at the frequency of unmade babies

the naked branches of trees
float, reflected in the fluid
of forest pond,
the panorama of sky
drifts in the retina of a young man
thrown out into the world

by a father, wasting his allotment of humanity

couch-surfing in friends' basements;
he often walks the woods as penance
for faults not his own



but today,

stoned to the bone and amazed,

vibrating at the frequency of unmade babies

in the flux of womb waves,

of amniotic nirvana,

his awareness opens

to the scintillating energy around him,

a sparrow alights on a tree branch…



he stops

to count his breaths;

he deliberates

and then smiles…

he is remembering a time

when he was not breathing

as we do,

with lungs greedy and isolate,
when his heart was beating
in synch with another's,
with a mother’s,
to the rhythm of the Universe,
when all was well,
when she still knew possibility
and could feel
pain

OUT

Home bound

Stone ground

Laughing til it’s holy

Loving life only

One way down

From the upper room,

Climbing out

Your father’s womb,

All that noise

All that crying

Pop stars mop bars

Wrong way moon down a one way tomb

The light can’t see

The fingertip feel

Itself, it’s sealed

It sells

Like sex on Sunday,

Gloria Mundy,

Solomon Grundy

Driving a Hundai

One more word --

third eye groping,

And heaven opens --

OUT,

I am out,

Inside out

No doubt,

No dust clouds

Hanging over me

And I burn and am free

In the strange, incidental truth of it.

Driving through the Bronx

Driving through the Bronx









Driving through the Bronx,

parks run for a couple of miles,

rolling woodlands and open fields

in a 500 foot strip along the freeway, slumped

beside broken buildings,

piles of projects,

products of some god’s idea

of a joke

or of a tentative mercy –

house the poor, but don’t keep them safe or happy…



And the poverty and the crime

are hidden from the night

in daytime, a deluge of light

just past a week of bad rain

and overgrown anxieties

and domestic pain

skulkers

They skulk

And that is the only way to describe it.

Cats at night,

Homeless and home-free,

Prowling the Universe, the hood,

The protectorate of Isis,

They, pussy-footing down driveways

Across street ways;

What is their point, what are they trying to say

Why do they look at me that way?...



…Like I’m crazy

Well, it’s not my idea

to fawn over the cute little f'ing things, “Well, HEY there, cutie. Well, HEY there,”

As if I were talking to a one year old child;

It is they who cull this ninnyish salutation from me,

They who make me feel like a warm mammal in pajamas,

They who, concurrently, make me feel like…



…I am an affront to sanity, talking to stupid, skulking, prowling, pussyfooting,

Conniving, feline, fraulein, fornicating, free-basing, drug-smuggling, embezzling,

adulterers!, adulterers!, MURDERERS!!

They think they’re so fucking intelligent,

Pretending they know what the hell I’m saying, what I’m thinking,

Then looking at me with necks haughtily cocked back a fraction of an inch,

With eyes appalled,

never thinking to validate me in my insatiable hunger to feel okey-dokey.



Well, all I want, after all, is just to pet them.

But they spot it. They sense the neediness. Run off like beauty queens

From an old pimp.

Not so unintelligent at all really.

Self-protection. Intuitive creatures, indeed.



The short of it is, she’s gone,

And I dreamt about her last night,

Petting her, she on her back, pawing my hand.



And if I would have only held it together in 1999,

If I wouldn’t have kept cutting my wrists, I’d have kept that apartment,

Not had to give my poopy-butt,

my black cat Audrey,

up to the APL for adoption

or for slaughter.

haiku for Nenette

Nenette, subject of the film "Nenette" is a rather large, 40-year-old orangutan. Bored-seeming and coyote-spirited, she looks out on the passers-by at the Paris zoo.





you laze on the cross
of your daily lassitude,
orangutan-Christ