to her own mouth and carefully placed it within.

I stretched myself out on that table, my cheek cool against the polished wood and her fingers cool again and light against the skin that covers my throat. I could feel each click that apricot pit made as it brushed against her teeth and how each click echoed inside the bones of her skull and through her spine to her rib cage and down the long bones of her arm and through the maze of small bones knit together as her wrist and hand and that echo lingered there at the tips of her fingers, at the point of the lacquered plane of her fingernails, and lost itself in the tangled ropes of my pulse.

The Brutal Joys of Morning

When I destroy your city, I will create a wasteland. And this, then, it is a kind of beautiful, reaching action.
-- Daniel Pallas
Within That Awful Flare: Futility, Obsession & Art


Constance draws the curtains against the rising light from the east
against the noise from the playground.
Constance walks faster & faster toward the rising light from the playground,
toward the curtains of noise drawn east.

Constance turns toward the noise, the light,
faster & faster like injury.
Constance aches against her walking,
ashamed of walking and
Constance rising and rising toward
Constance.

Graphic Equalization

The moisture in this air bleeds sound, resonance heavy,
scarcely able to carry these simple street musics.

Tongue numb, unresponsive to the glimmer of speech,
I find myself listening to the way I would have made these noises.

I imagine my posture: a stiff 45 degrees off true to favor my good left ear,
standing back away from but also leaning toward the sounds sprung from voices.

I am facing a grid of photographs; I am pretending to nearly touch the surface of these images;
I am looking at her reflection faintly hovering in the glass; I am pretending not to eavesdrop.

A light voice, singing, is refined when passed through the filter of these plaster motel walls;
it will become the essence of her voice and language an essential song.

I guess I have been muttering aloud, a series of inflected rehearsals, trying things out, seeing how things sound.
I guess I've got something to say.

There was a time when my ears were much, much sharper than this,
when I could hear the spiky sonar of feeding, flying bats and the friction gravel made underfoot one hundred yards away.

I volunteer to blow up balloons for the big dance and into each I breathed a single word to later stare
at the pieces of my story woven into ropes and arches and carefully unlocked blossoms.

Artificial Roses Folded from Dark Leather

on barbed wire stems,
a bouquet of them, in a vase of poison.
What kind of gift is this?
Heartfelt, perhaps, but
what heart and what feelings
and for what possible reason?

The window's glass is broken,
it's sill a shelf for display:
reflective surfaces, shattered,
gleam dull rust and ochre,
oxblood and iron.
And these are this new valentine's
coded chromography.
What is the love that's messaged
by a tissue sample?

I may remember passion and
the forms that passion may assume,
but the concreteness of it all is still unsettling.
I may remember when things could matter this much,
but it doesn't mean they do.
With dustpan and broom I may
remove the evidence of this expression
and be impressed or not but
I certainly have a window to repair.
About this all,
that much is true and purely recognized.

I wish I had a dime for every dollar spent on love,
a fraction of the time invested on moments deemed timeless.
Oh, what a moderately comfortable middle-aged man I'd be!

Living Next Door to Death

It’s not so bad
living next door to death.
I can stand on my tiptoes to
peek over the fence
and look at the piles of bones
in death’s backyard.
I can fall asleep to
the moans and feral whispers of
the guests at the party next door.

Sometimes,
when the mailman gets mixed-up,
I’ll knock on death’s door with
a handful of misdelivered envelopes and,
even though no one ever answers and
I have to just slip the envelopes into the
already crammed-full box,
I’ll feel brave and tall walking back to my house.

One year at Christmas time,
I left a plate of sugar cookies
on death’s doorstep.
They were the kind you cut from a roll and
decorate with sprinkles and
those little silver sugar balls.
I never got my plate back, though,
so it was a good thing I didn’t use a
good one.

When my friends come over,
I tell them who lives next door and
they say, “Bullshit,” so
I say, “Don’t believe me? Check it out yourself.”
Sometimes, they don’t come back, so
it’s a good thing my friends aren’t very
good ones.

Anyway, it’s nice on summer nights to
sit on my porch drinking a beer or two and
listen to death saw away on his violin.
The crickets chime a chorus and
some whippoorwills make their spooky calls and
the moon hangs fragmented in the cottonwood branches and
the night just goes easy like that,
me drinking beer on the porch and
death playing some nameless tune,
at least one I never recognize, and
I’m pretty sure death just makes it up as he goes along.

Senryu #23

Perfume hoarded under stars
Night closed blossoms clenched on vine
Crushed to fragrance by our embrace, reclined

Haiku #9

small songs through thin wires
cut through the weight of seasons,
of snows not fallen

Senryu #11

two old men harnessed
to wagons of bricks pass by
on the road and shrug

Senryu #14

I can tell her mood
from which door she knocks upon;
front or back tells me.

Haiku #11

some translucent flesh,
shock red and sculpted flat
splayed into a maple leaf

Senryu #26

I knew a girl with
sixteen fingers and only
nine of them were hers

She Masturbates Standing Up:

she will turn to the bathroom mirror when she comes
although she will not open her eyes.

I know this without needing to
because I've seen her talking with strangers.

Each room in this house has a vase
and each vase holds an inch of molding water
because we threw their flowers all away.
We could not bear them.

A fist inside my chest continues to close.
She believes this to be my heart
and it might as well be.

The monstrous leaves of an alien autumn clatter;
theirs is a purposeless noise
and even the smokes of their burnings
will not influence me.

At night, though, I cannot help but hear
the scraping from below, the porcelain pulse
she insinuates and the moan within my own tangled ribs;
strange music, this, but not difficult to memorize.

Imagine the circle of moisture collecting on
her reflected face.


Tyounyi, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1989

Making Love in the Meat Locker

It was blood ice and a kind of fog
that rolls down from a panting mouth,
The quick chill of saliva and human oil
against the atmosphere
Her hands against the metal shelves
and frost
Her hands sliding down the ribs, the flanks
of hollow pigs
our full weight in her arms
The scratching ache as she dragged her nails
through a hoarfrost of slaughter
The resonance of frozen concrete and how sound carries
when I turn my face to it
when I close my eyes against it
when I come

To eat the bodies of others is to eat death.

Please, we say,
more of everything, please.

She would wake from her nightmares and

angry, she would carry her emotion
against him, against whom she had dreamed,
against whom she'd dreamed badly.

Sleep soft palms slapping him,
his shape there next to hers in a black iron bed,
with barely formed
groans of strange words,
words like "blue"
and "steam ship"
and "corridor"
and, until she woke,
their meaning was clear and
when she wakes all that is left her is the sadness of the dream
and there is no comfort in embrace.

The dry sound of them panting confusion
is a metronome for the movement again
and back toward another kind of sleep.

Narcophobia

(diminishing form #23)

And it’s those kind of nights again
locked up inside a tired skull
that begs to betray with foul dreams and dark sweating sheet tangling thrashing
so cigarettes and coffee and cocaine aren’t helping
can only help so much

the reversed landscape on the ceiling
those cracks and shadows in the plaster
are difficult for these failing eyes
to travel again

I am wishing for a new vista
but that is not a possibility
not tonight

a field of light begins to grow
in what I suppose must be the eastern sky

too little too late too often

Diminishing Form #34

Cesarean and Scoliosus
work the phones and bones
and go out late at night
to fuck the men
who call them on the phone to come over

And it’s hotels and motels and holiday inns
and they are always blond
because that’s what they want
the men who want the blond girls

And it’s babies at home
and grandmas and girlfriends
and boyfriends going to jail

There are all of us
under the downtown lights

exchanging currency we made up in our heads

Trans Am

(diminishing form #9)

It’s like you’re standing on a downtown street
watching all the secretaries ands lawyers on their way back from lunch
and the thin whine of many sirens comes drifting through the buildings
but you can’t tell where they are or if they’re coming your way
so you keep eating your sandwich

but the noise gets louder and suddenly
there they all are
the police cars chasing a dark-haired girl
at the wheel

and when they flash past you
and you can see her there in the driver’s side window
you know all you need to know

the love of your life was driving that Trans Am
and downshifting past you, fish-tailing away from you forever,

and she’s going to end up in jail

Diminishing Form #6

It’s quickly becoming a kung fu world
and cable tv is starting to prove it
All those girl detectives taking showers,
girl mercenaries taking showers,
and beating each other up.

