Washington Square

I am a revolutionary

alive and now in the city of borrowers,

absolute master of library arts;

a giant warring sloth with armor plating turning pages,

changeling bounder with moves

as sudden as reality showing

up in stranger places.

I, too, see the evidence.

soldiers in little hamlets -

blondes with new smiles seem likely

to know where I've been by the uniform they wear.

in a healthy not-New-York Tootsie Roll face I also read

camouflage affect hiding the friendly fire,

sometimes forcing Sisyphus' surrender with red Camus flag;

they kiss themselves through me.

I am the brindle cat of 9th Street, [N.S.B.H.]

guerilla Wallace in Wonderland war room;

Joan of Arch counters my Xeroxed strategies

from her wire-windowed room

chased around corners by giant metal whistles on wheels,

too many histrionic police inside

flopping, babbling, bobbling!

Restrained by their plastic, Glock, semi-auto microphones pressing at my medals,

I try some sort of response

But all that comes out is:

overdue to your categorizing streets,

engaged in mornings filled with CPAs hovering over your Dewey decimals,

taxonomy's tenderness sheltered by: can't see the forest for the no trees falling.

"ba-bye..."

"are you sure you want to do this?"

"red motorcycles and green sailboats..."

a fifth column of people and cars continue going up and down

with all the gunpowder of a dog-eared old history text with evil Indians pictures

written in a language you did not specify in your exegesis

but giving me unequivocally the monumental intonation of

forever

rounded

Washington Square:

American Revolution

Gem In Eye

Go and find the night sugar

On indigo thin Brazilian wings.

Dark warm blood hum he needs -

Of spinal chord guitar strum.

The plangent sweet blossom moon,

A calling crystalline tinkling;

His twin up there darts too

In disingenuous clever orbits

Above your ward's dayroom.

The Opening

-- for Mayo

In these empty apartments

I have walked past the spot

and there [N.S.B.H.]

on the wooden ground where we touched

Ears are growing up into the room like vegetable garden cluster,

And I remember your sound.

Yes, and while I watch alone, I see the dirt

and ancient putridity

and panic and cockroaches draw back, from

our seminal flesh all larger and lush.

And, while I watch alone, the circle passes through me

ever wider from the opening

Until the very walls are cleansed down to the horizon;

The snapshots of this naïve hedonist manifesto

of present

Giving way to the flowing reality

that exists at the center:

A promise.

And the city built of playing card photographs falls;

prepositional surfaces - of, to, with, by -

pornographies that they are, fall

from our flesh.

Now Lou Rawls sleeps on the floors in my empty apartments [no break here]

Dreaming that if everything were blue, there would be no blue,

"or China."

Ginsberg was right, the key is in the window in the West End Bar;

For I have learned the secret to the mystery of life - and that is,

It simply wants to see itself.

225 T.I.F.K.: From the Aria of Captain Ho Shant in

key: » c# °

He is a migrant worker;

Picks the fruit of the Zoloft tree

Up and down the coast of Urffonng.

As he sat up in my bed,

Clouds drifting through the room

Created an orienting response.

Memory came... "While they were

Draining out the hypno-algor drug

From my veins; after my incarceration trance code

Punishment, a little tin drum fell out

Of space at my feet

With your picture on the taut skin."

The Cold Feet

When you veer right, abandoning the main road in an almost [N.S.B.H.]

involuntary caprice, sharp grey gravel grumbling

A warning under your hardly new tyres; you wonder why when

the wedding party awaits you even now as, in the mirror,

Unfamiliar foliage obscures a way out. You pull the sleeve

of your tux to check your watch... It’s missing – but you

Could not have forgotten it on this day of days! But what? A tattoo

where the watch should be – two words in purple, blue and red

Indelible ink: GET OUT! Those jokers from your black-out bachelors’

party. How long were you unconscious? "Hey, there’s still time to

Get out of this, Richard," was rather overdone already without the tattoo;

yet why wasn’t it there this morning in the too hungover numb to notice,

Cold shivering shower? How dark it is suddenly. The road is just

a dissemblage of tall grass between (such odd-looking) trees. Better slow – Brakes. Something wrong with – can’t steer either! Car moving like it

has its own mind – or minds! Preposterous?! Just slippery rut

In the ground. Yeah, that’s... but can’t stop... Music, voices? The

radio must have been jarred on...newscaster saying...what? "The freak

Fatal accident this morning at Bride’s Lake in..." Click.

