Goat's Head Oops

Goats

I’m not built for this kind of thing anymore, I think, hand pressed hard against my side. The cops had already cleared, leaving a floor full of broken glass and blood to clean up.

Bars—funny places. If you work in one, you know what the camouflaged stink beneath floorboards and in saturated spots in the bathrooms smells like. You know bars are filthy places. Even now, little flies flit around rows of bottles stacked behind the bar and ignore the blood spattered on the wall. I catch myself asking if flies get addicted to alcohol. Barflies. Ha ha.

I love bars. Always have. I think of this particular one as my church—here twelve years this February coming. I’ve bounced in lots of places. Once picked up a part-time gig in Denver where I had to wear a frilly shirt and bowtie. They had a reel-to-reel instead of a jukebox and played the same shit songs over and over, 80’s shit songs that made me tired. I’m no good when I’m tired. So this place is my church. It’s where I feel like I belong. I’d be cranky all the time in a nightclub or a place where bouncers wear frilly shirts and bowties.

I was thinking that very thing when I heard glass crunching under somebody’s boots and turned to see one of the assholes that had started the whole damned ruckus. The cops had missed him somehow. He must have landed unconscious behind a speaker or under a table. But now he was up, charging me, grunting, half-limping as he came on hard. Only, I did a little sidestep, extended a leg and down he went, glass scattering beneath him and sounding very much like marbles dropped on wood.

I’d noticed his bunch when they walked in. I hate when guys like them come in, guys with something ugly behind their eyes. Borderline types that don’t know when or how to die. Back when I didn’t know shit from shinola I took little notice of things like eyes, but after a couple of brouhahas that ended in a whole lot of stitches, I learned. Today I can separate the goats from the sheep. Goats have eyes that sit dark and blank, a little cloudy so you can’t see if there’s a person inside. This guy: goat for sure.

He was up as quick as he went down, his beard scraggly, graying. I could see he was crazy and suddenly I felt damned tired. Exhausted. Everything slowed around me. His hand reeled up with a blade. I grabbed his arm, two hands. He knocked me back against the bar. I ran the edge of my boot down his shins, better’n ten times, and I was shoving his arm down and away and growing real tired when I felt the blade slip in. It was warm. Didn’t hurt. I’m down on one knee then, bleeding. I can smell the place. It’s dark, filthy, and smells a lot like goat.

Last Night I had the Strangest Dream

Beléndez At the Dodge: gOld Soul

A young
Neruda,
this poet
in a chair that rolls like

a mechanical horse,
a jungle path called exile,

music,

constant accompaniment,
the parrot and the cat,
monkey and the Andean asp,
all that rises in the caw-and-hiss of a
sleeping night caught in an updraft of
dream, tropic stall of northerly wind
somewhere over Central America now,
a small place near the sea, conch and coral, salt;

dream fills the spaces between, sprouts leaves
that perfume the air with spells, dream-worlds
faintly tipped in Mazatlan gold, in blood,
like claws taken in the hunt and adorned
to be worn, still warm, hacked mitts
slightly smaller than the poet who was,
he claims, no bigger than a mango in his
birth, no smaller than his own early shadow
in this long, late light.

Watching the tide roll away . . .

Monterey

August. I am sitting on the dock, reading, and you are lying on your turquoise towel, face lit by the sun. The lake rocks around us, ever ever, quietly.

These are the same green hills Edith
Wharton camped in while fleshing out the Ethan Fromes . . of the world.

Earlier, you said you would like to own two dogs, and while I was taking my walk up Chestnut Hill I thought about whether a dog might not have made Ethan's life bearable, if he'd have aspired to break away and marry better than he did.

Of course, Edith didn't marry all that well either, her shameless husband-in-the-garden-dancing, naked, in these hills of lunatic beauty.

All of this makes me aware of my own happiness. I am happy, happy and very much at peace here with you.

Then, from . . across the lake a dog yowls. Another answers from , , some distant compound on the far side of the hill.

Drawn from my book, I set my eyes on you. You are breathing and I am breathing and I see what lies inside of you, hordes of summer flowers, hyacinths, and long horizons steeped in light. I see past the gentle reckoning of your thighs, the soft rising and falling of your stomach. My eyes bear down on the steely water of the lake shining through you.

You wake to see.

I have taken away my clothing and I am dancing all around. All my beauties and uglies are turned silhouette against the sky.

