ALL RESPONSES |
| --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
I see you, people of the night, but do you see me?
Your eyes are engrossed, your fingers are diligent.
What’s on the screen,
in the paper,
arranged on the shelf
that means more than this?
Are my tears so invisible, my shrieks so silent
that you don’t feel me bleed?
Turn off the light,
close the book
walk out the door
but remember that I am your baby,
your child,
your forgotten nightmare.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Humanity paves the earth with prayers
for toys requested, but never received
and dreams spray-painted on brick walls
but white-washed and ignored
Sex and dogs and cats and coals
our honest offerings to gods of stone
in lieu of honest industry
the withered skin of shivering souls
The future apocalypse appears
on oscillating branes of gold
its lords of rape and plunder
ignore the crying and the fears
Dark luck shares its unknown wealth
in quiet streets with common names
inscribed in bloody sunburned hope
to wake up to a world at rest |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Toward the end
of an early evening,
a strange bird
straight out of poem
or old song alights
atop a Park Safe
signage down on
Rhode Island Avenue
and sings doleful
songs for those who
have been wronged
in love and anyone
who listens strips
and lies prone-naked
on hard red bricks
ashamed, not
touching, partnerless,
as if God himself
knew what each
was thinking
toward the end
of an early evening,
memorizing doleful
lyrics of a strange bird
straight out of poem
or old song |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
litter
that's all it is
litter warmed for a while
blown about with the winds
to the four corners and all that
a little at first
then a scattering
scatterings for a long time
then little piles collect like leaves in autumn
before long a coating covering everything everything |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
I don’t like it when bodies lie naked in the streets.
Cats wouldn’t do this, even cats who take a chance
and cross a dark road in oncoming headlights.
Bodies lying in the street, naked? Yeow.
All I can think of is salsa, salsa, splattered
blood. On bricks: a hard way to get a tan.
?Porque? Warum? Anyone else remember
starved humans at Auschwitz? Cold
November, impossible endurance?
Forget allusion for free T-shirts and skivvies.
Skip metaphor for a hundred dollar bill
in each model’s hand. C’mon, Friends,
naked Compadres, get up, get up.
Please, before a car comes crashing
over your bones. Leave this dead mooning.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Start with the ones closest to you
then work your way back
Children count for two-
one for the life they lived
one for the life they would have
Go down all the alleyways,
there is a higher concentration of bodies
in the streets between the streets
Don't bother with the buildings,
that's where the live ones hide
they set their dead on the curb
Look in every nook and cranny,
bodies have the tendency
to slip between the cracks
Bodies sometimes hide under other bodies,
they feel safer that way
and the ones on top feel like heroes
Don't look at the faces,
their eyes shout out random numbers
and you'll lose count
Headstones also count,
unless the expiration date is before 1932
those bodies are long gone
Undoubtedly you'll miss a few
but it is still important
to be as accurate as possible
And most important of all
don't forget to count yourself |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Some believe to be the part
You have to live the part
Through a cold night they lie naked
Dreaming of apples
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Park safe. If naked
Quickly don trenchcoat, dark glasses--
Or just keep going. |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
On the bottom of this sea,
we breathe
in, to keep the fire burning
we exhale
out, to feed green earth
we taste each breath
on our loving tongues
we sense patchouli,
lavender and rose
that float
in the air around us
that hold their arms around us
who hold on to each other
whose chests rise and fall
and gasp with delight
with the joy
of the rhythm of life |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Rejoice you are not here yet, flat dead, with the rest of us
in one of those earthen plots where they chisel your name
in granite headstones; instead we lie, naked and useless,
day in and night out, waiting as an asthmatic waits for breath,
like a diabetic waits for insulin, as a paraplegic waits for legs,
like a womanless man waits for love in a splendid display
of apathy (This is it This is it) This is the time to lie
down and be counted, to become a statistic lost in the columns
of life’s statistics: the divorces, the college grads, the deaths
by tsunami, by earthquake, by rope or carbon monoxide,
Viagra prescriptions, cancer, the next order in a pizzeria,
your ejaculations, the number of vitamin B12 pills
in the plastic bottle located on your bathroom sink, next
to the sharp razor and mirror you look into every morning
and pray to your God for another day to live and breathe
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
The body streams
back to its stone
to where the earth’s tongue
has not yet tasted water
where we haven’t yet
learned our home
where our name has no sound
we do not know our own skin
where the gods have not
walked among us
where we do not hear
the story they tell us
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
(revision)
Leave this dead mooning,
this bloodless lying, is it
a naked call to remember
or think a cold November?
