poems 4

the fury of sparrows

a guy pulls into
his garage then
sits in the car
smoking Camels
biting his lips
with yellow teeth.

a dog barks at
a ghost walking
down the street
in the pale light
of Ohio winter.

a tricycle lies
overturned
on a green lawn.

even the birds
are too mellow
to sing this
morning, sitting
all quiet in their
trees which is
a kind of poetry
too.



Eastern Europe

all that bullshit about
“freedom and democracy”
no jobs no money
no hope at all
gangs of stooges and
lackeys serving
Washington's interests
the young men going off
to be exploited
as farm laborers
in the West
the women and girls used
as sex slaves
in their brothels
you can tear down a village
overnight
pollute the water in a minute
but the new Lenin
will be a long time coming
the return of basic
decency and humanity
will be a long time coming
now the West and Islam
are at each other's throats
so maybe
there's a chance.



hole

walking the
cold streets
at dawn
feeling
like a ghost
there’s clouds
behind the
naked trees
the flowers are
smiling like
severed heads.
in New York
some kids
laughed at me
cuz I didn’t
speak Spanish.
the only Spanish
word I know is
puta.
there’s a hole
in the clouds
a hole in my head
Kurt Cobain
is stoned
and writing
a love song.



the experience

Jimi Hendrix warned
them that when the
Chinese commies
take Saigon they’ll
take Laos and
Cambodia too and
then the shit will
hit the fan

and he was right but
then the Vietnamese
wiped out the
Khmer Rouge over
the objections of
China and America

and other blacks
hated him for having
white people in his
band and for dating
a light brown
Puerto Rican girl

but then he took
another hit of LSD
the purple haze
came on and made
everything alright.



a God for teenage hoods

summer night and
the hum of
air conditioners

when I was a kid
I used to roam the
streets on nights
like this

you have no idea
how sweet the night
air seemed to me

and the sound of
18-wheelers from
the far-off highway

even the streetlights
seemed poetic

sometimes
I vandalized cars
while their owners
slept

I never got caught
and the stars looked
down, wondering.



dogma

I’m a slacker
and a loser
and I like to stare at the clouds for hours

I read a lot of books
and don’t know anything at all

I like ladybugs

someone told me
I should put myself
in the hands of
God

but I’d rather be in the hand
of some high school cheerleader

I’d rather be a white birch
in the Russian forest

or a Chinese monk on pilgrimage
to India

and God is
wind chimes when a breeze picks up.



halcyon days

world full of
powerless, penniless
revolutionaries
screaming their ideas
onto paper
while serial killers
and outlaw bikers
roam California highways

disillusioned Trotskyites
feeding their hunger
on the stale bread
of frustration
while junkies sit in alleys
brains shredded
by LSD

a tear for the lost
is a wet brown leaf
in Autumn

those who know
sit in hot empty rooms
in the cancerous summer
tubes in their arms
pumping them full of
insanity
and stark raving loneliness

they sweat the blood
of the Gods
so remember them
as the sky fills with sulfur.



no shit

I have dreams like
being in Russia
amid all the poverty that
Gorby and Yeltsin and
the rest of the asshole
traitorous Liberals created
it's often so realistic
I wake up feeling sick

or I dream that I'm
wandering in some strange
place and there's other
people there but they
ignore me and I ignore
them (dreams imitating life)

or this town is a raging
inferno and the flames are
kissing the night sky
and when all the white trash
have been burned alive
Satan puts out the flames
by pissing on them.

