POEM

Equipped with disinformation before speaking

is like saying to oneself (while looking in a mirror):

“My appearance makes the mirror look better.”

Freud is still exploring collisions in the Pipelines of Time

& it’s true how our thoughts wander,

especially when we’re wounded like pups,

for it is on this very night of May 2nd, 2013,

that I thought of a particular game of chess with L.M.

I feel that chess pieces “die” in every game.

Shall we play by not moving a piece to keep them “alive”?

Chess pieces die & are eventually resurrected; they become zombies,

the living dead! The king never officially “dies”; he’s “mated.”

Mating, without a mate? What a horrible ending to a love story

when the queen is captured. What of this horror?

like the Lady of Shalott floating down the river to Camelot.

The king is always surrounded.

He must have a perpetual, nervous twitch,

& thoughts are often like mental throat-slits.

I learned today that my father wanted to fight his brother

a couple of years ago, over their mother’s estate

in a sleepy town in South Carolina.

It is creepy what people do over money,

asphyxiation, grounded, barbells to the gut,

behooves the beehives full of buzzing,

just want to keep Sleepy John Estes playing in my ears,

let the bluest blues wash away the blues,

let everyone else feed the seed.

I must be the ideologically backward-type—some days

I see a dog with its teeth in another dog’s throat,

or friends turning to enemies, same thing, or rubber bullets

that need to be wrapped in rubber—“stop gap” to violence,

separating lovers, decoupling, destroying progress—

families torn in knots, my receding hairline

abbreviated daily, where do I go for justification?

Rabelais’s Carnival, that’s where! The deluded barbarians

envy mathematics—class warfare, Truth or Dare?

Content of nonchalance. No one reads these poems

& I’m content with that, because the collected words read themselves . . .

ALL TOGETHER NOW! sing sing sing O you choirs of Futurist characters

that readily fit the pre-existing glimpse of . . .

Interruption: someone asking me if I want to play cards.

My hand is always dealt. I bend the corner of an Ace card—

the streetlights grate the sky, airspace spewing chemicals.

My lament has already passed, so I smile,

smile wide with wider entails, like a mannequin

smiling, or wailing, behind the glass box

where dialect “interpenetrates with public space”—

& with all of these pent-up feelings, how does one face the world?