Copyright (C) 2002 by Steven Sills

AN AMERICAN PAPYRUS: 25 POEMS

by Steven Sills

                              Post Annulment 2

Afferent, the city bus cramps to the curb and brakes

through

Solipsistic muteness

With an exhaltation startled and choking.

As the sun blazes upon the terminal's

Scraped concrete

The shelved rows of the poor men

Hear the sound die on the pavement

In a gradual dying echo.

A cigarette succumbs to the voice as

Carrion brought to life; all the tattered people

awaken;

And a man spits toward the tire of the bus,

But misses.

And as he watches his own spit vanish

From the hard crest of the world,

And silently scrapes his lunch pail against

A corner of a metallic bench as if expecting the pale

to bleed...

And hoping it would bleed...he tries to remember the

angles

He and his wife stood to project

The intermingled shadows that both

Had labeled as their marriage.

He enters the second bus:

Its coolness sedating the skin that

Overlaps his troubled mind.

His thoughts pull together

Like the light, cool flow of the air conditioning.

He feels a little pacified.

He knows the shadow's intangible depth:

Its vastness having overpowered him these months

Until he could not reach the logic that told him

To find himself outside its barriers.

As he stares out of the window

He wonders why she has left.

How could she have left without indication

When he has remained angled toward work

So that he and his wife can stay alive?

In the bus window he sees his diaphanous face--the

windows

Of the Hilton, where he has a job in maintenance,

Piercing solidly through its head.  He rings the bell.

The idea of her not home, and legally annulled

From his life--her small crotch not tightened to his

desperate

Thrusts--makes him feel sick.  He gets down from the

bus.

He goes to work.  He suddenly knows that being in love

is not love.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                     Earth

I use her earth to plant my seed--

My limbs twisting around the collective molecules,

Trying to dig in.

Only the obscurity of my body

Presses so fully that it is neither

Body nor bed nor the intersection of both,

But euphoric traction;

And then, planted and repulsed,

Only the seam of backbone minutely faces her,

That bed of earth.

With all conscious force

I breathe the aloneness that intangibly defines the

Air.  I swallow its ambrosia

Of depth and ask myself

Why I ever married the woman.

There is void.

Then a hollow answer calls my name and says "it was

time."

I realize myself in movement, parting the scene.

I use what has been planted for the reaping--

My suit tucks me into its structure of cotton;

And soon a building will be again the structure

Around men of cotton suits, pushing a product.

Lost, I drink my coffee alone on the stoop.

She had asked to fix me breakfast

But I would not let her.

My miniature is one and black.

I drink me in when I am not

Pressed by the coffee's steam.

Cars' casketed phantoms of people

Chasing up and down Dunlavy Street of Houston

After something--their whole lives after something--

Come and go from consciousness like respiration.

The people plant and reap.

Who can count all of their

Insignificant names?--

Animals that are not created sensible enough

To propagate unless lost to frenzy,

Caught in structures without meaning.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                    Bar-Room Buddies

We Mongoled Human experience.

We pushed it into our mouths

As the crisp pretzels of which the shape became salty

dust

At our tastes: the crispness of life,

And we Mongoled human experience.

The tequila, that Sandras or Cassandras, or whomever

it had beeen

At the moment of malevolently blessing our heated and

Maddening consumption, was what we left

Our wives for; and then hardened ourselves on

The springless cushions of the sofas of our friends

Whom we eventually forgot the names of:

The wetness of human experience that we Mongoled,

And felt the bladed emptiness

Of stomachs that could not consume food

On mornings after.  But the Angels of bar rooms

continually

Appeared before darkened stages where, in front of

guitars,

We played.  They apppeared at various stages to the

weeks of the years.

They came, silently whispering themselves off

As Sandras or Cassandras;

Stared up at us for two hours; and disappeared.

The reappearance of their light enamored us, and we

left

And followed but found bats that offered

No shelter, and often caves we could not fit into

Or were forbidden from entering.

We invested our capital

In the Silicon Valleys of this great nation.

Third-world bitches, in factories, became sick for our

chips.

We held power.

We bred metals and bought the ownership titles

Of properties, but could not find a home of the world.

We married again and brought forth children

Who were duplicate strangers of ourselves.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                           The Retarded

Legs clamp around the rim--

The whole seated body sticking slightly

As moaning howls come from his

Paralyzed mouth.

It is after having

Put him to bed for a nap, and then the pot,

That this woman who would dab the bile

From his bed like one who napkins a spill from

A tablecloth, does not clean away

The substance behind the smell

Which predominates over the bathroom urinal

And aggravates his senses.

No woman to do these tasks,

And then to rim her hand

Under the butt;

No woman to drag him from

The pot,

After she has had his body bent

Toward her for the wiping,

And flop him onto the bench

In the shower; no woman...

She sits, cigarette limp in her mouth,

Thinking that the day has almost ended.

And the stars she stares out at

From the living room of the group home

She remembers are other earths limping

Half-free in the grips of other

Dying suns.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                        Houston

In Houston's summers the gods

Use the clouds as urinals

For three minutes daily.

In Houston the Boat-People

Come from planes.

Inner-city--intermingled and alone

Like its green Buffalo-Bayou

Strewn only in the imaginations

Of those who run along it briefly.

A mile from the bayou

The settled imagination of a

Nine year-old Vietnamese girl

Allows a mangled brown horse

To elongate and flatten out

To the reality of the rolled up carpet

(All because of the rain).

