Genbaku Dome

at home in Backstab Fortress

annihilation crispies in a bowl of gunpoint milk

batman about to die in the cliffhanger

young no-money in pajamas with feet

reaganomics not trickling down

to my bomb site body of dead meat

my head all forks and knives

the target of ex-allies

a sponge of nails and crustaceans

little Genbaku Dome on a spine

standing in the bunker for forever

finger on my saturday night special

my girl junk in knots for you

my asshole in a sling for you

a sucker for a bottle of cheap revenge

mainlining unalloyed hate of you

take a smoke break while i think

of a denouement for you

hang myself on a noose I crochet for you

praying into my matza and jelly

to help me flower into a killer

not clear on the basic difference

between a pussy and a monk

but in the end the futility of settling our score

mushroomed into an abdominal mass

me drinking to oblivion

in a honolulu cocktail lounge

all the fight drained from my hands

slumped over the memory

of your kind advice to just stay down -

wasting these billion-dollar words on you

depleting their secret energy

when they were always more than weapons

when they had the power all along

as seeds of reconstruction

to rebuild this bashed-in, brokenhearted

sorrow factory of a world

Fairweather Friends

Down and out on 9th and A
ten days sober with a girl that wanted to kiss me
and a lawyer that paid for my shrimps --
I would walk through Tompkins Square
with a bucket of mashed potato in my gut
my hair some kind of archipelago
plastered to my face...
Heather would buzz me into the record company
to peddle my mini muffins
and I'd get a glimpse of the slick boys
she had to grease to make a living.
I heard she relapsed and I'd often wish
I had summoned some kind of compassion libido
to hold her tenderly, her stick figure flesh
subsisting on pizza rinds and diet colas...
I can still see her sunken whole wheat cheekbones
and hear her voice break like sun-streaks
through a junky's drapes...


The lawyer was ex punk rock,
with eyes like chainsawed blue benitoite
fighting down the gems of rage
reformed power breed
fear-jerked by an electric collar -
walking thin, suited and sleek beside me
the mashed potatoes in my belly
poking out in stubby asexual rebellion
and him buying me shrimps to appease
the godless, lawless banshee inside me
that reminded him of his glory wrecking days...


around that time I ran into my Italian
high school sweetheart on 10th and University,
he looked plump and well-fed,
eyes glazed over with the green slumber
and a sad gaze that encapsulated our failure.
He was no longer playing bass, no,
now teaching high school math and let's
leave it at that.
I stumbled away
stunned by the slow atrophy of passion
the way people moved on
like beasts of domestication
all protest corralled offstage...


and then late at night in the evicted penthouse
where i was squatting on a slab of socks in a pillowcase
i put a pen onto a page -
and wrote things i didn't know how to say -


i took a break on the can
and right then there was an earthquake -
the planet bumped me up off my butt
and when i landed i laughed my ass off
just feeling this huge love well up
for everyone who had slept through the adventure

Blue Honeycomb

I draw the bees under my cloak
to strange pains in my ribs
doubled over as the kids call Red Rover
a swarm of yellowjackets
thick in my side
drawn to my dark, sweet matter
like agents of an invisible alchemist
searching for a child bride

this was when the dead boy was still alive
his light blue eyes like blue fireflies
tossing the football into my arms
as we raced between wisps of silver wind
across the snowbanks of Strawberry Fields

we were so happy - happiness of our dirty knees
happiness of our limbs in the gummy grass
and feelings of curiosity -
our bodies these bottlerockets
waiting for a match -- our minds these racehorses
waiting for a gunshot


then friday would roll around
tolling like a knell
I'd plunge my fingers into the paint
feel it taint me, the smell seep into my hair,
wish i could find a bed inside the primal pigments
and never return to the weekend hell

one day i made a run for it.
the touchdowns had gone to my head.
blue fireflies shouted that i could do anything -
that i could play professional football if i tried --
through the back staircase
the dark matter in my groin roaring
with the will to dare -
past reggie jackson's house --
blow a kiss to his legend --
shudder past the red stain on the sidewalk
where the bicyclist crashed
i made it past 79th street,
to the avenue of treasured art --
the sky swirled like a hope kaleidoscope
a thousand watercolors on a sheet of 'what now?'
my shoes were little purple slippers
and one fell off - it confused me-
on the corner staring at the green light
trapped - with all that blue honeycomb in my belly
blue hive of bee ambition

and no money for a cab..

