Lightning rolls
along the ground.
Snow quietly gathers
within the blackbird.
You didn't sign up
for this, but neither
did anyone else.
Lightning gathers
within your mouth.
Something happening
to your fillings.
The sky turns
like a ferris wheel.
Suddenly you realize
you were actually
founded by monks in 1813.

All Fun and Games

I don't which one of these heads
is a blast furnace, which

the play-oven with a 40-watt bulb,
the toucan covered in vomit and peyote,

jailbait, the argot of a tribe
awash in post-ironic irony,

lost in the heavy-pink-vine-draped
exclusive plushie secret sex club,

which is the subject of many TV shows
where the president is an idiotic thug

and the contenders heartless vampires
thundering from their pulpits,

the entire city one big experiment
set up by a race of aliens intent

on getting to the bottom of our
mumbo-jumbo about the soul,

our strange language in which
adjectives pile and tumble into

a heap both boring and useless,
all the nouns deranged, defanged,

verbs always in the infinitive,
stacked and lolling like a bunch

of different heads in which there
is a glowing, and then a bellow.

Waste My Days

I feel like I've been swimming all day
and still I'm in the shallow end.

That's not a metaphor,
I can't get out of this pool!

How will we ever replenish
our margaritas at the fabled

margarita fountain from our youth
if we're unable to dis-

entangle ourselves from these
inflatable rafts, once thought

to be our salvation, now seen
truly to be our undoing?

Ironic then that our creator
is a giant eel swimming through

a green cloud of expensive perfume,
either that or an elephant gun

all painted up in rainbow colors
then disassembled and packed in

separate crates for safe transfer
from one remote and rocky land to another.

Last to Leave

Sometimes there are simply too
too many wonders in this world.

Neon orange sodas. Ball bearings.
Strange flags with two-headed animals

emblazoned on them and going
absolutely berserk in the wind,

the heart becoming a soupy mess,
fancy mustaches in and out of style,

the colorful warning signs
and little toy cast-iron cannons

driven through the mud and
broken bits of last fall's leaves,

cream puffs, ridiculous catalogues
of things you can't help but love

in spite of your titanic fear
of the maudlin and sentimental

which also has its place on the other
upside of the aqueduct carrying

despair to the suburbs of Melancholia,
not to mention all those

vocabulary words you've forgotten,
which mysteriously twine together

with those I'll die without ever learning,
which will then be finally taught to us

over a cold beer by Kafka in a party hat.

Early Morning Philosophy

The birds were gone when we woke up.
It was like no one had ever
even heard of candy before.
And like an amputee holding
an artificial limb to the light,
so do we consider
the human condition
while gazing upon the wreckage of a presidency,
the butt of a celebrity debutante.

Don't Stop Now

Light creams itself
against the walls over and over again.
It thinks it has to travel
299 792 458 m / s
through vacuums
and also Iowa
to be beautiful,
to be the stuff of life.
But then it catches
in your hair, darling,
which is like
a prairie on fire,
the opposite of a vacuum,
a mountain of light?
Mountain of jellybeans?
I don't know,
but suddenly I feel like
my hair is full of fiery jellybeans,
like I'm suddenly traveling
very very very fast.

"And In This Cornah, In The Black Trunks..."

You are full of high tech devices
designed to help keep the elderly safe.

You shine like a typo in the sky.
You jangle with strips of wallpaper,

paint chips, cow chips,
mutant death ray, shock collar,

cute little stuffed animals,
one sour-apple lollipop.

You're a story by Flannery O'Connor
so that's kind of a mixed blessing.

You're staying up past your bedtime
and if someone tries to settle

you down you're out the window
on a rope of knotted sheets.

You've already lost and then
won back all your money

on cockfighting at 4 am
in a nameless backwater burg

where you didn't know the langauge,
didn't even know your own name,

and how can you reason
with someone like that?

The Need for Bells and Whistles

You're a tiny
wind chime

made of skulls
and bamboo.

What Do You Think?