I guess I must be crazy.



the new napalm

you’d cut my head off
and feed it
to Saddam Hussein
use it to fertilize
the white phosphorous desert

the ashes
of my personal sorrow
will keep
the stock market up
and fill your barren hearts
with nuclear warheads

my head bursts out in flowers
that wither under the heat
of your military-industrial
death-plex
that the hangman laughs at
in a drunken stupor
in his depleted uranium
dreams.



upon realizing things will never get any better

dusk falling through the windows
I’m half asleep
thinking of Hitler and his dog
and the dead rats in my head.
a wasted life—
my screaming parents
the lousy jobs in warehouses and
supermarkets and restaurant kitchens
sitting in my room, the sunlight
dripping cancer from the walls.
I remember that time I had to walk home
in the rain down a broken discarded street
white litter everywhere
thinking maybe the Gods just gave up
and quit trying.



holding on

I went for a stroll with
my crooked legs

and people started laughing—

you ever felt like shit?

ever felt like pissing on
people’s faces?

ever felt like you were a dirty
rag in the gutter?

ever stared at passing cars
under a filthy afternoon sky?

ever felt like the graffiti on
the wall was right?

ever felt like you were no
better off than the homeless
and the addicts?

ever put a rock through
a window just for the hell of it?

ever worried the squad car’s
sirens were coming for you?

ever wished you owned an Uzi?

if the answer to all of the above is
yes

then you must be a poet too.



the Fellini poem

I found a hand
in the street

a giant white
hand made
of cardboard.

a giant nose
with a mustache
underneath

a foot the size
of a BMW.

there were
other people
in the street
but none of
them seemed
to notice

just me and
some woman
leaning out
a window

with her tits
hanging out

and then I
understood.



the demons are real 

red flower wilting
in a glass
sunlight
on the white walls
in my state of
confusion.
the demons
growl at me
in my sleep
so I turn them off
thinking of
Penelope Cruz
of hippie chicks
in 1969.
the demons
are quiet now
hiding somewhere
in the back of
my mind
like a tumor.



dog day afternoons

I fill out applications but they never call.
I guess they take one look at my work record
and throw it away.
so I lie in bed all day
staring at the butchered, crucified sun.
I listen to radio on the Internet –
mostly grunge, indie rock –
while the razors dance
in the black hole of my mind.
I fantasize about raping the young wife upstairs.
sometimes I think I'm in Hell with the souls
of America's war dead
but at least I can go to the fridge
and pour myself a glass of cold water.



open window

alone with the night
and the wind flowing through
the leaves

there was this song
in my head

one line of it goes
I will remember you ...

and I was trying to recall
who sang it

was it Tori Amos?

and then it hit me

of course!

Sarah McLachlan!

on a night like this
when the leaves are falling
through the stars
you realize that a beautiful song
from a beautiful voice
deserves to be remembered
perhaps more than anything else
in this universe

and maybe in the end
will be the only thing that
anyone remembers

even when all that's left in the end
is only the stars themselves.



no, I don't support the troops ...

if you mean the American troops in Afghanistan
cuz all they're doing is
killing women and children
if you wanna show me some troops I can support
gimme the Viet Cong fighting in the jungle
outnumbered 10 to 1
running from the enemy's choppers
and B-52's
gimme the Soviet soldier
dying by their millions in the mud of Belarus
or in the streets of Stalingrad
killing Nazis
Red Star shining from every cap
gimme Fidel and his band of brothers
ambushing the enemy with their machetes
in the heat of the Sierra Maestra
gimme any of them and all of them
but don't call what the G.I.'s are doing in Afghanistan
heroism
cuz it's a fucking debasement of the word.



Pure Land

I prayed to Buddha to fix my heart
and I'll be damned if he didn't
and they say Buddha ain't a God
but I prayed to him anyway and it worked
and when I look at my hands sitting on the table
with the sun falling on them
I think of Shakyamuni and the other Buddhas
and when I drive through some place at night
and the neon lights are all glowing
I think of the Buddhas
and when I remember all the crazy things I've done
(smashing windows, petty sex crimes and the rest)
I think of the Buddhas
so you can worship whoever the fuck you want
but the Buddhas were always there for me
when I needed them.



say what?

there'll be no white elephants
crossing my path

the “I” may be an illusion
but all poets seek fame and glory

the “I” may be an illusion
but the memories in my head seem real

and the rage and the fury
are all too real

I lay myself down in the nectar
of the black rose of night

and maybe the Gods will visit me
bearing a thousand gifts

or maybe just one gift
red as a plum

and when the world finally drowns
in the last great flood

maybe my salvation
will lie in the suffering of others.