A specificity needing repair
is the everyday tackiness
of scenic Las Vegas....
A specificity of old despair
is the answer for those
out of touch with touching
the gild nobs of fortune,
beckoning to be winners.
Someone hits a jackpot
while another panhandles
for bus-change outside:
someone else is detailing
prizes to be registered for
then given away in a drawing.
A lurid murder-kidnapping
happened in town suddenly
bothering visiting good folks
gossiping over breakfast fare,
with fun-pack coupon books
sadly crumpled like empty
cigarette packs to be
cleaned up later; & their
quantity of winnings revive
somewhat the losing spirits
of those gambling with fate
& small killings in the soul
as well. "Nothing can save us
from being human," a drunk
tells me, taking my last dime.
What Serial Killers Whisper, Remembering
stealing what wind brings
we espy leaves falling
across bodies of evidence
there's little time
to dismember
He Told Me Someday
What the hand meets when touching
a corner of its existence, the irreparable fact
of three other corners evading this
parallelogram imperils all human mimesis,
along with its statistical correlations.
My hand is not detached from anything
in its quest to ascertain life's seams.
I know a one-armed man who eschewed
insubstantial attempts at philosophy,
a man who told me lurid secrets
of future transcendental poets with
hypnoidal glances into funhouse mirrors
reflecting new virtual reality, unenslaved.
He told me someday my mind at its zenith
would house a computerized implant system
without conceptual barriers or taboos --
& there'd be no need to fathom for eternity
any theoretical parameters around us,
the ceiling would be beneath our feet
while we press our Vulcan palm signs
into auras fulminated by time
gorgeous color fields will feel
a garland of effervescent being
giving us a chance to start over
& draw the stick man clearly,
not the dread colon's decay
in our earth's language
of missing phalanges.