Hey, I've got an idea:
let's bonk each other in the face
until one of us passes out.
Let's mop up the blood
with the nice lace dining room tablecloth
that we ain't using for fancy guests no more!
Let's cook up some bacon.
Lots and lots of bacon.
Let's lose our keys and drink
all the beers we got in the yard
and hold a quorom with the squirrels
to decide the fate of the neighbor's
yappy dog, the one we nicknamed Yappy Shitter.
Let's not cry, but if we do,
let's not stop.
Let's bomp-sha-lomp-ba-domp
then re-write the book of love,
scrawling our names and addresses
and birthdays and phone numbers
and favorite colors on every page
and let's make a big
papiermache effigy of our hearts,
and then let's hold hands
as we burn that mother down.

The Best Time for a Party Is Now

The seagull turns and turns again,
never nearing the shore.
Back then they thought the pelican
fed its brood by bleeding its own breast.
Back when who thought what?
I think I'm looking through the far-away end
of this contraption,
everyone keeps waving and shrinking.
What we think is probably all wrong,
future generations will laugh at us,
but how upset can you really be?
By accident the death metal band
plays at the wedding
but everyone at the wedding loves death metal!
By accident does my whipped cream
splash over the side of my hot cocoa!
Hey, throw in a few more margaritas
and some of those pool noodles
and I'll be your Day-Glo elephant
stampeding the petunias,
stampeding even if I'm only
one elephant who's actually only
one skinny white dude who's actually
wearing a rabbit costume
totally freaking hell bent on giving you
some flowers and a big 'ol smackeroo!

Oh No!

The red sock has gone in with the whites again
and that weird dinosaur is back in the garden.

We've got to learn to be more careful.

People think that just because I'm a race-car driver I've got life, like, all figured out.

And it's not just my fans, either. It's everyone.

People are always asking me things like, "Well, what can I do to get my teenager to listen to me?"

And there I am, just sitting there having a coffee and trying to concentrate on my next big race. But this so-and-so is standing there waiting for an answer, an expression of hopeful, beseeching concern stamped all on their brow, and so I say something like:

"Well, have you tried talking to little Billy-Johnny-Sally-Kim-Rhonda-Jack-Hudson-Sally over a family dinner? Or, failing that, why don't you stay up late in the living room one night so when she or he finally gets home long after dark you can sort of ambush her or him and force him or her into a heart-to-heart?"

They always fall all over themselves thanking me.

In fact, there was one time very recently when my senator came to watch me race my very fast car, which is blue, and he was, like, "What can I do to alleviate the suffering of my constituents? The race wars have left most everyone impoverished, there are reports of lootings, stabbings are up, cannibalism..."

Etc. Etc.

As if I've got a single answer in my securely-helmeted head. As if I didn't have a mother hooked up to a ventilator in the hospital, as if I didn't have a goddamn race to win, and another and another.

My Favorite Dream

How did I end up on this slide

and is that a bonfire at the end

of the beach with all my friends

Haiku for the End of Time

I look forward to
your birthday party
at the canyon's edge

The End of the Age of Innocence, Part Three

I don't know why

I agreed to brunch

with Whitney Houston.

The End of the Age of Innocence, Part Two

No way am I

putting that in my mouth

for less than a dollar.

The End of the Age of Innocence, Part One

Bullshit! someone cries

and the gavel bangs down.

Rope and Brand 'Em!

What I didn't do
was wrap your bicycle around my face.
You're welcome.
Nor did I do all that stuff I said I did
with, about, for and over your mom.
I apologize, that was a little crass.
The wolves got ten times scarier
once they learned how to climb trees.
Have you ever walked through the woods
and had a wolf drop onto you?
Jeez-um crap.
I don't know what one thing has to do
with another
much anymore,
not that I ever did
much to begin with.
A passing glance,
chance encounter,
hey! now you're married!
It's just that sometimes
that great sea-faring beekeeper
with the ants in his pants
and the funny-spooky mask
gets a hold of my soul
and throttles it like a busted pinball machine.

