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1. It wasn’t over a woman that war began, but it’s better To see it this way, my myth professor loved to say, a man From the South rumored to extort the bodies of college girls Into higher grades. My girlfriend of the time told me so — He was a creep, she Got an A in the class and liked his joke about religion As self-mutilation, it was Ramadan then and, O Helen, I was fasting. I lie awake in a desert night east Of the Atlantic on the verge of rain, the catapulted grains Of sand on hot zinc roof, the rustle of leaves, the flap Of peeling bark on trees whose names I do not know, and where Would I find a botany guide here. Water flowed Like a river from the Jabal once. There were elephant pools, alligator Streams, and a pond for the devil to speak in human tongues. All desiccant names now after an earthquake Shuffled the ground decades ago. It will rain soon, I’m assured, since nothing has stopped The birds from migration. All the look-alikes Are already here: the stork, the heron. The white flying flowers, the ibis, and the one That aesthetizes you more.

Pumberly Pott’s unpredictable niece declared with her usual zeal that she would devour, by piece after piece, her uncle’s new automobile. She set to her task very early one morn by consuming the whole carburetor; then she swallowed the windshield, the headlights and horn, and the steering wheel just a bit later. She chomped on the doors, on the handles and locks, on the valves and the pistons and rings; on the air pump and fuel pump and spark plugs and shocks, on the brakes and the axles and springs. When her uncle arrived she was chewing a hash made of leftover hoses and wires (she’d just finished eating the clutch and the dash and the steel-belted radial tires). “Oh, what have you done to my auto,” he cried, “you strange unpredictable lass?” “The thing won’t work, Uncle Pott,” she replied, and he wept, “It was just out of gas.”

There was always a lizard Or a frog around the pump, Waiting for a little extra water Or a butterfly to light. Jimmy said the pump gave him the worms. I got the worms under the slick boards. The pump would bite you in the winter. It got hold of Jimmy and wouldn’t let go. The blades of Johnson grass were tall And sharp around the pump stand. I had to hoe them all the time Nobody filled the prime jar, though. One time, I cut the tongue Out of a Buster Brown shoe And gave it to the pump. It made a good sucker washer. Sometimes the pump seemed like Jesus. I liked bathing buck naked Under the pump, Not in a goddamn washtub.

Oh, greenly and fair in the lands of the sun, The vines of the gourd and the rich melon run, And the rock and the tree and the cottage enfold, With broad leaves all greenness and blossoms all gold, Like that which o'er Nineveh's prophet once grew, While he waited to know that his warning was true, And longed for the storm-cloud, and listened in vain For the rush of the whirlwind and red fire-rain. On the banks of the Xenil the dark Spanish maiden Comes up with the fruit of the tangled vine laden; And the Creole of Cuba laughs out to behold Through orange-leaves shining the broad spheres of gold; Yet with dearer delight from his home in the North, On the fields of his harvest the Yankee looks forth, Where crook-necks are coiling and yellow fruit shines, And the sun of September melts down on his vines. Ah! on Thanksgiving day, when from East and from West, From North and from South come the pilgrim and guest, When the gray-haired New Englander sees round his board The old broken links of affection restored, When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more, And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before, What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye? What calls back the past, like the rich Pumpkin pie? Oh, fruit loved of boyhood! the old days recalling, When wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling! When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin, Glaring out through the dark with a candle within! When we laughed round the corn-heap, with hearts all in tune, Our chair a broad pumpkin,—our lantern the moon, Telling tales of the fairy who travelled like steam, In a pumpkin-shell coach, with two rats for her team! Then thanks for thy present! none sweeter or better E'er smoked from an oven or circled a platter! Fairer hands never wrought at a pastry more fine, Brighter eyes never watched o'er its baking, than thine! And the prayer, which my mouth is too full to express, Swells my heart that thy shadow may never be less, That the days of thy lot may be lengthened below, And the fame of thy worth like a pumpkin-vine grow, And thy life be as sweet, and its last sunset sky Golden-tinted and fair as thy own Pumpkin pie!

The ship at anchor wasn’t what it seemed— yet Punchinello gripped the eagle’s neck. (The dream of life is just another dream.) It soared above the masts, canals, the steam of chimneys, till our Punch was just a speck. The ship at anchor wasn’t what it seemed, the harbor, Venice, Europe—even the gleam blazing San Marco’s horses shrank. A fleck! The dream of life is just another dream that really wants a king, a god’s regime, or some poor hurricane to wreck the ship at anchor. Wasn’t what it seemed, Punch’s old life, another Ponzi scheme? Weren’t sailors waving from the quarter-deck? The dream of life is just another dream that none of us will live to see redeemed. Death scrawls his bold John Hancock on your check. The ship at anchor wasn’t what it seemed. The dream of life is just another dream.