She feels the wetness now beginning

To seep into her clothes;

She raises herself; she sees the old Cuban

Walking from the house with hands

To the sky, as if to make the heavens appear a little

longer

In the manner that the downtown buildings,

From Dallas Street on, by their

Stories of windows draw down

the sky's enormity from measurement

Both extensive and inadequate;

And she follows him.

Apart

And yet they both think about the Vietnamese

Teenager with curlers in her hair

Who yells "boo" behind doors

That are entered;

The Cambodian boy who

To the view of the Montrose area

Pours on the bare shrubs,

And then strips and pours upon himself,

The water from a hose, and that both animal and plant

Glisten in the sun

As if they have been greased;

Falling into Houston's world of high buildings

From the descending planes

While hoping that the big world would

Not overpower their memories;

And the Cubans, in house #2 always yelling of "Miami."

They believe that Cambodian refugees

Always clean house #1,

That Africans never clean themselves,

and that Laotians often pour rice down the drains

Causing the faucets of the house to stop-up;

And that the welcome-center Manager

Does not care to bring over a little clothing

And a little food or take them on little trips

To the Social Security Office or the doctor's office

Past 5 p.m.--

But of different seconds in that minute,

Different lengths, and various perceptions.

She remembers the ugly man

In Vietnam that ran from the police

And then a scar around his eye

Opened from the clubs and the blood

Tried to escape him completely

As the body attempted to pull itself

From the street, and could not.

He remembers thinking that the

Cranium of an old man is always heavy

On the neck, and that his

Is becoming like this.

He desires to clasp the gate

That is around the Hispanic cemetery

And watches the cars on Allen Parkway, below,

Curve and toward the sun

Become a gleam moving endlessly

And instantly gone.

He desires to arrive there and

Read a few tombstones

Before and after watching.

She desires to imagine horses

Carrying her away from here to the West,

And other horses following with her family behind.

She desires to follow the Cuban that she fears

Since he is moving away from the refugee houses.

There are no horses in inner-city; and

The Hispanic cemetery cannot be found

To souls wanting to rest there.

"Este cerca de calle Alabama?"

He wonders,.

The rain stops.  The hammers and saws

peel their sounds from a roof.

And he notices her steps

Despite the stronger sounds; halts;

And glances behind him as shingles fall ahead,

While wanting her to completely leave him

And wanting her to come with him.

In Houston's summers,

At certain areas, shingles like

The god's shit falls from housetops

And the dung dries in the air,

Flattens, and ricochets to sidewalks.

In Houston Cubans pack

From refugee houses

And plan to fly away into America, and depart

Far from the Castilian hot-dog vender

Of Herman Park waiting for

The thirsty and hungered

And those ignorant of what they want

But know that they want something

And so come to buy from her

Who wants people to come to her

For more than the chips

Because the hotdogs are overpriced,

Who formulates

That she is unskilled

And that a computer course would answer it all;

Far from the Netherland psychologists who

Stares at her ebony reflection

In Rothko Chapel's dyed pool;

Apart from others, and no-one, all

Pulling alone for humanity to both

Come and go from their lives.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                           The Politics of Herb's Woman

Waitresses lightly frisbeeing out

Dishes of breakfasts

Catching glimpses of Colonel North's

Photos on the front sides

Of customers' papers and

Formulating judgments

Of rebel or martyr

From an appearance

And a few words that

Drifted in when the

Hands relaxed plates to table mats;

Farmers wishing the seeds

To suddenly open to be plucked up faster

So that they are not

The last ones laid in

By their hands;

Little "third-world" nations of people hoping

For the great debtor nation to continental-drift

To bankruptcy, painless and alone;

And nearly empty of thoughts--Herb's woman, Jeanie,

Behind the Ellison Building standing

With concrete drilling its stiffness

Through her soles.

There had been a time--

With face raised from her age-smelted pose

To the ever firm stories of that building--

That she would think of receiving

her paycheck  so she could

Go to K-Mart and have something.

But now years on top of each other,

Uncountable to her,

She continues guiding

The few of the masses of cars

That turn into the lot

Where to park: in winters

Conscious of the visibility

Of her cold breathing,

And summers with the scents

Of greased telephone poles

And sights of light gleaming off

Car windows, she thinks

Of buying old junk from garage sales

For her yard sales, with the same prices,

So as to recall the sounds of human voices

Other than her own.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                Brumfield

His job was a novitiate where there was no operator's

manual

With which to have faith in, and no rules

But to move with the dustmop pushed before him

Along the empty corridor, and then down a staircase

Where he could descend to more passive depths in

cleaning.

At home he would smell the odor of his bare feet

coming to him;

Would see the blue under his toe nail that looked like

marble;

And these would be dominant sensations

Though he would be vaguely aware of them.

Beneath his bended legs he would sweep his hand

To capture a fuller scent as his fingers would flick

To capture a fuller scent as his fingers would flick

His unshaven face.  Then in his only room where the

bare mattress

Was lain along with his leather jacket

And the dirty underwear cuddled around a clean

toilet--

Where the Rosary hung on a wall

And the guitar leaned in a corner--

he would do his push-ups.

Most of those early mornings some train

Would pour its breath to the weeds

At the edge of the tracks, losing them

In sound and mist of a voice

Screaming out, alone,

Through the cold and the living.

His arms would tremble

With the body weakening, and then demobilized, to the

floor

Before the count of fifty.

