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You wake up earlier; make a beaker of Newcoff to the sound of Dragnell Counter-Lasers shutting down for the night. A Re-uptake Visual Vapor & Precipitate Port Leakage Control near the foundation of the AFA instillation sounding like glass beads crunched between nightmarish giant jaws from diurnal dreams. You bring into your tertiary AI mind window the Mandelbrot [Resite-org-run<> Mandelbrot, Benoit B., 1979 experiment. Annals: NY Academy of Sciences 357 (1980) 249 – 259. Fractal aspects of the iteration of z ® l z(1– z) for complex l and z.] Set, to distract yourself from the grinding. The nightmare giant.

‘I love the smell of Newcoff in the morning.’

...................................

"Blue Soothes."

Warren Border walked up to the dirty picture window, his coffee in hand. She went on.

"When that Blueman play horn... It get me all straighten out."

Through the streaks he could see a tall-masted sailboat out early this morning. It was green with orange sails; far out. A thought came: ‘$50,000".

"Go ahead, baby, aks me what happen next...how Blue do...when he so far out nobody listen no more but me. That’s why he gonna come an take me out a’here. I understanh...the manh. Those other niggers can’t listen the way I do. They – don’t – hear – shit. I said Blue gonna take me out..."

The coffee cup moved out of the way. "I’m so sorry for them."

"What’s that honey?"

"Your friends, Trashina. I’m sorry they can’t hear shit. It’s such a joyous sound!" His eyes weren’t listening to him, a blonde figure in a white bikini was on deck now.

"What, baby?"

"It’s such a joyful sound." A large man had joined the woman in the swimsuit.

"You damn straight!"

"...your 10:00 news and weather from KSNJ, 100.5 FM Stereo, and here’s Dr. Susan with that info-matic, gyro-matic, on the spot with what she’s got, SUPER velvet-toned report-o-matic, frantic-lookin’-fine ten o’ clock news spot time, and your Saturday morning weather. You’re looking so good this morning Dr. Sue...Well thank you Morning Maniac, KSNJ’s own Michael – Atila the Honey -- of New Jersey’s only all- jazz station – Money! Mr. Money, how was your big thing last night?..."Oh, Dr. Sue, I took Number One Woman to the Mermaid Lounge, and we were actually able to get in to catch Blue Apple’s last two sets: man, he...

"They talkin ’bout Blue! hey Warn...on your radio..."

There was a car pulling up in the deserted parking lot out front. He could look down from his second storey living room picture window and see the formerly empty, rubble-strewn lot, between him and the stunningly bright aquamarine waters of Barnegat Bay. He stopped his mouth with the coffee mug.

Warren had his own hopes and dreams, the fulfillment of which were now in Blue’s hands, literally. The jazzman jaunted up the ragged steps of Warren’s borderline-white trash neighborhood six-plex, with the copy of a successful 1992 Julliard scholarship applicaton he’d made for Warren. It’s magic red-carpet rhetoric was available, for a price, of course.

The way out of the short man’s ghetto of Seaside Heights, for the tough-minded, intense, coffee-drinking, unpublished writer, was North; up the bridge of coast a goodly way. Up North to the workshops of P.A.C.T-- Provincetown Arts Concepts Training. The air around him was thick now with Java-laced, low-instinct, hypothalamic breathing. Blue knocked on his door...

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Internal Rate of Return

Caution: Objects in Mirror

poetry like you~if no~don't I?

more you pleases prose perhaps:

that which doesn't end and begin

in a tendency like poems

I have in a dawn yard,

an early book I never finish;

sequel to the seventeen year locust,

cicada of the U.S. that has in the North

a life of seventeen years and in the South

thirteen years, of which most is spent

underground as a nymph and only

a few weeks as a winged adult.

Poem Found in the Weeds by

A Curve in Jersey

Away from the teeth

You drag your lips,

Towards eternity -

Some night I never entered;

A skull

Floating in flesh

Corroded by the blackness

In the glass.

