Dreamscape
Dreamscape
A woman alone on a white flat,
delirious, or sleeping.
She proves that mortality
is merely a roof against
the cosmic radiation
of time. In her stance,
tragic or ecstatic,
there are hints
of deliberation. There are
solar tempests
that change her skin
to that waxy patina
with which bronze statues
are coated after restoration.
She might lie there
for a century, a public
monument to thirst,
to the harsh incipience
of indolence or pain,
to the fence
where every lost leash
snarls on its own epitaph.
Colloquy with the Man who Failed the Olympic Trials
What is our will? What is our controversy?
As the steam rises from the dishwasher
and the cabinet drawers yield their harvest
of forks, we split philosophy
with mocha chocolate cake, our toes
keeping their grip on our carbon,
our eyes sore with the haze
from the forest fires. We won’t see
forever towards the disappearing
electrons, won’t understand
the projection of the projection,
the illusion of the imagined,
the splendor of the harvest
of rose hips breaking from orange
to red, their narrow fruit
crowded with seeds, and all our training
whittled down to a pair of track shoes
specialized and left on the ring
with the signatures of our coaches
and all our most spirited competitors.
Ceasefire
Lobbing the victims
and rocketing the perpetrators.
Under the tunnels,
the old disguises
rear their plaintive
hate. The drones
have been smoked
out, the bus stations
smithereened. No more
sanitary engines,
no more pandemic
examinations. A fatuous
equality between jailer
and the jailed. Everything
boils down to who claims
the fingernails of a god
intent on scratching out
both pairs of eyes, those
of the observant
and those of the observed.
Cartography 1
Now I will draw
a map of all the paradises—
the neat and sportive
mountain ranges
where Christmas invented
the notion of a false dawn.
In my running hand, I bring
the old cedar shingles
to grow the hot fire
in the incinerator,
the one that will engorge
the chimney with such heat
that the cement lining
will crack and crash
to the bottom. My ultimate
happiness is to think
that my ogling produced
the spectacular tumescence
of the one who somehow
wore his manliness
like a caul over his bare
head while he strutted
in his dress greys
more jubilantly
than all the neighborhood
spear-and-swordsmen.
Blasphemies, various and sundry
I gag on the spoiled
nectar of heaven. I slip
on the sour cream
of paradise. There,
in my Ferris wheel
inebriations, I am scratching
the sky where the gods
have lost their sutures
and their eyeteeth.
Every superstition
wins the genuflection
of my conscience
but not the lilt of my ankle
bones. Here, in the fleet-
footed slurry
of the afterlife,
I primp my skepticism
in front of the mirror
that tells which wind
will arrange itself
most fitfully into fists.