YOU'D BE SO NICE

you'd be so nice
to walk away from
in a crowded piazza
that exists solely 
in imagination,

i can see it
anytime i want,

the crowds of small faces
and gesturing limbs
walking across the way
cathedral to cathedral,
toward the long decaying stairs
or to the fountain
tall and dry
with ruddy faced cherubs
grimacing when
love seems nothing
more than a match
in a room full of
very dry , brittle things,

and then, of course,
a large flock of
irritated pidgeons
taking flight,
flustered and fluttering
wings against
clouds the
color of old tools,

you on the bench
eating crackers and cheese
or maybe standing
as it begins to rain
and the crowd
gets thick about you
while you try to watch
me walk a line
to a vanishing point
on the horizon
between apartments
and gaudy government repairs,

yes , I would be walking
away toward a fate
obviously unplanned ,
trivial as a crossword clue,
meandering into
an anonymous history,
walking in uneven steps,
one leg longer than the other,

it begins to rain,
I won't look back,

yeah, that would be sweet.

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WONDERFUL THINGS

I talk so the birds
do not fall from the trees
and bruise their feathers
whatever the weather,

I sing so the bricks kiss the mortar

like the two were sealing a deal,
a conspiracy to grow old fall where they stand,

I dream so that you will love me
because you see my face
when I'm not looking at it
rehearsing a pose and stare
I think will send you to the stars,

I walk everywhere I go

to keep the earth spinning
where it belongs
with the other marbles,
making music that
is far from the center
yet near the heart
of wonderful things
nameless and unseen.

MINOR GRAVITY

Oh! the world is a vulgar place where the words for beauty are matched with calamities of tongue , coarse and unloved.

So we sigh and watch the flowers die a day at a time, petals curled and brown, pistel and stamen bowing to the table, hanging from the vase like dry tongues swollen in thirsty gasps.

We raise our glass to the new born babe damp and mewling the same experimental complaints, we remain in awe and transported wonder and give ourselves to regrets that the tears go by too fast,

too soon our own words will indict us for each pipe dream and in seam come undone.

Ahhh...we will lurk longer at the lake and stare into the water after we’ve skipped a stone and toss off a cigarette, relieved the lines in the face looking back aren’t ours just yet. There is only enough time to invent all these phrases that sustain themselves and contain mystery that arises the harder we squint for a clearer view of the lines of our face,

our faces are terrains of over explored expectations, the lines are the ravines where the certain futures fell,

hands,arms, legs tremble, ache, drag along the walk way, each step gets a caress from a shoe heel that could not be lifted high enough against the minor gravity.

SOMEONE IS GOING TO GET YELLED AT

Sister wants to fight while Dad prefers to drive and smoke his cigarettes alone in the car,

Brother tells sister to stop telling him what do do, it’s his tree and it’s his branch and he’ll jump if he feels like

And if gravity is kind, he'll have the good luck of not breaking his leg or snapping his neck.

Mom stares at the mixing bowl she filled with unwashed potatoes, thinking shit, all the ice has melted

Sister throws a rock at brother as he sits on the tree branch, swinging his legs back and forth.

The rock misses him and flies next door, crashing through the neighbor’s upstairs window. An old man comes to the window stares down at sister, who turns and runs into the house to find

Mom still considering the dirty potatoes in the mixing bowl.

Lighting his third cigarette with the push button lighter, Dad sings along with the advertising jingles on the radio and steers the car with one steady hand, the other one conducting a sudden outbreak of big band music from the speakers that is all but drowned out but a loud and frantic screech of tires.

Brother thinks about climbing down at last, thinking the dying of the light and the cry of sirens coming closer indicates that something’s amiss and someone is going to get yelled at.

THE REST WAS SILENCE

We were in San Francisco standing on a steep, sloping corner outside an Italian Ice store, smoking a joint in the cold , cutting wind. It was a beautiful night otherwise, because down the hill you could see the lights of the downtown buildings form a bright crescent around the bay. It was night and it was lovely but I was slightly drunk and shivering in my sport coat, and the joint made nervous as an assassin’s cat. The famous poet who’d come to see our reading at New College asked me what I thought of Gang of Four and Lydia Lunch. My stammering blended brilliantly with the gust of wind that swept over us just then. I muttered something finally about Johnny Winter and turned to look at the skyline and the expanse of the black bay and the boat lights that dotted the surface with bobbing bursts of yellow and red. Save for the gusting bluster, the rest was silence.

PAPER FLAG

A paper flag is in the window, stars and stripes bleached by hot and cold winds and all the sunshine California brags about even on afternoons where smoke crowds the horizon and air burns your lungs as you breathe, The stars and bars are now a faint, rusted green, a nauseated tint of yellow erodes the edges of each straight line, What was once white is a crinkled brow, a worried grey, the blue we knew is cracked and lined with spiderwebbing and the dry shells of dead insects,

The tape holding the paper to the window sill is likewise cracked, baked onto the glass paned, affixed as long as the window remains unshattered but long after the rage that made many scream one syllable slogans and cry at cat videos and cartoons of angry eagles clutching lightning bolts and missals in its talons has receded like beach sand coming and going with tides that occur whether we pay attention or not,

This day is pleasant, the workman are somewhere else with their tar and jackhammers, but this window still bears the paper flag staring at the traffic and diminishing pedestrian density as the sun recedes and the shadows get longer while whatever was on our mind as a species scrolls off the list of many things we’ll get to think all the way through.

I HATE POETRY

I hate poems about poetry but I do like poems with dirt under the fingernails,

that is,

verses that make less sense than a man and woman in the center lane of the expressway with all their furniture and A Sylvania tv that glowers with one big eye at passing traffic, yup, the news THEY DON’T REPORT when you need to hear it most. I like poems that are so full of crap that each stanza could fertilize acres of future corn, i have NO poems about poets or cats ,

no dog poems either but lets have more poems about baseball because BASEBALL is ALREADY a poem for the ages. Meanwhile, I remember your face coming out of the mist of the night parking lot and find myself grousing and grazing under lovely trees, after a walk, rubbing my knees.