A possible title for that last poem:

Mr. Wonderful's Misguided Enthusiasm!

or

Mr. Wonderful's Entirely Justified or Essential Enthusiasm!

Let's share this blueberry ice cream
and watch the city eat itself.
Won't be long now!
On this day in history
J.M. Barrie took three hits of acid
and ran off into the woods,
trailing bright pink crepe paper.
When he returned to his flat,
he reportedly had half of Peter Pan written
as well as a code of ethics
for equestrians.
Probably apocraphyl,
but what a fun story!
Let's look for each other
in the face of a rose,
or the ashes in the bottom of the grill.
Let's not look the lambs in the eye.
I don't know how many balloons
it will take to replace the oaks,
but it's going to be fun trying!

Expatriated Poem

Don’t think I’m some sort of idiot
just because I’m over here in the corner
drinking paint.
I know what I’m doing:
I’m drinking paint
and I’m smarter than half
of our government
and three-quarters of our great
nation’s universities and if
I put on my glasses?
Fucking forget about it, man,
because then I know six more
languages than when I got up this morning
and I’ll read all of John Donne’s sonnets
then quote that shit back to you.
I will now state the obvious:
times ain’t the best,
but it’s solipsism to say
they’re the worst.
Melodramatic, too.
So, the less-obvious
but true:
I have a good ear.
I have a spider fern
and I have a bike
we can both ride on
and I love spring
not only for the explosion of green
but also for the smell of lilac.
I always read the New York Times
and what I said earlier
about drinking paint?
Not true.
I’m only pretending to be over here
in the corner drinking paint.
Really I’m two thousand miles away
and I’m never coming back.

Ursula Maria Hamburger posed as a woman of independent means for many years, living in a state-owned villa on the outskirts of town. Nights, she crept into the basement and operated the radio in the dark, finding the dials and switches by memory.

She was beautiful. She looked something like this:



Her husband, Rudolph Hamburger, a Sybarite by temperament, had been arrested in China for attempting to use small children as pieces of furniture. He served out his days in a small cell, sending her ciphered messages via carrier pigeon. Unfortunately, his cryptology had grown sloppy, and he'd replaced all of the vowels with smatterings of rose water.

He was handsome. He looked something like this:



Now all she had left was Granitov, which was Alexander Foote's code name. She knew it was not her place to seduce him, that the Komitat would likely liquidate her, that somewhere Rudolph called out her name. "_rs_l_ H_mb_rg_r" read his last missive, "_ l_v_ y__."

Granitov looked something like this:









Granitov was less human than black hole, a cipher, a vessel into which all the universe poured its love, its longing, its coded messages -- it all returned, but scrambled, useless, not the thing you wanted anymore.

Nights, Ursula would end her transmission and then weep quietly, her tears destroying the launch codes, the intricately layered communication, till all that was left was a smeared blackish pulp, which looked something like this:











(Endnote: Written in collaboration with my good friend Peter.)

A Modest Recipe for Disaster

These pink whales just aren’t cutting it
and neither are these kites.

Only the naïve are shocked when
the benefactors admit collusion

with the priests who have drinks
with the arms dealers, all of whom

are the president’s cousins. How
can dream survive next to delirium?

What we need is a snake-bit revival tent,
a couple of maracas, a dandelion

the size of a Rottweiler and twice as mean.

There was no way to avoid the black square in the middle of our vision. It was simply there one day, like a brand new 1,000 year old redwood.

People were puzzled, understandably. There were also a number of concerns. At first, all the concerns were logistical. What about driving? Isn’t this going to increase the number of accidents? Furthermore, how are we going to read? Or see movies?

There were more traffic accidents, none too serious, the worst involving a delivery truck full of whipped cream and a taxi en route to the airport. And there was a dip in reading, just as there were dips in television ratings and attendance at the ballet.

After a while, the numbers returned, more or less, to normal. These things, after all, come and go, people said.