Through the fogged condensation

Of the upper corners to a window

He would glance up at the train--

Each car imagined as the girlfriend, Cindy,

Or the seminary, which he never

Grasped or rejected and so

They slipped away;

Or his mother, who with cancer

Began to close herself off to him--

Grasping one of those trains appearing at the time

With the familiarity of two strangers

Who recognized each other's desire to remain such.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                              Oracion A Traves De Gasshole

               (Patron Saint of Respiratory Therapy Workers)

Saturday.  All the same:

A silvery grey

Thin and undistinguishable

From skies to parking lot

In exact shadow; and he finds his car.

The lid, laced in rust,

By the turn of the key,

Parts the grey as it pulls up;

The grocery bag is dropped into the hole;

And the ground beef slaps down on the floor

Of the trunk as if a second slaughter,

Its grounded nerves convulsing it

A couple of inches nearer the oil stain.

That meat, in body, that last moment

After consciousness has severed itself;

Skin peeling under the fur, hidden,

But not from the last hot beams ahead

Of emerging dusk, becoming crisp

And then soaking up the hot blood, as the trachea,

With the last of the air drawing in,

begins to fold its walls; and he could imagine it

Like he could imagine, from unexact memories,

The woman, last night

At the hospital, whom he began to like--

her body pulling cell by cell

Apart before he had a chance

To finish the rescue with the hose

Descending the nostril as a rope,

and then flushing out mucus.

He gives the ground beef an air-born somersault to the

bag

And closes the lid that is connected to the vague

light bulb of the

trunk.

The Gasshole's reflection on the trunk lid

Is lank and curved; the appearance of his face

With its facial tip of the nose and its greased

Separation of hair like a wet muskrat in a metallic

reflection.

His face moving away, he sees an old Hispanic man

Who walks from the area of cars carrying two bags

Of groceries in an embrace that could be

For weighty children; he thinks "The senescent,

Carless, careless baws--turd!  A campesino!,"

And he envisions himself as that: having to pull out

the thorns

That pierce through his tennis shoes as he shovels

scattered cacti leaves from out of the back

Of the pickup to his animals;

And living in the dry ravine surrounded by houses made

of wood

That had been patted loosely together like adobes,

beside

The families of the kiln workers

Who with him eat out Land's blessings

And piss and shit out onto her graces,

But himself happily not knowing the language of the

Mexican people...

Himself not wanting to know the language

Of any people that his sister, Cindy, and college pal,

Dave Broom-Up-The-Butt

Echo.

He does not wish to think of them

Or the vaginas that are not his to put on

Or the illusive woman who would be sick with him

like a child lying on the sofa in fever and hoping

That in the shadows on the wall and the

Passing sounds that are concentrated on her mind

One will bring deliverance--only placing the

deliverance

On him and yet loving him for himself

Beyond that need. And while unlocking the door of his

car

He feels that the recreation in life is also a

routine:

A routine of sharing and parting,

And at the end one is grounded and tossed

Before the validity of his own

Perceptions is resolved.  But he is alive,

Now; and he will put away his groceries;

Read a chapter of his Biblia,

A cenotaph of the dead..

maybe a verse; think of forgetting mass

and mailing in his tithing

And to veg' himself away a few hours

Before he would have another night

Of throats, lungs and

The air of the masses.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                               Come

(Camp Wonderland for the Retarded, Lake of the Ozarks)

Grabbing the already read letter,

Slipping out hot and wet

From the bare mattress--

Like Sweet Pea's turds

Right before

His psychomotor seizures,

Only without a softness to stub myself

Into--stiff and hard I drop

From the cold rim of the bunk

(Even if I awaken

The idiots below).

With non-syllables and vowellessness

A pitch that is language enough

To keep this man, Jim,

From wherever

The unassimilated disappear

Howls "He does not want me here"

While its flesh of Jim beats the plastic urinal

On the walls barricading a pillowed head.

The joke is on him this time...

All over him for the next hours.

The letter's impression

Writes and rewrites in my mind:

Come, my sister calls to our father

Like Ronnie's suppositories butting back.

Only suppositories are meant to do so.

Come, she speaks to me,

And the shrink

Shall put in touch

All that he did to us.

Tripping over Keith's mattress

I step out in humid silence

And wipe my cheeks.

Two cabins, beside ours, simultaneously fry

Bugs in blue, electric lights.

Keith, a crippled rocking horse of autism,

Scrapes the feet of his vibrating body

To the bench where I sit.

Sit, Keith; go back to bed, Keith;

Go to the bathroom, Keith:

In this camp I shape the minutes of his life

To some acceptable pattern.

He rubs his hands together

As if trying to spark fire

For the inhabitants

Of his imaginary world.

Stop that, Keith, I say.  Sit, Keith.

Keith sits:  There is no coming out

For him after twenty years

This way,

Or perhaps for me.

The pale gas lamps are strewn around

A small area of limbs

In a corner of the sky--

All but patches are aflame

Like a roof of a tent around

The stakes, ready to break off

And fall.

Rock, Keith,

As the sun is stroked

So far into the lap of the night,

Suffocating and as good as gone.

The folding and unfolding

Of a crinkled letter into squares;

The imagining of the counselor

Of cabin four

And what a pulse would have created

If her head had drowsed

To my hand on the back of her seat

On our way here;

The general silent howling of "Come!"--

Keith does not cripple to this.

He has no sister that calls a stranger back

To erase and draw back

Them both.

He does not say "come!"

All hours.

He comes.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                               A Gentleman's Right

He must have thought

That there was some covenant of the old

That bound each to move around it

In a square orbit.

he was fifty now, so there

Must not have been any question:

Lessen the speed at the train tracks;

Stumble his car over their ribs;

Swerve closely to the drive

At a slower pace, and hope

That where men dodge the bumping

Of their tails from Parks

For a private club,

That one would come

Out from the doors, partnerless.

