Blue Cannibals

Raincoat tied with a sash and buttoned, she
shifts as I sit down directly across from her, folded in thirds
newspaper under my leg.
Take the cigarette.
                              She shakes
the purple disposable lighter
                                             next to her ear.

Meshwork lining
the chainlink distended.

"Hope you aren't late,
he's always a quarter of Tuesdays."
Exhale.
            A line of ants
red on the concrete in sunlight from under the bench.
                                                                                    "Did you make that?"
Smoke over black swells of mesh windscreen
drifts out the bright blank.
                                          She walks
	                                               to the plexi-
glassed

in map.
            A red mark of egg shape
on pale calf.
                    A yellow plastic cup
skids along the gutter.
                                   I grind
the ember on my heel.
Tuck what's left
behind my ear.





Poached

SEALs used to call Green Beret colonels "green wings."
                                                                                           Caravaggio sucked; I mean, he was
a terrible painter.
Groups especially. X-rays
show how in certain dramatic religious group portraits
there are completely distinct and
very different compositions
under the ones art historians venerate.
                                                            One of these
"other" compositions
detected by the naked eye is called pentimento,
a persistent, ghost-like image.
                                                The husband of the woman in
the apartment below and one over,
a SEAL for forty months in Vietnam and later, after they
"shut the war down,"
an expat merc and one of Uncle Sam's Bad Boys

says the most authentic movie ever made about the war is
The Siege of Firebase Gloria.
The man who plays the sergeant, Lee Ermey,
also had similar roles in The Frighteners and Full Metal Jacket.

Ermey was in real life a Marine and noncommissioned staff officer.

At the first of two parties I've been to since I moved here
I met a woman and her name was Gloria. She asked
how I liked being here.
                                     I said I was homesick.
She said, "Oh, you were born in the desert?" and I said, "No,
I was born in Kentucky."
                                        An army brat, she didn't understand about rednecks.
                                                                                                                           The first
 of a number of conflicting explanations
with regard to the word
"redneck," is the necks of hippies
were white and tender due to their long hair and burned
after marching all day on parade grounds in the brutal and exhausting
lens-like combination of humidity and blazing sunlight
common to places like
Fort Benning in western Georgia.
                                                      Another explanation is in small, rural communities
throughout the south
parents disciplined their children with a hardy
slap on the back of their necks,
which slaps then turned the necks a shimmery yet near permanent shade
of iridescent pink.
                             A third, more widely accepted account maintains
the word refers to anyone who works outdoors,
laboring in farm fields, where exposure to direct sunlight, along with hats that shelter faces,
and clothing that has loose and open collars
gives the person after years of getting sun-burned darkish red and crusty skin.
                                                                                                                            When Gloria
visited my office later
to pick up some materials
she was planning to use in her class
she asked if I read much or if these selections
were part of a canon.
I said, "I just read everything." 
She said, "I thought you were a redneck." 
I said, "I never fit in there."
Then she said, "Oh."




Untitled


Reflected	
				at one end,
where the sidewalk rises
on an oak root,
                        that oak. 
                                      Three kernels

drying where water was, 	dark rind-lung shape.

                                                                                     A squirrel

leaps

from a milky bough.
                                 
                                 The van with primer spots
u-turns.
Cruises back.

Behind him. She walks down
steps of wine-red tile, mortar white as bone.
                                                                      Her hand
shuttles over black rail.
Drops of water drip beneath her fingers,
catching warp threads of sun between slender cast iron balusters.




Apollonian

I like to walk around at night.
I like my clothes
baggy as I can get them. In the grip of a lifestyle
these preferences gather around me
what majesty a desolate basketball court projects:  the gentle curving back
board reminds me of a headboard of a bed I slept in
before another person's couch
and some foil and thumbtacks to seal the only window….
The imprints little stars
in relief on the heads of the tacks
leave on the tips of my fingers:  my quavery hand
shakes my arm to vibrate in my shoulder. Axillary nodes aren't
any more painful to have taken out than most nodes,
raising your arm will just hurt worse than hell for a while after surgery.
                                                                                                                  Waking up every day
on sweaty, pilled acrylic foam cushions,
pinpricks of sunlight
spilled on wooden floorboards….
Stinging scalp, yanked out hairs
wound tight around sausage-shaped fingers,
it's hard to believe there was ever a reason
to be unhappy, that you ever were. 




Three Tits Calligraphy

Fewer nerve endings per square inch on your back than
your arm, let's say, as characters
a tiny metal sphere
rolling, scraping drily in its socket
carves in skin that goose fleshes a fan-shape,
a fuse-like garrote of sensation
slinking gently as a feathered boa around your neck,
seeping up your nape and
over the base of your skull while some viscous
ink conveyed by capillary action streaks and staggers over waxy sebum
on your broad back
pulled taut between forward bowed shoulders:
every line, every stroke
hopelessly, and completely disperses.