You must raise your hand to shield your bleary eyes against the sun.

Skirting the edge of the dock, I am dancing until the light locks up, until it is grown so solid I can no longer move against it. I am immobilized, belighted. My shadow breaks away, bounds over the rocks, climbs up into the trees and disappears. I expand like heat, and you are like an echo, like signaling flecks of sun on water.

The lake tips.

In the cool dark hours, the absence that my shadow left rouses me from sleep. I hear, its footfalls on branches, just outside our bedroom, the leaves it rustles as it sniffs its way through the lightless halls of night. You remain quiet, ever ever, and touch me with your hands so I can close my eyes. They curl up on my face like two old dogs warmed by fire.

This is how it is to love you,
which I do.

What it is ain't exactly clear

Lied To

Something's gone haywire.

It becomes most apparent around people,
in airports or classes or on supermaket
lines--the great disparate judgments of
insides by outsides, mostly yours on
yours added to theirs--as if yours were
not sufficiently your own, not sufficiently
point and counterpoint, like blades that
repel though smithed to clash and cross
and make a furious noise, a noise that
slides along the self-loathing of
avoidance, because you thought it would
be easier than this and you were wrong.

Desolation Row

Collage: Editorial

50 people were buried in the rubble.
The number of dead was not immediately
known. A large number of civilians were
inside. The exact number was unknown.
The number of occupants was around 50.
The exact number was unknown. Around 50.
Buried. They were checking. Residents had
repeatedly been warned. Unable to reach the
area. Showed no video footage. Showed no
video. Around 50. Buried. They were checking.
Expanded its assault on Lebanon. Renewed
attacks on northern Israel. The number of
dead. A large number of civilians. Inside.
Unknown. The exact number was unknown.
The Christian heartland. The last significant
road. Barrage of 140 rockets. Three Hezbollah
rockets. Strike. Inside. Fighting. No casualties
were immediately reported. 50 people were
buried in the rubble. Around 50. Buried. They
were checking. Expanded its assault. Renewed
attacks. Farm workers loading vegetables.
Dozens of farm workers loading vegetables.
Around 50. Dozens. Killing 28. The workers’
foreman. Five Lebanese civilians were killed.
19 wounded. Christian areas. Picturesque
coastal resort. Air raids. 50 people were buried
in the rubble. Civilians. The number of dead
was not immediately known. Four civilians.
Four bridges. Israeli soldiers were killed. A
Lebanese soldier was killed. The exact number
was unknown. Conditions. Pressure. Cease-fire.
Disarmament. Bombing of bridges and roads.
Tightening the blockade. Cutting communica-
ions. Starving them. Starving. Dozens. Inside.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14163530/

Make it new-port

Newport

Bunched hills,
July's dry, umber fields,
green-gathered copses of
occasional trees,

Clouds unfurl in sky, retain this
somber light, this expanding collection
of blue eternities,

Small, brick homes remind me
now and then that I am in England,
on a train, though this seems something far
and nameless, like passing deep through the
belly of some marvelous mound.

Their motto is don't tread on me . . .

Self-Evident Things Cornelius Saw

...................Truth is the majority vote of that
. . . . . . . . . .nation that could lick all others.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Three times in the early autumn of 1780,
ten-year-old Cornelius Banta spotted him,
General Washington, mounted, riding
among the 14,000 troops encamped and
waiting for French reinforcements to arrive.
Cornelius may have been delivering cider
from his father's mill, or following the trail
of a deer, or may have simply wandered
feverishly, drawn by the restless air of
revolution, the lives of so many uprooted
men. The ridge would have been thick with
the scent of them, the smoky fires of 14,000
Cains.

Two centuries have come and gone and now
it is late spring, the azaleas are all withering
if not entirely unbloomed, though the giant
rhododendrons overhead bow beneath
flourishes of periwinkle, white-petalled
silences, and magenta tongues of fire.
Washington Spring sifts silently through the
green cresses that it feeds, and all the place
is mist and passing flower, abuzz and good
to take the sun in. The chestnut tree that
shades the eastern bank is not old the way
the spring is old, not ringed with an age of
rippling revolutions, remains too new to
have provided cool passage to a General or
a soldier fingering the frayed remnant of a
letter from the girl he'd love if he survived
with arms and legs still ripe with her, with
hands and fingers that once might cup her
love in round caress.

