Ben Franklin Sees London, He Sees France

Dear Monique, stop splashing the bubbles around.
This book is priceless and I’m due
at Versailles. I’m supposed to petition
compassion from your icy countrymen.
I hold a check, not that we have money,
for Lafayette, also in love with a seat
in the front row. Lower your laughing.
This bathroom is not a bullring--you’ll startle
your husband, Jacques, the Royal Frog.
This is a curious drama. I read Dante,
mistranslated by that idiot Hancock, but steam
fogs my bifocals. Don’t call me Uncle Benjy.
Why don’t you vacation in the Carolinas? Your skin
is too perfect, too white. Eat more.
I prefer thickly-carpeted paths, strenuous
struggles of gloomy appearances. Excuse my panting.
I was raised Quaker and my wife eats potatoes
with every meal. Put your legs down,
I can’t see the door. My beliefs?
They are as if cut straight out
of The Bible but where your back narrows
I pray for the next ten generations
that you can’t reach that spot. Please,
don’t hurry: the croissants are still warm
and we’re only midway through the Inferno.
Fifty years ago when I wasn’t old
and fat my crazy mother
drew my baths, made me memorize
catechisms of diligence and planned prudence,
and near Philadelphia and stable borders the winds
howled as I walked under the storm,
the dark sky not large enough
to hide me, and floating Monique,
the lilac soap leaves a fine film
that must be done away with.
I am not a perfect politician.
I cannot see clearly the rebels gathering
in your French barns, disturbing
the sleeping animals. I turn my back
to them, like an optimistic matador.
I can smell everyone’s fear
but my seeds need to speak. Excuse me,
dear mother. You and America never taught me
about the beautiful cracks and rivers that now surround me
or how God died from fever in Florence in 1321.
The ribbon in your red wig has
come
undone. Move over, I feel so dirty.

all star jews MLB

This team could not beat the all stars from, say, the dominican republic, or italy, but with sandy a pitchin' and greenberg a hittin' clean up, in a one game play-off I’ll take my baruch atah adonai brethren:

1B hank greenberg
2b ian kinsler
Ss lou boudreau
3b al rosen
C brad ausmus
Of shawn green, ryan braun, sid Gordon
Dh kevin youkliss
P sandy koufax, ken holtzman, scott feldman, joe horlen, jason marquis

A Summing

That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
Beckett


I. My First Forty Years

Farouche dreams pour down like rain
from yesterday’s Kuala Lumpur.
Dear Doctor: these sessions
are a one way ticket on the Trans
Siberian railroad, the longest hearse
ever ridden. First, Vladivostok, then de-camping peasants
who revel in the morning near Novosibirsk.
The Ob River surges near its aching banks.
My family lacks this history. My uncle, from Kiev,
collected E.A. Prescott Pistols
and Eustache Le Sueur pencil sketches. He said,
inside the small box, two circles
of blue wheel near each other. In the middle
is a small statue of a minor deity,
her breasts tossed like falling snow.
The background newsprint suggests Serb, mid 30’s,
but I know better: this is page 217
of my autobiography. A small band of soldiers climbs a hill
looking for ammo and better shoes

II. Two Weeks Last August

After three years what gifts do I bring?
Plucking the strings of a Guadagnini
and watching the flies gather inside
my glass of port, you fully expect
these routines, darling doctor,
like old school assignations with louche men
smelling like miracles,
vacationers to Ogunquit, semi-coherent transitions from
one bleak morn to blasé eve. You cannot strike
this from the public record. The campanili are shrinking.
How can I keep waiting? It is predictable
and endless, like children, or chickens.
This is the Age of Federalism and, it goes
Without saying, seems like hell—
Carpaccio on a Ritz, the moon finally out,
her teeth gleaming, something elegiac, but soon
erased, like Geronimo befuddled by blood
oranges and skies of rosaries. All my friends
have names that are palindromes: Lon Nol,
Nisio Isin, Revilo P. Oliver. This irritates me.

III. Puteum Abyssi

Near Rouen, the Festival of the Ass
has ended. This is my last trip.
I am surrounded at home by relics
from Venice and medallions of St Fellatio,
patron saint of gag reflexives. You ask
if I have a good memory. I remember
Nothing. No thing. Just last Tuesday
my butcher asked me my name. I replied:
“Rabbi Jitters, I presume.”
You have asked me repeatedly
to write down my fantasies: Well,
Meinem Kinde, I have none,
purged from me by you eons ago,
callipygian ideals long lost. It’s OK.
I have no need to explain.
But in the last locust-free spaces in Brooklyn
I maintain one final desire—iron
braces for my callow cousin’s honied vagina.

top 25 scary movies

Gates of Hell
A Tale of Two Sisters
Psycho
Quatermass and the Pit
Audition
Ju-on
The Tenant
Captivity
Dressed to Kill
Carrie
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (remake)
Don't Look Now
Suspiria
28 Days Later
Bride of Frankenstein
Vampyr
The Body Snatcher
Cat People
Peeping Tom
The Thing (re make)
The Last Wave
The Other
The Night of The Hunter
Rosemary's Baby
Damien

all time baseball team

No negro leaguers or paige and josh Gibson wld be here; no relievers: I’ll use Koufax (L) and feller(R) as closing duo; no steroids issues, or a-rod, bonds, and clemons would be off (and in jail)

