Wasting Time
Not even trying
nothing to say
nowhere to go
so full of shit
wasting time
who even cares
another man
flushes another night
down the drain
watching its thin
legs flail
hopeless
as a cockroach
bouncing underfoot.
For Someone Who Understands
Who can hear it
Who can accept it
Who can love me.
Sure, sure, sure.
But everybody knows about you
You like hot girls
resting comfy in their
blessed twenties
and you
ignore the rest.
So who’re you trying to fool?
Now see here!
It’s more complicated than you
make it out to be!
I have some needs
that aren’t quite
greeting cards,
but that doesn’t mean
I don’t have some
that are.
Why not just be sweet
to me while you slip
off your things
and put your big breasts
into my
admittedly
too greedy hands.
If you match my strengths
and my weaker points
and I do yours
then
together–so they say–
we can rise,
becoming something
better than we were
when we lived apart
and begged God
for all this
bullshit.
Right?
Or is that just some more
bullshit?
Where are you?
I’m not bragging.
Why must I brag
every time I breathe?
It’s so gross.
Where are you.
I’m not mean.
Why do I always feel
a little up-nosed,
a little, let-them-die?
Why am I mean
every time I breathe?
It’s so gross.
Where are you?
OK, OK, never mind.
Guck Mal! Guck Mal!
Wo ist mein Bleistift?
Ich moechte dir schreiben,
habe was dass ich mitteilen will,
etwas interessantes,
dass dir bestimmt
gefallen wird.
Wie geht’s?
Was??!!
Ich kann dich nicht hoeren.
Du musst lauter sprechen,
musst dich genauer aussprechen,
musst mich naeher betrachten,
meine haende fester druecken,
mir mehr Glauben schenken—
Tja.
Naja.
Die Kinder, die am Rande des Teiches stehen und mit den Augen–entlang der suessen Aermchen, die sie wie Gewehre ausgestreckt halten,–die weit ausgefahrten Zeigefinger folgen.
“Guck mal! Guck!”
Die Enten, die, flaumigie Koepfe hoch erhoben und lange graue-und-braune Federn wackeln waehrend die gruene reflekteriende Frontfedern im Sonnenlicht kichern, im stillen klaren Wasser herum paddeln.
Total Ahnungslos.
Da, durch die knochenweisse Pappel, kommt ein uebler Dampf.
Is this thing on?
Anybody out there?
Anybody want to listen
to the things I say
when I’m uneven steven
looking for a love
I can’t even desire?
Anybody looking for me
out there in the busy minds
and pestered hearts
waiting in line to buy
their fair share
or hustling the wharves
to follow the slosh
of long distance waves
on corrugated iron rust?
No?
OK, OK, that’s cool.
Whatever, you know?
Whatever.
Because, like, in the end,
what I’m asking for
you cannot give me,
you seven billion strong
buzzing in the myriad ways
hands and feet can throng
hoot holler jivedive play.
Read me on your cell phone
as you blow your nose.
Read me on your tablet
in your dress-up clothes.
Read me on a screen
in a book
on a podcast
with the night air
circling round
like a pack
of yellow eyed
wolves,
flashing its wet
white teeth,
howling its long
lost promise.
Yesterday Morning
Yesterday was a Monday.
He walked to work–twenty-five minutes down one street; five up another.
He weighed 140lb and hadn’t smoked in years.
He spoke to no one but himself, and the time, the splotchy shed-bark winding-spreading and other sorts of trees, the rowhouses of brick brownstone shingle and cool sunlight, the pedestrians of all stages habits and prospects–always wearing backbacks and/or swinging briefcases purses leashes or loose casual hands: it all went by quick enough. The long walk road is mostly just houses. I mean, sure, a few shops coffee shops and perpendiculars onto commercial roads–but mostly just contiguous three-story homes with the concessional large apartment building. There’s an elementary school with a large sprawling asphalt schoolyard where kids gather round under orange netless hoops or just out in the middle with nothing over their heads and nothing to lean their jacketed shoulders against. And another school for like kindergarten through third. They have a playground raised up above the streetlevel. Instead of cement the kids play on smooshy black rubber puzzle pieces that fit together to form a floor. He shakes his head, because he knows that junk will always emit a little plasticky poison, and that kids are actually better off scraping their knees from time to time. Another botched job by concern, progress, and the PTA! He says nothing out loud. What’s there to say? Who would listen? For how many millennia have wolves howled desperately at the moon? The poor things! They change nothing and, exhausted, lope back to their cold damp dens just as bewildered as always. Strange, inscrutable, glowing floating monstrous orb! And such a deceiver! Over and over again you think it is dying, fading, disappearing. But it isn’t! You mustn’t fall for its ploy! And yet, it is so very clever–gets you every time.
