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Much better than a goat it was to drop an anarchist from a Park Row window because he wouldn’t confess to federal agents. He fell to his death while sitting on the windowsill holding a pamphlet close to his eyes and maybe waving his arm in appreciation, and no one heard him screaming — they were wearing earmuffs or just they forgot to bring their earpieces but it was nothing, he was a fiend and a cutthroat and he would have murdered Rockefeller if he had the chance, for which reason I have locked my front door for I can’t find a rat trap big enough.

Much Madness is divinest Sense - To a discerning Eye - Much Sense - the starkest Madness - ’Tis the Majority In this, as all, prevail - Assent - and you are sane - Demur - you’re straightway dangerous - And handled with a Chain -

The minute the fiddler takes to the stage betwixt the rapper and the organist I dive out through a slit in the rear of the reggae tent, meaning to take a slash and chill. But there’s a rave throbbing in the woods beyond. Bonfires radiating inside holly, spruce, and ash. Canvas banners thrashing in the storm. Chinese lanterns chase across the speckled dusk like molten bloodhounds packed against the moon. I’m twisted, I’m a little bit skagged. Can’t recall who I tagged along to the festival with, what o’clock or eve it is, precisely    ... How the trout am I gonna get home?    ...    Did I bring a tent    ...    Yo! What the sugar’s the hun with the glow sticks, the yokes, the coloredy fleece called again?    ...    If you fly with the crows you’ll be shot with the crows    ...    my Dad said. Could be doing with a suck on a spliff    ...    a dab    ...    so scanning fore, then midground for someone to tap, I sketch three paralytics at a tipped-over shitehouse, legless, clasping wire fence to hold upright. Never piss on electric wire. In Tipperary Gah shirts. Tall guys. Hurlers. Sinewy bastards. Dude in the middle bending double belching steam and spittle like a hot bog in Iceland, chucking up loads. Distressed he is. Heavyweight retching bout. Losing control. Nearly throwing the towel in, collallapsing. I see him stretched out to dissolve in the land and its zillions of ants, trillions of carcasses. What a banquet he’d make for the jackdaws. If ya lie down with the dogs ya’ll rise up with the fleas. Small urge in me for calling an ambulance. Small but rapidly growing. ’Til the others start egging him on. G’wan Jamey! Fucking champion craic man! Jamey swims with the general will — hauls himself rigid and warrior-tall, drawing gallon-swills of boosting oxygen, then arches crablike at the waist to balance backwards on his massive palms, stalling as the constellations eddy, the cosmos rearranges around him, ’til his whistling tongue-tip comes aligned with the prong of The Plough and he launches like Polaris through the murk, propelling himself straight, hurling bilious floods of intermingled crackers, croutons, crisps, sausage rolls, Diarmuid’s Special Offer Salsa Dips, Guinness, Smirnoff Ice, Devil’s Bit, roasted nuts and Dubonnet and effervescent codeine foam and fizz up up up up over the fence up over the flags up over the maize down into the pines down into the flames down into the rave.

As one in dowte, thys ys my ssayyng: Have I dysplesed yow in any thyng? —Thomas Wyatt That greasy letter into which my legs entered, its tone conspiratorial as his wink, a linguistic wriggling of the eyebrows, a heh heh —it may as well have appeared before my door chafing the air with the stiff noise of its cheap leather jacket. Am I not chagrined by his proposition to put it all behind us and begin again as friends? How do I reply? And how shall I contend with the fact, Reader, that this matter cannot mean much to you, and that I, as author, am required to consider how to tell this tale in a manner that will entertain you, despite having never met you and having no way of knowing how to affect you, get you to let me touch you all over, kiss your lips then tongue your mouth open, move my mouth down your neck to the valley of your chest, pluck buttons off you with my teeth. I have thought of this for a great, long time. I have sat here hunched, feeling sick; I have paced rugs bare. Why should you care? His door opened, selves spilled out my heart's bucket, flopped their silvers across a floor. He was too poor to enter a store, too poor to pay postage for a letter, so poor he'd have stolen crumbs from a mouse, so poor he'd have sold his cadaver if he could. Yet, consider the man: his deep voice began to work away at my inhibitions like sandpaper. Before I knew it, I'd moved right into him, wiped the eyes of windows clear, mended the tears in his screens, made our bed with sheets so icy clean— but you do not want me to give too much away. What fun would that be? Here, as with any tale, the moral's like a molar, set far back in the mouth of the story. Open wider, let me stick my pliers in, wrench it out. Left unattended, anything's prone to spoil, go bad, turn rotten, sink into itself, stink up the whole house. And how shall I begin to make my account? Dig through the junk heap. Start small. He grew over me calmly as a vine climbs a trellis. Your nightgown is unbecoming. A few small terrorisms. Eyes wide at my wince, incredulous. You thought I'd hit you?

the children of haiti are not mythological we are starving or eating salty cakes made of clay because in 1804 we felled our former slave captors the graceless losers sunk vindictive yellow teeth into our forests what was green is now dust and everyone knows trees unleash oxygen (another humble word for life) they took off with our torn branches beheaded our future stuck our breath up on pikes for all the world to see we are a living dead example of what happens to warriors who in lieu of fighting for white men's countries dare to fight for their own lives during carnival we could care less about our bloated empty bellies where there are voices we are dancing where there is vodou we are horses where there are drums we are possessed with joy and stubborn jamboree but when the makeshift trumpet player runs out of rhythmic breath the only sound left is guts grumbling and we sigh to remember that food and freedom are not free is haiti really free if our babies die starving? if we cannot write our names read our rights keep our leaders in their seats? can we be free? really? if our mothers are mud? if dead columbus keeps cursing us and nothing changes when we curse back we are a proud resilient people though we return to dust daily salt gray clay with hot black tears savor snot cakes over suicide we are hungry creative people sip bits of laughter when we are thirsty dance despite this asthma called debt congesting legendarily liberated lungs

His muddy rubber boots stood in the farmhouse mud room while he sat in the kitchen, unshaven, dealing solitaire. His wife (we called her Auntie) rolled out dough in the kitchen for a pie, put up preserves and tidied, clearing her throat. They listened to the TV at six, he with his fingers fumbling the hearing aids, she watching the kitchen clock. Old age went on like that, a vegetable patch, a horse some neighbor kept in the barn, the miles of grass and fences. After he died his boots stood muddy in the mud room as if he'd gone in socks, softly out to the meadow.