I have 30: needed to expand because of egos involved

C Johnny Bench
IB Gehrig
2b Hornsby
Ss Honus Wagner
3b Mike Schmidt
OF Babe, Willie Mays, Ted Williams
Starting Pitchers: Grove, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Maddox, Spahn

C Bench Berra
IF Bench A-Rod; Jimmy Foxx, Eddie Collins, Hanley Ramirez, Hank Greenberg
OF Bench: Barry Bonds, Griffey Jr, Tris Speaker, Ty Cobb
Bullpen: Koufax, Feller, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, Clemons, Carlton, Gibson, Carlton

top 25 comedies

No order; no repeats: sry marxes, sturges, pythons, woody the perv


The Awful Truth
Bringing Up Baby
The Bank Dick
Duck Soup
Sherlock, Jr
Used Cars
Love & Death
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
To Be or Not to Be
Easy Living
Nothing Sacred
Raising Arizona
Rushmore
The Big Lebowski
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
The Odd Couple
The Paleface
Some Like It Hot
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb
The Wrong Box
The Producers
M*A*S*H
Fargo
My Favorite Year
Tootsie
This is Spinal Tap
Carry On Nurse
Our Man in Havana
Something Wild
Real Genius
Pink Flamingos
Mondo Topless
Harold and Maude
Hobson's Choice

Kent State shooting enhanced audio home movie. May 4 1970

On Explaining to the Judge Why I Drove Over a Pair of Teenage Girls

I don’t feel comfortable preaching:
a renter of blue movies, forgetful of exercise,
I speak Yiddish when Student Loans call.
Broadway was spine straight and bone-dry,
and the sun was at my back, turning
everything into Arcadian newness.
The girls darted from the left, through
the traffic, certain of relations
between loose limbs and concrete.
Uninformed of mortality, they eyed familiar
corners--I was shocked by the pints of blood.
For once I was not angry. I drove slowly,
daydreaming about a lewd lunch with a lover.
Her streaks of gray threaten to engulf
her head’s canvas as she lisps
when she tells me, please, please, please,
stop sucking my skin. Her right eye
has a hole and our days are filled
with facial chaos and cable TV.
My Chevette has dents the size of thighs.

Judge, do you remember “The Wild One”
when Brando and his boys raised gravel
in Compton with their black Harleys,
winked at our awed moms,
and drank liquor down in single gulps?
How our fathers shut stores early,
movies were boycotted, and girlfriends
licked Marlon’s chrome?
Hell, even my rabbi learned to roll joints.
Sneer, if you want, Your Honor,
or go with your mistress for a stroll,
because that’s all it would ever be.
This guilt makes me confess:
cocky and cross-eyed Lee Marvin,
on his knees
on Main Street swallowing dirt
and blood, became my father,
teaching me to never refuse the girls
most exhausted, to drive straight
and hard, using
their legs for handlebars.

Lawrence Welk Meets Velvet Underground

martini and fonzi

Theory of Western Literature (Part I: Tragedy)

There is no longer autumn in Akron, Ohio.
Leaves willingly turn overnight from green
to death. This is how we grow old.
According to last week’s dinner companions
last summer’s drought has blocked
the so-called process of photosynthesis,
the mutating struggle to replace cells.
About this and how marriage
won’t turn our young heads gray
our grade schools lied. They told us Venus
would be visible, that California never crashed
into Utah one Friday night forming the Sierras,
that Columbus was a great white man.
All sexual disease, replied Coach Beerbelly,
could be cured. We became the unlucky ones.
The Pledge of Allegiance became less fashionable
and rigid Bon Jours! to Madame What’s Her Name
harbored nagging doubts. Wall Street made fathers
glow as they moved from parked cars to hotels.
Everything was perfect: the endless library shelves,
the frenzy to divide and dissect, the pleasures
of our paved playgrounds. We thought we could slay Nero
and in turn be slain, heroes’ deaths,
narratives read aloud a thousand million times
turning meekly into sitcoms of smoking guns
and faulty coffins, moving us offstage,
handcuffed, passive victims prone to inbreeding,
more eager now to live with beautiful nurses
named Sophia, ivory clasping their dry bosoms
as they roll us down to the bottom of the hill.
With the help of court-appointed translators
at dusk we eat darkness and sing “Arrivederci, Roma.”

hot rods

Gauguin's Loss of Virginity (1890-1891)

These days it doesn’t take two years:
post-game comfort after a tough softball loss,
John Lennon’s birthday, or passing tenth grade
for the second time, but these are consolations.
Gauguin knew better: his Juliette,
her back pinched by the limestone,
needs the fox’s paw to support
her spiraling, sun burnt breasts.

She can barely keep her eyes open:
she has been there twelve months.
The bed at the inn is lumpy,
the coffee is cold, and Paul can’t keep
his genius fingers off the maids.
The lilacs and tulips won’t re-straighten
and the rocks’ moss itches like hell.
There are numerous other delays:
Paul has to run to the hill
to shoo local boys away. The kids
aren’t reluctant to go--
there’s not enough action here anyway.

See!, how the narrowed horizon soon evaporates
near Cannes and other questionable virgins,
where less violent marriage processions
won’t keep marching toward the canvas.

