What Kind of Man Do You Require?

What kind of man do you require?
A little boy questioning your sleeve?
A wealthy man held together by a suit?
A rolling hog who won't perspire?
Whatever the answer, it's surely moot.

You're no use knowing what you should receive;
Only once given can you know.
There's hungers in us we can't see the source.
It's all well and good holding what you believe
but what you need comes without a choice.

You'd sooner stop the wind to blow
then stop me coming through your door.
I know your blood, I can stem the flow
and if you ask I'll make it roar.

She's Turning Into Flowers

The mud is such a soft bed is what she said.
She knew and I found out beneath the orange
flowerbed of the stars. The wolf was red,
killing and killing us, we slept. He cringed.
Her blood was thin with aspirin, her teeth
full of green drums. Though she was ragging,
I pinned her to the wall, telling by her breath
she needed it. Cereal through a straw
is all you can sip through a broken jaw.
Like pressing a flower in Shakespeare’s book
Your mouth only says what your bones can cook.
There’s reams of rhyme that surge from your scrawl
If you bend your eyes white and learn to look.

Lake Erie

My Mom and Dad riding bikes by the lake,
my brother and I perched on the backs.
It never happened. I don’t recall.
I’ve got the pictures, that’s all,
in the photo album, gory and stained.
It looks so tired today, the rain.
It doesn’t want to fall.
The sun stayed home in bed.
The Rainbow shot itself in the head.
It bled all over the horizon.
We rode our bikes by Lake Erie
and it was never on fire.
Randy Newman wrote that song.
Lake Erie burns on and on.

The Little Tapes Warbled

Those tapes and tapes and the mud beneath the tarp. She slept on them every night when she slept. She would’ve traded her life for a little sleep. The rain tiptoed it’s ballet across the tent, stars pushed out of Heaven, never getting any bigger, remaining pinpricks as they fell closer.

Desolation is nothing new
It's a perennial fashion of youth.

Everyone agreed the world would end soon but they maybe expected it would be beautiful. The land a cookie crumbling in milk. The mowed sea, jumping into the air in decapitated blades. Mother Earth and her tits of fire, her volcano tits gushing hot milk. Angels lowered down on strings of flame, running through devils with long, thin swords. Operas of light deafening the trees. Skyscrapers bursting in ecstacy. Skulls dashed against the sidewalks. A lovely choreography of total destruction. She and he will dance ring around the rosy as the meteors knock off their limbs. This was what Wally thought. His dream. This is what Wally thought she wanted. The end.

But the world would not relent. It kept looping the same path it had been since the sun hugged it into orbit and wouldn't let go however many millenia before. It retraced it steps like it had lost something, left something behind. The hula hoop of years. They survived. How boring. How tiresome. The whole thing should just shut up already. She and he hated everything and that was their bond. She’d rather be a crusty husk dead on a tree. Ideas are dumb. None of them are right. In a land of gas stations and boutiques and ring tones and buckets of chicken and beer pong and toilet plungers and whitening strips and condoms and corsages you were either dainty or rough and she didn’t want to be anything at all. She wanted so badly to hear the sound shelled in her own heart and she wanted it to be true and not like anybody elses and purely her own. She scoured the air with strings, trying to make out her heart. Her breath went into the tapes and came out but the life was gone. It was her voice and no life. The little failures hit the tarp.

How to shoot into the Heavens
and become a pulse of light?

A voice in your ear becomes your mind. A song pumps your heart with its fist. Wally didn't really care. Grace cared of little else. Wally wanted to breath the sky and taste the flowers and prick the skin of the lake. Wally dipped his hand in the sun and poured it in his cup. Grace led him there. She was his path, his ladder. She didn’t want the responsibility of him. His jello heart wobbling on her dish. His little guppy heart crawling through her stream.

He was nothing.
He was no one.
He became his responsibility for her.

The bird tied to her wrist flew away. She let it loose, he suspected, leaving the rope still taut, dragging on the ground. Grace decided to crawl into her grave and sail out a butterfly. She sunk the proboscis in her arm and sucked. She traded blood for joy and the pain went with it and it seemed like a great deal.