Looking at you

I smell the flash

Inside my cab

Where all the broken plastic

Knobs, wires, gauges, nervous wires still

Are concealed

At seventy-five miles an hour

Like weeds,

Yet exposed to the landscape

Off of the one-sided road

Of a photograph we call world.

Can we? Why can't we

See behind the lens

Like you

And your distanced

Dancing kiss?

[photograph insert here]

________________

Sidewalk Sounds

Have we even gotten rid of all the lawyers yet?

So tell me what to do about these ripe street jazzers,

Shining their bad side; hurt, bruised bluish from a flawing fall -

Down inside after-school fences of the rich

Memories on a bothered Alabama lawn;

Hurled adults through night-dead staid yards are split open

Children when they hit empty:

Cases in some Manhattan alley.

Pungent wailing, tar-tattered pulp yearning for a respectable

Suburban fridge.

Cryogenic rhythms pour the tempest from a teapot;

Complicated saxman playing symbols with his sandals.

My own case opened up for your consideration

In a padded chair I sift through pre-Miami

Vice Miles Davis, muted, for the hours you

Brought here

Once: whispy

Faded chalk words

On a blank school board.

Night Wall

the switch reaches for me,

a filthy trigger.

light raptures....turned off = "a" = 0

light ruptures....turned on = "u" = 1

memories seep through

like blood

spilled from the camera-

half of the hourglass;

I recede.

and the song is "Greensleeves"

that the soldiers sing

marching through the door-lips

into the nightmare gnashing

of new nudity -

then new air nudity - [no strophe break here]

While their steel pleads: "home!..."

Beau geste

Dalmatian

My eyes are hot -

Not from seeing, but the scene:

Alarm inside this helmet

Sound convulsing to displace me;

Even the callous breeze is shouted down;

Pouring over Munch's accelerating vision in desperate hours:

Nothing to put out the flame.

You're fired! is an expression of unknown malaise;

Now the carefully painted trompe l'oeil pealing

Affection of wives comes off the walls;

Horrid revelation:

Nor stands a wall behind!

Except the near one of jagged nausea

That comes from the spider's space between two dictionaries

On some third-grader's shelf.

Below, sirens riot at the fiery heaps;

Shaking poets throw their cooling booze with swaggering aim

In the wrong direction:

Spray those liquors at the red hot bus seat

That startles Sartre, a kindled spirit, civil servant,

Classic, steady firemen all; pick-ax punctuators.

All of me

Inside thirty-seven floors

I try and climb the greased brass pole higher in

Clever suspenders. posed and clutching at myself like a telepath, [no break here]

But the levels flip past, baroque pages raped by the elementary.

Standing in missing waves

Now lost audio invades a cranium carved out by echoes,

Feed-back images interpose a scratching

Early Toscanni Wagner Ring Cycle

Breaking intervals to bits, bouncing needle

Rusty jerk tin stereoscope of my old self-portrait;

Burroughs' involuntary strobelight hands can't hold my splices -

He is roaring in ozone-smoke, circuit-blinding, clock-faced footlights:

"Pain...can...be...neutralized!"

High up on a cliff, the vatic response as I fall through is

A slow-moving slate of grey clouds behind

Three distant silhouettes, firing-squad figures:

Shouldering trombones -

Numb Götterdämmerung: no golden tones; but slush pump suck

In the players.

Splices spinning to the realization as Klaus Kinski

Drops

A noiseless saber on an amber mosaic of Aztec [no strophe break]

Insects

Microcosm of a sticky hardening stuff oozing from a U of M

Window

Once gentle grammar life, fine lace, now acid-stain horror inside

People

Whose berserk carnival ride hell-ucinations stun

Their lifeless parade I

See in the crowd

Mutant crows micturate in formations along Fifth Avenue

Curb in a trance, channel for the grateful red engines;

Raising a beating, yellowed vortex,

The jungle arrives violently,

For a while

Spiders with the wrong heads - of historic friends -

Hold a net for the fire fighter;

But even the doorman is gone now...