The glissade down this rubble
is a sweet fall, a tender drop
to the place even reflections dim
in their own harsh echoes

Each flying side kick
mirrors each other,
improvement forms around glass criteria

And to marvel again
at each image

means always reminding

Life in the Cinnabar Mines

(diminishing form #27)

There is a kind of moisture that films the soapy red vein
and we follow it and the way it smells
deeper and deeper and deeper
into the sides of these mountains
on our hands and on our knees.

Quicksilver, they call it,
but only after we have
pulled it bleeding rust-colored poison
out of the hole that we have made.

And fire, then,
and the crushing
weight of burning memories.

Glass flasks fill quickly
with the heavy sweat of stones.

And, still, it flows around our stupid fingers.

Diminishing Form #19

fires in the laundry room, still burning
smoke rises through the stairwell--reminds me of lucky air
breath rests heavy in our chests, in our throats
definitely time to open some windows and
mix-up the atmosphere

the entire second floor catwalk vibrates with
pounding rolling masses of children
muted liquid shrieking, a chlorine perfume
maple leaves and curling at their edges

four times up and down these stairs each day
cigarettes and mail and beer and 10 slow laps in the pool
and each is underwater

closet floor piling under drifts of
clothes we will not wear anymore

sunset watching smoke leak thin from laundry room windows

Diminishing Form #17

Arranged there along the wall
tight carapace and brittle
too loose for such high cheek bones
yet ready to be knotted
again and again and again

Those leaves falling
without potential for tea
and dry crackle underfoot
suddenly deadly

Strange violence in bright sun
brings us all outside
to count things

When she says “ouch”
I fall down

I found my lucky rock right next to my nose

Center Stage

[I've already told this story about a dozen times and I think I've gotten a grip on what it should be--that is, how it should be written down. Sometimes I have to wait a while, sift through things, see what stands out in memory, before I can really understand the point of some of these stories, before I can reconcile the differences between what really actually happened and what would best convey what really actually happened. Events may contract or expand to encompass their overall importance in the big picture; minor characters are compressed into composites; subplots are developed or abandoned. It's just a process. Everybody does it all the time and calls it "memory." I try to call it "research."]

Sitting facing south means sitting facing center stage but sitting back against the wall means sitting in shadow, protected from the center stage lights and reflections of lights. It's a popular part of the room, especially for the fellows into table-dancing. Center stage attracts a different kind of guy, a guy who doesn't mind everybody else watching as he slips bills into the dancers' g-strings. That kind of guy likes it when the dancer slips her arms across his shoulders or flips her hair against his face and everybody who wants to watch can see. The guys who like the table-dancing, though, they like a little privacy, the chance to spend a little one-on-one with a good looking girl with hardly any clothes on and it's really not a good idea to look at a table-dancer when she's dancing on someone else's dollars. She's not supposed to pay attention to anyone except the guy who paid her to table-dance but, if she gets the chance, she might throw a wicked, eye-rolling smile at some other table-dancer in another part of the room. It happens a lot.

Sitting next to center stage means sitting in bright lights and having a good time and not being like the sullen, quiet guys back in the dark part of the bar buying table-dances. Not that sitting close to center means table-dancing is out, but the whole focus shifts that much more to a public mode of behavior, the performance aspects of drinking a lot and having a really good time. There is laughter out loud, there are larger groups of guys sitting together and having fun together, there are bachelor parties and stag parties the closer to center it gets. The DJ's booth rises up stage left and the DJ looks down on center and down on the floor full of tables around center and he supplies the music that supplies the dancing for the entire club. The wall behind the center stage is mirrored two stories tall and it reflects the entire club back in upon itself with the hot locus of center stage like the stage in an amphitheater, the reflected rising catwalks surround the white platform of center stage on all sides, two DJ booths and the same tables back and forth in the mirrors and twice as many lights and twice as many girls dancing with hardly any clothes on (or at least twice as many views of the exact same number of girls dancing with hardly any clothes on). Center stage is cool.

The center stage lights go down a little bit and the CO2 fog starts up and the music finds a dirty groove and there in that whirlpool there is suddenly a girl and she has some clothes on but they will be coming off. She's a professional dancer and she's been working since the first lunch show at noon and this is her last show at midnight and that's a twelve-hour day in anybody's book, with or without much clothing. It's her job and she's doing it extremely well, the shine on her dark skin is real sweat and the dollars on the stage floor, the dollars in her underwear are real ones. She's been learning names and, as she struts and kicks around the edge of the stage, she's leaning out into the audience around center stage and she is calling them up by name. She opens her arms, she smiles, she's glad to see everybody, she's been missing everybody and is happy when they come up to visit for a while. It's a delicate line she dances: a minute here with Jeff before she moves over to Tom but Jeff knows she likes him, too, and will be back if he can just wait, just be patient for a little while until she finishes with the others. She holds her breast in her hand and leans her entire self, nipple firstmost, into Dennis' face, really close to Dennis' mouth. Her hair falls around George's face and, for a tiny instant, it's like they're under a tent together, just the two of them, and there is nobody else around and nobody else is watching and her lips move as she says something to him and he just nods, up and down like an amusing novelty toy for the rear deck of an automobile, he just nods like that and doesn't say anything back but when she dances off he stays at the rail, another dollar creased to a point in his fingers and he waits there because he knows she will be dancing back to him soon. And she does.

At the edge of the stage, she is crouching on the balls of her feet, on the toes of her high-heeled shoes, and her knees travel apart, her hands on her thighs are pushing her knees apart and she is smiling and somebody out there at the center stage tables (Richard? Mark? Larry?) seems to have forgotten something important, something crucial, and he rises out of his chair a little wobbly and walks the two steps to the center stage rail and he reaches out for her breasts, he reaches out to put his hands on her, which is just not done and she's there at the edge of the stage with her legs open and her g-string covered vagina a few inches from his face and her shining breasts a few inches from his face and his hands are extended and the fingers are flexed open and he's trying to grab her. She makes her face just beam and, hitting the groove with which the music has draped the entire club, she clasps his hands together and using all the tai-chi wisdom she's learned, she throws that negative energy to the ceiling and he tries to grab her again and she clasps his hands together and she's smiling and moving to the beat and she just throws that aggression to the sides of the room and he tries to grab her again and she's getting a little pissed that the bouncer's don't even notice she's struggling there on the edge of the rail at center stage and she brings his hands together in front of her face and she's smiling and she throws all that frustrated longing away and out of sight and finally a bouncer sees what's happening in the middle of the room where everybody can see and he comes lurching over to put a five-pound paw on Richard?Mark?Larry's? shoulder and pull him back from the rail and throw his dumb, don't-you-get-it-asshole? self out into the parking lot. But everything is clear at center stage, all dark energies have been harmlessly deflected and there are no hard feelings and there she is at the rail again only this time she's on his side and she's pleading his case to the bouncers; she's saying don't make him leave and let him sit back down and he'll be good and he knows how to behave and she's smiling really big and on her knees with her hands clasped between them and she pleading for the bouncers to just leave them both alone, that they don't understand, that things will be different now and Richard?Mark?Larry's? wallet just tumbles open and all the cash comes tumbling out in a pile around his feet near the rail at center stage.


