8 Bit(s)

111 - Stereo

The cd skips and I would kick the boom box beside my bed
but the bottles are balancing oblong atop our grinders,
and papers, and I don't really want to interrupt
the chirping jack hammers
of the looping millisecond.

my chin falls to my chest and I nod, eyes closed,
at the stars framed in the window beyond
my feet and I think about you, and how
you screamed and clawed
your eyes into pink pulp our first time
tripping.  No one remembers except
me and those same stars that tried
to crawl inside you
like sparkling baby
scorpions.



222 - We Walk and You Hold My Index Finger

Below the green stained glass
Of malformed tree tops.
Astride genuine remorse
And sour reminiscences.
Between the barking of my torn
Laces (stepped on
For the last time).
Between rays of sunshine,
Tilting with the fury of traveling
80 million miles and, only now,
Arriving to no praise,
Your steps flare upon each
Paved stone before us.
Your eyes swallow
My  madness just as your hair
Subdues the sun's lance
And I smile for the first time
In six days.



333 - A Paper Lamp Dinner Party Friday, Under The New Moon,
On Staten Island

A taut cherry, wet with gin,
holds its breath
between the squared polished yellows of Mme. Serin's teeth.
How many calories are in a pound
of human fat?
A breeze comes,
even, off the Kill Van Kull river;
even as
charred black lines in pink ham.
There are stars, faint stars,
in that water.




444 - Saturday’s Keeper

The caked sutures of inked sky strained to breaking yesterday.  Something peeked through the cracks.  Some awesome thing whose beating unseated my nerves and forced my cadence like a familiar stranger walking by my side.

If I could divine why God's workmanship has aged so poorly my greatest fear probably wouldn't be opening Vanity Fair to find it sterile of cologne ads.

In the bellows of a four hundred year old pipe organ I knew saints rendered in lead and sand wouldn’t save me, no matter how much light gushed through their martyr wounds.

Something slashed my bare ankle between the pews when I knelt. The thought crossed my mind... could a mother made of knives show love without turning her boy into toothpicked cubed meat ideal for serving parties of 8-15. 

It's difficult to tell exactly what it is that taps on the hardwood- talon or droplet -since the light in the back most rows is composed mostly of dust and shadow.

I peered down my shirt this afternoon and two blonde haired blue eyes blinked up where I’m sure my gut was supposed to be.  Something tried to jump out of my skin, but I don’t think it was me.

There must not have been many angels in God's sweatshop that second day.  The fabric is really going to shit.  I’m not sure the darkness between the stars isn’t something's dried stain from where the fraying edges of the wounded quilt were stapled shut... twice.

The thought occurred to me over dinner, when something tried to sit down across the table from me and succeeded in dashing the chair to the floor like a game of pick up sticks, Monday's reputation is undeserved.

It's the Sunday's I look forward to the least.




555 - Walking the Dog Some Summer Nights

the sweet smell of rain is what comes to me
when i break blown out light bulbs on the midnight
side street that shines like water with bits of reflective
granite and clicks and taps like a rusted metal drum
in a down pour when my dogs claws scritch and scratch
across it with every paw stroke of his excited trotting

the sweet smell of rain is what comes to me
when the bulbs pop like a child's gasping after
knuckles are struck with disciplines ruler and the shards
settle like stars winking out just after a baseball
strikes the bridge of your nose and you understand your life
doesnt flash before your eyes unless youre really going to
die

the sweet smell of rain is what comes to me
some dry summer nights when i walk my dog around
the empty cul de sacs and the trees lean over real close
to catch a taste of the rain they've been thirsting for
or perhaps
to take a swipe at my dog as he lifts his hind leg again




666 - Somewhere Between

Laying prone by the streams muddy folds,
the stream that crisps and sparks with August’s
dewey 3 A.M. kiss, I close my fist on
tufts of nappy cattails, snapped and trodden
into the bank.

Brown bull frogs bound and flop over and under
the blackened, storm felled, trunks
at the edge of my backyard.  They are looking
for the pond I filled in last year
to raise the value of my house.

A rifle cracks somewhere near the tracks
of the coal train and the moon’s eyelids lift
in the gap between 80 foot Hickories. 
The mourning dove, covering
Her empty nest, stirs and whistles away.

I hum.  The moon quiets its gaze and rolls over
beneath its tattered blanket of vapors,
and the weightlessness of waiting not returns to me
like the breaths I held
when I felt you breathe in beside me.




777 - Root Down

in the green soup between the jersey shore and downtown manhattan I sleep, swollen with life and disintegrating.  pale green weeds pierce my sticky fly-paper asphalt, painfully shouldering their way into flat sunlight, drinking in all they can, and never sated.  decades of ignored potholes crack my roads, their maws large enough to swallow the unaware.  near a mountain of sagging cardboard edging my empty lots, a manged cat bleats for food, but desperation alone does not make food grow from acres of cracked cement and promises.  pools of prismatic oil throb through my gutters to be transmogrified into drinking water.  talking sneakers splash rainbows, my children leaping from the jagged curbs to the broken streets, their toes lapping at the tepid fluids.  barren shrubs  huddle nervously along the sides of my roads, growing dusty, cracked hubcaps; holding their breath for the moment when child and rusting, speeding, hulk unite.  it does not come.  my hollow store fronts and empty bus stops nurse my displaced, their Dixie wax-paper cups upheld as though brown acidic rain may one day turn to spare change.  it doesn't.

between my hills and my valleys filled with jerseys airy poison discharge lay the trees that broke my sidewalks and sheltered my curbs. memorialized the lost and cooled my cement fields.  trees made strangely stately by the light of summer's red sun and that whispered love to my wild dogs and my bleeding stray children, and sang my lullaby by night in the tainted ocean breeze.  leviathans. their magnifecence, their enormous anchors plunged deep into the ocean bedrock, keeping us all from drifting away. lost in the olive slurry between the jersey shore and dowtown manhattan.



888 - Remembering the Day You Reappeared

I watched you rise
from the lake
of fire amidst
the lidded notes
of the sun. You flared
white magnesium
and, in embrace,
set flame
to the wind.
Around me
jade willows wilt
and combust
into ash
and I feel a heat
that can only
be described
in negatives.