Here they are too small to fear,
but the noise disturbs the scene’s dumbness.
Next week there will another wedding march.
Paul will probably lose control again,
call it a day after the clouds shift,
and smugly rub down Juliette’s sores.

As for the fox: he will bitterly complain
about the rocks spreading in silence,
the vacancy in his eyes, a girl’s thigh
getting top billing, the lack
of horizontal stroking. He says,
to the devil with you and your muted pinks.
He desires to become Lassie,
a movie star, a savior for the slopes,
anything, but will settle for the role
of this dead landscape’s pastor
and take off on that impossibly-thin path
once again sure of his own four legs,
his power to smell fresh air and real blood.
On Sundays he will stalk sheep
and schoolgirls, evangelically
learning to love others before himself.

Gauguin's Loss of Virginity

Velvet Underground / Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell - "Venus in Furs" / "Ai...

COWS 'Hitting The Wall'

Stanislavsky and Methods

Before Kaddish, during the burial,
the ground dream too iced-over for hacking
into, the mother came up to me,
hair ablaze and said, thanks
for the poems about my daughter,
and I said, listen, this is not real,
but I always wanted to play
in a synagogue, marbled voices
and yellowing walls and she was kind
to me, a stranger in town, a fine actress.

In the morning the world was frigid
near Hoboken, my inverted hell, the Hudson
giftwrapping in ice polluted birds.
Happy holidays to you upstate New York.
Cosmic exams ask tectonic plates
to shift south, misshaping the coast.
The daughter still lives in the Village, surrounded
by scripts of Hungarian rapings, CD’s
of Bessie Smith, neighbors after
midnight with small sores
lining their lips, not living
the dogged code that everyone should
breathe. She remains alert
to her mother’s new home, vivid
from freedom, emotional territories
widening with each winter.
Her mother is a true believer

in Jewish Miracles, the daughter,
a blurred fax not so carefree
about the hasty withdrawals of men
and minutes, kept awake
by the nightly screaming of gays
upstairs, everyone else in the building
too drunk on TV and Ecstasy
to notice that Manhattan shrinks
more than usual from record lows,
the island, sold and stolen many times over,
that never weeps, or rather, always
weeps, tears flooding up from the sewers
into the laps of the homeless
who scribble memos on bags:
Dearest Mother:
please forgive me but I can’t live
in the warmth of the South
or your Temple, and where is father,
and I can’t remember my childhood
and there’s no real need
to keep on reading or caring--
you will be runned down enough
from the coming Potomac heat,
and, gee, how lucky and blessed
you are to have a healthy single daughter
willing to illustrate the awful perfect truths
about welcomed random calamities
that at least invent permanently,
as if they were part of a crowd or seedy novel
about the dramatics of atheism with an ending
enigma forcing her to enact
infamous roles in her bed about leaving.

advice

dinner!

paint. cardboard.

FB

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/MichaelBaker666

good reads

michael's book montage

michael's favorite books »

Bunk

The garage has been torn down. In its place,
a basketball hoop, net frayed, pole
aslant. This rotting house holds my former home.
Two stories, tilted chimney, porch banisters wrecked,
the Sunset View Drive address is no longer privileged.
The rotting garbage burns bright. Memories
are badly lit but I see my father walking out, see the pitched pots
and pans that began rusting out years ago.
I step across the buckled floors, remembering our dog
hit by a Mustang, seeing the chair
we propped him up in, giving him pause before he jumped
for the rest of his addled life. He never forgot the pain.

The last family left some of their possessions: Vibe magazines,
ruined headphones, an alizarin-crimson jump rope.
No matter—as with nature I too abhor a vacuum.
The sun room, my bedroom in high school, is heavy black:
the space is boarded up, and French Windows that once
allowed me easy exit and access as my divorced mother was upstairs
in her miserable master bedroom, are gone. I tear down
the cardboard and can see clearly the scratches
from my younger brother’s nails as he used this room
to gain entrance--he always forgot his keys. Heroin
and paranoia make for faulty memories.

When we buried him I went to work that night;
uninvented strangers were better company
than his friends or my dragging family.
His site sits on a hill in downtown Akron. I clearly see
the plants of Harvey Firestone’s, places of labor strikes;
one mile over, the highway that sliced downtown in two, killing
off that which remained from the ‘68 riots. I go there
in the winter, like Lewis leading Clark to Oregon’s
final frontier. The steps are treacherous. Washington’s niece
Mary King is buried next door. History always lies.
I once thought that Akron would be my home forever.
Here in Hoboken, the aureoline sun blinds me. No one
calls. There is something growing inside me.

Back on Sunset View I go down into the basement.
I light a match. Ah, the room where I practiced
dribbling. Read Melville. Created Soul Train moves.
Listened to Black Sabbath and smoked
weed. I was seduced here by Cheryl, an older family
friend, whose skin smelled like gasoline. This is the place
where now I will bring my son
and chain him to the wall, tossing him cookies
whenever I god damn feel like it. It’s good to have
a home. Here, I will stare forever into his plastered eyes,
waiting for the next perfect hand to be dealt.