Leave this impossible endurance.
The people at Auschwitz
have done this already
without a thought of art.
Forget allusion.
Skip metaphor, Compadres.
I hear a car coming,
crashing over your bones.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
How cold a road can be, my body jarred down against it.
The brick red against the white of skin, as...
Cold morning light assesses me harshly
And I, eyes closed, assess myself.
Can I sleep now?
What will happen if I sleep now?
I wanted to make a point.
I wanted to make a point that the body is a beautiful, natural thing.
It feels neither beautiful, nor natural to me in this environment.
I kid myself that no one has assessed me, as the morning light assesses me.
All eyes are silent, for nothing can be said
To improve matters.
When I get dressed again I shall go for coffee
And join the others in nervous camaraderie.
I shall look at them properly.
I want to see how they express themselves to me
And who they are beneath their nakedness.
Click here to hear Paul read this poem.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Dateline: Appledom
Cyberopolis History Museum suffered a catastrophic blow during the pre-dawn hours when a security malfunction enabled several specimens from the newly installed TDH Exhibit to escape.
En masse, these Technologically Deficient Humans infiltrated the Park Safe app, a bricks&mortar reconstruction of an ancient urban avenue, circa 1995 (Before the Digital Era), where they threatened to activate carbon-burning transport vehicles in their efforts to flee. To avert the devastation likely to follow on the unlicensed release of spent carbon, these TDH were necessarily neutralized.
Until the exhibit’s security malfunction has been debugged, the museum will remain off-line to viewers.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
There must be at least one of them
for each cobblestone
for every fallen soldier
for every pound of rice not distributed:
female, woman or child
are the highest numbers,
except in history books.
Those are not Boticcelli's beauties
their bodies drawn by realities so different than their dreams.
Who will clean the streets without them?
Who will wash away war once all launderers are dead?
Who will be left to teach young man
that pepper spraying innocent people for fun is immoral
in Davis, in Iraq or anywhere else?
[For all of those whose real bodies occupy the streets of so many countries...]
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Bury me, please, naked,
clothes being such a waste;
when I enter the other side,
I don’t wish to be overdressed
Do brush my hair, dead straight,
and don’t forget to pluck
the eyebrows: I may be stiff
but I am not a disaster
Set my iPod to replay, get some
titanium batteries, and play
Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”
until my cock crows a million times
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Fresh parcels of pale pink flesh
splash against impervious
and ever-present pavement
There they harden, chill
and, in time, fade
into indiscriminate shades of gray
Their pliant, seeping
humanity yielding
to the rule of stones.
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
I have the ugliest skin of all animals
Look at me lying in the street
You must not love me.
However, I can kiss you
like a demon in the morning
and an angel at night
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
what might they be thinking
with such mass exposure
the common signs of recognition
cast aside and unseen
colors and textures unavailable
telltale styles absent
perhaps it is death pondered
by all those quietly prone
with thoughts of bare essentials
and the last things to be lost
as their questions lie down with them
and their answers imagine what's next
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
Awaken naked
on a washed cobblestone street
Park Cafe breakfast |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
seeds gather to make many. the drought,
though purposeful, wakes death.
fingers of cracked soil. seeds gather, waiting.
spires climb horizons tempest. moist air of March
is far. far beyond the eye of sight. far from
withering tongues. from where did the seeds come? why have they fallen?
not yet the petals of summers luminous gaze. or
Autumn’s tears. watch for the wind to unsettle the
order from chaos. |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
|
|
| WAS THE QUESTION TO WRITE ABOUT THIS FOTO? |
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| |