Then there came a host of medical worries. How was it that we could all suffer from the same condition? It is possible for an entire community to share the same affliction? There was a run on bottled water. Then a high demand for water bottled only in remote places, Fiji, the Belgian interior, water captured and filtered straight from Arctic runoff. There were shipments of surgical masks coming in from California.

After a while, nothing much changed. True, there were a spate of house fires and a couple of mysterious disappearances, a few animals beaten and hung from the branches of a cherry tree, but these things happen in any community.

People slowly began to believe that the black square in the middle of our vision had, in fact, always been there – fewer and fewer people could remember a time when there wasn’t a black square, and fewer and fewer could imagine a time when there wasn’t a black square, either. One generation led to another, and no one could quite be sure if the younger people had black squares or not. The younger generation, of course, could in no way describe whether or not they had a black square in the center of their vision or not, since they always were the way they were, however that was.

After a while, a few people began to argue against the existence of a black square. If there is a black square, the reasoning went, where is it? How can you describe what it is that I’m not seeing? What is black?

These few who argued against the existence of the black square were mostly the old townsfolk, and fewer and fewer people could understand the substance of their arguments. As these things typically go, they become the mellow background in our lives, passing along quietly, and when we think of them we think of them fondly, perhaps as we sit in our lawn chairs, watching the sun sink through the leaves of the trees.

What Kind

Of clown is in charge here?
Of matter expands as it freezes?
Of cheese?
Of animal did this mess used to be?
Of kiss will get me out of this tree?
Of shoes reflect my personality?
Of explanation is that?
Of snowflake is this?
Of effed up love?
Of burning superlative?
Of maniac is flying this thing?
Of pink explosive is smudged over my heart?

Here are three separate poems about Whitney Houston. Please start at the bottom and then work your way up!

Is That You, Whitney Houston?

[Heavy Breathing.]

Whitney Houston Called Me Again Today

"Hello?"

"Brad, this is Whitney again."

"Oh. Hi."

"Hi. Listen, have you ever thought about how death is that which gives meaning to life?"

"Yes. I read that in a Donald Barthelme story. Or I saw it on an episode of Six Feet Under. I can't remember which."

"Well, have you also thought about how silence is that which gives meaning to my voice and song? Or yours? Or mine? That you should not be afraid of silence? That it will eventually be broken, that all is cyclical, that even now the darkness of pop commercial airwaves is eventually to be broken by the soaring melodies of my voice and song?"

"No..."

"Maybe you should."

"I will."

"Good. That's all I ask."

" 'The rest is silence'? "

"Sort of."

"Okay."

"In the meantime, please do not dwell on death any longer. It's not nearly as important as you probably think it is."

Then she hung up.

Whitney Houston Called Me Today

I was having a glass

of iced tea

when the phone rang.

"Hello?"

"Hello, is Brad there?"

"This is."

"Brad, this is Whitney Houston."

“The singer?”

"Yes. Hello, Brad."

“Hello, Whitney Houston.”

There was a pause.

Then I said:

"Whitney, how did you get my number?"

"True love finds a way, Brad."

I hung up.

I just wasn't ready

for that level of intimacy

with Whitney Houston.

I'm beginning to suspect that my rat is more popular than I am. Whenever people come over (which is often and getting oftener) it's always, "Oh, you have a rat, I didn't know that, heaven's sakes, that's so unuuuusual, let's see that rat."

I'm rather helpless against my guests' curiousity, even as it piques my pride. After all, who's the rat and who's the human who owns the rat and called all the other humans over to begin with to share in some finger foods, kool-aid, and civilized socialization, huh?

And so, with all the inevitability of nightfall, my guests pick up Andrew Jackson and pet him and scratch behind his ears and ask all sorts of questions about what it's like to have a rat as a pet. Then, invariably, they talk to Andrew Jackson in this cooing sing-song voice, like he's a human baby and not a fully grown rat.

It's the condescension toward my pet that ultimately grates upon my nerves. Who do they think they are to speak to my rat that way?