The Ugly American

In China, near the ousted sanctuaries
of black Beijing, streets too slippery
to safely streetwalk on, my French stepsister
sleeps with a rich Chinamen. She’s not sixteen.
He drunkenly whispers to me, as if I
were a priest, everywhere he goes
his penis follows, like an angry sailor.
She needs to be told
how much all of this is worth.
Mao’s war isn’t over. We émigrés eat rice,
wary of servants putting in pellets of poison.
For this I sleep all day, my mosquito net
and lethargy muting the smells of charcoal
and fried dog. At night I feel better:
I send out for American beer and heroin
from Thailand. Neither really helps, nor hurts.
My father, the fat, bogus diplomat,
never comes near here anymore, busy,
we are told by the papers, bribing
the locals for peace concessions.

The Yongding River is dirty and bloated,
overcrowded by taxis ferrying hybrid races
across and back, looking for work or selling
war trinkets. Last night my brother, confused
about transitory symbols of loyalty, and fueled
by homemade vodka and gravesites
of victims, blew tiny holes
into the Chinaman’s head with his shotgun.
Today, as with all other days, we wear black,
fearful of our dwindling list of mealtickets,
arrogantly oblivious to boys in Oregon
murdering boys from Ohio with lucky punches
after infidelities. These killings
lead to makeshift suicides, bedsheets
amateurishly ripped from the jail’s cots,
as if the raised dust from the rafters
did not really look like halos
pouring from their suffocating heads.

Someday soon I will steal money from my mother
and cover myself with jade, rubies,
Spanish prostitutes, because I’m bored
with the Twenty First Century. It can’t,
or won’t, end soon enough. I want it to say
to me once: I love you, I mean it,
please come back. But I remain hostile
to clarity, hating the details of accents
in this language that I’ll never marry in,
red walled churches with faded prints
of slant-eyed icons, long dead. Repeat
after me, America, you foreign pinkbitch joke:
I think of money, only of money.

My pajamas have bloodstains. As always
this goes unexamined. The next needle,
I think rationally, better hit its mark
more cleanly. There is no moral here,
even less, purpose. These are only words
about fucking and dying, not chic Chinese pictures
that after translation mean mercy.

All my life I wanted to kill
someone with my bare hands. The problem
is I don’t know where to begin. If alphabetical,
my heroes, the Chinese rebels, needn’t worry:
all their names begin with X. Sooner than later,
then, happily I will get to myself.

The Ohio River

This is the Big One—the showstopper:
the Mississippi is claimed by too many
as it murders; the Colorado becomes too big
for its thin-hipped britches. Here,
my river slices Louisville from its ex,
idiot Indiana, and glistens in its endless sludge.
This is not what Mason and dull Dixon envisioned:
an under-the-weather God making arbitrary borders,
keeping the ham hocks and sour mash south, goth girls
and anorexia, north. No easy task
these days maintaining territorial peace, what with cable
and cyber space classifieds, but after dinner
we still pass the harp from one to another,
monks and whores alike, and sing songs
that measure out our acrid mind-plans
of plump consonants and bottomless reveries,
and we who come to this river’s edge—empty
of desire--watch the sacred ravens gloat,
weary from sloughed-off forgivenesses,
leaning against trees that once hosted lynchings,
but now revealing shadows to distant shores.
We should substitute saintliness
for Aaron’s Rod, refuse to adopt
the text’s drought-ridden maize, hissing pests,
uncivil exchanges between husbands and wives.
Let us live in this muck and peat and ashy ooze
and late at night eavesdrop
on the river’s echoes
of ring-laden Judith creeping tick-burdened into her enemy’s tent,
becoming a lean wolf
barking down the ancient agonies of now,
and we who seek grim peace become lost,
alone, out from the tree’s shade forever. What
did I know of faith’s stabbing pain?
O, Moses: Open your broken fingers
and make me moist again.

Crossing Bridges

For Mike O’Neill, Rocker, 1965-2006


I too have thought of jumping.
The cooling breezes, the lack
Of taxmen, the subtle shifts in sound.
I thought better of it when I took stock:
Three thousand in the bank, my friend
Jim Bob near Cannes, fifty Dylan
Bootlegs, the complete works
Of Milton and Dante. Alas, piety
And romance languages remain alien.

Better, I think, with a gun: the impact
That cleaves and cleaves, part hole,
Part re-shifted mass: too smart for new beginnings,
You now can concentrate on endings: mermaids fucking,
Endless tuna dinners, free kelp shampoo.

Each day the tennis ball comes back and
Someone with slippers walks near us. Our boss
Gets fired. The apartment becomes rent controlled.
Oriental babies shine in the moonlight.
You have always yearned for the lost,
The underrated, the forgotten past: The Kinks,
Freewheelin’, the Yardbirds without Eric.
Yards of unknitted yarn, moreover, gathered dust
In your dark closets as you thirsted vainly for fame:
Pulitzer Prizes, sailing, opening for the Ramones—
But the viscosity of pain prefers rejection.
And you had no one to turn to. Your wife
Switched to chardonnay and good friends asked
What your name was. The disproportionate climate
Was no help either, as the humidity of Florida
Became a steady intruder, like a newborn.
Tomorrow--we prayed--will never come.