If not, he would have

To go around the block

Another time

Like other old fags before--

The railway crippling with

Its iron in each return raising,

Cracking up from the skin of the street;

Limbs of that bar's tree

Waving down (some

To the windshield), warning.

Thoughts that the energy of youth

Had some pivotal focus

Made each imagined man to him

Like a lollipop,

but the parks would not do:

There the man with the smashed fender

Might be obligated to 69

A winner without a face--

a drag race ending in the winner's backseat,

And on his tools which would rib in.

And inside that bar where women snuggle

Away their faces in equality,

And where men rotate hips on the dance floor

Like an earth's axes...this would not do:

For there were no friends to affect

Mutually and faggishly in embraces;

And the young and sensitive

Were Oriental and fonder

Of the cigarettes

They put in their faces

And the beers that suddenly appeared

Before them. This would not do:

Mouth-hugging the earth

On its bulge of life

Or moving to songs

Where the dances never end.

He was an old fag and must retain

A square orbit.

It, at least,

Was a gentleman's right

And in accordance with the

Manner of the fags.

The block was long.

In the shadows and oblique actualities

He felt its length.  His stomach tightened

In fear of the length.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                    Transitional Mendacities

No, the supremity of having been split off from

A larger entity by being spit out

From pussy lips while

Reeking pain and havoc

Like a living tongue pulled

From aperture and den

Is not sign enough

That he is meant

To be sustained

As an integral part of the world,

Unique and indispensable.

Thinking about how much longer

He will need to play out the day

That issue is not his, and never has been.

"The job was done"

He could say, later,

After the storm.

Hand-limp,

His broom dance sweeps

Upended under an empty park bench--

Dirt caught under

The tongues of his feet--

So his paycheck

Will come in the mail

And become bank figures

He can suck from

To keep he and his woman

Housed and fed, and well enough

To legally rape each other in embraces,

Forgetful of their lives.

The man has a son,

and stands nights

aching behind an assembly line,

Sleeping the days away

While his son goes to school.

The son thinks his father

Is thoughtless and dirty

And his mother a grease-bitch

For marrying him.

The son grows up

Between his college books,

And begins to put it together:

A society of men

Wanting to take a variety

Of stimulating produce--

Though some were more the makers

Than the takers;

The image of rightness

In a man putting his hormones

To the making of a company

In a family; a family

That needs a provider to survive;

A man honorable and trapped

And there are nights

He awakens, gagging at the

Sudden thought of a man

Next to him

Who had engaged his body

In a lower form of sharing.

And he wonders if embracing a world

Of ideas can be done

When all things cannot be believed;

If humanism is

Energy vented

To avoid futility;

And what grossness

He would have to justify next--

All on those nights

When self-perspectives

Are swept under in change.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                              Man of Coal

You knew it was coming:

Twenty-three years and the mine

Would notice you one time,

Photocopied.

A voice below bellows

Your name, Dave,

Into the settling air of coal dust.

After you shut off the engines

And descend beneath the dragline's skeletal

Nose which canopies like a skyscraper on

Its side in mid-air

You confront a face

You cannot see in the descending sun.  Shadow-still,

Enormous might engulfing over you

To the height of

The dragline's triple-tank wheels,

You see him--

The heels on his leather boots

Locked in the train-track grooves of dirt.

As he hands the notice to you

Its stiffness shakes

In your calloused hand.

You know that what is left of the day

Is becoming cold; and despite the smell

Of dirt there is a scent

Of watermelon in the damp air,

Although you do not know it as that smell

Or that there is a smell at all, really.

And yet a faintness of some half-knowledge

That touches its weight lightly in your mind

Drags itself into places you cannot touch.

Pulling out of his shadow

You think of how you might hand

This sheet to your wife

Like a child presenting to his mother

An award from school:

Your wife screaming laughter of relief

As she hugs the paper to her breast;

Or how your strong hand might sweat

As you pick up the receiver of the ringing phone,

Expecting that after saying "Hi"

That one of your college children's voices would end

The conversation there

For you to hand the vibrations

To your wife--but instead

That child

Congratulates you

For no longer destroying the land.

The noon hour whistle

Vibrates the walls

Of the hollow heavens

To the cab; the thermos-well

Of soup, sitting on your lap, you cannot see, but

You feel its stillness

Stagnating and absorbing

The contaminating minerals

Of the tin, walling in the contents;

And still you want to turn on the ignition

To finish out one more complete day

In the twenty-three years here

Of hard work.

The quandary then snaps, and you escape.

When out of the valley you enter the truck

And close the door--

The second time harder, and it latches.

You turn the key

And the truck bounces to the highway.

You stop at the sign;

Stop the motor while

Still on the dirt road;

But in the end turn left, again,

Home.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                               Maddog

(Or Death to the Barbie-Dame Image)

You said that it happened--that day you ran away

From a self you buried underneath the ice-packed snow,

All those cold years ago--when your last friend, then

Had put an end to the Gabriele whom I've never known.

This

Friend, like yourself a Barbie Dame, became totally

lame and

Withdrew out the door when you needed more hands to

keep

Your epileptic roommate

From smashing her head on the floor.

Gabriele, held together by the stitching of hate--

The plastic-eyed polar bear with the stiff arms

That the factory of the human race mutantly created--

This time it will be you who shall feel the wall of

artificial

Fur ripped from its threads, and your stuffing falling

out.

