Deconstruction, Reconstruction

Deconstruction, Reconstruction

I.
What I built,
what I tore down,
what I put back together again.

ne ho pieno il cazzo

She is a mystery in shimmering gold at the bar
drinking ginger ale on ice.
She seems more sure of herself at thirty-four,
with four at home and coming from her retail store job
than the crowd of young women who crowd the bar
and yelp for attention.  Putana putana putana

She pays for my meal and my Irish beer.
She tells me that I make good chili, but I tell her
that I eat her lasagna at 9:30 in the morning,
two hours before lunch. 

I taste her turkey club and eat her pickle.
I take the scrap of bacon she doesn’t want to eat.
She is my food and her face feeds me empty.

In this age of ugly women, you are an incarnation,
a resurrection of what woman might be.
Devoid this hollow hall of food, beer, breath, and talk.
Devoid this man, aware with ears and eyes, but deaf and blind.
Devoid this word, beautiful, that I wear out,
a shapeless sea trying to define itself.
It cannot comprehend you;
she cannot move you subsume you:.
the blue jewel your eyes, the silver cross your heart. 

II.
There was a man driving familiar roads
through familiar places but at an unfamiliar time
and now suddenly everything became alien.
He thought of the basic repetitions of life:
jobs, banquets, and games, wood-floored basketball
or soccer on miserable spring days, it was all
really just the same.  Maybe only death brings out
of this routine, these cyclic scenes of comfort
undercut by fierce anxiety, taking on more work
to pay for more things.  He could not stay comfortable.

As a child he knew that he read too much even as he wasted
a summer’s afternoon on the orange shag rug with dust particles
lit distinctly by the late light at the window what a day to lay
on the floor with George Washington crossing the ice-chunked
Delaware to capture Christmas-drunk Hessians at Trenton
and then to suffer in the log huts he had seen and the long cannon
he had straddled at Gettysburg after the miniature horse farm. 
Later, much later, he thought, “false hope is worse than despair”
and this is why the existentialists seem wiser than the theists
because most of the religious pander to the stupid sheep, but each
ram can be caught between hope and despair and think
that a new set of eyes might allure and lead him out of the droll
repetition of summer days and time to play and no school. 

III.
His Trinity of choices: drive this car off the road,
fail to follow the turn, slam into the pine trees
or the footer of the concrete overpass, or off the bridge
into the rocky Susquehanna.  Or keep driving:
pass the exit, miss the turn, and drive west during the sunrise
while work wonders why and where he's gone. 
A secret pleasure, a day squandered: breakfast at a diner
past the mile long bridge, the barrier, you can't go back that day.
He never missed an exit; he never let a woman
devour the heart he nursed in desire. 

IV.
Maybe I'm crazy like the man
on the library steps not begging,
sitting and meeting other people
whose clothes smell like army green age and piss.
Maybe the world went loony around me.
I am security, a sacrificial ax stuck in my neck.
I hear the computer's whine and the vinyl record
playing its continual imperfections that heal my ears
of the constant electric digital buzz in the air.
I hear every cell phone conversation in Chinese,
a language beautiful as slaughtered pigs squealing. 
Wires and waves transmit an incessant undertone
of electronic blood, each pulse threatens the existence of man.

V.
I have concrete in my veins
as I lay here listening to you cry,
another stone on the torture board:
you cannot crush me now,
I am stone. I do no need to breathe.
I am escaped into the dark without.
I refuse, an ass
pulling back on the rope
frayed with age.
Despite the stick, I will not move.
ho due coglione pieni
I will stay here to watch my trees grow.