Two Poems

The New Me

The moon is the best tombstoneI know, the least horrible one,and the sun wants toburn everything down,

so it’s only for the greatfrigid distances of spacethat we survive at all.

Underneath the letters of each stop signyou find an inscrutablediamond-image that bleats andtells you it’s too late.

What sad songs lurk in the vacuumed carpet.What silky math tricked youinto that binary dead-alive.

But do you ever have that day whenyou rise up in a strange room,and all the threads hooked into youvanish, a sail without a boatlifting up in a rustling likepigeons off an old man’s body?

When a man sets his own houseon fire with a lighter and breath freshenerhe’s not trying to speed up time,he’s trying to molt.

So too when I’m barefoot sprayingWindex into the dark of amplifiersor menacing birds by flappingmy ugly stick-arms,

I’m trying to brandish a new melike a toy pistol straight fromthe factory, ripped from the packaging.

Bang! says the little white flag.You’re somebody else.

Here

The parking lot lights shinesuccessively in on the taxidermizedwhite tiger and badger and puma

locked in their advanced positionsof fury, of formaldehyde,with marbles laid over their scooped

out eye-spaces, orbiting the bedsteadof the old hunter-man who moved intothis nursing home totally

healthy to make catcalls andsob to the nurses about his lovefor himself.

Here you must followa quarter mile of neonsigns to the egress

where the healthier old wanderback and forth along glass corridorsbiting their nails,

their various ailments containedperfectly by bodies which arethemselves contained perfectly by the

building shaped to their wanderingslike the grains inside a rainsticksliding forth, sliding back.

It is not really a home butyou will never leave this place whereyou peer from the high

one-way mirror into an outsidewhere the pigeons and onehefty bag line a telephone pole

and lean off intoa distance you cannot seeinto, into which they fling

their raptor-bodies, tinybut with such deft hungerlike a pro unhooking all

the buttons from a cocktail waitress’shirt, in a single musical gesture—like notes—as evening unravels and spills

its stale, defunct beautyover that empty lot, full oftree shadows, and stains us with its orange

and pinks whose promiseof romance keeps everyone aliveand unfulfilled.