For a little maddog on top of four joints

Makes a person see the unsealed human fragments

That had been smoothed over in time

Like a million and some bone fractures

The milk of approval had swum into and covered over

for looks.

For me fragmenting came yesterday when I saw a welcome

mat

Iced over and yet I entered:

Your house was hot and your oven smelled of baking

meatloaf

Although you had said that you could not be

domesticated.

And then I saw your bottle of wine

Standing at attention before two glasses.

The pledge that bowing to anything or anyone was

wrong...that people

Were only needed to gain the most bare

Of physiological and psychological needs (pitstops to

being

human)--this was

gone.

Gone with your hair brushed and your skin smelling of

perfume

For some other man than me.

Come on Gabriele, the gal that used to chew tobacco

and

Spit it into an empty beer can...

The gal with the deep dark-ocean eyes...

The maddog gal, grip that wine glass now.

For Gabriele, you smile at everyone with meaning

You are as together as a feather when a hurricane is

in town,

And when the hangover's over and your own insight has

Fragmented you from a million pieces to a billion,

My stiff polar bear arms

Shall poke and not embrace.

I sit back at this party I am hosting--

My back firmly pushing against the back of my chair,

And my head and eyes cocked.

You all are the performers this time...

And Gabriele, you are the main attraction,

Attracted, after this night, to the omni-present sense

of your

Smashed self; and me--

Sensitive little me in no man's land

Where no man wanted to grasp me from...

And no woman--

Mended back together in thy survivalistic polar bear

image.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                              Becky's Demon

"Something happened.

i don't have those visions anymore."

And you believe with a mind like Papa believed with

When i told him i could see things

Clearly before they actually

Were.

His back and forth pacing from those same two

windows--

Which had been like a toy soldier powered on a human

battery

With a three minute's stand at one, and then the next,

Suddenly stopped.  For i was different.  You anointed

me

And cast me out.  i was alone.  You caused me to hide

Beside a pitchfork in the shadows of the corners of

the barn.

Yes.  Papa stopped.  His eyes moved.  i'd never seen

his eyes move

Before.

They stared down at me.  My child's eyes

Below--and he aimed his for them as a fisher for prey

in clear waters.

i backed up behind the pipe of the kitchen stove..

But with one stretch he reached his arm over

Like a bear's paw that in force comes down like a

Redwood.

my knee aching as if broken, i crutched up

From the other side of the room, beside the door....

Then, bending on my knees the next conscious second--

Feeling the blood of knee caps sticking to hay and

dirt--

Seeing the sun poke like sticks through rafters and

cobwebs--

Thinking i grabbed a hold on the sunlight which could

Lift me

Up like a rope; but grasping the pitchfork--

Raising the pitchfork--

Pitching the pitchfork--

After hearing the creaking and scraping of the opening

barn door

Plowing

The top soil of the dry earth.  Thinking:  he would

never kill

my shadowy corner.

II

And in this plush chair of the Bishop's office i sit a

decade

And a half later--a Salem witch of the west explaining

her

Dull, trembling self before three Mormon men bending

above

me.

But you don't understand me, as if anyone ever has.

i had psychic abilities.  But you don't want them, so

they're

Gone;

And i'm good.  i no longer believe, Bish'y, that I saw

Benson

Dying

And Yourself rising above the

Twelve.

But You're still scared of me.  You only want to

anoint me

And cast me out.  You only want me to hide in a barn,

And belong to shadows.

You call my abilities a possession of a demon.

Papa doubted i could see; and you see me as perverted.

But you do see that i see...

That i have something with some power.

You and the Missionaries lay your hands on me...

me who left my Protestant roots so as to be rooted in

your

Family.

You put your cold hands on my forehead,

Trying to vacuum out my psychic abilities,

Which i tell you are no longer--

Trying to take away my saying that i'm okay...

i'm good.  Speak to me.  Don't cast me out and leave.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

They wanted her to drop her thoughts

As naturally as her underpants fell, after they were

Over the hips, so the steaming winds of her daily

showers

Could clear her of encroaching stain

As she had been cleared away.

They were a function, ignorant of their thinking,

charting

Charts.  She felt she would have to ignore these

doctors and

Nurses in the mental ward.

She would have to ignore the pacing patients

Asking cigarettes from her.

The hall was rectangular.

Everyone moved rectangularly.

She would go to dreams of past realities

Where she was watching the shoppers' reflections

As they passed mall's little fountains--

Different types of people-reflections but all silvery

In the still of the waters,

Happy and part of the lives of the mall.

She would imagine herself sitting on a metal bench--

packages of her new clothing pulling on arms and chest

Like the recalling torpor that came more easily

To her lower legs; the weight of the mink that arched

Her aching shoulders more like a lady;

And a small sack of chocolate stars

Touching her upper neck--

Wondering what packages her fellow-creatures

Bought to be brought home and to whom

They brought them to.

And then, as the locks of solitude clicked in her

consciousness,

Came the wondering of where, oh where,

Did the Mall-Lady go?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                               Savior-Searcher In The Bible-Belt

I can see you in those dry moments, then

As clearly as if I were there: staring at the cracks

Of the white ceiling above the bedpost, wondering if

You will slip down three flights to the outer darkness

Like your ex-Mormon roommate, here.  Your visual mind,

Against your will, probably thinks about your squirm

That a few moments ago squirmed you of your juice,

Wiggled her skirt back on, resurfaced the lip-spit

Crackup in her concrete of makeup, and wordless,

Walked like a princess out the door.

As the last of the ecstatic vibrations tides you in

the rear

You arise from the raft of the mattress.