You can see water down below, up ahead, too close, GET OUT! Doors, won...

MS Found in a Grotto

So I’m selling arcane volumes of spurious lore in a little push-cart at Redundant Beach to pay for a timedrug habit when Xuzuqu, Queen of the Ray That Bestows Mysteries, appears and purchases my only copy – finger interface chips only slightly worn - of Blood On The Moon, in first edition holotext; but it’s just a ploy. She wants something else; I can see that alright.

I reach for her credit ribbon, why doesn’t she just hand me the payment instead of holding it out just beyond reach – AAHCK! The Xzuquean wrist coma grab...should have seen...that one... ...going...

Floating where (five-eyed green Koozqua woman floats by on a lit-up silver divan; thought they only mythology) blackness the koan, one hand clapping, disembodied, hovers nearby, gone now) ...something up ahead...it sounds like a waterfall...light...sky...Drexian calfbirds above me...tropical Earth heat...dusty rocky ground.

Splash that wakes me like Endymion found on a river like

Behold, she waits there: mirabile

Dictu! With her hand on a book.

Blood On The Moon, waves

My Blood On The Moon:

My Queen – Xuzuqu!

Poem No. SSP 3245B-R18 For The Lost U.U.?

I'm going, goodbye, here is a rose to wear on your wrist at the cotillion.

Tomorrow, wriggle it down your erudite fingers in front of the Balzac dressing mirror

Through which I shall always see you & I drinking absinthe from the ancient and heavy glass goblets

We bought that night in Boston. Held each other in a moment before the library

In the storm.

In a black and white dream, Chirico buildings supplant the Aspen Music Tent

Burning like an old treasure parchment. A map of Edinburgh Fringe the doctor snatched from me

On Neptune ward, dressed in tennis clothes, looking like a young H.P. Lovecraft,

To impress the nurse in the morning. She distrackted (sic) too much by him for medication time at

"C# diminished" in the afternoon.

I've a tattoo of the Wabasha Bar here on my filthy chest like a scary man with a snub-nose.

In Trombone Alley, Edna St. Vincent Millay makes her lovely way and, she too, powerfully armed,

Down to E. Bishop pouring poems on the river....turn to sails; while I concatenate a larger body Of spasms, hoping she'll sing inside the hollow of my canvas and poles; James Mason's Bayreuth Titanic hypobass of 1/220 millionth beat per second -- monolithic deep dream of love-death in oil slick arabesques surfacing midst glints on Krafft-Ebing's thanatosis tide.

The doppelgnger: 2/3s water, 2/3s wine, 2/3s deck chair, I'm William Wilson chasing Ulalume

Around that nightclub in Belmar, New Jersey, like the Marx Brothers, all white with sea moonlight Showing through the crack;

Where the Broadway girls are so glamorous,

And Ulalume (Usher?) remains by a worn, wood bar there so I can buy.

Her sedatives are British and sere.

Who?..there's a small ‘lectric ‘larm clock buzzing like an egg: her frozen blue light tube Overhead;

Golden Valley -- a whirlwind in the cab; how shall I pay, how to pay them? Please, Goldberg this Joint, my friend! Below Stockton she's waiting for me, going no wear know where nowhere know Weir No ware...Would you like to come -- I know you'd like to, or are you

Already here?

Take a cruise ship, I know you'd like to; see how it is done.

And when you come bring shower golden roses

To our baby -- Morgen Usher-Brindle

-- For her poem-papered chamber; verses

Writ in a Jersey bistro. This florescence

Of alarmists charm the burn-scarred wooden bar --

Gray eyes of the Miller Moth in The Fall...