Looking down again, only spreading orange and blue shadows

Of flame.

The flapping white coats rustle

To a blazing barn I'm trying to save.

Riderless schizophrenics

Have frozen in their stalls;

Preempting motion on either side,

Far beyond the feathery hoots of harlequin-sophomoric Psch-owl-o-jests,

Trying to hypnotize Sulfuric Acid in a paper cup.

Still moving on the beach,

The drum inside and slow thighs;

Once supercilious colorful peregrinations of the fireman now reduced

To Voodoo charms

Can't drive away these flaming shores.

And sunward, stranded, futile warriors gobble

Campbell's Soup can wrappings. Naked backs in the din.

His last headline glimpse is of a crackling hemisphere

In the Grand Central Businessman's Restaurant,

Staring through an empty eye,

Closing early in the middle of a dark forest:

Fish scream the only clue, quietly fireproof in streams

Of consciousness;

With the diner alone at his table

Sunken-cheeks and bloated, burn-black belly,

In smoldering rags, lovingly seasoning a Wharhol/Klee filet.

Off...somewhere, the firehouse Dalmatian barks in a friendly way.

Of Symphonies and Breakfast Dishes

I will come and work your farm in dentures

Make scenes in the Stockhausen morning naked

Shout at the dusty dog who likes to play around that pick-up full of bean

sprouts and Telemann

Listen for the errant Lohengrin hidden away in your woods

that contain a dream of enfabled Venice

You lost to the Trojan stewardesses.

Sing Die Winterreise to myself and a mannequin-quiet cornfield,

distant clouds scattering in the sky within like pages.

Be your introducing broker when you wish to speculate in precious metal flutes

in cowgirl pork-belly bags

You're resonating between.

During the night,

Watch 72nd Street subway riders disembark in your sink

full of symphonies and breakfast dishes.

Walkup

Walking away on winter sparkles, the three a.m. sidewalk;

Looking down, seeing the same stars I imagine one black mother in her

Bed stares up at. Fancy ceiling;

Galileo of her children's future

-- when a big red storybook bus blows down Lake Street empty

As Jonah's Whale;

Transporting nothing but light.

Past white flakes, frozen and immobile, I'm rising up into it; [no break here]

So far away it looks like darkness.

Imprimatur

Press the stamp

Like a Band-Aid

On these envelope lips

Some man or message

Conserves itself inside

The silent healing journey

Internal Rate of Return

I saw all France peeking

At you for a moment

In 1974

Trains you have known,

On musical trains I caught then:

A sleeping, young girl had her

Tennis shoe toes planted in my lap.

Years further on I am the park;

I am Riverside Park and I see you

Come into the marina, a misty wooden figurehead.

Slow moving trains bring the best wives to sea;

To keep track of its bums in their beauty;

Push them gently on deck into the spray and

Watch them fly away, though frankly

I can't tell if they're just blown away or what -

Dope pushers selling eternity nearby even stop to watch;

They honestly love a crowd, a circus, cotton candy especial'

But they have to steal a clown or two or it's no fun.

I'm sorry, I want to steal you too -

I can't stop my grass from growing either.

Your big city is a tent

I never put up today,

Always paying rent in jam tomorrow;

And "summer is icumen in."

The Library

When all the hookers on Broadway carry candles laughing

At special men who walk around

Inside the wax and wick of some few small conversations you forgot;

Our happy brick offspring escaping into pavement,

You'll come back and I'll be Paris;

Give you rock'n'roll Thunderbird for underwear,

"The thing with feathers."

Bob Dylan smithy to fix those flattened tires.

Then I'll bring the floor up as the poetry well lit

By this hanging New York chandelier

Becomes heavy with colors

Marrying your oils in bursting ribbons;

Though a holiday need not be inflated

For those who get up mornings jogging,

And hide their monsters under a sleeping poet -

The juggernaut: Hamlet.

No nunnery, Ophelia,

Get thee to a library. Go!