Then you cover up your nakedness,

And move to the light of the living room.

And then I actually see you, Don, in the hour that you

had told

Me to step back in.  You are bending over the

end-table stained

In the blood of wine.  Sunlight, stripped silver from

the grey

Clouds, pours through the window to the table.

To your right a nine of swords card of a man pierced

in the

Back gleams as it walls the card of your future

lovers.,

And the redness of Doctrines and Covenants to the far

left of

That table also looks pure in the light.

You do not see me.  Your mind is racked in screwing

the pack

For an answer.  You turn another Tarot Card

In the order your destiny is to be read.

Your sad eyes look up

And your languid voice says that you are late

For your meeting with the local Bishop...

A meeting to straighten up your fucking life.

I laugh!  In bitterness that shakes my intestines, I

laugh!

Another hillbilly man

Has lifted his head above the rest--a foot up from the

jug--

And has blown his breath into the air

Which 'naps another young and fragmented one

To the call of being holy.

But before you arise

You turn the gleaming card of number four--

Your eyes in a more motionless trance than before.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                               New England Washing

        (Mental Account, Some day of Gorbechev, 1987)

Another hour.

There is no circulation

Beneath the steering wheel for my feet.

Outside myself

There is the last of the sun at dusk

But like the conquering Hsuing-Nu

Pushing themselves beyond a

Great Wall and through an eternal

Gathering, it is hardly felt.

There is nothing great to trouble me

And nothing substantial descends on my senses,

Giving me thoughts other than the fact I'm thinking

nothing:

Only

A flock of birds in the corner of my left eye

Blend down with the grey skies

As if the fence barricading

The farm land does not pertain to them;

Thoughts of the center line

And not going over it.

Days of Gorbechev, the radio speaks of,

But not his nights--where, one time

He may have smashed

A big, red cigarette in an ashtray

With an action stiff and slow;

And as he stood up the mattress of his bed may have

Raised to touch his rear, again,

Like a quick and soothing give-me-five handshake;

And opening a window of the embassy

To escape the stuffy dryness

Of electric heat to his suite,

He may have let the cool American air

Attack him with the smells and sights

Of its diplomatic car exhausts,

Grey and orange from street lamps

And store lights...and how

The nation breathed for once as it moved.

The third: road; cows, like islanders;

Multi-tinted bladed fields broken by acres

Of forests and pastures; a black-sun scene with

Car lights; a vision blurred and pebbled

Through the windshield--

A truck passes my pinto;

Muddy water slapping its face;

Its stick eyes smoothing it

To a duller complexion.

It isn't yet Christmas

And I am going home.

My parents one day drooped

In front of all, and were old--

We should be having much to say...

I, thinking like them, with

The mind of the world,

And us smiling unhappily

And speaking none of that:

But a lot will be said.

I am a bum.

One of their hearts shall give in

And their marriage will be a farce...

Even in car accidents the married

Die separately.  And then the widowed

Mother, smoking the cigars of her husband,

And coughing them as the husband had done

But in the apartment of the son, might

Visit away her life:  I would

Bring her there, thanking God for a reason

Not to try hiding all of me in some pussy

As in daylight the main part

Goes into underwear.

This is their town

Far from trays with saucers

And plates and spoons and forks

(Sometimes hardened in scalloped potatoes

Or bent) and knives and glasses

(Glasses sometime with folded bread inside)...

But forever coming down the belt for the

Dumping and washing...the trays that disappear

In a square hole and come out clean

Will continue regardless if I am there.

Men fuck virgins; a child-worker

Is born and all is holy.

There is nothing great to trouble me:

The rains that drop and drift next

To streets in gutters, take away

Smashed Pepsi cups and beer cans

Without intent, bound God knows where,

But out of sight.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

          The San Franciscan's Night Meditations

When I am at a dead-lock

In your rear and the

language of my body

Will not come from

The third element of the soul,

What am I to say?--

'ALL BUT ONE DEAD:

Mexican immigrants celebrating the

Stowing away on a 120 degree boxcar

With urine in their stomachs,

Acknowledging capitalistic thirsts...

Sigue sobre pagina"..

Double hubble

The peso is in trouble

And to Mars

America plans

Jumping over the moon,

And all this has disturbed me!"

The night is full of impulses

To live and to run and seep heavily

Into its dark robes of

Silence and morbid rightness;

And as I, again, try to thrust on dryly--

A log without a river traveling it

To the product of lumber--

and hope to create love in

The smackings of night,

Like anyone else, I know that soon

I am to apologize for lack

Of an ejaculation,

And will promise to have a counselor

Tame me to the exclusion of

All but work and lust.

Sounds of people

Kicking around the

Night of early morning

Beneath my lover's window;

And I withdraw under the sheet,

lying flat with the dead moonlight.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

             The Philosophy Of Rita And Herb

Staring fixed at the rows

Of flowered

Wallpaper a pale gray

In the dark efficiency--

The three walls still absent

To her consciousness

As a shadow of silver lightning

Fades the greyness

Of one portion in her view--

The "schitzophrenic" lifts

up a cigarette hidden behind

An ashtray and the flat ground

Of ashes on the table, which

Skid and resurface with her

Hot breathing.  She thinks they are

Continents drifting, and herself

Upon them.

From feeling stiff and pushed under--

Numb to the point of a corpse--

With insecurity enough not to remember,

Even, her ABC's, Rita runs into the night

Where outside of a window

She blesses the workers making

Colonial bread.