A man like this, with no family and a career he wandered into and daren’t saunter out of, has no choice but to walk the nine flights to the eighth floor (architects, it seems, are universally superstitious and can’t abide a thirteenth floor; so they make two second floors and waive their hands in front of everyone’s faces, trying to convince–!themselves most of all!–that their “twelfth floor” is something other than thirteen floors above the ground floor). A man like this, approaching forty and not proud of it, should walk up the steps, working on leg strength and cardiovascular stamina on his way to gray demi-cubicles atop thin gray carpet surrounded by wooden offices where executives sit at their desks near their windows, wondering about the bottom line: where is it, what does it have to do with them, and how does it relate to making sure your kids go to church and getting them to practice and worrying about them and hoping for them. So many questions, and such a lot of paper, plus this machine with the glowing screen that, through a keyboard next to an gell’in ergonomic wrist support, attaches you to an essentially infinite amount of paper. Except the paper’s virtual, not real–unless you push a button and listen to a few seconds of beephonkwhirr, at which point the paper comes out real. It’s complicated–no one understands it. We just accept it because it is a part of the bottom line, which is quite important, especially once you’ve made it into one of these rooms with a view.
Lonely Tune
I saw you there,
on the other bank,
across the water
where the pebbles splop
so that we can know
what is what.
I saw you there,
on the frozen pond
where the girls spin
reach and dance when
the sweatered boys race
push fly and chase
as the powder snow
dunes the edges,
spilling white spray
in drifting swirls.
I saw you, or wished I had
and began to walk away,
strong enough to feel sunlight
flip soft green summer leaves
and the creek sing glass clear
over the jutting dimple beaks,
but not so strong as to hear
you laugh rose-fired cheeks
and tell me you’re glad I’m near.
A man accidentally walks alone
along a bank he’s long known.
A man in jeans, his hands shoved
into windbreaker; his feet above
the in-town, under bridges, beside
shale banks loamy banks fallen trees
self-tossing, frolic-lite creek.
You know who I am.
I know who you are.
We know where to find each other.
I’m sick of talking to myself,
peeling oranges for only me,
sick of sucking sticky nails
after a quick early morn
soliloquoy.
Oh, listen to him,
he’s bored!
Oh, hear him out,
he’s terrified!
Oh, give him a chance,
he doesn’t know
what to do
with himself.
In Le Havre
In Le Havre. Young man, dismount this train!
And so he did, and wandered a while, along a wide and boring road with houses a few businesses a few trucks several cars a person or so passing him every so often on the sidewalk.
But then he got closer to the sea, to the city center and the sun shone.
Concrete steps, a wide yellow boardwalk. A woman with too much make-up serving bar in a strange room with a cement floor, lots of space, and a couple tables huddled around a small wooden (brass trimmed) bar in the center of the room up against one wall. Oui, oui, and she–in a long red sleevless dress and a white feather boa, motions for you to follow. She is fifties and old-looking, with black mascara, red lipstick and face powder caked over and her small, button-eyed, slip-nosed wrinkled face. Her small-featured face poked out beneath curling hair that hung slightly askance with difficult-to-believe volume. She’d smiled when you first entered and said something in French to her comrades–all about her age, mostly men in brown suits with or without the tweed jacket and old-fashioned tweed cabbie hats. They all also smiled at me, waved me Salut, let me go on up with her around the winding carpeted, in some spots unsteady, steps, to see a tiny bedroom down hall from a tiny bathroom. Reasonably priced, probably safe, unless there was a fire. And so I was set; threw my stuff down, squeaked down the steps behind her, once again simultaneously greeted and parted from her customer/friends, who nodded jovially, raising a thick hand or full glass. The room was strangely dark and basement-like, but it was on the ground floor, and soon I was back on the street, with money in my pocket and dinner in my heart.
I’d settle for you
I’d settle for you
said the spider to the fly
on the web sticky
and dotted morning dew.
You’re sturdy in mind
body, heart, and stuff.
Your eggs so clear
and begging for it.
I’d settle on you
and make you my home
a colony of sorts
some kind of love.
I’m getting older now
and I’m sick of pretending
so I’ll hand it all to you
if you want to hold it all,
about which you may
or may not now know.
I accept your court
said the fly to the approaching fangs.
I’ve asked for this ever since
I was seven and now you’re here.