I touch the little fires all around, daffodils
have given way to daisies, soft petals like so
many colored tongues in a green morning.
Last year's leaves carpet the earth here, layers
of so many leaving years. You can feel them
all, like a nerve that runs throughout, pins
and needles of the place, and too, the lives of
men that would have broken camp that late
September, to abandon this Edenic post for
war, its survivors consigned to roam the earth.
They did it, got all broken and dead, for the
General and the wide-eyed cider boy from
Banta's farm, for streams that rise when rains
fall, for spring that leads to summer, for all
such things self-evident, like bodies strewn in
raw red fields, in every posture but repose.

Heart and Soul

Villahelle: The Heart of It

The heart's gone broke long before
the body's clothed in tatters,
a loveless hour, a closed door,

some wrinkled folds, driven airs
in which each breath is scattered;
the heart's gone numb long before

loss turns corporeal like a scar
in a mirror that's been shattered,
a loveless hour, a closed door

never granting entry nor
rejoinder to the clattering
heart grown cold and underscored

by summer's passings, winter's hoar-
frosts, heart shrouded in their mantles,
a loveless hour, a closed door

we press against and cave in more,
till the earth beneath gathers round
the heart that's fallen years before
a loveless hour, a closed door.

Bonnement m'agree

Hads, Fee, Eys, Sol

One woman serves my ego: that
masculine lack of attention
masquerading as adulthood.
She uses words like “man,” uses
“manly” lots, even when I’m not.
“Unconditional love,” she said
last night. It sounded like “Don’t leave.”

Another one speaks to my soul,
her traveling-need desires what's “next,”
all the things she’s seen and done, the
spices she has risked, she hangs her
walls with them, wants always more and
hot and more. Everything but me.
The word she uses most is “friend.”

Too, there’s one whose own need touches
mine, frail and strong, running, always—
her eyes. Sometimes they rest and then
I see and say “I know.” I think
I love her like a mystery,
a thrown improbability
probing last-known hiding places.

But one—she, my ever ever;
each poem I write--her hand's on mine.
We dance along a floor of glass,
never out of sync, as long as
music plays. Play tunes out all my
imperfections. But when it stops,
then she aways. She never stays.

Ending then, these are the women
in my life, none of them a wife,
each one of them more dear than I
can say and each one with their points
both hollow and sublime—none mine.
All mine. And in their turns I see
they’re right and cannot disagree.

The lunatic is in my head . . .

"If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest."
.........................................--Ben Franklin

Something in the way she moves . . .

Dear

It happens sometimes, that I am seized with a thought or remembrance so strong that if I am standing I must find a place to sit, or if I am already seated I must turn away so others do not see the tears of mixed emotion, the awkward smile and far away look. Often, these strange occurances have something to do with what is really dear. Often, these nudging reminders have something to do with you. I think you understand what I am saying. I think you know how it feels to suddenly be filled with light.

Do you believe in magic ?

Conscientious Abjection

I used to believe in
so many things;
that was before I

Tails of Brave Ulysses

Number nine, number nine, number nine . . .

Claritas With A Splash

a man puts down his drink, reaches into a sack, withdraws a painting: young woman, fading colors, turn-of-the-century, and another man, ugly, lifts a glass to the woman's painted lips. she is baptized red in the redly pigmentation of cheap wine. immediately, her clarity works through my dirtiness. then the choir walks onstage, orderly, songbooks crooked in arms. i grow full. purrmutation. hushed choir "amen-ing."

i see myself, "tomorrow." the violin section leans in, turns pages while the magnificent mezzo-soprano is pressed in and down by militaristic drumming until
her voice is the only ringed route of escape. one baggy-faced violinist and another paunch-cheeked clarinetist argue accompanied by a wide-legged woman who bows on cello-strings. the room is no longer made of wood, not the hue of a red baptism, but cast in golden light. a child turns and asks, "who gave out the stars tonight?"

the stage is full. black sequins on velvets and silks. huge boulder buried beneath. above it all, wisps of white and balding pate; one man's back, two black buttons mark the split-seam of his long-tailed coat. from behind he resembles a night-locust conferring music on the world, and then a swan. he is too small for his wrinkled coat. symmetrically, he battens up deaf magnetudes in playfulness-and-sorrow. his is a song carried in the hands of a very old man, all the beauty of this one old man.

the very long-lipped bassist with thick glasses, the bony-faced chinese violinist, both look lost, serious. none of the women look as sad as the dogfaced men. still, they can't be thinking of each other--only their parts in the magnificent--only that. only fingers plucking strings, bouncing bows, every boundary locked in sound, closed in with wood and reed, parried by oboe and bassoon, shattered out of complacency by rising brass. how does one indicate the rising pluck from the descending rub? in that space, reverent stillness falls on everything. in that moment i too fall, back to earth. sitting in a barroom with a fading pink woman who's dressed in the color of something she drinks, i hear the refrain, the counterpoint, all. i hear nature and the star-child, the untenable, "play on."