(La Ventana, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1993)

Why I like Haiku

Frijoles Canyon, Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico, 1967

Two boys, 10 and 8 years old, on the washed-out path
along the canyon bottom following the stream up toward its mountain source
though they will come nowhere near that place that day.
Each wears sneakers and jeans and each wears a t-shirt, one striped green and blue,
the other plain solid blue. They are just plain clothes.

It is summer and,
while the creek still has water,
the air is nonetheless dry
and a little dusty. The boys walk.
And to their left they see three mule deer,
an antlered buck and his first harem, two does.
The boys stand. The deer stand.

Unsure who moved first,
both boys and deer turn to run up the canyon’s sloping north face.
The deer wish to escape the boys and
the boys are desperate to spend just a few more moments in the deer’s’ presence.
The younger boy stretches out his arms toward them as he runs.

The Oracle Rising From Porcelain

with sheets of water outlining the form that she has taken.

This, then, is what I circle
snuffling and snorting and breathing much too loudly,
and that circle returns upon itself
until I am able to hear the sounds she makes and then
the opening,
abrupt and pungent,
when this brain and that gesture collide.

Too often now, when I try to talk or write what’s happening,
there is a loss of language and
there is a fumbling for vocabulary and
it all falls to foam ungently as failure.

Again a circling, like a dog in mid-droze meanderings,
as I fight against consciousness and its tired messages.
A struggle down, a struggle toward
that hole of revelation where things are as the should be,
are as they are to be supposed.

A blind animal, unearthed,
and wishing for it to rain and then to not rain and then to rain again.

Tied Up In Knots, I Am; She's Got Me Tied Up

I can see the runway from the balcony, I can watch the airplanes when they go up and down, and that’s pretty much all I do these days. I have declared an independent territory and it is inside my head where it belongs. People are allowed to fly in to visit me on the balcony; I will stand and greet them, will wave to them serenely. I often do.

And I think about the tangle of myself, the way my guts and organs and veins and nerves are all balled up and twisted upon themselves and each other. I read that if all the threads from which we are knit were unraveled and stretched out as one cord, that it would be really long. It certainly feels like that.

I don’t have to turn around to know that she is moving around inside the apartment. Her actions insinuate the air and I can hear the rustle of tendon and bone when she stoops or and when she stretches. The sensation of her is strange comfort.

At one point several years ago, I was moved to gift her with a bracelet, thin strands of gold looping around each other and around her wrist. It looks so good there; it reminds me of itself.

And driving with her is like dreaming, the ways she slides us through the lanes and the intersections and the other automobiles. I can recline in the passenger seat and feel the ebb and the flow as she accelerates, as she slows down, the gentle pressure in my abdomen when she glides us down the off-ramps and toward our home.

Smoke rises from our cigarettes, our fragile pipes, and shreds to nothing in the winds that blow around us. Smoke rises from our cigarettes, incense from a bowl of black sand, and twists into a uniform haze under the ceiling. Mist rises from the ground and is woven into foliage and into blossom by the early morning sun. Steam rolls from underneath the bathroom door and these showers are the longest showers and the hottest showers I have ever taken.

I imagine the kind of rope that could be braided from her hair and from which what would hang slowly turning in a breeze from the water, a breeze heavy with the odor of salt and iodine and barbed wire and the other islands in this archipelago. I imagine the kind of rope that could be braided from her hair and, coiled with potential and with desire, how it would hang from a hook inside my closet door. I wish I had one hundred feet of that kind of rope.

I remember the cat that twined within our legs tangled in the sheets and pressed itself against us and she, still warmed and liquid from sex and from having sex, could only arch her back in mimicry of its caress.

I watch the way the airliners seem to surge against the sun that is going down in the water and their windows are lit like a string of stones flung rising and higher into a sky not yet dark enough for stars.

Catfish Apologies

I'm a guppy.
Scoop me up in your little nylon net.
See that red?
That red's for you,
my oxygen baby,
that pulse is yours.

I'm a dog.
Put some crunchies in my bowl
and I'll eat them, every bite.
See my tail wag?
That back and forth,
my Purina princess,
that motion is for you.

I'm a parakeet,
give me a mirror and a bell,
watch me amuse myself.
Hear me singing,
"Hello, Baby!"
That's your song.

I'm a catfish,
you can catch me.
I weigh 300 pounds.
Watch me swim?
I don't think so.
I'm on the bottom of a very deep, dark river.

I'm still a catfish in a river and
I see the other pets.
I wish you'd drop your line into this deep, dark water
and let me eat it up.
I would crawl into your rotten rowboat.
We could get our picture taken together.

A Long, Slow Ride Through Town on the Way to the River to Get Her Brains Blown Out

For a moment much longer than a mere instant, I was captured within eye contact with one of the convicted. She was young looking, certainly no older than mid-twenties, a dish-faced, moon-faced girl with unraveling pigtails and bad acne as a red mask across her brow and beneath her eyes.

The truck that carried the convicted had slowed to lurch through the deep potholes at the intersection. The placard around her neck announced her crimes: excessive fascination with foreign videos, prostitution. One had apparently led to the other, but I couldn't decipher which. Her dunce cap was somewhat tilted upon her head and the way her head limply bobbed with the movement of the truck made me wonder if it might not fall off altogether.

Our eyes clicked together, she with her wrists bound and riding in the back of the People's Liberation Army truck under machine-gun armed escort to her execution and I enjoying a lukewarm-warm Xian Beer with my 1/8 kilo bowl of dumplings at the roadside shack the foreigner's called Jiaozi Hut. She looked drugged or stupefied, seemed only vaguely holding herself erect, but I saw her still register some surprise when she saw me. It was if somewhere still inside her some part of herself was still able to exclaim, "Oh, look! A foreigner! A yanggweizi!"

I felt an urge to wave, to move my arm and my hand together in a synchronized and friendly gesture but, by then, the truck had waddled through the rough spots and was pretty much gone.









(Click on the cover or the title for more information about Artifical Rats & Electric Cats from Camber Press)

Driving Miss Lazy

Six and a half hours as an assistant pimp


It's a gray area of the sex industry. Listed in the Yellow Pages under "Escort Service -- Personal" (as opposed to "Escort Service -- Protective: see 'Guard & Patrol Service''"), emphasizing discretion in billing, fantasy fulfillment, weekend and afternoon specials, businesses with names like ~~Live Playmates, College Girls, Action Escorts, Gentlemen's Delights, AAAAAAAAAH ~~Entertainment, and She-Male Escorts offer "personalized service," "cuddles," "private sessions" and "no more disappointments." Presented in those direct-to-video movies shown on late-night Cinemax as little more than workfare for the conically augmented, the escort business purports to provide the client with companionship suitable for all business and personal affairs. The theory is that, for a fee, a discriminating gentleman may enjoy the temporary cachet of the service's arm-candy, a trophy-wife-for-a-day.
The reality of the escort business is all over the map. While some agencies surely must provide just such a service for the unattached business traveler (every myth has its roots in fact), others certainly offer much more to the client willing to negotiate behind closed doors for more intimate attentions. And, no matter where an individual business may be poised in legality and/or morality, the simple fact is that a large number of owners and support staff make their living off the charms of young women for rent. There's a word for that. To understand this aspect of the escort business, I sought the lowest of the low, the absolute last man on the daisy chain, the open-mouthed recipient of the last drops of trickle-down cash flow. I spoke to myself about my recent experience working for an escort agency as a driver and bodyguard for women on out-call service.


