The Happy Genius of My Row Home

in my room at night
on gray woolen blankets
it is time to build a fort
of typewriter parts
to stave the winter
and there make observances
of my life here in this colony
and its generations
in a song beginning with moans
prologue with slow promise
sweet and natural in my bed
i abandon all study
of myself without light
who is to say?

Love Park

anyway fifteen minutes late
love park’s a hangover in schedules
unreadable to make my train
skaters in the amen corner
this is very gray
when it doesn’t autumn
and this green copper
about me sculpts enough to own
this sunken waiting
from last night’s concert
offer reluctant attendance
this vibe is on the parkway
statues that peel out of iron
all for other freedoms

Visited

somewhere at the fish course
lost to the translators
of missing nutcrackers
& long days on ship with dog
the courtesy of learning
to say hello & thank you
& relevant days of the year
on this night
things that had been
a little something for poverty
then as it is now popular
stopping this evening
my darlings my days my damage
for the long walk home

Slava

properly welcomed into the home
the wheat the ameretto the sacrifice
feast at the hunt for wrens
and parade
flumoxed by the season
this show this bookends
a drink for patron of far cold land
ingenious plowman
together we become a church
in this thick iconography
everything is proportion
the nightime congretgates
traumatized by the sleeping man
before the guest arrives

DeKonig’s Women

i thought of the knife
in charitable discourse
flesh of small things
forms of greater good
source of my sexuality
on the side of the story
let’s not do this again
that time on that night
so much not out problem
to recover during acts of god
i’d wear pagan symbols on my tie & denim
to the reception less a wingman
with many exits posted this way
& snowballs grow with no one to halt them

Alonso Quiana

paid $5 32 for breakfast sandwich
& twenty for gas
for the old horse
both at a loss for chops
shriveled at new programs
indefinite highway music
inside the erudite skull
if this were epic verse
flags would be flung & great
advances made for occult sciences
long dead of apoplexy & bomb drills
enchanted into sitcoms
parading in front of picket lines
for a look at his fbi file

Don’t Try This at Home

at home, polyurethane flame
group effort from the ivy
protect us, from fire
o, mandatory conversation
with children at large
i mean confrontation
thrown with the sand
so much medieval ammo
consumed with faces
in between the storm
and stress of electrons
against the musical instruments
somebody has to run the show
don’t try this at home

Questionnaire

If you were an eighties trivia question
would you be television or music
in the reganomic rhythm
omitting key phrases
if you were a sexed teenager
would you be in the greenhouse or basement
an archetype for our generation
no longer needing retail
a lost boy who admits
gin and polyester don’t mix
do you tire of wheezing
can you do without the protagonist
so another couple can take over
in time of the best enemies

Hermano

for TJ

what i’ve got
a family affair
among the indigenous
exploding histories
on men with wigs
you can’t, you wont &
let us all in to hear
some holy juke box prayer
like madonna only hispanic
all i can do is dance
& rile the folks
with as many nicknames
the sound of a crescendo
to turn this mother

The Next Thing

about to get video game on
with the doctor’s rebuttal
this is an epidemic
of my limits, this ambivalence
this time of the year, this vertigo
but more together than that
glass that doesn’t ring
and clinks blankly
i can’t read the line
the next thing on the out of print schedule
in the face of a ray gun
just to repeat the sentiment
on my typewriter
there must be no doubt whatever about that

Tea Leaves

misread the russian silence
in this handy insurance policy
or acts of god
the parting decision
just at the good parts
if they could be read
aloud at the high seas
i’ve been a pirate
without hostages
or free radicals
speaking of birds
to doctor wounds
and rid us of omens
if that’s what it takes