An old man in a cowboy hat, Herb,

Is saddled on the wooden railing of a porch

To an apartment complex: seated there beside a

remembrance

Of a young woman like Rita.

And in the spitting fumes; bad-muffler sounds;

The rocking phallicism in radio music of passing cars,

He feels he has to move or die

And gets down

To his pickup.

And Rita, upon dawn and upon the end of rain,

Walks the streets again after tiring,

Ready to go back and confront the curfew-conscious

Group home, and the "zero" on her record full of

Zeros.  She worries about carrying in her womb

A mini-Herb with scabs of grey hair

And little pot-holes in his tiny face,

Though she is still a virgin.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                               Estivation

Weekends in Tranquility Park--

With the downtown buildings, hallways of giants

clustered,

Exhaling the coolness echoed

From the rectangular mouths of doors

Opened and closed by cityers--

A coolness came over my thoughts

The way lack of wind contains

The hastening of Yosemite's flames.

There, diurnal and punctual, she crossed

That small area of grass, fountains, and cement

Which were generally buffeted more fully by sun and

adjacent

Sounds, moving the park more than Bush and Dukakis'

Presence.  "WALK" was always lit when la chica

Approached the street, carrying her library books.

When would she, artificial and pneumatic,

Who like Houston's miniature stop-lights

While going to work, veer my movements

To slide off a plane ticket and be led

Through and from burning Amazons

And green-house climactic changes--

Through wasted ozone and my own depleted life--

The breath of her mouth my only nourishment.

Masking tape

From hurricane threats

Remains at the edges of windowpanes;

Palm trees, below, are hybrid to cement;

Thuc Nguyen's business report figures

Blend and bury themselves as distant sounds;

The staff meeting and this cigarette industry are

gone.

Slid off a plane ticket caught in life's winds

Restless     No friends for real

All wanting something from me

The outside world has nothing

Except life-ending amusements of

Sex to escape void

The dead have some solidity of truth

About what happens after life

Even if they are not aware of it,

And the rest breathe in fables

Everything is surely unchanged in

Springfield, Mo., where I was raised,

But none of it is mine

Nothing is ours--humanity drifts along

And intersects briefly in alliances      My friends

Are co-workers whom I must expire

My life with civilly

As we light cigarettes

And bitch of no new raises

When would she pull on my arm

Tugging me thoroughly into breaking glass

Of the 12th floor conference room

To fall, putting me out violently,

When I can no longer dream

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                               Mid-West Hymn of Aten

Aten, where it is throned on the television beneath

the window,

Sees above and below and says nothing:

It enjoys the woman secretary and the road constructor

Who from opposite shifts of the sun

Come to it, the cat;

Follow the roaming in its mansion;

Pensively laugh as it clings to hundred dollar drapes;

Feed it holiday popcorn on the throne;

And close the drapes that the cat, Aten

Had opened by its tugging,

And will open again:

Opening below

     Where the woman, statue of her liberty

     Wedged in a mud layered hill of snow

     Ankle-thrusts

     The tilt of her body after a moment of standing

still:

     Face looking in the trash receptacle that her

flabby

     Breasts rest on the rim of and point toward; head

bowed

     To the tin; And mind distinguishing between good

and

     Bad trash.  Her hands raise from the snow-blended

     Mixture to push back the hair that was intimate

with trash.

     She raises her head and glances up at the sky

that

     She had noticed a few seconds earlier; and

wonders

     Of the person who would throw away a nightgown

     And wilted plants, dented but unopened cat food,

     And scattered baby pictures--

     But the cold wind pushes further into her rashed

cheeks;

     And she drops the gown before she can mentally

conceptualize

     The woman's possible image  She digs further

and...

And opening Above where

Two crossing jet

Had each made an element

Of a cross in the skies---

A third, now, and the

Heavens appear to play

Tick-tack-toe with their bad arts,

Or do not know how to push out caulk neatly

When hoping to seal out the heavens.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                               McConico

Through the hazy waters

Of his hot bath, looking, he thought

That his woman's pubic hairs

Should naturally have come out

More permed like his,

Regardless of her color.

The door being shut and locked

With a rifle in front--still he heard

From the living room a forum of senators'

Televised voices discussing laws of limits

In openness and freedoms

And ramifications.  He did not understand--

As the mirrors steamed, dripped

Down from the air conditioning's touch, and resteamed

When it shut off;

And when he wondered what home owners

Had used the bathtub before

And what disease might be

Dropping from the cracks around the faucet--that

The fags would push down the American way of life.

He did not argue that if they were isolated

From the mainstream, their liquids might get off on

any

Products as they worked for the cost of their

isolation

In, for example, a barren region of Texas;

And that the isolated would, by the testing of the

Virus, be proven witches

So there would not have to be witch hunts--

No, he just felt their destruction.

And he thought of his woman

In the bedroom, waiting, and became

Forgetful of anything

But the desire to have her.

They had that freedom.  The American constitution

Said so---freedom to live and breathe

And fuck and fuck..

Fuck so hard that the penis would

Knive through the condom

And spray-paint the man's name

On the dull walls of the vagina.

They had that freedom--those inalienable rights--

Her to be banged and to squeal

To her friends that she was in love

And him to white pussy

And a gal that he could call his own...

His woman.  And if the initial M got ready

To graffito-crawl his way out--

A problem for the rest of their years---

She could erase it, not remembering it

With any more significance than

Having clipped a broken end

Of a fingernail.  She had that right.

Her man said so, and so said

The American constitution.