Question: First, if you could, please explain how you came to take ~~this job. 


Answer: Call me Ishmael. Some years ago -- never mind how long ~~precisely -- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would ...take a job driving prostitutes to their "dates." BR>
I'm joking. That's the first two sentences of Moby Dick. And I shouldn't call those girls prostitutes. They were discreet escorts and models providing personal service to discriminating clientele. Whatever all that means, I don't know. But that's what they were. 

Really, I was working an office job, I can always use a little more money, and I thought this job sounded both easy and interesting. I answered an ad in the paper, went in for a brief interview, and was hired. 



Question: What was the job description? What was the pay? 


Answer: The job description was "driver." My duties were to convey the escort to the appointment, check out the premises, collect the up-front money due, wait outside for the escort to finish, keep an eye on the time, and watch out for trouble. I got paid a flat rate for expenses, $25 a night I think, and a percent of all fees and tips the girl collected and/or told me about.
I was given a company pager. I'll describe it to you like they described it to me -- by the numbers. When the pager flashed one, it meant the girl needed help. When two came up, it meant the girl was ready to leave. Three meant the call was canceled; four meant collect more money from the client. Five meant call into the office. Six meant the girl was with the police. Seven meant go in and check the client's room. There were a few guys in the abandoned storefront they were using as an office and waiting area. They had sort of scooped out an area in the general debris scattered around and put in a couple ~~of thrift store sofas and a television. That was where the girls, the other driver, and I hung out waiting for calls. My shift was from 9 p.m. until 5 a.m. 



Question: So, a call came into the office and.... 


Answer: Right. OK. So a call comes into the office and a guy working the phones would answer. What was interesting about this was that there were about 25 lines coming into the office, each one for a different agency that was advertising in the Yellow Pages or the newspaper. So, really, even though there were all these different companies and agencies being advertised -- College Girls, Hot Bodies, Xtasy, Ashley 2nite, crap like that -- all the calls were being taken by the same guy for the same three girls.
Anyway, a call comes in and almost always it's a hang-up. If the client was talking at all, he was usually pretty shocked about the rates and hung up. A half hour with a girl cost $150 and an hour was $250. If they got someone to actually make an appointment, they got the address, phone number and method of payment. They'd call back to make sure it was a real phone number or that the client was really registered at that hotel or motel and in the room he said he was in. 

I really don't know why they asked about method of payment. Cash is always cash and they didn't have any way to take a credit card over the phone. That was part of my job. They showed me how to fill out a credit card slip and copy the card number by rubbing the carbon paper with a disposable lighter. They said they were waiting for delivery of a machine, but they were also waiting for delivery of a bathroom door.
Anyway, after everything got confirmed, I was supposed to wake up the girl. She'd be snoozing in front of the TV. She'd go get dressed and put her make-up on and off we'd go ~~into the night to spread joy. 



Question: Tell us about the girls. 


Answer: Well, it's not too complicated. They were young. I mean pretty damn young. The girls I worked with were 17 or 18. None of them had finished school, I mean high school. They were good looking girls but, you know, there was something...OK, well, like one of the girls, she had pretty bad acne. She just smeared on a bunch of foundation and she was ready to roll. Another girl, I don't know, she was just sort of...I don't know, sort of lost. It was like she didn't know where she was, didn't know how she got there, and didn't know how to leave. She'd stare at the TV, she'd get dressed, she'd sit in the car, and that was about it. I don't know how she acted with the client, but she wasn't doing much around the office or in the car. Maybe she was using drugs or something; maybe she was just ~~gritting her teeth to get through the night. 

They weren't ugly but they ~~weren't drop-dead gorgeous. They weren't stupid, they didn't seem stupid, but they didn't have any education and didn't seem to be in a rush to get some. It was kind of weird; for girls so young, they acted a lot older. I mean, they acted tired-and-sad older. I started talking to the girl with the acne when we were out driving. I asked her why she wasn't doing something else, something less intimate. I mean there are other jobs, even in the sex business, which would seem to be less stressful, less invasive, less emotional. She just got kind of vague on me, started talking about how easy this job was, how fucked ~~up her boyfriends were, how much money she could make doing this. I didn't quiz ~~her or anything, but she sure wasn't talking about future plans or doing anything else; she wasn't saying anything like, "Once I get enough money for junior college..." or "When I save enough for a ticket to Hollywood..." or even "Of course, I'm not doing this forever." It was all just in the moment for her. 

I asked her if she'd ever danced, you know, in a club, topless, or anything. I mean a good dancer could make just about the same money, maybe more, than she was making doing out-calls. She just sort of rambled about how she could if she wanted, how fucked-up her boyfriends were, how easy this job was. The same shit she'd said before. 

But, you know, she seemed different from the girls I've known who've been dancers. Strippers seem more, I don't know, focused than this girl. I mean they have to keep in really good shape just to dance. The dancing itself is a serious workout; it's hours of aerobic exercise. And the dancers I've known have always had some kind of goal. They may not achieve it, they may get lost in drugs or drinking or just being in "the life," but they all had some kind of goal. They were going to school, they were saving to start a business of their own, they were looking out and forward and beyond the clubs. This girl was just, I don't know, flat or something. Just stuck. Or too tired or too lazy or too paralyzed to do anything else. 

It didn't make too much sense to me; the things she said didn't seem to connect up too well, but...I mean, I was just her driver. But all three girls seemed to be nice girls. Seriously. They weren't mean or anything; they weren't bitches. They ~~were just sharp, you know, like looking for an edge. Like it was nothing personal, but they'd cheat you if they could. Even that girl who was sort of zoned out. She wasn't interacting much, wasn't talking or anything, but she wasn't mean about it. If I said something to her, she'd answer. But even she was always paying attention on the call. I mean, she didn't act like she was having fun, but she was keeping her eyes wide open all the time. 



Question: Tell us about going out. 


Answer: Yeah, OK. I guess I got the full range of calls. We got a prank call. Someone from a hotel called in for a girl and we go there. It's late, like 1 a.m. and we come walking in a side entrance to the ~~hotel and I'm definitely not dressed for success that night, kind of scruffy, you know? And this girl dressed like...well, she's dressed like a hooker. Vinyl thigh boots, sort of cheap, mismatched clothes but tight and gaudy-sexy. We walk past the desk and the clerk, a young guy, sort of gives us the eye, you know, but I'm thinking of course he's going to give us the eye. I mean, here's some ratty looking old fart with a teenaged girl dressed up like Irme La Duce walking through their hotel lobby at one o'clock in the morning. If I was working the graveyard desk shift, I'd have looked at us kind of funny, too. 

Anyway, the call was for a suite on a restricted floor and, of course, we couldn't go up without a room key. So, we call the room from her cell phone and there's no answer. I'm starting to understand a little better. We go back downstairs and ask the desk to call up. Big surprise. Nobody's in that room and he won't tell us if anyone is really registered there. 



Question: So, what happened? 


Answer: What do you mean what happened? We leave. We can't say anything to the shit ball at the desk, even though it was probably him who called in because, remember, the office always calls back to confirm. We can't flip him off or call his boss or anything because we'll probably be coming back there someday for a real call. It was just, like, "oh, well" and back to the office. He was just a sadistic, bored jerk. 