Some Introductory Sentences

Move to me here where the sofa stores meet the sea

And we go down to the tracks so soon nobody could know

Where I reach inside you to find the magic DOS of eternity

Amused by us all through the lens, vagina,

Crying tears of milk

I star in a movie called They Paved Hitler’s Brain

All about the justice system in a small town

In front of Ford’s Theater

This afternoon the beach trees cradle so gently

It’s too bad I’m moving more to the north each day

A freight too slow and doesn’t have eyes

But this ye shall surely know

That one day we shall touch amidst the singing

That one day we shall touch amidst the singing

That one day we shall touch amidst the singing

That one day we shall touch amidst the singing

One Hundred Second Wake Up Window

The letter is why

Sample messages of humanity leap

To the sidewalk inside the calendar like

Synapses, and as far away,

Into a portrait you sleep next to

Always – but the lies,

The bleating Cuban car horns –

Thick red tubes of oil paint coming in

Daub my face on the homunculus pillow;

Viscous incense – disembodied, without price;

As though I were the gallery.

In her dream the hall

[no break here]

To my bathroom becomes 3rd Avenue

With liquor bottle taxi cabs filled

To the cap with diamonds and other

Male fluids.

And Order

There’s a bar in L.A.

You can walk right in the open door off

The sidewalk and go in and order

A drink, any drink you like, and sit

Down on a stool next to any person

You like and say

Whatever you want to that

Person you want for a long time and

Maybe you will marry that person

And maybe that person is fabulous in

Bed and rich and can save and heal and other

People may come

Right in off of the sidewalk and say

Anything they want, anytime, to you, they

Want and buy drinks and play the right songs too

And make you laugh and compliment you on

Your manner of dress or

Your comments, your moments,

Your choice of drink, stool.

You can talk to that person about

L.A. or the bar or bird

Songs or moving to New

York City or another stool, a

Different, a better stool,

And starting over there right in

Off of the sidewalk

And order.

Up on Paradise Hill

High up above the bar,

There’s a little songbird improvising,

Amplified by something not present;

And echoes this in its song.

From Dr. LaSalle’s Notebook

The magician found her last night digging on her knees near a bush under a street lamp.

She seemed in a trance. I noticed a harp was playing some distance away, up a hill, coming from an old deserted house whose front screen banged slowly in the wind.

In her trance, lips mumbled with longing; digging at the dream spot. The next moment, she spoke directly to me. She said it was her source core that she had seen shinning silently "below the surface:

Numbers in the ground."

The magician and the Digging Woman still one, behind their hut, of a certain evening, with harps making their promise from a small tape player just inside the door, they did bury the silent cylinder where no one will ever know.

Even I disremember the exact spot.

New York Subway Soliloquy On The Subject Of Filth I Shall Not Ever Forget

Hidden from an early age under army

Blankets in old Times Square theatrical

Hotels; undaunted by the mediaeval pabulum

Of Alcohol, of Art, and of Broken Hearts, I became

A life. I recall looking out from my attic

Pied-à-terre above the 72^nd Street station,

Panorama: drizzled smoked-glass men shoving around,

Like farts, urban fruit boxes, baying

Dogs of war. I would stand in

My Manchurian silk robe watching, wondering,

What will they think of tonight alone with their thick

Fingers around a beer bottle not saying much

Of each reminisced mugging’s alogic?

Each hooker’s "Do you want to go out?" It starts

Sounding like "...get out?" Not far

From Lennon’s tomb I walked into a subway car –

Wear-shined tracks like two over-tight, dirty guitar strings

On a broken birthday instrument --

When she began. The ode to it

Was sung by a woman shrouded in thick, brown

Army blankets.

She extolled extemporaneously, like Cicero; she held

For the Union Bank of Switzerland in 1995;

Inside her subway, still, the sum of too many partings resonates.