His shift in Toastmaster

Had for that day ended,

And so now he could rest in waters;

Focus on the bubbles that rose

When he farted; and let the memories

Of the entire day be released to rise and fall

Like the steam.

He would have to scrub himself

Good before going to his woman:

She understood money

With its charm of a cocaine high--

Although the need for dominance

And the breaking of rules

Made her love him

Who still did not supply her with all of her needs--

But the composite smell of the factory and the drugs

That he sold after each shift

Would lessen the good feelings that made

That understanding.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                              Beauty Shop Motif

Taking the boat two hundred miles

With her Ozark loving husband

Not having the key

And why I don't use

The hair dye she prescribed--

The one I had bought from

Her last time--

I say, "Yes, Honey"

And watch her lips through the mirror speed on.

My back aches in the chair stiff as a board.

Have I gotten as old as this?

Have I started saying, "Yes, Honey?"

Conscious of slight pains and discomforts--

Words as silent racing of lips.

Another shampoo is ground harder

In the grey hair of my scalp.

The long gray weeds that grow out of it

Will be chopped off another two inches more

Than what I asked her to do.

In a room of old women, like me,

Who let the buzz of dryers

And loud beautician speakers

Keep their minds active from remembering,

My bored and wayward eyes

See in the mirror

(Now seated in a once empty chair next to mine)

A young one:

Her fidgeting body willfully captivated;

Hair held high and hostage;

Curlers stiffly tightened;

Bulges diluvial by Cylenderic Bottle

Held ungodly above her head

And squeezed by gentle but firm hands

Of a male beautician--

And I remember that the noxious liquid

Dribbles under Cotton Crowns

Around one's head

As the eyes water from the sting

Of this thing called love.

Somehow I want to warn her

Although she may not be a stranger

To being whitewashed

In a man's liquids

And the click-of-the heels logic

Of women, as if

One's whole damaged life

Can be bounced from a mirror

In and to all women

Like an SOS.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                              Sculpting of Winds

It was as if certain people came in.  Those disliked

were

Disregarded and the rest kind of circled in and out

But at the time in and a small period out were

associated with

And considered part of that person's reality by

himself

The way a cat brushes against certain familiarities

Agreeable enough as it goes for its meal,

And so I befriended places.

Saltillo in Mexican mountains when the land shivers in

shadow

And the sun stretches through the air and beyond it

With an intent to overpower what is closer to man--

The River-walk and the Alamo and between both where

A Philipino in green shorts eats the grass

Where sidewalk and road intersect.  There is a city

where I

Thought I could find myself less lonely,

And so I have returned home.  Snow embraces

Springfield's earth to its death.

Under the sounds of the rolling drips of water in the

gutter

I am frozen, though fingers tearing apart the wet

leaves

I pulled off from a tree, wishing they had been

Dry to grind and become the physical appearance of the

wind.

Cracked and peeled back from a boot a portion

Of the snow is removed but refreezes more heavily

On one area of the dead.  I stand as an outsider

Imagining myself to allow a job section of today's

newspaper

To become the thoughts that crash along in the mind of

the wind.

I need money but cannot find anything worth doing.

To change from a person to a commercial function to

eat...this..

This day I shall sleep away

As the night.  In Springfield, Mo.

The Great God may also await for his eviction.

Two hundred Indians in Houston bow down to Krishna as

the gates

Men lock around him are opened and closed.

But in Springfield he probably awaits,

His red-sock feet on his sofa

As the furnace blows

The Soviet flag on the wall before his feet.

His walls may have many flags,

And his mind thoughts of glasnost and communism

Intermixed.. impractical thoughts

He must sacrifice so that

He can exist together more easily

With the community of the dead,

Unalone.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                               Post-Annulment

Afferent, the city bus cramps to the curb and brakes

through

Solipsistic muteness with an exhaltation startled and

choking

[People are play-things in one's reality!  One must

look

Into other eyes or he'll be reminded that he is a user

too]

As the sun-god, Aten, blazes upon the terminal's

Scraped concrete--its graven image--

Making the place an Amarna,

The shelved rows of the poor men

Hear the sound humbly grazing

Through whispered reverence over

The glass-speckled pavement

In a gradual dying echo,

A cigarette succumbs to the voice as

Carrion brought to life; all the tattered people

awaken;

And a man spits toward the tire of the bus

But misses.

[Religion is a lie!  Everything is a lie!]

And as he watches his own spit vanish

From the hard crest of the world,

And silently scrapes his lunch pail against

A corner of a metallic bench as if expecting the pale

To bleed...and hoping it would bleed...

He tries to remember the angles

He and his wife stood to project

The intermingled shadows that both

Had labeled as their marriage.

[Marriage, that sanctified legal rape, fosters

The child-man to be a destined societal function

As he grows up in the family unit]

He enters the second bus:

Its coolness sedating the skin that

Overlaps his troubled mind.

His thoughts pull together

Like the light, cool flow of the air conditioning.

He feels a little pacified

[Come to thyself, human, the refuge from lies!]

He knows the shadow's intangible depth:

Its vastness having overpowered him these months

Until he could not reach the logic that told him

To find himself outside its barriers.

As he stares out of the window

he wonders why she has left.

How could she have left without indication

When he has remained angled toward work

So that he and his wife can stay alive?

In the bus window he sees his diaphanous face--the

windows

Of the Hilton, where he has a job in maintenance,

Piercing solidly through its head.  He rings the bell

The idea of her not home, and legally annulled

From his life--her small crotch not tightened to his

Desperate thrusts--makes him feel sick.

He gets down from the bus.

He goes to work.

He suddenly knows that he is not in love.