The next call was at another hotel. Everything was set up nicely and we got there and I knocked on the door. The guy opens up and he's talking on a cell phone and we go in. He gets off the phone and says, "Sorry. Something has come up but here's a 20 for your time and trouble." I don't really know what to say; I don't know if it's even true. Maybe he just didn't like the way the girl looked or whatever. The girl snatches the bill and it disappears forever. She didn't tell the office she got it and she sure didn't give me my 10 percent, ~~but I wasn't going to bust her for $2. I just let it slide. 



Question: So you're not making any money. 


Answer: I am not making any money. We finally get a call and it is way out there, I mean it's about a 15-mile drive for a one-hour call. The girl gets ready, I get ready, and we go. It's a house in a nice, middle-class neighborhood; new houses, you know? All the trees are little. Go up, ring the bell, and this kid answers. Kid. I don't know. He looked about 25 years old. Not bad looking, but drunk off his ass. The girl's eyes light up, you know, like ka-ching! I cruise around the house checking to make sure nobody's hiding in the bathroom or something and run the guy's credit card ~~on his coffee table with my lighter. He's got ESPN on some big screen TV with the sound turned down. He's all bleary eyed and embarrassed and quiet, just sort of nodding when I explain the rules and get him to sign the contract. No touching the girl, no intimate contact, no lewd or sexual behavior. It's all bullshit, really, something for the cops. The girl is practically shoving me out the door. 

I go back out to the car and settle in. It's warm so I leave the window open, listening, you know, for what? I don't know; screaming, breaking glass, sirens...

I get everything arranged real nice: the pager and my smokes on the dashboard, a cup of coffee from my thermos, and I'm reading a book with one of those battery-powered lights. And, bam, in like 20 minutes ~~the girl is back. The guy paid $250 on his credit card for an hour and she's out the door in 18.25 minutes. I asked her, "Is everything OK?" She says, "Everything is very OK" and we drive back to the office. I'm wondering if she maybe took some tips to, you know, go off the contract. I'm wondering if this drunk kid gave her some cash to...um...augment the agreement. I sort of try to ask her what happened but she doesn't really seem to be in a mood for sharing right then. If she got cash, if she got extra, the only way I'm going to find out is to pull over and strip-search her. And, you know, I just don't feel like doing that. I mean, I may be acting like a pimp, driving her around to have sex with some guy, but I don't have to, you know, act like a pimp. I can't visualize slapping her around, working on her with a coat hanger or something, saying things like "Where's my money?" My money. It's not my money. I suddenly discovered my heart just wasn't in it. 



Question: So, you're going to get $25 from the call; 10 percent of $250 is $25. 


Answer: Oh, yeah, that. I'll get $25 if the credit card clears and when the transfer from Visa or Mastercard or whatever comes in to the company account and whenever they decide to cut a check for me. That's like at least two months down the road. You have to keep your own records and, you know, trust the company. I just have to think, well, maybe that money's gone, too. 

Anyway, we sit around the office watching Nick at Nite. The girls conk out pretty much right away and the other driver wants to chat. It's about 2:30 in the morning and I just want to stare off into space for a while and this guy is wanting to talk about the job. I'm like, "Shut up." Luckily, another call comes in pretty soon and I grab it. 

It's another motel and we get there pretty quick. We find the room and knock on the door. The door sort of slams open, if you can do that...can you do that? Can a door slam open? Anyway, there's this little guy, about 5-foot-5 maybe, all buffed up like he works out, and we're inside. He's got his cash all ready and fanned out and he wants to get to it. I give him the contract, you know, no touching, no sex, no lewdness, and he sort of flips out. I mean, he's going, "What is this? What is this? What is this?" and I'm going "It's a standard business contract, sir." He's asking, "Well, just what do I get for my $150 and what if I want some more?" and then it sort of hits me. I catch a quick look around the room and the closet alcove is empty, the bag rack is empty. I look at the girl and we both know. [long pause] 



Question: What? 


Answer: C'mon. Little short guy, lots of muscles, no luggage, cash out in the open, wants sex? 



Question: Enlighten us. 


Answer: He's a cop. So, we're both like, "Sorry, sir. Good evening, sir. Complain to management, sir. You're on your own, sir." This transaction is terminated with extreme prejudice and, even if this guy isn't a cop, he's a weird little fucker and way too aggressive. We leave and go back to the office. I wait around until about 3:30 and the dispatcher says "go home" and I do and that's it. I don't go back. They called me up the next night wanting to know when I was coming in and I said, "I don't think so." I spent six and a half hours earning $25 base and maybe, in a couple of months, another $25 if I feel like even calling them back and I got ripped off by a teenager for $2. I figure that's enough. 


Question: That's it? 


Answer: Oh, yeah. That's it. Pretty glamorous, huh? Huggy Bear, Jr. That's me. And I drive a beat-up old Volvo, too.




Westchester County Weekly Copyright ©1999 New Mass. Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

Our Barbies, Ourselves

We were sitting on the porch, Stephanie and I, drinking glasses of ice-cold water and eating saltine crackers. They both hit our spots. Crickets were chirping in the gloaming nightfall and we could hear the kids, one block over, trying desperately to milk one last inning of softball from the gathering darkness.

"I can see," yelled Cinnamon. "I can still see perfectly. Just pitch the motherfucking ball, alright?"

"Such a mouth," giggled Stephanie.

I took a long drink and put another cracker in my mouth. Across the street, the Anderson's living room window changed from blue to grey to blue again as they switched channels from Entertainment Tonight all the way over to A Current Affair. Those Anderson. I could set my watch by them and their ever so regular viewing habits. And I did. Eight-oh-three.

"You're out!" shrieked Jasmine in the middle of the play. "Stop running, you running cunt! I tagged you three fucking years ago. You're out!"

"Fuck you!" came Lilac's retort.

Can that Lilac retort? I think so, and Stephanie does, too.

"If I'm still moving, you're still losing. Tag this, you stupid little whore!"

Stephanie and I both smiled, separately though simultaneously, to imagine little Lilac's gesture. There, in the kind of darkness that encloses us when that kind of darkness falls, we could see the dim forms of catfish on the lawn. They walked, in the kind of way they walk when they walk across our lawn, slowly and without rhythm. Like catfish.

Lilac's voice rose an octave. The fish paused then redoubled their motile thrashings. Stephanie and I both smiled, separately though simultaneously, to imagine little Lilac's distress. We could hear the dull sound wood makes, Louisville Slugger wood specifically, when it hits girl flesh. I put a saltine cracker on my tongue and closed my mouth. It, the cracker, began to dissolve.

"More ice cold water?" Stephanie asked.

"Mmm-mmm," I answered around the cracker. She filled my glass until the water bulged, trembling, against the rim of the glass. We could hear the shrieks of the girls floating toward us and the gentle shiver of breaking glass.

In that moment, hung against the twilit paint of another evening's end, the girls came pounding across the Mitchell lawn with sports equipment akimbo.

"You girls," Stephanie smiled at them.

"How was the game? You girls?" I asked them all through the paste in my mouth, the remains of my saltine cracker.

Norman Mailer Buying Batteries

I have this imitation I do at parties. Most of my friends have seen me do it several times but it's pretty funny and they'll say things like "You should watch him do this" or "Check this out; it's pretty funny" to the person they're talking to. Sometimes they will prod me and say "Come on, Robert, do that thing" and I'll hold my hands near my face and say "Oh, no. Not at a party" and then I'll do it.

It's pretty subtle, mostly gesture and expression, and a lot depends on lifting an eyebrow at precisely the right moment or on the way I curl my hand around my glass or can of beer or whatever and point my index finger just so. It's more like a gestalt or a channeling or something psychic than just doing an imitation, an impersonation.