Tampa’s Sunshine Bridge is steely and straight.
Nearby a woman waves, a crooked finger
Beckoning you. Oh, I was wrong: it is really
The heat from the Everglades torching everything
And everyone not living underground. Thank
Jesus, the water around you will never evaporate,
Allowing your luminosity to become re-animating
As your brown curls rise upward,
Like snagged, sleepless godheads.

Drunken Hercules

Don’t be stupid: all this perfume
and no soap or razors, no Ouzo
or tabouli or bruised Greek women,
and worse, no future, like zeppelins,
gray antique phalluses, muted engines
disturbing the hideaway caves
of the cocky starling, he who would laugh
as I fell down Lombard Street,
San Fran’s fog stuck
in my black and broken mouth:

I am no man. Leavenworth Street
sends no signals, receives no callers,
but Nob Hill takes us,
minor players, by surprise
as biker bars never close
and third-party checks
are routinely accepted by strippers.
Wait: the feast has been canceled
and the clouds shift and dissolve
under the moon’s charred static
as the promised pain never comes.
We starve our girlfriends, we turn
tourists into permanent guests.
With Chinatown’s finest
filming our cathartic chant--
we want Alcatraz!--we practice
bogus hocus pocus and dress like Texans.

We must be cautious: our desires
and evidence are dwindling. Nightly
we crash cars into the Pacific,
right hands gripping genitalia, only
to bite off our wagging tongues,
and gods willing, have opera singers
sew them back on in the morning.
Here, there’s no law against it.

I Could Read History Books But Women Stagger So Easily

You said, “Alison, Kent State,” and I said, “No,
the Chianti,” and when your voice caved in
I opened the blind, only to see
the campus fill with tear gas. There
Ohio’s air will not revive you and inside
I raise a glass and toast Mao and James
Dean, draw maps on the pillow cases, couple
our hands and concentrate on clock ticks.
On the red sheets’ shallow graves
our fingers fit tightly. Two more bottles
and we will speak for the dead.

It’s late so we turn down the Beatles

and see Alison Krause and others
fall victim to white out, lives tilted down-
ward by the Cuyahoga’s lifting schemes.
The quadrangle becomes clotted
with uniforms and upraised rifles--
children flee to the Victory Bell,
others bend under the elms’ broken arms,
covered in ash, tar, and blood.

Now each morning gravel dust clings
to girls leaning out dorms
thirsting for boxes of bones and rooms
without views, the asphalt
reminding them that there is more
outside their heads than in.

Classes and meals and the midwest suck
as tile tears at their feet
in the showers. It’s easier
for me: Earl Grey and Beefeater,
pointless painting, and no labor.
Don’t drive or drift away--
it’s that time again and you can’t spell
or remember parking spaces, re-interviewing
eyewitnesses, telescoping photos,
never thankful that I enjoy mysteries.
It’s pouring so I will knit your eyes dry,

now and always, so that I can claim
my wavering wants, because I read
your cheapened springtime desires. Don’t we dream
that your body will re-bloom?
The media begins to call, you have to catch a plane
to the end of the world, and you move
your white hands through your breakfast
only to see Alison look back,
cry out, get shot through the head, falling
softly into the patchy turf, ghosts
holding up her smooth skin, hands
now each night in someone else’s arms.

History

Saturday night’s isness remains, stays
concrete, but this and that
become lesser, paler--
the roofers’
tar spars
with Noe Valley’s Zen Bakery,
dandelion-fresh girls flexing triceps;
runaways beg for smoke, coin,
and the Golden Gate is smothered
by yellow. I crouch to look:
San Francisco is not my city
but every dark night,
without light or car or map,
I climb easily to my cliffy home,
static-filled flat of whiteness.

My unease is worse in the morning:
like the playing of a trumpet
in an empty subway, I hear
Sunday’s Want Ads barking at me
as so many faraway fathers
and the Pacific mistral startle me:
Half Moon Bay is the color of tangerines.
Hungry and penniless, I walk up,
then down, Haight Street,
a dingy heaven for needles and insomniacs
and with lungs bursting, sure
that I’m lost, I stop near the Panhandle
and see what I would never believe:
The Church of St. John Coltrane.

In the alert congregation
saxophones are the witnesses
and “Alabama” is today’s sermon,
a text on child murdering,
and I stand to declare
Why is it 1963, and who is this skinny
and scared boy hunchbacked
not by Ohio’s boredom but
by the southern Sunday sun,
seven years and clawing, with anger,
through blood and soil and ash,
on his hands and knees
through the bombed church’s debris
looking for the bones of four girls,
and tell me who is this old fat man--
fatherless and faithless--now holding
a tiny black hand up
to God’s immaculate public relationship,
blinded by guilt and
a gold many-holed instrument?