Poem MET.3245.R19 For Philippe Pinel

Her question hung

An iron gauntlet;

Falling to Earth outside the wedding spurting

Blood – of Rilke, Strindberg, Aristotle, Aeschylus! (...)

A grade school teacher drove me all over Queens

To find some doctor who’d write for Lorazepam. Till in an armed,

Locked mental ward emergency room, some kind of KGB woman émigré

Schizophrenic, dressed all in opera black approached

Shouting: "Not ask question – only answer question!" (...)

With one of the Erl-King’s daughters,

I slept, helping dream Negroes. Now

And then I think of "pumpkin" Natalya Rolnick in Tribeca. She

Only drank herbal tea, and was amazed that I was content to read

Their family Nietzsche to her from the coveted mother’s living

Room floor. Regretfully, in bed, it was like trying

To cuddle with Sputnick...

Wet pile of scholarly tomes on advanced physics and the Western

Canon shame me outside

The bedroom window of Divorce House by the little white garage

Where Mr. Pogue broke his power tiller. This wife

Used to drive past me, husband, her plans already in her hatchback,

Walking up the alley with my $7000 horn to a kind church

Where they would let me practice; hovering under the auto-da-fé execution.

Not really very suspicious at all of my bearded artist mornings.

In a few months I would be screaming for mercy

As though I were a misclubbed seal baby.

Ah...I Gotta Read Some Poe

Ah...I gotta read some Poe.

I gotta watch the 5:30 news.

I gotta have a shower

Coffee.

Metal fragments sprinkled on top: Coffee Ferro.

...that’s what I’ll do.

I’ll go to a nice packed disco and get a Lambada-me!

Wherever there’s bright lights seek me there, I don’t care.

Wherever the rearpaint smell reaches fever pitch, that’s my ditch.

Wherever there’s a gal, she’s my pal; wherever there are quips, count my lips!

Wherever there’s a word, I’ll write something absurd.

...I’ll be seeing you in all the geometric places...

Ghost

Bus junket past

TV window flickering,

Pre-dawn, through

A moldy curtain.

Someone speaks

Not from here.

The Second Fabric

We break something when we undress

Each other.

And floating in the specimen sea

The self erases

Jellyfish between the legs

Begin the surface undulations.

Sea anemones

Sometimes sting us to the shore morgue,

Adultery.

He begins to drown as we watch him

Undress. Taking away what is semipermeable we

Fall. Always

In pairs, the genitalia

Like lye against our acidic names

Sizzling – froth;

Burnt, the parchment plan for community

To wrap around our hanging clock hands down there

Where private parts might have been.

But we are surely lost when his eerie tongue listens

At the conch of sodomy – and s’there

Anything more silent than that breaking of the second

Fabric? O, lost children?

O, insane, nameless, forgotten, dead?

My Empty Arms Are Knots

Glenda you ought to call more

Because I am a vane with wind in it on a night filled

With rain. Glenda you ought to call me more filled with

Rain because most people. Ash-

Aimed

The sweet voice that continues is

Your Glynnis Glenda – sum

Times Glenda Glynnis frame a violet and purr –

Pull east like sky dew;

This is what I think of you.

Roar festival yawn and laugh:

Four other useful, prima facie

Ex-dictionary sounds.

Gone to lie down at roots end

Under trees; found out –

J’Accuse!

I’m put in mind of the famous objurgation

Which Turenne addressed to himself before

The battle: "You tremble, carcass [read: tree –Ed.], but you

Would tremble still more if you knew where

The Beacon Press, Boston for "inspiration and then some" of strophe 4.]

Glenda They Always Come Crawling Back

Too soon Wellington’s sIn/sOn/sUn charges at the Napoleonic dream that windows near

My New York Head, and I...I am exiled, I to Elba, able was I ere I saw

"Dorian Gray? Is that his name?" asked Lord Henry, walking across the studio towards Basil Hallward.

"Yes, that is his name. I didn't intend to tell it to you."

"But why not?"

"Oh, I can't explain. When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I daresay, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life. I suppose you think me awfully foolish about it?"

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