A girl I met at a party asked me to do it for her the next morning. She said, "Do that again. Do that thing you did at the party."

I pretended to have no idea what she was talking about.

Gone Blonde Again, She Is

naturally upset at such far-fetched chemistry,
the webbed reaction she feels
has somehow toned her,
and angry at herself
and angry at the ridiculous churning in his eyes,
the way he said,
"Did you, madam, do something to your hair?"

That weekend at the war
was when after they spread their blanket on the spectators' hillside
she had know he glared at citizen men
and citizen women who turned away from
polite and measured barrage
to accuse her hair
of flaggish pretensions.
"It's just a little too much sun," she heard him mutter to their acquaintances.
"She was out in the open sun too long. That's all."
And "sheesh."
He said "sheesh" a lot.

But before that and nightly,
he had drawn her hair pins
one by one
and he had carefully placed them
one by one
in a kind of fan shape,
a spray of silver needles
beneath her bedroom mirror.

All Souls Day Every Day

One hundred tiny skulls
are scratched in the plaster above my bed.
I can count them over and over and over.
I can count them one hundred times
and there will always be
one hundred tiny skulls,
skulls scratched into the plaster over my bed.

My girlfriend has one hundred tiny skulls
tattooed against her thigh
and I can follow them
from one to ninety-nine
and find #100
there inside the soft shell of her cunt.

I've got one hundred tiny skulls
inside my head
and each one
is the one
I wish I am
when I wish I am
one of one hundred.

One hundred tiny skulls made of sugar
dissolve so quickly.
Where the heck do they go?
Well, they make a kind of paste and
I've got a bunch of it in my pocket right now.

The People’s Preferred Methods of Transportation

It was not the heat; it was the humanity. It was truly that. Or them, the humanity. The other humanity, not Robert and Sara but them. All of them. All the Chinese people.

It was as if they’d stepped into Dante’s Inferno, and Robert was reminded of the one not written by Dante Alighieri in the early 1300s, but the one directed by Harry Lachman in the mid-1930s (Lachman also directed other films including Charlie Chan in Rio [1936], Baby Takes a Bow [1934], The Face in the Sky [1933], La Couturière de Lunéville [1932], The Compulsory Husband [1930]), and Week-End Wives [1929] but Dante’s Inferno starred Spencer Tracy [whose birth name was Spencer Bonaventure Tracy which is a very cool name considering it quite likely that Tracy may have at one time portrayed John Paul Jones in a play or a movie and Jones’s most famous ship was named the Bonhomie Richard, which sounds somewhat like Bonaventure, and that he supposedly had a long affair with Katherine Hepburn, though she only conveniently revealed the affair after his death in order to spare Spencer’s long-dead wife the posthumous embarrassment when he couldn’t deny it, and, since she, Hepburn, was practically a man anyway, she could very well have been named Richard like the ship, and it must have been an adventure to have even spent any time at all around her—an adventure good or bad at home or abroad. Sort of like the one they were having now]. Why did Robert know these things? No one would ever know.).

It was those kind of coincidences which really bugged him at times like that stuck in the pedestrian tunnel under the Xi’an Train Station with about 500,000 other people though it was a safe bet that only they were the only not-Chinese people in the whole shaft. The 300 pounds of luggage didn’t help; the little squeaky-wheeled luggage cart did help a little bit but the luggage itself didn’t.

I’m sweating like…like…like a coolie, he thought and immediately discarded the thought like a crumpled juice box while considering where and amongst whom he was doing that sweating and thinking. He was not the only one profusely perspiring, which, because of the vicious humidity, was abundantly and olfactorally clear. And it was confusing how a place so dusty could be so wet.

“Are you hot?” he asked Sara. “And wet? And dry?”

“Shut…the…fuck…up,” she gasped in reply.

“Me, too,” he continued.

“I’m…serious.”

“Huh?”

“Exactly.”

Already lost in that briefest of conversations, he decided to stop speaking and, unwittingly, saved his own life.

Any question of where to go was quite definitely answered by the amalgam of humid humanity that pulled and/or pushed them in one decisive direction until finally, like little corks floating on a sea of fleshy lava, they popped burning onto the not-much-better surface.

Blinking there in the cruel Chinese sun alongside half a hundred thousand of their newest friends and each of them holding a Chinese/English map of the city bound into their different guide books, they began asking motorized cyclo drivers the question they would ask a many hundred thousands of times in the months to come. While blinking.

“Zai nar?” they asked. “Where is it?”

They were pointing to the place on the map indicated as The People’s Hotel, a place they had telegraphed reservations. That had been fun; really, telegraphing anyone for anything was like sending a telegram for more gunpowder to help beleaguered cavalry troops at the wooden fort or sending salutations to one of the older Barrymores at a place called the Birdcage Theater. They wondered if the telegram had even arrived or been delivered and if it had even worked where what would be waiting for them in the hotel lobby beside the usual angry, drunk Australian backpackers. The cyclo drivers, most of whom seemed illiterate, thought they meant the city itself and kept answering to that effect.

“Xi’an,” they said. “Xi’an.”

Sara and Robert found this adding piquant exasperation to the aftermath of their ordeal of a three-day train ride and thirty-minute stagger through the hellish hundred yards of pedestrian tunnel.

“Bu. Bu, bu, bu, bu,” they’d insist. “No. No, no, no. no, no.”

And they’d point to the dot that designated the now-crumbling-with-neglect-and-animosity hotel Soviets built when they were still coming to places like Xi’an or like the People’s Republic of China entire until Mao Ze Dong lost his mind.

“Jiege difang,” they’d insist. “This place.”

The cycle drivers would insist right back though with greater clarity.

“XI,” they’d say. “AN.”

It was like an old joke and Sara along with Robert could barely stand it. And that was where things stood until some man, some anonymous Chinese man, took one of the guidebooks into his own hands to tell the drivers in shot-gun Xi’an dialect where the pair wished to be deposited.

“Dou xiao chen?” the kind man asked them. “How much money are you willing to spend for the ride?”

While Robert was calculating the relationship between renmenbi and dollars, Sara snapped.


“I don’t care. As much as it takes.”
The kind man smiled and held up his hand in what looked like a surfer’s gesture for “things are cool.”

“Things are not cool,” Sara answered.

It was weeks later they would learn the gesture was the one of the one-handed counting signs for “six.” Six renmenbi were officially 85 U.S. cents though it was not until weeks later the couple would learn they had been ripped off by 78 unofficial U.S. cents and be pissed quite off. The government-approved exchange rate was 1-to-7; U.S. dollars were going at 1-to-30 on the street. The counting was done one-handed because back in ancient days when the Chinese understood and practiced capitalism, such hand-symbols could be used beneath the protective covering of capacious changpao and thereby keep asking price and counter-offer private from eyes not directly involved in the transaction.

While Sara supervised the loading of their 600 pounds of luggage into the designated cyclo, Robert sat on the street curb and for some elusive reason began to ponder Mendelian genetics with what was left of his quickly sautéing head. Sweet-pea blossoms in pink and blue tumbled across his brain’s gyri and sulci.

If I took a half-blue and a half-pink, he wondered, would I get a three-quarter pink or a three-quarter blue? Would it have round or wrinkled seeds? Would they be tasty?

He snapped out of his Austrian garden revery to the sound of Sara.

“Zou [Get up and go],” she was saying. “Zou, zou, zou.”

“Hey,” he answered. “You’re speaking Chinese.”

“Yeah. Amazing,” she said. “Now get the fuck up and go.”

“Amazing.”