I got blisters on my fingers

Velvet Overlay for an
Addict Named Derrick In a
Discordant Downword Direction

banging on a piano with fingers blistered by hot grease at my job as the cook in a local barroom is not rare the way late roses are rare (early roses rarer still)—in just the same way walking streets at night is always suspect, so they did not expect me at all, ever.

no other comprehensible course than sleep, because I don’t have trouble sleeping, it’s the waking up that’s hard, like being a killer cop in the fuzzillo 88. it was not that he said he did not give a shit, it was the way he said it that troubled us, it sounded like many men's choirs gathered together, chanting penitential psalms licensed to the local cemetery where your forebears may or may not have happened on a strange peacefulness they remain too eager to share with you.

every time the phone rings my stomach curls in knots. i do not want to answer another call for help. isn’t it plain that I’ve been thrown to earth, a cancerous lech, a carnivorous apocalyptic riding out a rainstorm before the hunt resumes: isn’t it? I am nature’s thwarted rhythm, a green field of time that prays to be written. call on me, lour eed, oh lordee ooh lord.

comparative polarities deuced up with diplomas, stark and savage, like lurid men and women peeing in public lots, peeing, lots, all recorded by the police and pbs, so people can discourse openly about the constitution in a way that is at once enervated and annulled. did newton live quietly, or was he fitfully rendered in
fatalistic laws of motion, mellifluous cog of masculinity raised over the heads of unblinking roman regiments searching for the unceasing body of christ?

still, too early for roses. mid-april. trees are white and yellow puffs, insubstantial as bad marriages. even as a child I heard the loneliest of sounds, a piano never played, fingers never marked red by a heat that bubbles surfaces before it bores downword and whose oceans of blood and salt remain nearby vistas never
traversed, all dead seeds of a latinate urania, every one a maternal minuet, and nothing’s petrichorial prospects borne again and always on the unceasing rains of sameness and defeat.

What's going on . . .?

This picture was taken in Ecuador (I think) and posted at: http://www.amnestyusa.org/business/sharepower/chevron.html


I know that I am privileged to have been born in the United States of America, but sometimes I wonder what's going on. I'm sure the child in the picture, if still alive, will wonder the same thing one day. Is this craziness surrounding oil an expediency of survival? Sometimes I feel like I'm trapped in one of Kafka's stories. Where is science when it comes to energy alternatives? Why haven't we tapped that nuclear reactor we call the sun? It's good for about 5 billion more years.

Skating away, on the thin ice . . .

School's almost over.
I'm exhausted.
And not a creative bone left in my body.

Back in the you us us are

Flight

I am punching holes in the walls of my life when you
enter inside lightly you lighting
my arms making them light. Tiptoeing. Seal
your mouth. Mine.
Eyes closed
You. I.
Together.
Rising.
Soaring.
Comes biting
Mid-March wind.

. . . scream of the butterfly . . .

Dumb Anding For My Poem Spun

So I'm trying

to get

this

thing

p
o
e

t
r
ying to repeat that
unfurling, hear
that unfurling
metaphear

old song
ancient listening
sound of the start of everything and
the first anding
and all I have to date are dull litanies,
no quick beam of a storied moon, just
the ludicrous lowery of my own tongue-
locked embodiement d-
yang-
. l-
. . i-
. . . n-

. . . . g-
ua w-here soul is

s
ou
n
d

some

thing

(
w
ha
t
?)

else

not

UN-
like a memory,
a past-his-bedtime-summer-boy,
peering out a flimsy wood-and-screen door, frame of a
musty green bungalow, nighted boy, dumbstruck, firstly
registering the rise and beat and rumbling trill, crickets calling,
lulling, scritching their lives away in impenetrable dark.