Please don’t do it, he thought.
I just found you.

He thought with all his heart. Surely she had to hear him he was thinking so mightily. Grace could always hear the words volleying against the ramparts of his skull. The words lying like balloons waiting for his lungs to inflate them. Grace blew them up, read their messages, and popped them with her needle. He coughed and coughed. That was almost like talking. The sentences that surfaced herked and jerked their way up his windpipe through a slalom of detours, never arriving where they were headed.

Please just get in bed. Stay in bed.
I’ll take care of you. I want to. It’s all I want.
I could be proud again, preserving you.

Something was spoiling. Everything he said made her nauseous. He drove wooden nails into her stomach. The flies piled up, fat and happy. He rescued what he could. The tapes. Wound their tongues back to their teeth. He couldn't stop the flow. She became a stone. She turned into flowers.

She left.
His eyes had nowhere to rest.
Her vacant chair
was lonely with air.

Clumps of grief shuddered through his body. Reverberations through a world wrenched of a soul of magnitude. Waves passing from the new absence of a stone plunged through the threshold of water. She wasn’t supposed to leave him here. They were supposed to go together.

She was sleeping now. He was wide awake.

The little tapes warbled.

Vigil

On a bus rushing by Goodale Park
An old black man teases a younger one
about the huge Bible he’s carrying,
its wild mane of color-coded bookmarks.
The younger man opens the book,
stands up, removes his coat
and runs his finger along a passage as he preaches,
pointing up in the air, back to the book,
the long nave of the bus
his impromptu church.

In the park
a homeless man lies punch drunk
on a stone picnic table, wondering
where his way of life went, the dignity
of two busy hands, filled with sun,
how they were emptied,
why he didn’t migrate with the others,
where he will pass the night,
where he will pass the winter.
A fly circles him, in love with his stink.

An engine quakes nervously,
drinking the pond through a straw.
It’s not yet a ditch
but a forest of lily pads.

A table at a tavern across the way
is bereft of conversation,
the faces are all at the bar
mesmerized by the blue screens hanging above.

Dennison Avenue
bordering the west side of the park,
the first home I ever made for myself,
where the sovereign lives of
a block of citizens
lie peacefully against each other.
You’d never know people lived in
these houses, so empty during the day,
so dark during the night.
In the front yards political signs
withstand the wind like stubborn sails,
their chests bulge but the land does not budge.

I lie in the magnolia grove,
a trunk my pillow, my ear leaned
against a yard of dirt,
bombed-out and war torn,
every inch a civilization
consistently defying ruin.
The twig makes sense in the dirt,
the order of disorder.
I come upon the top of
an acorn’s skull,
the faint concentric circles
rippling outward.
What a little acorn lid,
I think it is my church!

I press my palm to the chest of the earth,
these forty acres I strode the season long;
I went walking with the trees at night,
The magnolias, the violet bush
suddenly burst at the foot of my porch, cousin to
the garden of July fireworks grown in the sky.
This park, this street, this open air,
where I wooed back my soul,
my laboratories all, my teachers and companions all,
whispering things to put on the page,
whispering things to put in my heart.
I spent my summer hanging out with the elms
and their squirrels, unsure as they were
about this world storming up all around us,
estranged from humanity,
but not from nature,
not from myself,
and getting to know God.

The last light of day
is ascending the trees,
burnishing the leaves
an incandescent yellow.
Long shadows stretch
over the earth like stockings.
A helicopter seed gently
whirs down into silence.
The sun is singing
to a great reef of clouds
as spring flowers
aspiring flowers
lie in their graves
waiting to be born.
A thousand generations sleep
in the womb of an acorn.

I am swept up by a great wind
to laugh with the leaves
dancing at the crest of the trees
above the shadows
rising like a flood.
The sky reaches down,
offering its hand,
and snatches up
the liminal strip of light.

The whole neighborhood is dark
except for a a window
illuminated like a manuscript
where a young man writes at an oak desk
by a little flame
burning in the corner
that will stay on all night.