“That’s what I said.”

The streets through which they traveled were as clotted with Chinese people as had been the pedestrian tunnel back at the train station, if not more so if such a thing were possible and it was.

“There’s a lot of Chinese people out there,” Robert said.

She sighed and she banged her head a little bit on the cyclo’s sheet metal body each time the driver hit a bump or another Chinese person. Rocking back and forth in the back and forth of the vehicle, Robert snagged his shirt on an exposed bolt and gave the blurry 50s plaid cloth a v-shaped tear. And that was the worst thing that happened that day. It had been his father’s shirt and Robert had many times seen the pictures of his dad holding a newborn Robert and wearing that shirt.

“I ripped my shirt,” Robert told Sara.

“Oh, honey,” she answered. “That’s awful.”

“I think we should get one of these.” Robert answered her answer with a gesture indicating the cyclo in which they were riding. “It would help if we had one of these for the trip back to the States.”

Maybe they could actually get one home. Registration and tags might be a problem, but Americans were already bringing Chinese babies out of the country and if they could do that with a human being, how hard would it be to transport a half motorcycle-half rickshaw? Probably not too hard at all. They could name it, their own personal cyclo, Caifu Meng and dress it in a pink Ralph Lauren onesie and the guards wouldn’t blink as long as they kept throwing money at them. It would be worth a try.

Robert was thinking about how he was going to unload the 1200 pounds of their luggage when they finally arrived at the People’s Hotel of Xi’an for Visiting Soviet Dignitaries and Other Honored Guests. The grimy white statue of Chairman Mao smiled warmly as they passed. Robert was reminded of the statue of Walt Disney outside the Happiest Place on Earth except there was no mouse at Mao’s feet smiling along with the Helmsman. Still, it was good to be home and the sound of enraged, slurring Australians filtering out from the lobby and into the driveway was almost a comfort. They made it almost seem cool.









(from Artificial Rats & Electric Cats, Camber Press, 2008. Click on the title or the cover image for more information.)

It’s Nice To Have Elvis on My Side

It’s nice to have Elvis on my side.
There are those moments in my life when I can see
the King right next to me,
a young Elvis right there backing my play,
and I know anything is possible.

I can stare down a cop,
I can talk to a pretty girl who waitresses at a coffeeshop,
I can drive all night to get home and see the kids for Christmas,
and I know he approves and he even wants to see more.
Elvis chuckles, “Keep ‘er going. You’re on a roll.”

In a rainstorm by the highway, we’re there together
with our heads ducked low and our jackets pulled tight
and we’re cold and wet and broke and coughing up a little blood,
but it only makes us more sullen and hard and determined
and we encourage each other, we tell each other,
“Hang on, man. You can do it. Just hang on.”
Me and Elvis help each other out.

It’s nice to know he’s been everywhere and seen everything and he knows exactly what to do, knows exactly what to say.
It’s nice the way he sits with me at the kitchen table on hot summer nights
and we play cards wearing just our t-shirts because it is so hot.
Elvis can be real thoughtful.

Some nights I’ll drift off to sleep and he’ll be in the living room by himself
and I can hear him sort of humming, not even singing at all,
just a low murmur, barely there, and when I wake up in the morning
he’ll still be sitting on the sofa and Elvis will say “G’morning, sleepyhead”
and that’s such a great feeling.

It’s nice to have Elvis on my side.

It Seemed Harmless

It seemed harmless at first, and so we just let him keep doing it and he sat there for hours on the porch cutting pictures and photographs of animals from any newspaper or magazine or pamphlet he could find and it seemed like the only time he wasn’t on the porch cutting out pictures of animals was when he was out looking for more pamphlets, newspapers, or magazines and from which he cut more pictures and photographs of animals or, if he wasn’t doing that, he was pinning with straight pins all those pictures and photographs of animals on the walls of, first, his room and when it was clear that he’d finished in there, pictures and photographs of animals spilled out into the hallway and down into the living room and kitchen not to mention the tattered leftover newspapers, pamphlets, and magazines fluttering around the porch and rolling across the lawn, each more-or-less complete except where pictures and photographs of animals had once been printed and he had cut them out to pin inside the house and were now a negative space, a silhouette of an empty nothing shaped like a tiger or a walrus or a ladybug or a basket full of cute baby kittens and just because he was doing that and because of the way the yard and porch and the inside of the house started looking, they took to calling us all names and whatnot and that, I believe, is not fair at all.

ASA 400

When I look at these photographs
I see the way she sees me,
the ways she is able look or, rather,
the way she is able to see the things she sees
(texture, color, contrast, shadow, me).

That nose and that chin were mine
before she took them
and what her eyes have done to the ones in my head
makes films and papers and chemicals
seem more important than they ever should be.
These are problems of optics and
the ways light will bend when introduced to liquid, rampant,
inside our heads.

In a photo album,
they are flat and will not rise to meet
the profile drawing near,
the conscious quest for detail.
Often, they are black and/or white
But more, a skillful melding of the two.
We will turn those pages slowly. Together.

Back lit and hungry,
a halo of halogen corona and, curious,
the one (or is it my?)
arm strikes shadow sharp and clear.
These are records, I must always remind myself,
but of what remains delusional and
how is it possible for these documents
to record the sound
of one other woman's shoes
as they strike the paving stones
that are displayed in the rain
on the way
to the door
which I am opening
because I remember
what it sounds like
when she taps the wire-bound glass
that cuts into the wood
and lets us see each other?

She Was Flexing

she was uncoiling
rhythmically pushing
the bedclothes into a rigid boundary
"Pain? Another sensation
and there are so many sensations..."

I wished we lived on a train
so I could flick my ashes out the window
so the lights from the stations we passed through
would move across her face in interesting patterns,
from back to front

"Watch my mouth. It will become
an interesting shape."
Instead, she kissed me
like the long fields of green wheat
we can see from the observation car




(Originally published in Tyounyi, 1989)

On the Occasion of the Unveiling of a Statue of a Representation of the Feeling of Estrangement

A man with his back to the window
wonders where that noise is coming from;
the one that sounds like a 45rpm kitten
being on played on 33,
not the noise like a throbbing hum.
That one's from the refrigerator
and he already knows that.

Inside a helicopter thousands of feet in the air,
the man on the radio tells us about the traffic.
When we look up we can see him
but he can't see us.
Inside his head, he's thinking of a woman
and the way she hooks her bra in the front
and then twists it around
and then kind of shrugs into the rest of it.
He loves that.

A woman moves her eyes away from the screen for an instant
and that instant is multiplied,
falls away faster and faster
until it becomes itself a blurring mosaic of fossilized moments,
and there is coming now a sound of applause
that becomes the sound of waves.
Her hand is poised above the keyboard;
it floats over all the letters and all the numbers.

The doors on our houses open inward
because we are so glad to be there.
Every key moving into every lock means something;
every bolt shot behind us or
every fastened chain
becomes a hissing prayer,
an interweaving mantra,
that makes a sound like
"go away."

4 Hearts

An arrangement of what used to be called emotion,
they are hanging like pictures
because they are
four hearts hanging like pictures of emotions.

These hearts here, hanging,
look like memories of telephone calls
or letters or scars carved into trees,
soft aspen trembling above the snow-line.

Lacquered thickly, they shine reflection
and put back some light into this dull air.
Glazed over, their beating has been fossilized and
only now reveal their tortured contractions.

Four hearts hanging and hung
against the softening plaster that
takes the prints from the hands
of those who would lean in for a closer look.

Sooner or Later

He put a playing card, the three of hearts,
into his bicycle spokes with a clothespin.
It made a noise.

