Sonnet

We used to raise antennae like mold
taking flight from an alabaster landscape
then lean softly with the wind
as if history had been blown up.
It used to take us hours to wind down,
making winding up as much a surprise.
The day never ended.
Now all we do is wind up.

Who’d dare touch the earth again,
not the stony essence running through it?
We’ve been hacked, on suspension,
no one ever looking, always watched.

The experimental video was designed as a video installation in protest of the media build-up to the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. It was shown at a cafe in Tacoma, Washington, and needs reediting, but here it is as is.

Slip and Drivel

The letters sent up never arrive
though arms and legs wave about.
Please stop summarizing what you (think you) see
was only seen on TV.
Running in place builds up currency
and leaves leveled lots northeasterly,
possums flooding sprung diameters
burrowing and backing into factory relics,
tumbling under any rhododendron or stilted hedgerow
parceling the heartland.
The apples rolling on the floor are rocking on the floor
as the father recedes into his constitutive colors.
Unreal sister:
traveling salesmen sweep you off your feet.
If you like the idea, it's yours.
I prefer not having hanger-ons hanging.
I return to my unfolding mirrors opening into smoked florescence
all for my hair.
But it pulls away like the pinup in a crowded house
at the discretion of whoever does the dusting.
I ordered more photos from the firm holding our negatives
as if the digital age hadn't caved it all in escrow
to spores hammering into a very old age
recombinatory life making its way indefinitely.

Abstract

The mechanisms are in place.
We order coffee to go and return to command centers by-the-minute
bank on the price range with smiles from another era.
The corruption is structural and the flower girl selling flowers is passed over.
Boys take out the garbage unable to see the ascendancy laying claim to them.
Tips for good service keep the arms market out of anyone’s hands
the game safely in automatic profits grandfathered in for home theatres
mobilized abroad where no one listens.
It's hard work inventing alien slime worthy of walling out,
uncircumcised enemies in hooded full-length suits.
The happiness seems almost ghoulish now,
one nation under Windows, emptied emptiness
unto others, backed up by loud, firm affirmations in low tones.

In Vietnam, Thinking of Iraq

Is it enough to list specifics and lose ourselves
in the godlike complexity of broken microchips
as we screen our broadcasts walking along nature washing up?
It's one thing to throw up a slogan
and drag a population across a border, an ocean,
it's another to oust the invader—always in bad taste,
the proverbial imperialist oinker.

The details sprayed on the bricks are not sweet recollections
but convictions, a moral economy not bombable,
and to be paid off
or be reborn a fly or damaged squirrel or at best a deer to be hit by a Winnebago.

The functioning of parts is still bound to the beholder
in remote control. The spirits of the dead still fly just as far
and will seek out the controllers of drones and smart bombs.
The chain of command will not sleep well.
If wrong, we are doomed.


(Ho Chi Minh City, February 2010)

From One End

I tell my friends, what you expect to find
at the end of a dead end road turning to dirt
along a crumbling beachhead?
Crushed glass of tossed beer-brown bottles.
Scraps of plastic and Styrofoam from fast-food beverages.
Thin plastic vendor bags of bones licked clean, tied in a knot—
heaped on upside-down steel barrels.
Dogs sniffing around can’t find them.
When a concrete hotel shell built itself off the beach
the interior vanished in insurance flames.
The retaining wall hollows out, the road is next,
lined with bald, bandanaed Norwegians loitering on Hoggs
with beer cans in hand and open carburetors
carrying them away. Most of the retirement colony is sedate,
lots of strolling husbands and wives and trailing maids or lovers.
Sometimes the lover rides with the husband on one scooter
and the wife takes chase on another, putting along to avoid collision.
I saw a pretty young American with a chubby gigolo in tow.
The rule of thumb: the escorts walk behind
(like servants, or wives in some cultures),
while those in love go hand in hand into old age.


(February 2010, Cha Am, Thailand)

Tableau

Where did he go, the one willing to work our way
down the strip of cheap eats?
The other ones go for fads
with boys riding in top-down canopies
to Krispy Kreemes, where the theater stood
with cathedral chandeliers
and we saw 2001 as a family
at its opening and later grown
men smearing mud on their mugs,
crawling around in paranoid chiaroscuro
as if they lost their way in the legs of a Caravaggio painting
where a page boy is screaming for help
while the big-wigs have fallen.
Luckily angels have dispatched, light cracks open the corridors
enough to make our way to the water cooler
in the mall security of ready vending machines
and our linoleum sounds ricocheting
the penetration of fluorescence.