i turned around, my ten years on earth
told me no one would believe me
what demons roamed this earth --
the library closed early, shhhhhh,
keep your private demons to yourself --
and i grew old on that corner --
older than a black oak
my womb shriveling into sour licorice
a croaking, decaying crone at ten
cut from disappointment cloth.

it was 3pm - still a sky of aquamarine
but inside the black curtain fell -
the boy who had outrun us all
who could throw a ball further than the sun
in six short years shot heroin
and me, I put my shoe back on
and limped to the dark sedan
parked outside my school like a hearse

Sandy.

Cast-off, beloved nyc - i watched you burn in 01 and now i watch you drown + feel like i left my heart in your underwater subway womb - would you ever take me back - when there are more tears in me than raindrops

child of gravel and granite, glass, railroad and rubber

born into human hands less human than the starry mica in the pavement

nyc my shepherd of stone and taxihorns

Guardian Alphalt Angel

horizon of hazard lights and fiberglass eyes
briefcases flashing through chinatown stalls
peeks into lives where the other apartment dwellers hide
reading picturebooks at the library that once was a courthouse
salvaged by ee cummings
discarded people in cardboard boxes, minds that fell into gratings
whole lives that fell into sewers
the streets lined with Stradivarius-throated ghosts
crystal iceberged psyches - all memories lost..
a darker night than other cities will ever know
when that other child disappeared
and left me holding up the walls.

groomed in cathedral skylights, clawfood tubs of tap water n' heavy metals

~in central park, in my snowpants ~ sharing my castle with squirrels

there was no other home,

but the kind coldness of the snow and the question-mark art left in mausoleums
a message from another realm "this is a code between me and you. this is our secret
society..."

that's how you raised me + warmed me - and faces on buses told me, like our island, i had an inviolable soul...

some sacred soil underneath the skyscrapers

and the strange green shoots that would split rocks -
are you me? i said to the little iron weed..
you're ugly and beautiful,
like a rainbow in the gutter.

Manhattan my friend,

it takes a typewriter to meet you

now that i live in the sun...

but we will always be blood

us dense and lonely -- crammed and lovely...

crumbling, as the earth reclaims the earth.

The One that Got Away

When I was ten,
I used to drink red wine
with my beautiful black widow,
huddled together in the kitchen
hiding from my dad.
We were in the mountains
smiling at the snow - it looked a lot
like ice cream on a cone.
My spider with her peppercorn smile
and black olives in her teeth.
Biting into bread and apples,
while nursing one of her nosebleeds
that no one could explain.
Her once-black hair now singed with silver
and her shoulders sagging like
dry cleaning in a fancy bag.
Then, like a rush of gold, exploding
all over my body,
her laugh would intoxicate me
shooting soothing poison into my groin.
In a dreamy cranberry haze
I could feel her fingers like
nimble black ropes
shadow roots winding around my torso,
my throat, my mind.
The sticky umbilical spider juice
suction cupping me in place
and her web the warmest,
kindest
kind of deathbed
the kind you believe is meant-to-be.

The Suicides

We went to the club and I waited near the dumpsters
watching Julie talk to the candy-bar boy.
He said, "You should have brought a better-looking friend."

At the door the bouncer pointed to my jug of water
and smirked. I threw it into the bushes.

Inside was a magic pulsar fungus
of bodies, a fecund honey-sweet hive
of the beautiful and the lithe.
Plum fairy lights and cubist strobes
and the anonymous thrum
of sugary teen bait bass lines
the vacuous zero calorie pop
that makes you wish for someone else's life.

A girl called Liz recognized me and smiled
and we started dancing
apart but aligned
like shy, off-season christmas trees
Liz pulling me back from the edge
with her pixie hair and lemonade eyes
the room whirring like a blade
I felt my Great Disgusting Ugliness
standing by to take another beating
but it was off taking a little smoke break,
while I bounced around
to Just What I Needed.
Julie was against the wall making out
but it seemed calculated and cheap
like she was accessorizing
and I was supposed to 'watch and weep'.