Manhattan Memoirs: Transparency and Obstruction

I was early, no thanks to the climate,
for the results of my HIV testing.
Stuck between Fifth Avenue and Broadway,
the elegant wildanimal passages
of America, boobytrapped by sleet, dragged
down by slush, I surrender to this lunar winter
and its soul-splitting icicles that mock Easterly
resurrection, the fifteenth murdering storm
since I moved here. Flanking 11th Street,
like gargoyle sentries, are Gothic cathedrals,
menacing connections to my lapsed Episcopalian
youth, the spiritual oasis for the House of Morgan
and other bulbous barons
who thieved their way through Europe, desires too large
for such stubby mortal fingers. Pushed
by the greedy storm I veer
up Broadway, mimicking the actions
of a tanned orator, lecturing
iced-over antique stores, refusing to tolerate
the sticker price for chinoiserie, Sèvres porcelain,
scorning Tiffany lamps that cost more than houses
in Akron, Ohio, home to Hart Crane and other suicides.
Everything looks tattered and lumpy,
Louis XIV sofas anchored to rare oak arms,
high society sites for fully dressed grinding. I duck
past the hacking homeless and slide
into the Strand Bookstore, registers guarded
by poster boys for this month’s disease.
I need theory: I steal
Blood of the Bastille. Two bars
and four cognacs later I enter
the doctor’s office late, a nervy night crawler
and spontaneous shopper doomed to swerve
off Broadway, walking around
with a petulant DNA pool flirting
with flights of fancy, inbred sperm
obsessed with cravings for pre-Marie France,
and before I know it I am in
the waiting room. As for the results,
pardon me, and nothing personal,
I have to first get through the Reign of Terror,
as if, anyway, it’s any of your fucking business.

The sensational and dynamic Damita Jo Freeman

One Less Bell to Answer featuring Marilyn McCoo

Dusty Springfield - I Just Don't Know What To do With Myself, 1964

Jimmy Cliff - The Harder They Come, 1972 HQ HD

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Soft Machine - Hope for happiness

Pretty Things - Come See Me

Jeff Beck/Yardbirds-Heart Full Of Soul

James Brown - Mother Popcorn (1969)

Galileo’s Theory Of Falling Bodies

Gomes said other documents in the archive show that Mengele assumed the false name of Josef Kabat and worked as a gynecologist in the early ‘60s in Mambore. (AP:Brazil)


We were always slightly suspicious
that you took charge so readily
at our town meetings. We don’t deny,
however, that we found your command
graveyardly necessary: your stiff,
bold arm silenced stoned suburban
crackpots, your stare made further points moot.
All in all, save for the strange lisp
and your surreal instinct for order,
we welcomed your burning coldness.
And, O dear Lord, what doctoring!
Never had we seen such glee

to probe, dissect, and carve up women,
such willingness to talk disease,
such brusque mocking of superstition.
Your summoning of Euro-techniques
thrilled and moved us: we forgave
your inclination to frown
when you delivered dark-haired girls,
or the over-eager slapping into life

of our rare blue-eyed boys.
And anyways, Herr Josef, what does the past
have to do with our now? Your skills
knocked us out: the new technology
that created ice from body heat,
the rows of obscure journals, the zeal
to experiment on the lowland’s kids.
You never slept or ate our sincere

gifts of native delicacies. Lust-crazed
war widows walked near your penthouse
hourly only to see a pale light on,
a scientist studying Marquis De Sade
they wished, but actually a masturbator
hotly desiring, like a eunuch
for another’s world, drugged dreams
of dreaming that would cancel
tomorrow’s promise of tropical nights
in favor of Aryan winter scenes,
grainy footage of snowbound women,
thousands and thousands, loathing
themselves for ever being conceived, clothes
closed tight from the uncircumcised crew.

Self Analysis: Freud in Western Kentucky

When the coroner cuts our mothers
open he will find coffee
grounds and sugar, diamond-like residue
of 6AM congregations
with other brown females, their tongues
bright blue flares as if their men
were permanently lost. We often wished
we had you, Herr Doktor, in the vicinity.
There were things to talk over:
Why the slippage of the Now? How is birth
a trauma when we took to life like lovers?

Near the Appalachian foothills
liquids are not lucid. Our mutant fathers,
parched beyond recognition, came home
at night blackened, angry
at the dead earth’s failure to yield.
There were no tasty sisters waiting,
no patients nicknamed Lil Queenie,
as if they were royalty. In Kentucky
sofas were slept upon, two by two.

And so the days come, then go, then leave.

Our relatives are perfectly unable to remain
satisfied. We stay locked in trances.
One neighbor Gladdie Dingaling has thighs
like a man, made bold from the terrible terrain,
each customer less jagged, unlike our children.
She will hear our confessions
only when the line outside dwindles. She smothers us
with flat-chested violence. The line
grows longer with each failed theory.

Piss on your Viennese practice: the rich
sport with illness, like college boys
playing blues guitar. In our pockets
we carry shreds of rope from an aborted
lynching: it brings us this spatchcocked luck.
Your science claims dividends
of clarity but in our mother’s mother’s gauzy
bed we dream of white trapdoors--
even Baptists need angels. But you wrote,
in German, for God’s sakes,
that they meant menthol cigarettes, over-desperate
condensations of self love and fear over cock
cuttings. Women may read that! Why not

walk across the Atlantic and come here
and write about

the evil
that breaks down
our front porches, the lawns full
of nephews
stillborn and blue and buried
nameless, our fathers like bad-luck cemeteries
sinking hunchbacked into bourbon bottles
as fierce rains from Missouri force
their coal cars to grind
the caves’ rocky mud,
tiny metal wheels spinning and locking,
lurching and crablike, then churning
upward, at last, trespassing
the scorched oval entrance, half
of the latent cargo spilling
out, black shards of ascendant gems.