(Tacoma 2006; Taipei 2010)

In Spanaway I Walk a Country Road

I walk with my neighbor who limps in inclement weather.
I limp beside him as if the world were a limping world
so we may not even notice his body breaking down.
Time is washing up again.
The first-growth taken away before even he can remember,
clearings left open to run-off, erosion
cut all the way into the foothills
where the Nisqually pours forth
through the shoulders of Rainier.
Weyerhaeuser left a moonscape of stumps
never replanted, "an honest mistake" overgrown
with buckling Himalayan blackberries
looping high and arching long
to wetlands to soak their dominion of fists
rooted in moist sunlight, vines releasing gnats and flies
worming from tart berries in their forest of thorns.
We talk of the road that leads all the way to the Mountain,
the road neighbors jogged on every afternoon
until passing cars picked them off—
swerved to fast in passing clipped one,
a mother twists backwards to hush kids takes one,
drunken golfers lose it … an ac-ci-dent. Very,
very sorry, they say in a whisper hard to record.

I walk with my neighbor who limps in inclement weather.
He's been around a San Francisco block and outlived it to tell,
says he believes in it, at least
has a hat to hang on, as they say on TV
what only family knew of neighbors:
cross-dressing boy goes on to fashion stardom,
horse-riding girls in love and lost in the mountains,
letters to an army buddy who couldn't let go—
discovered in the afterlife—
the wife left to sort his things, sharing
with us, dying within a year
to track him down for questioning.

We Are But Two in Our Circle

The visitors are at Woodstock though the spaceship follows them,
interviews them to donate to the color of their vests.

Charisma is not free and the angle
of one's bow may be paid off

so that humility itself becomes a pastime
for cameras and beginners, to welcome them.

We hold onto the apples too long
and the gift is gone, uneaten.

We say more are orbiting
and there are Fig Newtons in the drawer.

The window facing the hill is covered in geckos
creeping you out.

You say the squeak of mosquitoes is landing,
we are surrounded, the neighboring cabins exhausted.

Friendly hellos shape our first words
and by noon we are checked out, as usual.

Our bodies have done their things,
now we watch the movie

as if we were the lost mother, god herself
come to bump up the ante and bury sadness in the rising energy of the day.

Passage from Allen Ginsberg's "Wichita Vortex Sutra" on War

Different from a bad guess.
The war is language,
language abused
for Advertisement,
language used
like magic for power on the planet:
Black Magic language,
formulas for reality--
Communism [substitute Terrorism today] is a 9 letter word
used by inferior magicians with
the wrong alchemical formula for transforming earth into gold
--funky warlocks operating on guesswork,
handmedown mandrake terminology
...
Communion of bum magicians
congress of failures from Kansas & Missouri
working with the wrong equations
Sorcerer's Apprentices who lost control
of the simplest broomstick in the world:
Language
O longhaired magician come home take care of your dumb helper
before the radiation deluge floods your livingroom,
your magic errandboy's
just made a bad guess again
that's lasted a whole decade.

--Allen Ginsberg, "Wichita Vortex Sutra"

[Note: Line breaks and indentation lost in blog mode.]

The Anglos Dying

(A reply to W. S. Merwin’s “The Asians Dying”)

They step out of the Atlantic front
hacking forests into long halls, setting
armories on one end, pentacles on their chests,
they roar in the fire-light forward at each other—
an abundance of beer jostling from tall mugs. The gold

of angels’ wings adorns the halls.
Daylight stirs them under shifting clouds,
and St. Peter’s silence soars until numbness,
the crucifix of arches leans to them; their wrists twitch,
their sides seem to bleed.
In the catacombs they remember, touch a skull
“shattered by a spiked club.”
They want to believe, to never lose the shape of this blessing,
to never move, and sense from each other
an undulation—without hesitation—

they try to take Asia—the missionaries
loaded with magic, fresh architecture,
myths of towers to heaven, of endless steps
to nowhere—the rage of languages and famine.
“The pain will vanish like this, this bread, this wine;
follow!” say the missionaries.

