Last Gasp of the Monkey Mind: Even More Poems and Chance Discoveries Read online

Route 108

  To drive on 108

  is to be part of a cut-rate folk song,

  Jersey barriers prevent you

  from going where you never would,

  A junkyard rises up

  next to a strip mall church,

  Save your soul

  while you salvage for tires,

  One-room apartments offer space for a couch

  but no room for ambition,

  A neon sign flashes Chinese food

  specific in its ambiguity,

  And a fallen oak pins down a windowless van

  both metaphor and meta force,

  On a road where passing through

  counts more than passing judgment.

  Below the surface

  At the end of every day

  I collect the new memories

  and etch them into my skin,

  deep below the epidermis

  where the connective tissue lives

  It lives to link the days

  through sweat glands and fluids,

  transporting my recollections

  to hands, knees, back,

  where I have carved our time together

  the trips to the market,

  where we have been known

  to flicker from existence,

  shopping for bread, only

  to appear again in the dairy aisle

  the trips to the dry cleaner,

  where I change my identity

  to fit the clothes I am given –

  withered monk in vintage punk

  suburban princess in Versace

  the trips to the movies,

  one eye watching the screen

  one eye on the projector –

  producing a double double-vision

  that lets me read your thoughts

  and those of everyone else,

  except for the old women

  who cast a spell of concealment

  to stop the night ushers

  from taking their avatars and their popcorn

  popcorn that I summon

  through my legs and my fingers –

  brine and butter

  lingering on my lips

  along with the story of our last day together

  On being somewhere else

  Where do you go

  when you get the far-away look,

  when the world fades away?

  Are you following a trail,

  a trail of lost thoughts

  misplaced along the way to today?

  Do they lead you to one place,

  or everyplace?

  The old thoughts take you to yesterday,

  the grand thoughts lead to omniscience,

  the empty thoughts lead to the void,

  where you envelope yourself

  in the warm comfort of nothing.

  Are these paths that only you can see?

  Is that why you don't take me with you,

  because you fear I will get left behind?

  Do you discover new planes,

  states that you never new existed?

  Do you plant your flag and claim them

  for yourself,

  for us,

  for no one and everyone?

  Do you ever get lost?

  If you do, just follow my voice –

  it calls,

  it calls you,

  soft at first, but always urgent,

  a magnetic force

  with you at one pole

  and me at the other.

  Do you want to come back,

  or are you content to be somewhere else,

  someone else,

  lost in your thoughts –

  your deep impenetrable addictive thoughts,

  or are you just hopelessly self-absorbed?

  How shall I pray

  shall I

  study scripture

  ponder Aramaic mysteries

  relish the discovery of knowledge

  hunt the heathen

  vanquish their scourge from earth

  unwrap my mind

  fall to the wonder and the world

  retreat to a monastery

  live my life in silence

  receive the holy whisper

  throw myself into a moment

  proselytize to the unconverted

  shout eternity to heaven

  attend to the singing god

  or write another line

  The great white wall

  He rides omnipotent, casual in his certainty,

  surveying all before him,

  undoing what nature has wrought.

  Waves of white overwhelm my path,

  a crash of winter horror instant and complete –

  my labors are nothing to him.

  What have I done to deserve this,

  which of my sins justify this retribution,

  this great white wall?

  I mean seriously, do you know how long

  it took me to clear that driveway?

  God, how I hate the snowplow.

  My angel wings

  my angel wings are broken

  leather bound, pride heavy

  fractured by one more fall from grace

  my frantic fall, my search for ...

  my angel wings are mounted on the block

  cartilage wracked by iron slag

  forged with blazing antipathy

  a wrong kind of trophy for ...

  my angel wings are rudely exposed

  stripped of remembrance and wind song

  righteous no more

  a sweet sacrifice for ...

  the sightless

  the gypsy scholars

  the circus cannibals

  my angel wings are gone

  they are gone for ...

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  Beyond the veil

  I saw your ghost today –

  you seemed happy,

  but how could I be sure?

  You'd think with an eternity ahead,

  you might take some time

  to work on communication,

  all that wailing and moaning

  is so unhelpful,

  what should I take from it?

  That you miss me,

  your feet hurt,

  you want Chinese food ...

  If you're at a loss for words,

  just think how I feel –

  left behind without you.

  Rated R

  hallowed kiss

  hollowed shells

  lethal and soft

  luscious and harsh

  coat my lips

  pierce my heart

  with leaden gloss

  with lovely spite

  lightly shatter

  coldly caress

  my life

  my life

  with bullets and lipstick

  A man of letters

  As he writes in the dark,

  words slither from his pen,

  the remains of deep red dusk

  outline each letter

  while they lie in repose,

  waiting to be woken.

  The words bunch up in his head,

  causing his temples to throb –

  he must let them out

  or his brain will burst,

  they race through him,

  through heart, lungs, liver,

  to gush forth, corpuscles

  spread across paper.

  They stalk him at night,

  taunting, scorning, mocking,

  until he turns on the light

  or the sun rises,

  and they scatter,

  first the adverbs,

  then the gerunds –

  running is a craven act.

  The words are jealous,

  they clamor and cling

  to their intangible life,

  wary of signs and portents

  that foreshadow their demise,

  the immutable erasure.

  But it is dark –

  he does not notice their anguish

  or hear their pleas,

  he disembowels the vowels,

  castrates the consonants,

  leaving nothing,

  not even a notion.

  The ones that survive

  are bound to him,

  by an everlasting geas,

  he tells himself

  these words will serve him,

  but it is an allusion,

  a pair of red shoes –

  it is he who serves them.

  Another day

  The cauldrons are bubbling again, replete with shades and wraiths,

  packed and parted in civilization's stink,

  I have been left here or led here or birthed here,

  my origin a question buried too far down to care about,

  Diesel sweat drips my fortune from above, high above –

  the stalagmites grow tall with it,

  Statued in crowded isolation, a lone brick,

  I wrap myself in marrow and the rumble smell,

  What if I embrace the mortar and steam,

  build my barrow and fade, become elastic,

  Or tunnel out, escaping the caves and commerce,

  lungs bursting with aspiration, and exhale a new age.

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  through the following email address:

  [email protected]

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