Desdemona

Is it always my fault if the meat
is too rare, the wine still corked?
Even in my foothold in the sheets
I dream of sundaes and earthquakes,
not these spears of sterling silver.
There’s no line between desire and despair:
my father has already made that mistake.
You say that older priests also feed
on manuals, suntan lotion, and dusty canons,
that like soldiers they are alone,
stripping others near oaky pews
and sleeping until noon,
giving away pewter for parting gifts.
I see only wrinkles and smoky voodoo
and won’t learn how to live here there.
I think now I may let you both go
for my knees ache: I’m going to squat
and piss on your marbled knick-knacks
and in my will leave my underwear
to nuns, dirty parts highlighted.
For you, your damned silk: too bad
Jesus left his penis on the cross.

A Few Facts About Working

The music was typical Chinese inner
weather, but my heavy head made leaving
redundant. Nothing was right.
I had done all I could at my job.
Cloning is ethically ambiguous but this heat
tears me in half. I flee on Fridays
after tannic lunches, leaving memos
this side of perfection, like gin.
On the lowered horizon
a girl from Ohio tries to complete
a jigsaw puzzle. Don’t be afraid
to wear colors Shelley
my friend lectured. It was Sunday.
We sat on a ridge near Strawberry Fields
like inverted monuments, faded and green,
Nebraskans bragging that they could decode
our staged postures. Chinese leprechauns
in tight red suits jumped
up and down, out of sync
with hectored chanting. Already
wrecked we tried to get higher

than Fay Wray perched
on a building that we forget the name of.
The puzzle was a street scene
of Parisian stones and evil men
smoking. Wall Street must be dead:
the inmates are rollerblading through the sky.
A kid more perverted than Elvis runs
by, stops suddenly, and stares
up Shelley’s miniskirt. He looks
for ten minutes, as if she were a pop sickle
or rich relative of Jesus,
another exile in search of relief.
We think about writing home, guilty
about our moms, single women
composing new roles from one state
to another. Our last letters read: Beware,
the rebels have not been thwarted. Shelley
drags hard on the joint. Her hair
is whipped upward by a shocking wind.
The nearest dog, oddly enough, turns out
to be the color of a socket wrench.
Golden lovers couple in the wild grass.
I have not bathed in three days.

The posse for my soul will begin Monday
at eight AM. After noon
I’ll call Shelley, if I can remember,
and thank her. I should curtsy
everything. The uninvolved have been great.
I can live with weekend passes:
a blue uniform of rayon makes me
look less sad. It must remain creased.
Tuesday I’ll call off and explain harshly
there’s been too much overtime
flying around. Let the Orientals
have the fucking city. What can I do?
In a Soho bar I’ll spend the day
playing pinball, my import beers
slapping the low slung breasts
of my new-found best friends. Shelley
will stay at her desk in midtown
steadfastly refusing calls, the whir
of her computer becoming testosterone,
a virtual anti-hero to the other workers
dangling dizzily near her,
six feet under the ground.

Christian Scientist

In Youngstown, Ohio where tragedies
happen at least twice a day and
it’s 7AM and workers belt bourbon
and beer before work and smoke cracks

the light over the bottles,
as women awake startled, hands
reaching for tissues, garments shut tight.

In the alleys we sought distraction
and the gap-toothed hag’s arms
seemed ready for flight. Everyday she tells us
about the night she ate a box

of twinkies and fell into a coma.

Nothing could save her. Like Lindbergh
she left her easy life and floated,
without modern instruments, toward Paris

to have coffee with God. I can’t go forward,
I can’t go back. They argued about Presley
and the Pyramids, laughed about the Irish,
and arm-wrestled for the danish.

Help me, make me stronger, but God triumphs.
He grandly points to his groin: “Seed,
Divide, and Don’t Buy Microsoft.”

In twenty minutes the EKG’s straight line
started to zigzag like a whore’s whip--

put back together she screamed for eclairs,
L.Ron Hubbard, and cable coverage.
They discharged her with warnings about the pills.

She joined a circus of preachers
as a minimum wage clown/masseuse,
short order cook, and reliable plant
in the hostile Midwest audiences.

She married a blind, bald man, reared Koreans,
bathed in barbed wire, and got sacked
over the cotton candy scandal. She came home.

She works the corners near here now,
threatening the workers with crossed fingers
pointed deeply in her pockets, following

other fathers to K-Mart
on Sunday mornings, mocking selections
of screw eyes and generic vice grips.

Weather and play become dull and damp
and our Faith, the whore, spreads with the morning,
leaning towards our younger brothers, puffing
and scratching, day in day out,

dreaming of rivers’ rapids, hits of codeine
and Wild Turkey, her future lovers,
because soon the loud whistle’s noon

alarms another fleshy heaven
that stains her thighs’ second shift.