Others listen, answer softly, in the cadence of the living,
“nothing they will come to is real.”

The Anglos advance into the shadows
they cannot see; shoulder to shoulder into the clatter they cannot touch
and raise the barrel’s flash,
pierce the rain with a pointless sound,
poison farmlands and return from settling mists,
behind horizons muddying an ocean with sunsets.
Packing trinkets of brass, they come back to this.

(Seattle 1985)

First appeared in the University of Washington Daily.

As the Sun Abandons Us at Birth

The moon's left its dents in all of us.
You say you belong on the vision-quest too
falling in place, focused on the arena
and phantasies of Rome in flames—
time for twittering against the grain,
no one to take note of the camphor
spinning the toy submarine in the bath,
fizzling quanta as if the big Bang hadn't been divvied,
its detritus cycling through us—filters
for the machines growing around us,
glowing as we plugged them,
new mirrors to mother us, tame us
in keeping us shaving—hanging on
to the proprieties of being us,
parking and delivery, staid coordinates.
Loveliness failed after the nth temper
evacuated all we rehearsed, raw this, raw that
touched me, leaving projections backing up,
dreams slow to wash up wasted mornings,
waiting, then leaving behind the fits believed in.

Land of the F

These are the times we talked about in grade school,
picture books exchanged for a ruler
to hold its place on the shelf,
the biggest planes and payloads
spread out on our table—
rising suns uber alles—
dynasties of masses stocked
to bus minions in prattling formation,

now cameras and locators trace forms
closing in on
our word,
a word to
speak for
our word, weak
in might, speaking
here not there to own
skies there
tear empty here.

Speak out here,
our word lost,
America's mouth is crossed
in twists and plots
in footage no longer here
on the way, already
in the way

I am leaving,
cancelled cable, wireless
not to see the sky their sky
as nouns and satellites
service no threat to rally
after the salute fires off
our hearts
paid to divide
to take our place
in America's bubble
of bullets, charging into your sunset,
the sky breaking down on you in red is not yours.

(Tacoma 2004)

Poetics Today

Each to her own, but a poem is just a poem,
no matter broken enough, detritus
stands out class to write his names
a hundred times, I will I will, I won't I won't
while wily ifs loop in no longer loopy and talking with one's others,
but a step on the tube in the wrong election
just short of Palestine and Guernica
and the intimate moments barricaded under
the clashing of gods that make you bob
under two roofs, man and wife,
portable, unfolding theism Americans pin their tails to
in nostalgic retrofitted retroviruses
uplifting lost causes in the grandeur of Rushmore filling the preemptive metropolis—
as if smiles for the latte meant more than good training—
ticks off the lonely widower, depending on that Joe.

Time to leave Joe and return to a bulletin of tunas fished to death—
may I recommend the marbled horse sushi
or holding out for Petri-grown chicken thighs on the horizon
along with body condoms to preserve sterility and perfect health.
May I recommend a man or a woman, but hey, it's your life.
The penguins imitate German nature and are taken. The “birds and bees”
are for the birds, more vulgar euphemisms to put off fucking.
Categories map us, chain us to ourselves.
Possums are liberated, leave little ones wound up on the back porch.
Goodbye Franco, goodbye Koizumi, goodbye Bush—
may the aerial bayonets of your visits find out your secret dyspepsia.
Imperialism is on automatic toilet.

Edward II

I can't remember who left who . . and this angers you,
phone set to take . . souvenirs
for a day you'll . . lay out the cards
in a film documenting . . the anger
over the men who raised you into anger . . to drop
all the bluster . . no method
to get the gusto . . off ground
and the leveling river . . media
to plug . . show tunes a la Champs-Elysees
bays gulls holding . . hover off
blinding light deflected ... the turning air carrier
.
The last time . . we admitted
long enough . . grown away into others
until another pulls away again
—then lost—forced off—
a dynamo . . dropped
in the lap . . dead leaf
sitting . . sitting . . sitting

blown off . . tipped off . . held off


[Originally there were supposed to be three spaces where the modidified ellipses " . . " are now, but I kind of like them now.]