Those of Us in Pajamas Whistling Marches

Those of us
whistling marches
in pajamas
are so sated with
soda and sour grapes
that we let the phones
in our pockets ring and buzz,
we allow those knocking
on the door to blister their knuckles,
the newspapers taped over
the windows let in only
the slightest slivers of sun
through the tears and cracks,
it’s natural that we drum our lips
and admire the dead garden in the back,
the bony limbs of leafless twigs
splayed like fingers reaching for a glass of water,
two seasons of unraked leaves,
this is our glory, our monument of
where we’ve come to remain
and settled in like a skin irritation
that won’t go away when you scratch,
radios and TVs blare and stare back at us all day,
our internet is highway of sex educated hitch hikers,
those of us in pajamas
wonder when one of us
will break ranks
from the couch
and do something about what’s
in the card board boxes stacked behind the garage,
full of pencil sharpeners, dead batteries
and legal papers we haven’t read,
but there’s nothing we can do
until we finish what we’re doing,
which is nothing
which is fine
because
it means
we don’t miss a thing.

Arise and write!

Every which way but
into the sleeve of the jacket
now too long
and longing as the arm
drops toward the dressing room floor,
one leg longer than the other
and pants a size too small,
it seems you were invaded
and raided and all the faded
jeans and things that are
what you require for work, lunch,

all the points between appointments of
blue pencil marks, remarks in red pen
displaced, at sea in unknown pockets
in a pile of pants and shirts
unwashed like mythical masses
arriving at the docks
after passing under
the grey lady’s armpit
and the light she carries,
home fires for everyone,

Nothing makes sense
but that doesn’t matter
when work is the word of the day
and the word is first
when you thirst for a drink
and think you have no dimes
nor quarters for the soda in a can

or water in a plastic bottle,
you just hit the throttle and
plunge ahead into the brand new day
full of traps and fortunes
and the terror
an angry typist can bring you
or an empty page
taunts you with,
you rise, you shave, you
put on your cleanest dirty shirt,
you move onward into
the rising light,
the streetlights are still on,
the bus is late 
and deadlines are all
you have to live on.

Before we start

Before we start
lets place a dime next to our plates
to tell us where the chatter stops

when the words get hard as the water
in the streaked water glass.
I could stop on a dime
back in the day

when I drove a station wagon
to the store,a trail of tread
behind me showing me
every light I skirted.
It was your skirt that turned my head
when I stopped for a paper,
fingering the dashboard ashtray
for a dime.

All those screaming headlines

never stopped coming,

the news didn't change

when we married

after months of talking about
current events as we ate
Asian take out.
Today I drive
nothing but trivial paths,
you are the keeper of the dimes
and the traction i

in the tread of my shoes,

I sing your name

when I buy a paper,

you are the music

the headlines never had.

Gravy Boat

Timeless in airports
in non-smoking lines, every one deserves
where they're going to.

I could say what I mean
in congeries of intent,
but meaning is only a streak of luck
when the words like each other
and decide to try something new,
like a marriage that works
because husband and wife
are never home
on the same nights
and the sentence they've started
promises paroles and pardons
from the contract
of a kiss.

Under ether and the knife,
we might tell
the truth as we've felt
it for years
only after what's been killing us
is one with a snip and stitch.

After words, extraordinary language
becomes the way we walk
from the recovery room
in another light
of what's there, always the light
of fixtures that don't hide
the creep of gray hair
that is part of your response
to questions
posed like actors in costumes
for dramas about powdered wigs
from dead cultures
who tap at the library door
to know why and how come
all the lines are said in quirks
of style so fat with what
what you really mean
that the patient
yearns for the burn of ether.

Still, there is the issue
of the magazines to read, the post
cards to write, schedules to memorize
when coming into one's own
is an adventure traveled
in the back seats of cars that are
rented with other people's money,
when the scenery passes
and the billboards of brief,
smiling women
are more interesting than
the mountains or the forests or the
local histories ventured over ,
through or ducked all together,
when what you find yourself looking for
is anything with legs
that really speaks to you
in formations of language
that tells you all about
a life too terrible
to survive the perfections
that binds a life to marriage
or occupation
that has a hint of escape
written illegibly in a liberty
that is mustache cups to drink from,
and advertisements on T-shirts,
work days one forgets
when you're having fun
testing markets
with a metaphor
for the phases of The Moon,
ebb and flow
that is a trickle of chump change
to pockets rich in lint
and holes that are all about
the money they can't
keep for the pants
they don't wear
while customer sales
tells everyone
to fuck themselves
with all the credit
they can get their hands on.

Witless in movie marathons
hoping the hero
finds beauty tied to a tree
where there are
three bottles at her feet,
at the roots of her bondage.
Under the hot spaghetti sun,
our hero must decide which,
one trunk tethered woman
or three sealed bottles he
will have his way with.

