Assholes

They’re everywhere. We, their prey,
do well merely to hold the line,
salvage remnants of our days;
it’s part of nature’s grand design.

They close on us like toxic skies
thick with soot, slide their bleak,
soulless, calculating eyes
all over us, a gaze that seeks

only life to smother, joy
to quell, opportunities
to break our shiny birthday toys,
count our heedless calories.

Clergy bids us to be nice,
in fact to love them, but the scent
of such self-interested advice
is rank, familiar, evident.

To make it worse, they always seem
to prosper, to have the upper hand,
their monumental self-esteem
beyond our power to withstand.

They get themselves elected, twice,
despite their pinched and addled brains;
leaving us to pay the price
and try to scrub away the stains.

All Night News

All night we addicts take our turns,
connect for cigarettes or sweets,
or a cup from the immemorial urn

abstracted from uremic cheetah
to be simmered lovingly all day,
until a glance will etch the teeth.

Awful coffee, is what I’m saying.
No one bothers to pretend
it hasn’t always been that way,

and yet the heads recoil again
and again from the waxed-paper rims,
delighting the fixed few old men

who gather as the day gets dim
to court by night the cardboard
queen who hypes Virginia Slims.

Yes. Much as it’s to be deplored,
an itch for the bitch nicotine
will still often jog me toward

that urn in the odd hours between
gray despair and dawn’s red ink.
But I head first for the chrome caffeine,

unable to care what the regulars think
of someone who never seems to learn,
who always winces, always drinks.

In a Country Churchyard

I saw an ancient woman at St. Paul’s,
in Virginia, kneeling, busy among the graves.
She watched me inspect the sober meeting hall,

finger the native granite, before she waved,
called me to see her weather-blackened stones.
She scrubbed at the discolored architrave

of an old family stele, her miniphones
almost lost in the blue hair that escaped
her blue knitted cap. I could see her bones

as she bore down, the stark, defined shape
of her carpals as the brush stretched her hands,
her vertebrae in the thin skin at her nape.

“It’s just something I’ve never been able to stand,”
she told me. “A dirty grave is a pure disgrace.
It’s all this awful traffic. Should be banned.”

“The exhaust. It eats up things we can’t replace.
This black is nothing but acid. It’s not just smoke.”
I wished her luck on the ban with my straightest face.

She scrubbed awhile in silence before she spoke.
“When I’m gone this place’ll melt, that’s all.
Well, fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em. I hope they choke.”

Now

I’m getting old. My friends are settling down;
they’re less messy when they go these days,
no bent Ducatis at the edge of town,
nothing left on streets to hose away.

They go in bed now, which I suppose
anyone would wish, given a choice,
propped on clean pillows, the family close,
framing their last thoughts in their last voice.

Better, surely. But if the funerals of youth
mourn lost potential as much as fact,
elders’ eulogists must grapple with truth;
with life behind us, we must hope for tact.

Though I don’t suppose it matters after all
what the living say, or if indeed
they even notice; whether we hit the wall
or wither, the same end is guaranteed.

Things will happen, birds contrive to sing,
trees, forests, fall; the sound will live
in other ears, the beat of drum and wing
part of someone else’s narrative.

All that matters, all we have, is now:
the past is gone, futurity’s a parlor trick.
This candle flame is everything we know,
the light and heat we make of wax and wick.

The Missing Persons

No one’s certain where they go;
that much, at least, is sure;
exactly what they can’t endure
detectives rarely get to know.

Their photos overflow our files,
which hardly matters—these are faces
citizens can always place,
but haven’t seen in quite awhile.

They go for cigarettes, a drink,
or just to walk, have a think,
a quick breath of evening air,
then no one sees them anywhere.

Small wonder. They’re anyone,
nothing much to catch the eye
but portable oblivion
no witness can identify.

Small potatoes. Millions sit.
Legions disappear in place;
they never leave, simply quit,
staring into middle space

while newly solitary kin
attend to folds of empty skin.
We need a Bureau of the Blank,
a Mostly Missing Persons tank,

where armies of psychologists
can puzzle out the mental twists
of those who leave, but fail to go,
familiar faces no one knows.

Here’s to those who hide and hare,
who pack their kit and catch a train,
spare their families the pain
they cause by simply being there.

Madness

What’s imagination but
memory, reshuffled, cut,
and dealt again in new games,
old pictures, new frames?

And memory is imagination,
random bits of information
ordered, filed, labeled fact
by idiot molecules we pack
for storage in the bowl of goo
we trust to guide us, see us through.

And dreams, the ancient mystery,
perennial absurdity
or Morpheus’ lighting fixture,
are they not a simple mixture,
fancy and recall, rehashed each night,
a pinch of joy, a peck of fright?

And what’s madness but a dream
displaced into the dry regime
of daily life, to strew the sheets
on which we’ve scrawled complete
concordances of joys and pains,
to ravish our disordered brains
and leave us sporting in a lake
of fire, fitting us to make
of pterodactyl Noah’s dove?
It has a name. We call it love.

Because

In Eden nothing went amiss;
they didn’t have a use for gray,
just a chain of perfect days,
an unremitting happiness

to visit on the primal pair,
who lacked for nothing; all was there
to simply pick, hanging low,
all the loaded branches bowed

to an earth that rioted with life,
and all was plenty, all was ease,
and Adam and his bony wife
were happy aborigines.

For a time. (If time could be
where nothing happened, nothing changed,
where nothing could be rearranged
by order of His Majesty...)

But soon, dreaming of her dreams
inspired Eve to coin the scream;
Adam asked her what it was:
“Because, Addy; just because.”

Then, leaving Adam at his chapel,
Eve got hungry for an apple,
decided she should go to college,
tasted of the Tree of Knowledge.

The Old Man was steamed, of course;
He stormed up on His highest horse
to cast them out. Adam prayed.
Eve was skipping all the way.

Memories of Old Scratch

I saw him once on the Lex express,
alone in a door seat, old, a fright,
dentures halfway out of his head,
swaying somnolent or drunk or dead
as the passing local station lights
flashed his specs with festive menace.

Twelve, I saw a Frankenstein
no one cared to recognize,
a secret no one would admit:
although he swung no ropes of spit
and was eminently civilized
in his gray wool overcoat and Times,

he rocked quite alone beneath
his mentholated cancer blurb,
the casual passengers all sardined
safely back from the grinning fiend,
no one the slightest bit disturbed
by those unspeakable acrylic teeth.

I was glad to get a seat,
too green to face the fact
in his Phantom of the Opera act,
until he snapped awake, stared back.
“Have a nice day,” he clacked,
got off at Fifty-ninth street.