I’ll lay real still until you
take over my body, blooming me
like I’ve waited for ever since
I was young and began to feel
the knots wiggle and wrangle inside,
asking to untie and become
some kind of a woman,
the kind I need to be.
I’m looking for you
said the tiger to the ewe,
the gorgon to the virgin,
the weed to the lawn.
I’ve been waiting for you
she said.
To a young Australien
The longings
and the things not there
The children
and the magic undiscovered
The friendship
and distortions from way back.
Sorry to the wind
over a winding nothing moment
come across the desert
where ‘roos bound
and white men crack peel
melanoma on cable TV.
A nice young lady
living for dreams
not unreasonable
A boring older man
unable to get past
a twenty five
he should’ve
quit long ago.
Sorry to unwashed armpits
thinking of a hot maybe British babe
once glimpsed talking pleasant and even
with a twiggy-thin mottled blond British dame
on the subway to the airport.
As if full, down-diving torpedo tits
were all a man could ever see
could ever care for
could ever sacrifice to.
A man on the train,
wishing the jangled jumble
would add up to a kind joy
where he was a man
and someone she
was a woman
somewhere here
in time
before
he has to step aside.
AMW/BW/To A Young Australien and then sauntering off and then wandering back
A Hard Rain Gonna Fall
All you people, walking along all your streetsides,
listening to the air rustle the leaves,
misinformed dogs stand their delusional ground,
cars purr zip and whirr,
children shout high and scamper everywhere,
water-like seeping into all nooks and crannies
of the organized world.
All you people who hear the clank and smell the stench
of stopping, situating, pistoning garbage trunks,
on a new, worn, and/or gum-blackened cement sidewalk,
next to a street fresh paved and punging tar
or old and regular, silently bearing all while sinking low.
All you good people in the cityscapes, bayous, forest hills
who listen to civilized beeps, clanks, cackles, rattles
through the rock the rap the jazz the symphony
pumped ‘cross plastic knobs into your ears.
All you people waving candles and holding hope
for a different tomorrow.
I am here!
You heard that right:
I am here!
You didn’t know I had it in me
to roll up out of that tiny ball, shattering the egg
that sat still since the time of the monsters.
Look at my laughing yellow stalagging teeth.
Understand my smooth dagger claws
and the impenetrable scales shingling my bulk.
For to be, I tell you, a sport,
I gave a sixty thousand year head start.
You built your weapons, powerful enough to destroy the earth–
as if I needed the earth!
You put your systems in place, organized your thoughts,
studied and optimized strategies psychological and physical.
Pardon me, forgive me, excuse me,
I just have to laugh!
A rich, righteous, eloquently strong, booming laugh,
flattening whatever city I’m nearby.
Oh, gosh, my breath’s so inferno, isn’t it?
I quite evaporated your puny fleshy form, didn’t I?
Sorry, sorry–I really need to watch myself!
Don’t know my own strength!
Except I do.
And I’m very ready to show it to you.
That’s right–
good night,
cause you’re going down,
down to the ground
like bugs underfoot.
You have no chance.
You imagine you do,
and that gives you
a certain luster,
a definite cuteness,
a real, if pathetic,
charm.
Oh, oh, OK, sure!
Try that angle,
huddle up in your churchy dens,
cuddling together beneath
fraying, decaying,yellowed, brittle pages
that’ve coddled you on down the ages.
“The demon thing with the dragon wings
and the howling, mean-eyed sing-song-sing
can destroy our bodies but never our souls,
never our heart and the light who keeps us whole!”
So cute,
so lovable,
so very wrong.
Friends, people, don’t you get it?
tearing your puny bodies into jag-edged
bloody rags strewn across telephone wires
and on pavements so sturdy and rough
is not my main game.
I just do that so you get to watch
with your gooshy eyballs
as I sink your heavens,
dungeon your souls,
laugh away your pride,
hiccup off your virtues,
shit upon your wisdoms,
expose as sordid fraud
all your heroics,
your hard-fought insights,
your courageous self-overcomings.
I’m here to tell you that jupiter
must swallow the universes,
and jupiter is cold as spiritual death.
Jupiter is the final answer.
All your wise ones, your fools,
your sturdy practical folks
were all always wrong.
All your human ideas
just so many pebbles
tossed feebly into the gurgle-quick creek.
The joke is on you,
because I’m not even evil.
I’m just the brute facts,
the natural meanness,
the cruel happenstance
of the real.
Sorry!
‘Cept ’cause I’m not.
I don’t care
if I hurt you
now and forever.
Signed,
Your Dragon
AMW/BW