He made a wrong turn in the middle of the night
and ended up southbound on Rt. 387.
It was worse than he imagined.

At the 24-hour diner with the neon coffee cup he met a girl
while he fumbled for the money to pay his bill.
It had been a lot more than he’d expected.

He kissed the girl outside near her car
and she pushed her hips toward him, let her breasts touch his chest.
It seemed like the right thing to do.

Riding back, the passing semi blew him off the road
and into the weed-full ditch,
his leg sadly pretzeled beneath him.
It was broken.

At the emergency room, they cut his jeans from ankle to thigh;
they ran a tube into his arm and poured in the drug.
It became quiet.

In recovery, they asked him who to call,
who needed to know about the accident.
It was pointless.

When he was released, they returned him all his belongings
in a labeled paper bag: his wallet, his shoes and
the three of hearts.

(Lunarosity, October 2003)

Monkey Talk

I. In The Basement Of The Psych Building

We chitter at each other through the mesh of our cages
and all our noise is an echo of every primate’s chatter since Oldavi:
“Me! Me! What about me!
And why has my skullcap been replaced with a Lucite dome?
And why has my brain been shot full of electrode things?
And why does my monkey chow come out only when I pull this lever?”

We are not really listening to each other
but we like the way it all sounds when we do it all together.
It is better than no noise at all.

II. Approximate Latitude 7’ North, Longitude 15’ East

When I clung to the fur along my monkey mother’s belly
and put my opposable thumb in my mouth,
I thought things were pretty darn good.
Then she started talking to me
and then I started understanding what she said
and it was things like:
“Watch out for boa constrictors ‘cause they love to eat monkey babies” and
“Watch out for the panthers on the ground ‘cause they’ll just rip you to shreds for fun” or
“Watch out for humans watching out for you. If they are indigenous, they’ll pop you in a pot and cook you up for soup. If they’re from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, they’ll try to blame you for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.
“Watch out, my little monkey baby. Watch out.”
Well, like most kids, I didn’t listen to her
and I toddled through the leaves and branches of the canopy
and I played with all the stuff lying around on the jungle floor.
I started putting things together and started thinking about putting other things with other things and, like most kids, I got me some ideas.
I taught myself to tie knots. I taught myself to weave leaves.
I invented glue. I pondered representation and, later, non-representation. I considered money.

My monkey mommy hovered above me in the canopy
and her “tsk tsk tsk” followed me benignly until
she saw me on the verge of bending some twigs into a pleasing shape
and then she swung down from the trees
and beat my monkey baby ass quite red all the while shrieking in her worst mommy monkey voice:
“Art? You monkey moron! Art?
This hurts you far more than me
but I won’t stand by and
watch you end up inventing religion.”

I got the point, you betcha,
and I never ever tried again to juxtapose incongruous elements to imply or signify a representation of neither any kind nor any abstraction nor to convey a particular mood or feeling.
I still think about forming a coalition of disparate monkey groups
to examine the underlying tensions that
undermines individual monkey goal fulfillment
but I’ve got monkey moron babies of my own and,
oh my oh my,
do I beat their baby monkey asses monkey-ass red.

III. 1967—New and Improved Primates

Boys’ Life magazine,
the official monthly publication for all Boy Scouts of America,
had in its classified advertisement section in its back pages,
small notices from small companies from which
one could order small animals through the mail.
Various companies offered sea monkeys and pheasants,
sea horses and quail, hermit crabs and squirrels,
rabbits and lizards, raccoons, and, best of all,
spider monkeys all delivered parcel post
straight to our doors, no C.O.D.,
check or money orders only, allow four to six weeks for delivery.

She arrived 36 days after we sent in the order,
shipped in a cardboard tube featuring air-holes and
she wore a tiny soiled diaper made from foreign tissue paper and
she was stark raving mad, I mean,
her eyes were as big as dimes,
which is big for a squirrel monkey,
and as blank as punched silver money but always moving.

At night, at the bottom of the birdcage become her cage,
she would burrow deep within a mix of shredded newspaper and cedar shavings,
and she whimpers and shivers and dreams her small monkey dreams
of a river and some trees and a long green darkness uncoiling forever.

The Distance Between These Things

Imagine me as a child
with a measuring tape
borrowed from my mother's sewing basket
and it was yellow on one side and
gray-white on the other.

Imagine me stretching it
across the dining room table
and realizing 57 inches lengthwise
but 64 on the diagonal.
It was the birth of geometry.

From protractor and compass,
I learned to extract the area
of a figure and express those values.

My hand was so many inches long before it grew.
My loneliness was measured in square yards.
The cosign of my longing became
my latitude and
I could find its position from
the angle of another person's moon.
This was and is and will become
my geography,
my way of saying
that I was here
for so long
and for so often
and it will never be enough.

So,
stretched from end to end,
each of my emotions might circle the earth.
Or not.

The Whore is on the Beach Again

She lets her monkey,
to the limits of its slender chain,
play in the ragged ends of the surf.

The boys who could don't
make fun at her.
No, instead they taste the sweet rotten fruit of her mouth
and the monkey's sweet moan when he finds a perfect shell.

One-Handed

“Kee-rist,” the Old Man’d say when he settled into his chair, some kind of cheap fake Laz-E-Boy recliner maybe even from the Salvation Army or, like he said it, “Salivation Army.” If anybody’d ask him, “Say, Pop, just where did that chair come from? Where’d you get it, Pop?” he’d just say “Watch a you seff” and that was that. Maybe we’d laugh about it, you know, but not so’s he could see.

The Old Man liked to do things one-handed; boy I remember that, whether it was splitting the tax stamp on a pint of Jim Beam or, like he said it, “Mr. Bem” like that, or lighting a match for a usable White Owl stump or giving one of us a crack on the back of the head with those thick, hard knuckles of his. It used to bug me a bunch, but I think I know why he liked to do it, why being able to do things with one hand like that made him feel like he knew what he was doing and it showed when he could do it. The Old Man loved it when he’d catch one of us trying to do something one-handed. He’d grin, you know, he’d be “bemming” from ear to ear.

Came in handy, too, that habit, when the Old Man got one of his paws jammed up in his lathe, split it down the middle like a codfish and in those days they weren’t trying to save nothing, they weren’t sewing nothing back on. It was, like, “There you go, Mister, there’s your hook and there’s a couple grand, too. Send one of your boys around when he’s big enough to stand in your spot and do what you did for the rest of his life.” Even those days a couple a grand didn’t go too damn far and when it was gone, it was just gone and that was that.

The Fish in the Little Pool by the Patio

are colored red, black, and pearl swimming.
Though her hair remains quite brunette,
her skin has paled and swollen.
The carp that brush her face
remind me of my own and no less sucker-like lips
that wandered there, too. Once.

But, the fish themselves are thinking food thoughts.
They don't remember her long hands with lacquered nails
that scattered freeze-dried insect eggs over our trembling waters,
the ornaments that hung from her wrists, or
the ways her gifts are wasted on them now.

Vanilla Construct*

a sonnet

A brittle atmosphere out there
before the silhouette was described
in the steam created from your breath.
There is a way the world comes boiling
right after having been seen,
becomes startled rolling lumen
after having been through your eyes.
And for extra friction
there's a way you sort of lean eager to gather in
the noises the valley dogs make when they start howling.

From a matrix torn from vanilla
another kind of meter may be extracted.


* under certain circumstances, the topical lip ointment marketed under the name CARMEX has been known to smell remarkably like the long capsular fruit of a vanilla plant (esp. Vanilla planifolia) though no such ingredient is used in the formula