EXIT STRATEGIES

Help me think of a good way to kill the Death-Hustler. Any thoughts on suitable exit strategies?

Honest word-smithing should not resemble

the fracas I have just created here

by dropping my smoldering cigarette

into this box of old photographs.

I mean, I don’t work so hard

to embarrass myself

with the common disaster

of incinerated letters and photographs.

Maybe not, but there is the “bigger picture”

I’ve got to consider – when I throw up my hands

like the shadows of two meat cleavers

is it really a coincidence

that my fingertips divide neatly into sections

and form a radius or halo

around my spectacular full blooded heart?

You’ve got to adapt

to changing circumstances.

You’ve got to embrace

unthinkable energies

unthinkable Socratic violence

in the dead of winter.

You’ve got to armor

the plane of appearances.

You’ve got to embolden yourself

with alcohol

or whatever it takes,

you’ve got to make good

your unfathomable boredom.

It is Sunday
and for me
the “real
entertainment”

is about to begin.

For no good reason
I put on my Tuxedo

and now the holograms
coming in off the avenues

the multiplicities
of staggered light

of vertical
ice-breaking

mountaineers light

the sculpted faces
of the molecules

are arranged
to my own ends.

Let’s say I am free
of mystery
for the moment

transparent

and no blood is clotting
in my veins.

Cambrian, fitful
you are boreal, immense
like a glacier

I don’t give a damn
about your heart palpitations

or if a bird died on your arm.

Drinking hot Sake
with my friend’s ashes
sitting up in the coffee can

I am assured of losing my mind.

Our entire experience
remains incomprehensible.

I loathe it with simplicity.

There at the end
you pronounced what words you could recall
with huge, foveal delight

of tongue-struck iridescence.

Cambrian

Boreal

watermarks of words
like quartz

like snapping guitar strings.

How delicate the italic
and mineral footing

of my little brush
against the ceramic

I can intuit all of its plush abstraction
like a rage swept in
from elsewhere

[ but I can also
follow myself

the lion in its paces

very discrete marks
on the page

or assurances
and verily
the desire to approach
myself in strange shapes

a looping stranger
shouting, emerging

enormous as a cloud

“I want to kill you
right in your face!” ]

Managua, do not creep into my poem
his life is meaningless Managua
if you appear as casually
as the virgin Mary
burnt into a crust of bread

have some decency
and pull yourself
out of the greater darkness
Managua

blue corn flowers
like Stelarc’s marvelous
metal arm

hover over me
with the threat of violence

even the hundred soldiers
smoldering in a pile Managua

do not convince you
your life is meaningless

you are a piece of work

My thoughts aren’t here to do me any favors.

So what. They are distended or elongated
by their movement at infinite velocity.

It is terrible to speak to the point of the thing
the radiant Jay, the little note-book or book of matches.

What did you think of my version of
The Bloody Hallucination?

The esteem I feel for my friends
is just like the secret
of The Bloody Hallucination

a body full of ticking fires
and lances of alternating light.

Will you stoop to conquer me
you high velocity Satanic rays
of pure thought malevolence?

If they are demonic powers
no one suffers from them
except you and Bill India
who will suffer exquisitely
with or without me.

Bill, I want to call them Northern Lights
even if they are explosions in my Brain.

I want to call them BROOD or BLUT;
my fistfuls of the Atlantic darkness!
as in, “my heart swims in the Atlantic
darkness”

anyway, it will sound like a bottle
rolling toward me
across the kitchen table.

Solaris of my shame, be true
hold me to my thoughts!
be ever so merciful
even in your weird
implacable anger

with which you populate
the whole earth

but still beat me to the door.

On the street exactly at the curbside
you punch a loud guy right in his face
and my heart swells ( horribly )

I contain these immensities
like Damian, contentedly
in a willful sleep behind the stars

then I join you for a cup of black coffee
and you remind me
it is black, bottomless dread

as with all hunger surrounding the dollar.

Earthworks of the stars at noon
an un-lit parking deck
where I wander after you
for forty five minutes
and palm your mind directly
with turns of equivalence.

Only little Ariana, Leonid
stands up and curses me
to the roots of my teeth

and I go into convulsions.

Lying in a bank of snow
steam rising between my legs
how funny and trenchant
all the bird-song must be

to the little tower of sparks
my head has become.

Eerily, some awe has passed through me
without imperfection
or diminution

my sailboat of the white sails
is straight and true.