What has happened to the color of money in your eyes?
Nothing satisfies.
You are not my mother.
None of you are my mother.
This earth, who calls herself my mother
might as well swallow me up or starve me to death.
When enough pocket change jingles in my pockets
    I will smile at you
and the squint of my eyes in the late summer sun
and the breeze that unsticks the salt wounds left by
my chafing shorts caked in earth and sweat.
I'm the devil. Come with me.
Play poker with your soul.
Flip a coin. Heads I win. Tails you lose.
How subtle she was the night she swept into my house.
Or was it a Sunday afternoon.
Uncelebrated. I feel uncelebrated and unable to celebrate
this ever-changing menagerie of life.
All of this fire and brimstone and nothing but boredom.
So many little inner fascists like rodents running around
the rotting corner pieces of my house in the dark
dodging traps and poison bullets.
What is this trap of the mind and who is
the questioner this time?
My caustic venting and charisma
are little more than a plea for help.
I can't do it alone.
They've got millionaires signed
up to wear space suits before we know it
they'll be selling us silly putty to eat for breakfast.
I'm not all cracking knuckles and scowling,
I have wondrous memories of a heaven I once knew.
Holy water. A fragrant Venusian lagoon.
Visions of irises opening in the garden.
Am I unearthing a four-billion-year-old lineage
of pain and oppression
in here or is it that I just need a few more hugs?
Doesn't it just rattle away at your
concept of evil when I reach out for a hug?

Sometimes I wish I could disrobe
and hand over the job to someone
else but I've fired seven secretaries in
eight months and if you think there are a shortage
of secretaries you should see what we are having to use
instead of fire-stokers.
So much focus on the horrific possibility
of the death
of the physical body.
Why not the death of the soul?
How many people experience a soul death
    long before the body decays?
The scorching madness of lifetimes,
spent enslaved by attachment to this
    entity we call mind.
The phenomenon of mind.
The rampant oppression of the Earth
    and her People.

Allen? God?
How have I come to this?
All to teach you these simple truths.
Naked human tenderness. Honesty.
The joys of playing with fire.
I smell the gas of burning
rubber tires from John's yard.
It lingers in my bedroom now.
What do I want from you?
Invite me over.
What is the color of the money of the soul?
A purple dervish swirling?
Suggestibility. Naiveté.
We are so fragile.
There was a moment in time
when I felt strong enough.
Not just like Atlas. Not just like
Cleopatra or a mighty Sphinx
or a statue to greatness,
to own my own share
of responsibility.
I'd love to disrobe.
And transform.

Dear Allen Ginsberg,
Yes, a nation whose eyes are a
    million blind windows.
I'm lighting a candle.
The one next to the window.
It's boarded shut so my plan is to
    knock the candle over.
Light it all on fire, and run from
    the building, screaming YES.

Dear God,
Invite me over.
Into the essence of our love together.
Let nothing stop the
sweet symphony
of our intimacy as it
unravels our lie
of being at all
separate or not in love.
Please can I have all my dreams
    in this lifetime?
Please can I have something to love
all the time not just these
bits of pocket lint and change?

Please Allen.
Please. God.
I'm so tired.
The currency of my country has changed
but the television looks the same.
There is no room left for me in this world
of constant transit and shifting shapes.

In surrender,
The Devil.

The wind
(without your breath)
is still.

So,
I watch leaves

and wait.

A small machine creates peace. Like a radio tuned to ghost
messages, it creates electronic sound and nothing more: no music,
words, sound effects. Hear it instead of city noises—it jams
awareness of shouts, car horns, cries of children, marching boots,
screams of the drowning, manifestos, headlines, sports results.

In the country: block the barking dogs, the psychotic neighbor.
I used to lie in my hammock under the hemlocks. Now I stay inside
and listen to white noise. White noise aids meditation or at least
stops thoughts of your mistakes, your wounds, your insensitivities,
what everyone's done to everyone else.

All the words: declarations of love or loyalty, pledges of protest,
lies about you, rants about me—white noise is better than silence.
It isn't white, of course, but devoid of color. The white race isn't white,
either, and a race isn't what we thought it was. White magic isn't powerful
like the other kind. White noise isn't clearer if you listen hard.

It has no message. It's notable for what it isn't. Just like you and me.
White noise is Post Modern: it contains its own contradiction—these times
are sick with paradox and irony: politic that celebrates incompetence
and deceit, children hurt by those obliged to nurture—air, water, food
destroying life—voices of dissent ineffective as white noise.

Outside the window, the forest and fields are white with snow that will last
for months. The sky is white, hiding the sun. The hours of light are short:
the sun is weak or hidden. We need to buy lights to counteract the desire
to retreat to bed, to hibernate. Light for your eyes, white noise for your ears.
Aspartame for taste. Scent machines hide the smell of decay.

These are times to sleep through; wake if the nightmare ends. Then open
windows, open the door. Listen. Hear the clatter of a thousand leaves
tousled by the wind. Taste tomatoes warm from the sun. Press flesh
that smells of jasmine and spice. Or stay in the empty room, watch
the white sky, hear the white noise.

I can only have a raw exuberance for life.
I put my head out in the pouring rain,
to catch but less an eighth the character of Eve.

I am that same child born of a paralyzing hypocrisy.
I was blown from the same breath that blew igneous rock,
at times a temperate being and at times not.

The same as you and don't you ever forget it.

1. The Old Woman and The Rubble
She stands in the dusk
as the machine lurches on
—two minds not working.

2. Palestinian Cat
She is so so thin
she can lie down now to rest
in a wide tank tread.

3. Walt Whitman Rides
He mounts the steel seat
and says an anti-prayer:
the beast pops, farts, dies.

4. The Eyes of All, Wait
Ibtisam, young girl,
shot, scooped up in soft debris,
in early summer.

5. Dozer Rendezvous
On the edge of town
the iron animals prowl,
smoke, laugh, scowl—blunt-nosed.

6. Pre-Dozer Etiology
James Martin's a cop
in the city of Beaumont
—his eyes bleed hate, Bush.

We held hands across
the portable hospital table,
you sitting on the bed and I across in that chair.
You trying to keep breathing the oxygen, diminishing how much
I hadn't realized.
You didn't want me to go.
You said "You're not staying the night again" and I said not this
time. I was afraid of two nights in a row. I got heart palpitations
last night. But I stayed much longer than I had intended.
But at last I waved goodbye and left you with terror.
When I got back to Jersey there was a call waiting for me
and I had to turn right around and got no sleep anyway.

How can you forgive me?

Eating
the noise
of your silence,
chewing
on a litany
of broken clues,
I await again
the temptation
your eventual opening
to me
will lay out,
casually (so as
not to reveal
the snare
of it),
measured like
white lines
on a mirror
slowly fogging over
with little black lies
burrowing inside
yawns of
promise.

your words
more serious
than the
moonlight
shafting
my window
wake me
in the night
jumping around
on my pillow
like small
green frogs
surfacing from
the bottom
of my darkest
waters
stirring up
ancient amazements
and resurrecting
illuminations
long veiled as
buried treasure
in my
unfathomable