The next day Julie called me at the crack hotel
to say Liz had jumped in front of a train.
I just hung up to take the bullet like a man
and swallow my pain.
Then I vomited all over my rented bed
and tried to clean it up with baby wipes.


The first time I saw a boy try to hang himself
was on the lawn of our performing arts high school dorm
he failed
and had to drag his blue-faced corpse through the dining hall
amid the roar of hushed gawks
stares so harsh they carpeted the cafeteria
in a thick blood-purple ooze
the color of the blood that he failed to lose.
Outside the window was a statue
called The Elephant erected in ode
to a girl that had succeeded
in doing it right, and earlier that week
someone had pointed to the words "Help"
gouged into the armrest of a plastic orange chair
with the prongs of a fork, saying "it was her".

Alive

This Chelsea rabbi had a brother
who assembled hats or spun cloth
or had his own yellow pages
I forget,
and his brother had a cousin
who wanted me for a wife
because,
even though I was a half jew
I was still their pretty outlaw
their gem in blue jean rags
with the blue eye lids
full of thin tragic veins.

I told the cousin,
“I have no place to live”
and he gave me his egg salad
and a MetroCard
for the month of August.
We were sweating
when he swore he saw me at a rave
but he was so thick in the pants
from all the potato food we had to eat
to make up for the dead
and their crawling up the wall anguish.

I was only half grateful.
I hated everyone
on an equal basis.

So there was some talk on the telephone,
some mumblings of rabbis and cousins
and these strange men
that cared about my soul
just because somewhere
there was a jewish woman
who was my mother—
they didn’t know her
like I did—
they blanket approved her
into their adorable hot black suit brotherhood
their curly hair small business assembly
they just greenlighted her
based on her ghost.

So down the chain of cousins
came this code, the code to a building
no one lived in
in East New York.
It was next to a bulletproof fried chicken franchise
and a store where you could buy
wheel pasta, discount smokes and pork rinds,
all of which I did buy and consume
as well as Del Monte peas and carrots.
But that comes later.

First I got out a knife
and held it tight through the night
on the spent starry mattress
listening to the gunshots
feeling like
the weakest animal in the kingdom
my body paler than the moon
my eyes sadder than a wound.

There was nothing to do but wait.
I was waiting for section 8
or another rabbi rescue.
I thought it safest in the bathroom.
The tiles were cool.
I let the tiny stones refrigerate me.
I set down the knife by the door
and stayed that way for days.

Then I read the book Alive
straight through without any breaks.
The men clawed through the snow
and ate their friends
and survived and survived and survived.
No one knew what they went through,
and they came home and sat in a fancy restaurant
feeling like frauds
wishing they could crawl through the snow again,
wishing they could feel alive again,
like they did when they almost died.

Once You've Sold Your Love

Once you've sold your love
you see the sweethearts' sunset
as chemicals bleeding through an ulcer in the sky
when they go out for a dinner
you hear the animals in cellophane
screaming in the supermarket aisles
even your heart, your kidney and your lungs
have lost their elegant purpose
they become commodities for paying bills
just in case you lose all other means
and the men, old ones or young,
plumbers, poets, lawyers and fathers
poker players, fishermen, social workers, killers
they wander through the door like minnows in a net
cocks in a barrel, harvested for cash
bellies on a hide-a-bed
once you've sold your love

Mr. and Mrs. Grim Reaper

I was born the Original Fodder
for Mr. and Mrs. Grim Reaper
felled by the scythe of a need for love
with an achilles heel heart of amnesia

direct intravenous to dreams and pictures
i tap my psychic gash of fortune
+ ride the vocal diamond catapult
of words that make me more
than a meathooked beast

Mr. and Mrs. Grim Reaper
with the friendliness and deadliness
of scorpion guardians
their tender strychnine embrace
a high grade dope of one-way caring
beauty with bad aftertaste

but Mr. and Mrs. Grim Reaper
how can i ever thank you?
for this gift of birth
and the pleasure of my breath?