image: The One-Hit Wonders cassette graphic

Poems from The Gravity Soundtrack

You can read sample pages and download the first section of The Gravity Soundtrack over at the WordFarm site, too.

Also online

On Derby Day - written on deadline for Velocity's Kentucky Derby issue

The God of Peonies - new work in Blood Lotus

 

The Tao of Big Daddy

His guitar groans “It’s a Man’s,
Man’s, Man’s World” and it

simply is. When Big Daddy
and The Kings of Love light

the backroom of Lisa’s Oak
Street Lounge, wall panels

peel like tears. They, too,
are perfect, pockmarked

by dull switchblades. Your
intact skin, your wholeness

is not virtue. How could it be?
Big Daddy’s furnace heart

flames. Furious fingertips, O
ten thousand nerves, a spark,

a bathroom wall’s advice—
drugs before breakfast! or

take pills & die. The song,
yes, but Big Daddy too knows

hush: the lull in our constant
battled desire, the carved space

between yes and no, the empty
filled, finally, when we believe

in the complete, let go of the five
or so inches separating us all.

Grievous Angel

Who’s to say what’s serious, a joke made
at the edge of a friend’s grave? A promise.
The desert, a gas can, a light. A corpse

has no value, you’ll only be charged
with coffin theft: a misdemeanor, a prank,
setting a body on fire. My bodysnatcher,

my brother, haven’t we done this, already,
too many times? The many ways to scatter
a burden: hot ash wind lifting like a UFO’s

beam, lizards tracking me, charred, through
the Joshua Tree sand. The left bits swept up,
mailed to New Orleans, God’s own singer

put down near the highway. A laugh, at last:
ours—I rest here. Me reflected in your pupils,
orange, blossoming. I couldn’t give you

anything to hold, so take this wakeful night,
know it can't make sense. What's left? At least
make it a good story. An offering, one last.

James and the Giant Peach

James ran away in a big piece of fruit:
the beginning of the story. That is,
he has a dangerous past. A wanted boy.
Like Candy, like the Sugar Plum Fairy,

James came to New York, moved into a pit
of an apartment and became fabulous.
When he walked down the street at dusk,
stoopsitters lifted their chins with hydraulic

fists and muttered damp appreciation
for his fine self. That is, he became a wanted
boy: rags became costumes on his clothes-
hanger frame, shoulders twisted, a perpetual

25 degree angle. A hat pulled down over
his face, one eye squinting. Boots. Downbeat
everyone can hear. He dances after hours,
beloved of djs who play his favorites,

tears smudging eyeliner. Footprints in
glitter. Still, by dawn, tripping out
onto the street he can feel himself sinking,
little by little, smelling the fishy breath

of the sharks, which the boys in the club
believe to be metaphor. It can’t be anything
like gliding straight over the white cliffs, like
splashlanding in the Atlantic. What could he

do but whisper ladybug, grasshopper, spider
like a prayer? It’s not for us to judge. He was
a wanted boy on the tip of the Empire State Building:
blood staining cheeks, so full, pink, juicy, fresh.

The Equivalent of Ears

On our backs. Grass crawling bare
arms, the sweat sticking cotton

to skin & one-hundred-year
cicadas shatter-hulled beneath us

in the aerated soil. Wings reveal
single-letter communiqué: W, I want;

P, say please. Only the male of the species
can sing. We lie quite still. Clouds could

part like stage curtains, take us back
to re-naming all the lunar maria after

inkblots in our CAT-scanned heads.
Sea of Senility. Ocean of Ice Cream

Trucks. Still, the covered moon. Exo-
skeleton crunch. Like us, they were

grubs in the dirt before this. Night
cups you in warm wax after all

day in the pre-tornado calm. So many
craters face away. What is there

to get back to? There is only studying
and more naming of rightful names.

Your hand flutters, a laced wing
on a single breeze-shuddered leaf.