Lissen to the whistle of night bats— oye como va, in the engines, in the Chevys & armed Impalas, the Toyota gangsta’ monsters, surf of new world colony definitions & quasars & culture prostars going blam over the Mpire, the once-Mpire, carcass neural desies for the Nothing. i amble outside the Goddess mountain. Cut across the San Joaquín Valley, Santiago de Cuba, Thailand & Yevtushenko’s stations; hunched humans snap off cotton heads gone awry & twist nuclear vine legs. Jut out to sea, once again—this slip sidewalk of impossible migrations. Poesy mad & Chicano-style undone wild. Rumble boy. Rumble girl. In wonder & amazement. On the loose. Cruisin’ shark-colored maze of presidential bombast, death enshrined archipelago fashion malls, neutered wars across the globe come barreling down on my Neo-American uzi mutations, my uppgraded 2Pac thresholds. My indigo streets, i say with disgust & erotic spit, Amerikaner frontier consciousness gone up long ago. Meet my barriohood, meet me with the froth i pick up everyday & everyday i wipe away with ablution & apologia & a smirk, then a smile on my Cholo-Millennium liberation jacket. No motha’, no fatha’, no sista’, no brotha’. Just us in the genetic ticktock culture chain, this adinfinitum, clueless Americana grid of inverted serapes, hallucinations of a nation, streets in racist Terminator coagulation. Get loose after the day-glo artery of a fix. Power outages propel us into cosmos definition, another forty-million-New-Dollar-Plantation Basilica, or is it tender chaos? My upside-down Kahlúa gallon oración drool blackish metal flake desires, the ooze of Dulcinea— Tepeyac stripper, honey from Tara’s open green fans. Tara? Tara, where are you? Tara of the blessings & weapons against illusion. Against administrator pig, against molester snake, against rooster corporate lust. Remember me? i am the black-red blood spark worker, Juana Buffalo’s illegitimate flight usher, back up from Inframundo. Quick ooze again, this formless city space i live in— my circular false malaria. Fungi Town says everything’s awright without your Holy Wheel, your flaming tree wombs, this sista’ bundle i ache for, the one i lost in a fast brawl for redemption at the gates of this Creation Mulatto Hotel, this body passage, this wonder fire from the chest. i stand alone on Mass Man Boulevard. Look east, look south. Bleary sirens come howling with vats of genocide & grey prison gang buses jam with my true brotha’ wetbacks. Pick another bale of tropical grape, another bushel of pesticide & plutonium artichoke. Cancer tomatoes the biggest in the world. Bastard word,bracero produce, alien culture— power & slime. Crawl up my back, heavy loaded on cheap narratives, Salinas doubles, Atlantis sketched on Gorbachev’s forehead: you, yes, you, gator-mouthed agent—like gila progeny. Let’s hustle. Let’s trade. It is 1:27 A.M. in da rat Arctic. What do i trade passion for? Language escapes me. Passion is smoke. i dissolve. It is in my nature to disappear. No sista’, no brotha’. No motha’, no soul. This shred iciness is all, a crazy register that destroys itself into Polaroid, into a glacial sheet of multicolored border walls. Let’s foam & spin flamey bluish tears for the Thing-Against-Itself, soul-less soul, this film word surface. Sing out, baby. Wobble & bop to town. Drag yo’ hands across my fine-tuned work train named Desastre en route to Freetown—engineered African shaman houses smell of licorice, Ebola & famine blood, of hair torn, of death owls & cancerous alcoholic livers, of babies sucking this deep night to come, then—a busted chink of afternoon copper light wakes us, yo’ sista’ rolls in with a bag of lemons for Evil Eye, for the seven-inch ache in her abdomen. Keep me in stride. You. i am talking to you, fool. Don’t just sit there stretchin’ yo’ face. Tell me why fire yearns for the heart. Write it down. Say it. Fool. Speak the names. Conjure the recitations from the coffee cup, the steel-toe, border-crosser boots. The grass rips up the morning snow lights, jagged & yellowish. My AIDS face is hidden. Your rot, my epistemology. i stand in pure light, a blaze of eyes & arms, volcanic & solar, autistic, anti-written, burned by mad friars & clerics, uptown octopi readers, my long hair falls as reddish honey, on a naked supple back, on breasts small & secretive. Mystery evades me. Shadows crumble. Without attention i locate the love void & yet, i know all is well. My blood rocks to a bolero out of rhythm, a firefly’s bolero that is, the one in the dog eye. Hear me warm up to the multi-night. Scribble poems & shout rebuke for the sake of scarred angels, for Tara, who guides me in her emeraldine, sequined night of lies. Hear me now, kin to the half-collie language that i keep & walk. Kin now, to the leaves that plunge to the floors; swivel whiteness without axis, tectonic blasts without mercy. Straitjackets float on the river infinity. Pink-skinned fishes stare back as they evolve into my shape, my babble stream magnetic juan-foolery. Arm wrestle me on the soccer lawn, kick me in the balls. The murder music is for everyone. The Last Mayan Acid rock band plays Berlin’s latest score: dead trade market systems for the dead proletariats, rip up from Bangkok to Tenejapa. Everyone is meaningful & vomits, everyone deposits a stench pail, into the Cube— Neo-America, without the fissure of intimate thighs. Cross over into fire, hunger & spirit. i write on my hand: the road cuts into a star. Go, now, go, fool. In your lyric wetback saxophone, the one yo’ mama left you, the Thing-Against-Itself strapped across your hips. Do not expect me to name—this Thing-Against-Itself. Play it. Screw it. Howl up to the Void, the great emptiness, the original form. Night Journal: Keep on rockin’, blues fish, the gauze of hte day into night. Out there somewhere, Dis-America, pick up a chrome bone, the shards of the last Xmas Presidential extravaganza. You, of course, fool. Swivel into the clear. Float over the greenish migrant barracks pocked with wire torsos, toes wiggle & predict our forthcoming delirium—there is a velvet panther shouting out OM in funk, there is a tawny word in the middle of the city thoroughfare, a planetary semi of lives slices the wet animal in half. i am that punk half panther. My fierce skull & mandible, formidable, my pelt is exact as witch quartz, a slashed leg tumbles down the highway, battered by every dirty, steel wheel. Face up to the sky, you, i said, to the brilliant gossip from the Goddess parade. Outside, outside. So. Crawl up, baby, come on, keep on floatin’— sliding’, always: for black journeys, always in holiness. From Border-Crosser With a Lamborghini Dream,1999.

