When Lilacs Last in the Brickyard

Walking through the door a slow scarf wrapped
Around the throat of midday
The flames scorched the bride of the city
And muted the desire of tracks in transit
The last time these cigarettes were smoked
It was in the cotton fields by the stadium
Where the children of our new tribe choose
The skillful actions of sex changing
Patterns of movement above ground
The outskirts up in the air like a tent
Or a reversible umbrella of silk
Anything to keep the muscles from slack
The forms repeat themselves hand in hand
Like the shape of cold in the mind of cold
The ducks keep their bottoms warm in the pond
And the pigeons are wheezing at the sill
When the phone rings the bird ranchers are outside
With a warrant while the dust from their duds
Settles on the porch in the sunshine
Who prosecutes the molesters of lines, of flack,
Angelic in their justice not a serious condition
Just hand spasms and babbling
As the palm trees stir their spiked fronds
We move through a world where rocks move alone
That guy playing the fiddle is blind

Ames Hodges
& Mike Taormina

The Queen of Colors

If we could live inside the head of a girl

Andromache ravens pearls

Gravity wells.  Alpha.  Sunless noon.  The absolute.

Brambles cover the house after her spindle.

We are dormant under the sea.

Wine-dark lips.  You are something moist with barbs.

Are you wearing the spermicidal dress?

If you come back later I will drink you.

Gangrene plumbs the coal mine of the soul

When the mind descends under her bodice.

The logic puzzles kept there for our senses

Accumulate like spores in the darkness.

She walks with me now away from the sun

To be my bottle of night, my bruised thighs.

She is exquisite without eyes!

Chocolate ribbons of coal.  Scorched bride.

“Come away burnt sugar into the forest”

Where our bodies are mysteries to the vulgar,

Stacked like bricks, the bricks of an oven,

Not keeping track of the atrocities,

The smoke-filled lungs of a smoker,

A spot in the sheets where the moon drops,

A tarred pelican on the gulf coast,

As night revolves on the axle of night.

The Fruit Ripening Bag Variations

Truth Ripening Bag

1.  Remove any plastic packaging, place the truth in this bag and

      fold the top of the bag closed.

2.  Place the bag on the counter away from direct sunlight and heat.

3.  After 1-2 days, the truth should yield to gentle pressure.

4.  Remove the truth from the bag and enjoy!

Spouse Ripening Bag

1.  Remove any plastic packaging, place your spouse in this bag and

      fold the top of the bag closed.

2.  Place the bag on the counter away from direct sunlight and heat.

3.  After 1-2 days, your spouse should yield to gentle pressure.

4.  Remove your spouse from the bag and enjoy!

Iran Ripening Bag

1.  Remove any plastic packaging, place Iran in this bag and

      fold the top of the bag closed.

2.  Place the bag on the counter away from direct sunlight and heat.

3.  After 1-2 days, Iran should yield to gentle pressure.

4.  Remove Iran from the bag and enjoy!

Fart Ripening Bag

1.  Remove any plastic packaging, place the fart in this bag and

      fold the top of the bag closed.

2.  Place the bag on the counter away from direct sunlight and heat.

3.  After 1-2 days, the fart should yield to gentle pressure.

4.  Remove the fart from the bag and enjoy!

George W. Bush Ripening Bag

1.  Remove any plastic packaging, place George W. in this bag and

      fold the top of the bag closed.

2.  Place the bag on the counter away from direct sunlight and heat.

3.  After 1-2 days, George W. should yield to gentle pressure.

4.  Remove George W. from the bag and enjoy!

Poem Ripening Bag

1.  Remove any plastic packaging, place the poem in this bag and

      fold the top of the bag closed.

2.  Place the bag on the counter away from direct sunlight and heat.

3.  After 1-2 days, the poem should yield to gentle pressure.

4.  Remove the poem from the bag and enjoy!

Love Ripening Bag

1.  Remove any plastic packaging, place your heart in this bag and

      fold the top of the bag closed.

2.  Place the bag on the counter away from direct sunlight and heat.

3.  After 1-2 days, your heart should yield to gentle pressure.

4.  Remove your heart from the bag and enjoy!

Device to Summon Commerce Street

Inhaled just enough into the evening

to be drawn in a woodland scene

on that street shaped like an L

we can never seem to find

unless we stop paying attention

or turn the attention around

like reading those slow books

of our youth, the massive ones

always leading in a new direction

despite staying on the same road

at least it would if I replaced a few

chips in the meditation machine

the registers revert too easily

as the coming of night repeated

folding back on to itself

in a cascade of shadows

extra pieces and parts falling out

on the unkempt ash of the way

gradually map the mind at play

The Unpunished Vice

Poetry moves me as nothing else does.

“Moves” is the wrong word.

Only paintings do it too.

And ballet and jazz and wine and sex

Everything does it.  The piercing blue eyes

Of Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia

Never did it.  I am the wrong person

To ask.  Anyway no one is asking.

I must remember to read, to read more.

It is strange what it does to the soul.

Time evaporates.  Journey to the Moon

Is a philosophical novel by Cyrano de Bergerac,

A facetious and irreverent man

With a big nose.  It was there

He exercised true freedom of imagination.

God was hard to kill, like a hydra.

I don’t give a damn what Byron says.

About anything.  Byron used to have it.

Victor Hugo used to have it.  Keats didn’t

Have it.  Now they don’t and he does.

Emily Dickinson didn’t use to have it.

Milton had it, then didn’t, now has it again.

Shakespeare has always had it.

Homer too.  Ashbery, Stevens, Borges

Kenneth Koch, Whitman, Neruda, Rimbaud,

Michaux, Lamartine, Schuyler

Baudelaire, Stein, Bukowski, Donne,

Apollinaire.  On the subway I saw

A spectacled man reading a book,

A thick book, with a title in Chinese.

Totally intent, he had a faraway look,

His total being gathered in that gaze,

In that book.  “Pleasure” is the wrong word.

These intransitive declarations I make

To the night.  I have a key to the earth.

I Want You to Drink My Lips

Is not being born, not yet being born,

The same as being dead after having lived?

Why were the children

Gift wrapped and dripping with slime?

How should I know?

The more the wind scours the sapphire sky

The smaller and smaller we get.

A pinkish light falling on everything

Is sounding the shallows of fear

Where nothing grows.

We are walking around a secret intention

That starts out as a general feeling

With fuzzy poles, before a mercurial

Haphazard line can be combed out of it,

A series of curved planks to take you

To the country of half rooms,

Trout seduced by the prelude to night

As they descend from the trees.

An occasionalist keeps it all humming along.

You!  Surprise.  Subjects, objects

They all reinsert themselves at some point

But they always give way again too.

Like donkeys, like asphodels, like hands

Brickyard 2-11-13

The rabble are blitzed on the krieg of nations
wearing the world violator on the back.
There are some very bad ideas, he thinks,
Is this one of them? Whoever handed it
to him, shrinking into the dark, had to be loaded.
Blankety blank blank. Can I borrow your rose-tinted glasses?

We decided to change the song in our head.
Will the grooves still turn in the same direction?
In any case, the girl with the red farmer's boots
will not accept the flowers. Thank you, anyways,
for letting me borrow that dream - can you repair it?
I am not awake during business hours.

The couples in the Afghan restaurant remain docile
although he is sitting on two RPGs
and her hands are drones in the salad.