This causes the Gods of competing absolutes
to laugh high -five each other
and cash in their markers
because the tangle of words
composed
has become the record
that spontaneously combusted
in the heat of trying to ferret
a kernel of wit
from the incongruity of the example.
I go on reading bill boards,
hear news reports
on car radios,
the voices reading the copy in
place-less accents
that sound like America,
airless voices reading words

flattening ideas of pain
and renders
stories of lives and places
into neutered melodramas
whose endings I predict
like that geek
everyone knows
who can pick
the ponies in all
kinds of weather
but who
never places
neither a bet nor goes to the track,
but who reads
all about it, and that's all he needs.


Drifting into insomnia
and other satellite hours,
every light burns,
we are tired
at this end
of the century,
rhetoric falters
and has become
the real way we shed tears,
speaking falters
and faults are naught but
gaps that are filled
when we stop
clearing our throat
in search of speech,
too exhausted for miracles.

There is now a fade from
cue cards
and a desire for Neapolitan ice cream
with a slice
of pie to go with,
a fade
into the language of arms
that are not the
fingers I speak with,
stranger things
in a room
where every light
have coronas against walls
painted for years
the color of surrender,
we talk too much
about things.

Blue Skies From Now On

The best two dollar tie
that slips under the wing span collar


comes to a knot under
the lump in my throat,

some green and red
growth that was the result of a fashion nightmare.

I had dreams you
had nothing to wear

but the clothes you bought on sale
in the mall where everything

except the parking spaces
were discounted.

No, I don't get more apartment
when the rent is increased,

I need to live more intensely in it
to make the abode match the rising sea of outgoing green.


The boy's pants are too short to
be running a marathon
with the god of desire:
soon the world that used


to standby as he stumbled
through the malls looking

for a hem to cling to
will become rife with strife

and impacted with
lust, desire for things he

cannot logically use, women in
shorts only military secrets address in sane fashion:

the secrets of the Invisible Country
will be revealed and they still won't make any sense,

and growing older will be the
sigh escaping from the chair
you collapse into when fireworks are done

and sulfur
cuts a path
over the
picnic that celebrates
blue skies,
blue skies,
nothing but blue skies


from now on.

The voice that comes from the stream

for jls,lho and lol


It's not the voice that comes
from the steam
nor the tide that turns

at the drop of dime
into a newspaper machine.
not a name that fades in the ear

when you turn a corner
nor a name that comes through the
ear peace of your phone that

rings at the dinner hour.
not a lover who misses you
after all the years in jobs

on a far coast where time zones and
temperatures are closer and hotter
that the hotel sheets
are to the mattress where you stare

at the door to the hallway,
the shadows of feet passing in
the middle of the night,
you wonder what your lover
has too say,
not about this meal you're eating

or by what you're reading
but instead about how you're living
in this world when
nothing seems real enough to
count on as if life itself mattered,

i say all these things
come back to us
always in the moments when
we're required to be
the selves we've rehearsed in mirrors,
at home, imagining interviews
and interrogations,
the way your lips grew puffy
the first time i made you cry,

the way you traced the words of
the book you were reading
before setting it down
to dress for openings, dinner,
where ever we might be going,

the masks cracks and falls to the floor
when some meaningless phrase is said
and suddenly, powerfully
it’s clenched fists in public places,
the world is removed just then and too loud as well,

it's all those things after all,
every last cough and bottle of beer we balanced
on the fire place, there's nothing i ever had

that i don't miss, you were everything
in front of me, passing by and gone
like a road sign that couldn’t be read

What You Were Saying

The first sentence you speak
has you asking
why comets soar slow
as rudderless boats in dead leaks
which are gone when
there's finally a telescope,
let's consider the grass at night
when the sprinklers are on,
the salads and cakes
we made wilt and go stale
under these kitchen heat lamps.

The next sentence you speak
starts a new arrangement
with the things
that confound you in the morning,
all these combs, used condoms,
matinee ticket stubs
are going into the trash,
this is the day nothing changes yet
there's no going back,

But the sentence you'll say
after that considers a lofty cubism,
a stick in the eye,
the adjectives make you aware
how hungry you've been
and will make you search
for her phone number,
if it still exists in the handwriting
you wrote but couldn't read
that night when bar lights blurred
and her stubble grew coarser
each minute vanishing 'til 2 in the morning.

The last sentence is you
talking about talking too much
during movies you watch alone
in the kitchen amid the pie shells
you've made for the bowls of varied
sliced fruit , each speared with
serving spoons and long tined forks,
crusts that will go stale
and fruit that spoils
as you let the room get dark
until the star spangled banner is played
and you can suddenly hear
the humming of the refrigerator
with it's door left open.