The Saints - Stranded

Anita O'Day - That Old Feeling

John Coltrane Quintet with Eric Dolphy - Impressions

Reducing Debt

"What’s the matter with me,”
cries Bob, my friend
from Bayonne; Thirty years
in the enemy camp, aggressiv
acolyte, panicky proselytizer,
I pounded the narthex’s oak,
carried crosses
that advanced itchy reverends
and androgynous choristers.
After services,
pocket pool
and the slow grind
of putting red hymnals back.
These last days at the Temple,
cocktails become scarce
and immobilized faces
mark the low ridge
of separation: devout or recalcitrant?
I prefer
Episcopalian boob jobs
to Judaic Botoxing--call me
superficial. But I think
everyone would agree
that the Virgin Mary
could use some help
every now and then,
veering away from us
in that sharp, shocked ray of light.
I was on
The Ten Year Plan
at the Hoboken Shul.
Things otherwise are OK.
My apathetic cancer
is sunning near Cannes.
My car starts most days.
My exes have opened a store
called Les Trois Salopes.
They market pain. Soon I hope
my Napa friend
will find his way home to his cabin.
My Asian lover,
Chin Soo Kim, tucks
the sheets’ corners
too tightly. I forgive her
less and less
with each passing second.
Maeuntang
fills the house during wintry morns.
As an encircling skirmisher
I wound easily:
the clergy has become mortified.
For Mecca, I ruefully point
my mat westward
seven times a day. This way,
I am never the first in line.
What’s the diff? I contain triangles
and detours: I beg neighbors
to lay down their arms.
I coax perfect strangers
for five minutes of grinding comfort.
The shit never gets shoveled
fast enough. Patient, I am:
I ain’t goin’ no where fast.

Lunch at the Club

Serve from the left and clear from the right--
O!, that our lives could be that simple
and quiet. We stand erect, heads held high,
side towels bleached, as members
enter our stations, shuffling from age
and terrible anger. Their briefcases
are handcuffed like zeppelins to thin wrists,
and they coax sweets and martinis from us.
Akron’s air is sawdusty and dark.
We perfectly balance the bread knives
as we take confused orders, feeling small
and lost. We’d prefer long-necked women
and picnics with brie and chardonnay.
Instead we hear complaints
about shaky stocks, recessions,
faulty air conditioners, workers
going back to slums with bigger paychecks.
Our members idly threaten to move south,
factories, barrels, and all, the heat
to grow inside their heavy and hesitant wives.

In ten minutes we are full. Dishwashers
go on strike, busboys suddenly appear stoned,
someone dropped au jus into the kiwi garnish
and the surly cooks no longer speak English.
Everything about us sags: we were meant
for different roles. We gather
around the coffee machine, whispering
“Let’s get the hell out of here.”
We want Americana. We need to count cows
and billboards, to see green barns
lean into the wind. Outside,
the black Cuyahoga barely burns
and Opportunity Park’s factories
ooze steam. One man screams for meat,
“Now!,” and another coughs “cocktails”
at us like a smokestack. In an hour
we’ll have beer, slippers, and peace, but now,
like stock cars drivers on speed, we plunge
on, dragging deeply on Pall Malls, hiding
wet shirts and panicked hearts. Some of the tables
begin to sigh. Others leave.
The itchy-fingered managers
review past applications. We are no heroes.
We must first crumb the white tabletops
and then we’ll put our lives in order.
A Common Pleas Judge asks for his fifth coffee--
we drop the pot on him and his date;
kneeling to wipe, begging forgiveness,
we steal a sip of his lukewarm red wine.

It and Thou

For MBW



At first, the world swung into view
Slowly: the carefully-chosen Côte Rôtie,
Rothko’s deep rapture art, nights
Of pool at the Hungarian bar,
Drinking Dreher Pils and betting millions
With each other and neighbors,
Foreigners true, but possibilities all the same.

I was, deep down, in a hurry, of course,
Stumbling awkwardly without transitions,
Moving from shy kisses to haggard intercourse,
The uneaten steaks dulling Hoboken’s air.

Perhaps I should have analyzed more, taken
Apart the rigid clocks that coerced, met
With greater caution our wedding day,
Then house, son, divorce.
All beauty advances backwardly
As dismal minutes politely cry, no more.

Last night in a dark dream
I was carried forth by a timeless horse
Standing in a stream, our legs
Streaked with brown sand. My hands
Were cupped gingerly over her mane.
I have grown accustomed to these images.
I travel without consummation between two points
On a narrow line, like a wounded wolf.

Through the years, calm winds
Stuck by me, steering me towards bystander
Status, excusing my vacillations.
Anagrams and French hourglasses piled up
In my sunlit room: starting over
Was likelier for other brooding husbands.

Hear and now, the clouds are thinner, blacker,
And I am without home: she was my width,
My grace, my remedy. I will depart
This untrue terrain, and eavesdrop
On misreadings and timid praise
Whispered at my service: “He really said that?”
“He wanted to be who when he grew up?”

I will be among the last to leave: there
Is much straightening up after a funeral.
Bills have to be totaled, the marching
Ants have to be led back downward.
We will throw everything into one vast bag,
And I will step in and smoke a final cigar.
I will become quiet, like the moment
After a pony breaks his leg near the finish.

And when God finally shows up, I’ll tell
Him it’s 2,000 years too late. I already
Have met my maker—my sweet son—and
I’ll watch as those two bastards sift
The endless translucent debris.
No one thing is quite all blue.
No one person is younger than I.

MC5 Looking At You July 19th, 1970 LIVE Widescreen

Cheater Slicks Spanish Rose

Jerry Lee Lewis - Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On (1957)