Always, always must I gently intervene, and take Andrew Jackson from their hands, placing him back in his bronze cage, whispering a few words of reassurance into his twitching ears, letting him know that everything is all right, that he is loved, before leading all my guests into the antechamber where I make them wait for an hour or two before the duelists are ready to face off with pistols in the creeping morning light.

Miles from Home

1.

The burgers taste different here,
like they’re not even burgers.

2.

They’ve got this game here where
you roll a red ball at each other

really, really hard.
I think marriage is involved.

3.

Even the rutabagas taste different here,
like they’re actually blue lizards.

You Are a Mathematical Impossibility

After spending almost eight years
and the better part of 3.2 billion dollars,
the secret think tank located
several miles below Switzerland’s surface
and staffed by our most gifted
climatologists and researchers
has concluded that it is not cute
when dogs wear people clothes.
Furthermore, small yippy dogs suck.
The owners of such dogs should be
put down with their stupid, stupid dogs
because that is the only way to nullify
their ridiculous, planet-sized vanity.
Also, you are covered in bees.
This is one way how it feels to be in love.
Another way is to have a strawberry
smoothie in noon-time July.
The only way to stop the slow asphyxiation
of the middle class is to re-define
what constitutes the middle class.
We regret to inform you
that this will be your last paycheck.
Your coat has been shredded
and that weird rash thing
is not going to go away on its own.
The sky turns a darker blue
and the think tank concludes
that you are loved by many people,
that you should stay away from cigarettes –
that shit will kill your ass every time.

You Can't Be a Part of This

What wastedness comes over
our watchdogs at midnight.
This junkyard couldn’t be any less safe.
We traffic in dirty needles, son,
tetanus, lockjaw, stranger blood-
borne pathogens that ain’t even
in your sissy medical dictionary.
Our watchdogs will chase you
for miles and miles in a circle
or in a zigzag pattern
all over this junkyard,
all to inflict pain followed
by violent, terrifying death.
They are the opposite of a tofu
burrito filled with avocado
and heavenly light, which is
what me and the watchdogs dream about
amidst the blackened spark plugs.

The Party

This certainly is a strange party.
Everyone looks like they’re ready
and indeed waiting to be shot.
Is there going to be a test?
Some guy pipes up, suggests
we begin the festivities.
Who’s we is what I want to know
but before anyone can answer,
your mother comes out with a top hat
filled with snakes and daisies.

It’s true that oftentimes
I make little sense.
It’s not just the green river running
through my chest,
or the great yellow highlighter
squiggle betimes belying
both the cosmic weight
of the grasshopper winging
off green grass
and my own impatience
with such trivial bullshit.
Can’t you see
I need an oil change?
How long have I
been waiting at this light?
At the parade they threw me out
for being too drunk
and then made me magistrate,
leading the band over the hill.
Sometimes our punishment
is our recompense, then?
Anyway, point is,
I was born ready to be
your rock ‘n roll aluminum rabbit.

Dialectic Sweetheart

Like some busted
simile or fake-ass

haiku or a maze made
of roses at the end

of which sits a medium-
sized Minotaur with an air-

plane propeller for
a head and a cherry

cola.

Even if I do become an evil genius,
well, what then?
The giant squid will no more come to me,
the subject of an evil genius,
than it can exist outside
of cold and crushing depths.
Dark, too, I bet.
Which gets me thinking
I’m not cut out to be an evil genius,
being as scared as I am
of cold, dark, crushing depths,
plus how fond I am
of holding you in my arms, darling,
drunk in the lovely smell of you.

Queequeg takes a tumble into the whale's half-excavated head.
Now's not the time to be asking for favors, know what I'm sayin'?
We've had enough of that shit round here to last us for years,
so we keep inventing new modes of discourse, new metaphors,
our main trade in neologisms. Can't beat an arfluckle togged
in the blaredown. Can't larp in a tookaflaw. I used to have a heart
that worked just fine. Wait, it wasn't a heart, it was a Nissan.
It was an organism capable less of thought and more of dream.
C'mon, be a sport. I'd like to help you out but I think I need to lie down.