great aimless ones
who can become
disillusioned on sidewalks,
who can read footsteps aloud
in spurts of music,
who bring dreams like bread and wine.

At night I stay in
and beat against my windows with brooms,
crouching alone inside,
waiting for angels of pestilence.
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I can’t sleep tonight
because the bad moon ever.

Because the far dream.

I can’t make a hat
that can hold the lot of us;
it’s hot in here and loud
and cold crystal out in space—
I can’t drift out here,
can’t sleep tonight.
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I started in the swelter downtown, finding a perch on the stairs by the college and smoking cheap Columbian cigarettes in big hot gulps. Miami in the dog days is humid like the sky is leaning in on you, and everyone is foreign to everyone else. You watch them: a group of Cuban girls wearing brightly-colored nothing, swinging their hips as they go by; a red, sun-burnt beggar, claims he’s from Alaska, waiting for his sister to wire him some funds and any little bit would help in the meantime, really; an old man in soot-dusted purple robe, his whole hair a single defiant dreadlock, shuffling around corners waving his hands to the sides in rhythm with his curses and invocations. Somehow foreign isn’t ever foreign enough: you know these people, every one. Their weirdness is mere weirdness, is familiar. Mystery is what we crave, what we go out looking for, what we spend our lives waiting for. Even when we’ve given up, the habit of it is what causes us to rise each morning.
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der Schöpfer,
sans l’adresse
e senza un numero di telefono

only a paper-trail
in omnis lingua
και καθοδηγώ μέσα κάθε κατεύθυνση.

“Reality is an illusion,
albeit a very persistent one.”
-Albert Einstein

I flip the pieces ’round themselves
in temper-fits that last for days—
and while it’s true I tell the truth,
it’s only in the thoughtful ways:

the green the pastures tell the cars
as they go by in smoky fog
and revel in the passersby
in burnt out ends of salted hog

is just the sort of self-defeating
admiration of itself
that paints a blue sky out from under
silky black and endless bog!

You see? the pieces fit each other
across the bread in marmalade;
the truth is only true so often
that when it is, I am afraid.

that much about
the pressing issues,
the wars and revolutions,
all universe falling apart
and coming together,

and all of us,
the flesh of us,
going crazy and
coming off the bone—

I’m really a lot
more interested in music,
in the gentleness of thought,
the way in dreams
we find we
stroke the hair of angels,
assign them names that,
while beautiful, can never be true again,
names we’ll never even
remember.

I don’t really care
about the government—
it’ll never work
and they’ll never stop trying;
I wish that all the voters
and the soldiers
and the lovely meter maids
would come and lay with me
with open mouths.

You need that second part
when the first part
isn’t sticky enough—

for those really tough jobs,
you know? Like trying
to build a nest
or film a movie—

things you might have
conceptual difficulties with
when you’re on your own