We unstave the winter’s tangle. Sad tomatoes, sullen sky. We unplay the summer’s blight. Rotted on the vine, black fruit swings free of the strings that bound it. In the compost, ghost melon; in the fields(,) grotesque extruded peppers. We prod half-thawed mucky things. In the sky, starlings eddying. Tomorrow, snow again, old silence. Today, the creaking icy puller. Last night I woke to wild unfrozen prattle. Rain on the roof— a foreign liquid tongue.

I Tonite I walked out of my red apartment door on East tenth street’s dusk— Walked out of my home ten years, walked out in my honking neighborhood Tonite at seven walked out past garbage cans chained to concrete anchors Walked under black painted fire escapes, giant castiron plate covering a hole in ground —Crossed the street, traffic lite red, thirteen bus roaring by liquor store, past corner pharmacy iron grated, past Coca Cola & Mylai posters fading scraped on brick Past Chinese Laundry wood door’d, & broken cement stoop steps For Rent hall painted green & purple Puerto Rican style Along E. 10th’s glass splattered pavement, kid blacks & Spanish oiled hair adolescents’ crowded house fronts— Ah, tonite I walked out on my block NY City under humid summer sky Halloween, thinking what happened Timothy Leary joining brain police for a season? thinking what’s all this Weathermen, secrecy & selfrighteousness beyond reason—F.B.I. plots? Walked past a taxicab controlling the bottle strewn curb— past young fellows with their umbrella handles & canes leaning against a ravaged Buick —and as I looked at the crowd of kids on the stoop—a boy stepped up, put his arm around my neck tenderly I thought for a moment, squeezed harder, his umbrella handle against my skull, and his friends took my arm, a young brown companion tripped his foot ’gainst my ankle— as I went down shouting Om Ah Hū m to gangs of lovers on the stoop watching slowly appreciating, why this is a raid, these strangers mean strange business with what—my pockets, bald head, broken-healed-bone leg, my softshoes, my heart— Have they knives? Om Ah Hū m —Have they sharp metal wood to shove in eye ear ass? Om Ah Hū m & slowly reclined on the pavement, struggling to keep my woolen bag of poetry address calendar & Leary-lawyer notes hung from my shoulder dragged in my neat orlon shirt over the crossbar of a broken metal door dragged slowly onto the fire-soiled floor an abandoned store, laundry candy counter 1929— now a mess of papers & pillows & plastic car seat covers cracked cockroach-corpsed ground— my wallet back pocket passed over the iron foot step guard and fell out, stole by God Muggers’ lost fingers, Strange— Couldn’t tell—snakeskin wallet actually plastic, 70 dollars my bank money for a week, old broken wallet—and dreary plastic contents—Amex card & Manf. Hanover Trust Credit too—business card from Mr. Spears British Home Minister Drug Squad—my draft card—membership ACLU & Naropa Institute Instructor’s identification Om Ah Hū m I continued chanting Om Ah Hū m Putting my palm on the neck of an 18 year old boy fingering my back pocket crying “Where’s the money” “Om Ah Hū m there isn’t any” My card Chief Boo-Hoo Neo American Church New Jersey & Lower East Side Om Ah Hū m —what not forgotten crowded wallet—Mobil Credit, Shell? old lovers addresses on cardboard pieces, booksellers calling cards— —“Shut up or we’ll murder you”—“Om Ah Hū m take it easy” Lying on the floor shall I shout more loud?—the metal door closed on blackness one boy felt my broken healed ankle, looking for hundred dollar bills behind my stocking weren’t even there—a third boy untied my Seiko Hong Kong watch rough from right wrist leaving a clasp-prick skin tiny bruise “Shut up and we’ll get out of here”—and so they left, as I rose from the cardboard mattress thinking Om Ah Hū m didn’t stop em enough, the tone of voice too loud—my shoulder bag with 10,000 dollars full of poetry left on the broken floor— November 2, 1974

Oh, black Persian cat! Was not your life already cursed with offspring? We took you for rest to that old Yankee farm, — so lonely and with so many field mice in the long grass — and you return to us in this condition —! Oh, black Persian cat.

Grandma is washing me white. I am the color of hot sand in the bleached sea light. I am a stain on the porcelain, persistent as tea. Stay in the shade. Don’t say she was the only one. Cousins opposite say: you too white. I am a night-blooming flower being pried open in the morning. My skin a curtain for a cage of bones, a blackbird coop. My heart is crusty bread, hardening. Hardening. This way, I feed my own fluttering. Under shade, the day looks like evening and I cannot bear the darkness. Don’t say, I can’t stand to be touched. Say, I stare into the sun to burn off the soiled hands that print my body with bloody ink. Don’t say,Mulatto. Say, I am the horse in Oz turning different colors, each prance brightening flesh. A curiosity. Don’t say, Bathwater spiraled down into the pipes. Say, I never did fade. Say, Skin holds the perseverance of my days. Folding, folding, the water continuously gathers, making wrinkles in a map.