portraits

I.         family portrait

your father was a scarecrow holding a radio
my mother was a supine rotting pine trunk

his sperm was sawdust and her ovum a silver raindrop
I bleed moss and lichens, pebbles and pewter fire

I would wear the trophy deer’s head and keep silent
for your father’s lectures. Mother hung jawbones

of wolverines and shells of dried tortoise on the clothes-wires
during the salad days mom became a wool shawl

your father became a set of dentures forgotten on an ottoman
I wanted them to finish me off. I was barbed-wire rusted.

they would try to guess my age over the sawmill of a static radio
mom pulled a grey hair from my head said:

“someone is out there hunting me”
the first whipping was for smashing a streetlamp

on our dirt road with an aluminum baseball bat
all I wanted was to be able to stand under it

but it was they who had made me a signpost in the night
without ever teaching me how to read the omens

I.         self-portrait after all-night binge

bruises are muses
and for those who break wristwatches
over the bridges of formulas’ noses
and watch rain on bonfires
or hiss of asphalt
but I don’t do anything significant
just sit around all day eating bacon and egg sandwiches
staring at starlings
dropping their shit-parcels everywhere
and a bruise can be focus
on the crux and crocus
of a waning bloody lip from the night before
and I may call myself a warrior-poet
but I am the prep-cook allergic to garlic
the night past or its sexual repast
however you’d like to sum it up for the cameras
is mute moot under a steel-toed boot
and enough of that, it seems that nature
can be easily corralled
when we all have beer-bongs the size of Jupiter
we mourn the death of the fiddle player
and kick around dead dog skulls
paper plates stained with catsup
we grill our meat in iron lungs
Sunday or Tuesday night in Americana
all of our ex-lover’s names rolodexed by water-beds
guns and guitars and eight-balls in particle colliders
                             so many meteors fell that night
                                        that my hangover was like a planetarium

II.         portrait of a lightning bolt

if all of existence is a storm

then I am a T-shirt in a tornado

with a lightning-bolt airbrushed on it

III.        quick sketches of certain listeners

There is a light-bulb wrapped in purple velvet. She shakes,
she jingles, she’s spent.

There’s an eye shot out and shut into a weathered leather flask of a face.

There’s a never-once-opened bottle within which is a mosquito
whose belly is full of the blood of Christ.

There is a spy; he’s deaf, dumb, and mute.
He carries a talisman made of owl-tongues.

In the corner leaning is a framed blueprint
instructing how to build the first frame ever.

One tries to be a bird carrying a bird by its feet over a field of dead birds.
                          He stumbles into the street.

A wing falls like a leaf from my poem.
If my soul walked into the bar
It would wear a robe of clocks
A rope of clocks
A belt of clocks
All stopped

There is that hour for light that won’t breathe this smoke.
There is the heart in all of us scribbled with veins,
Etched with arteries.

The dichotomy we carry is one side always lying to its bisymmetry:

What the hell is it that keeps us from right down the middle tearing?

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