Nest

When it is cold out, I will carve a hollow in my chest
where it is warm and you are shielded from the wind,
which whips against your fragile skin. I am an old, gray tree
and you, with your feathered hair and your wide, extravagant eyes,
can nest like an owl being sung to sleep by the rising sun.

The War on Privacy

"Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order."

- George W. Bush
April 20, 2004 in Buffalo, New York

What a fucking farce.

What incenses me the most about all this bullshit is that more people aren't upset about it. We are being fucked, plain and simple. I hope you like it in the ass.

"The lens is everywhere."

- Milan Kundera
Immortality

j'aime les fleurs du mal

L'Albatros

Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l'azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d'eux.

Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!
L'un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme qui volait!

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.

- C.B.

Business Secrets

I eat lunch here about once a week, and I don't know why I do it. Or maybe it's because the falafel is pretty good and the waitresses are slow and unattractive. Maybe something about that is appealing to me.

The owner of this diner on the corner of Bilbo and Broad is a Lebanese man with a magnificent fluff of dark, wiry hair. He has come from a foreign land far away to shock and awe the downtown diners of this small city with his Business Secrets, like how to make creamy seafood bisque, or a pretty good falafel.

Though the man is from the Middle East, it is cold outside. Because the man is from the Middle East, the air outside smells like a block of frozen gasoline.

To my left is a couple, a woman with a tight blonde bun and menacing, pert blonde lips, and a man who looks like the sexual hybrid of a salamander and a beautiful woman from a nation near the equator. I keep waiting for him to burst into slimy, sexual flames. To their left sits another couple who appear to have been shaped from Pillsbury biscuit dough by the Great Baker Above, in all their flabby plainness.

All around me are the urgent whispers of groups of tiny men and smaller women, slyly trading their Business Secrets. I try not to look too long at them, it frightens them a little and they think I'm trying to listen in on their Business Secrets. For Chrissakes, they whisper for the sole purpose of protecting their precious Business Secrets. Why spoil their precise efforts?

In all of this I am reading. Oh my Gawd, reading of all things! "How can he read," the whispers say, "when there are so many Business Secrets to be had, just floating by for the taking, like an eternal tray of falafel?"

A group of nurses on my right have all ordered the same thing, and the waitress brings them all a plate of hummus. Some like the hummus, and some do not, and no matter how they feel about that hummus, each expresses her opinion.

A middle-aged woman at the back of the restaurant, whose Business Secrets I am not trying to steal, is talking about how she is old, and not a member of the MTV Generation. I think she might be implying that I am of the MTV Generation, but I know for certain I came from my own mother's vagina, and not MTV's. My father witnessed me coming out of my mother's vagina, and I don't think he'd lie about that!

By the time I was born, MTV's husband had beaten her too many times, and she'd left him for the West Coast, where the sun is so hot it can shrivel grapes into raisins and no one is beaten unless he's black.

By the time I finish my falafel, the nurses are still eating their hummus and either enjoying it or not. The blonde woman and the sexy salamander are still waiting for their food, discussing Business Secrets, hoping that the Pillsbury couple next to them are too absorbed in their seafood bisque to care. The ugly waitresses are moving in and out of the present time, and somewhere in California MTV is still on the air.

One Scotch Too Many.

"On a Sunday morning sidewalk, I'm wishing, Lord, that I was stoned. 'Cause there's something in a Sunday that makes a body feel alone. And there's nothing short a' dying that's half as lonesome as the sound of the sleeping city sidewalk and Sunday morning coming down."










(Yeah, I know it isn't Sunday.)

My African Dream

When you lay on your side in the morning,
like the careless woman on the crimson couch
in Rousseau's succulent jungle,
you are my bright African dream.
When you lay there, on your side, in the morning,
there is a valley that runs vigorously
from the sides of your breasts, rolling playfully,
first down the hillocks of your ribs, then up your hips.
When you sit at the edge of your bed in the morning,
your slender back is a milky waterfall, cascading
over and down, pooling up at your round white ass,
streaming into soft white rivulets ending at your toes.
When I see you there, draped in azure flowers,
surrounded by the black beasts of this earth,
and looking into a distance beyond all borders,
I am eager to discover your dark forest.

Castles

I really don't know what manner of paradise this is,
which I have created. It seems it is only a kingdom
of trees snapped like twigs and cold fish kisses.
I stare out my window for a fair lady to ride by
in a coach with room for two. Instead I am left alone.
The court jester is a drunk, the cook a spy,
and the queen sleeps only with others. In my feather bed
I am sweating and the marble floors are freezing.

**************************

In my heart is a tired, yawning absence
shaped like a palace decorated with your pink cheeks
and I wait inside.

**************************

I can't respect a man who doesn't mow
his own Goddamn grass, or make love
to a woman in his bed when she asks.

Waiting for to Die

I was eight-five when again came the big water.
Strapped to my bed, the water covered first my feet and legs,
then my belly, folding its liquid-linen corners 'round me
like a black and cool death shroud. Then it covered my chin
and I succumbed to the stench, like the black scent of ether.

Communication

I needed a piece of glass cut into a trapezoid for a lantern that hangs like a one-eyed head from the wall of the office.

When I brought them the measurements the first time they cut it wrong, and gave me a piece of plastic instead of glass. The plastic melted from the heat of the flame.

So I returned with the melted plastic, twisted on itself like putty or taffy, and said I needed a new piece, preferably glass this time. The lady there, whose head was inflated like a parade balloon, looking like she'd just stuffed her face with cakes made of hydrogen gas and ass fat, told me she'd need measurements. So, I left and returned once more, this time with approximate measurements for the glass.

"We can't use an approximate measurement," she said smugly.

"Well," said I, annoyed, "the last time I came in I brought exact measurements and it came back wrong. Just get as close to this as you can."

She attempted to give me an impromptu geometry lesson and spoke to me like a teacher who caught a student running in the hall with a flaming pair of scissors.

So I cut open her skull, surgically, precisely, with the edge of the plastic-glass, deflating her head shaped like Snoopy or Garfield. I folded up my measurements into an airplane, shrunk myself to microscopic size and piloted the measurements straight into her frontal lobe.

Pressure

I once knew a girl whose name sounded like music,
but also her name was music.
Her curvy body and curly hair
were shaped like a thousand treble clefs or bass clefs,
or music notes swirling into the air and into my ear.

And we danced to the tune of her name for a time,
but like all songs, her song ended,
or maybe the melody merely meandered away
and forgot where it was going, or I just stopped caring.

It is funny how a sound or a song or a name,
it's funny how they are just changes in pressure in the air,
detectable to the ear, and gone as soon as they strike
our eardrums. But in our brains they bounce
off of the insides of our skulls and echo for years.

ashes, dust

a broken, dirty world,
a brown-skinned, flirty girl.
my heart burned so much for both
it turned into a pile of ash,
it turned into a pile of ash.

*************************************

When I am dead I'll want

to be burned up in winter, when
my bones will warm the air;

to be scattered in spring, when
my dust will feed the fresh buds;

to be forgotten in summer, when
my loves will live the life of the sun;

to be remembered in fall, when,
in clouds of lead, the living see the dead.