Accept my need and let me call you brother, Slate blue oyster, wet sand crustacean, In your hurrying to burrow, wait. Hover. Parse opening’s disaster to creation’s Slate, to another blue-eyed monstrous sand crustacean, Water-bearer. Hear the ocean behind me, Pursued, asking to be opened, asking Creation To heed the tides that uncover you nightly. Water-bearer, wear the water beside me, Hide your burying shadow from the shorebirds, But heed the tides that uncover you nightly. Gems in sandcastles, stick-written words, Hidden from the shadows of shorebirds, Washed over by water. Waters revelatory Gems, sand, castles, sticks, words— Assured of erasure, voluntary erosion. Watched over with warrior resolution, Crab armor, claws, and nautilus heart, Assured of a savior, reconstruct your evolution, Clamor to hear, water scarab, what the tampered heart hears. A scarab’s armor is light enough to fly. In your hurry to burrow, wait. Hover. Hear the clamor of the crustacean’s heart. Heed this call of creation. Call me brother.

How is it that you hold such influence over me: your practiced slouch, your porkpie hat at rakish angle, commending the dumpling-shaped lump atop your pelvis— as if we’ve one more thing to consider amidst the striptease of all your stanzas and all your lines— draws me down into the center of you: the prize peony, so that I’m nothing more than an ant whose singular labor is to gather the beading liquid inside you; bring it to light. I have never written a true poem, it seems. Snatches of my salacious dreams, sandwiched together all afternoon at my desk, awaiting the dark visitation of The Word. When you arrive, unfasten your notebook, and recite, I am only a schoolboy with a schoolboy’s hard mind. You are the headmaster. Now you must master me.

In his fear of solitude, he made us. Fearing eternity, he gave us time. I hear his white cane thumping Up and down the hall. I expect neighbors to complain, but no. The little girl who sobbed When her daddy crawled into her bed Is quiet now. It's quarter to two. On this street of darkened pawnshops, Welfare hotels and tenements, One or two ragged puppets are awake.

From down the road, starting up and stopping once more, the sound of a puppy on a chain who has not yet discovered he will spend his life there. Foolish dog, to forget where he is and wander until he feels the collar close fast around his throat, then cry all over again about the little space in which he finds himself. Soon, when there is no grass left in it and he understands it is all he has, he will snarl and bark whenever he senses a threat to it. Who would believe this small sorrow could lead to such fury no one would ever come near him?