The Shade of Palms

Count the number of broken pilot lights
Times any three of your fingers

Take the digits and make a paste
Add water and raspberries to make paint

Imagine a large white piece of bread
And lines of berry color

Eat the bread
Then feed it to your cat

Make the bread into balls
With bacon

Allow the cat to lick your fingers
Then count how many were

Write that many words in the shade
Stand up
But not too quickly
Allow the blood to rush to your head

Thomas Crown

Those are the patronizing eyes that speak
As one who knows she’s beautiful,
Short hesitating movements with fingers
Across a starched skirt
But intentional
Like the odds of a horse race.
The queen of Camelot
Might consider,
Sunglasses slid to the tip of her nose,
That the woman was pretty
Like sailboats or Hyannis
Though she would need a cocktail
Before ever revealing herself poetically.
There is jazz to looking at her,
The woman next to Jackie
There is something like olives
In holding this frame.
Setting down a sandwich crust
And trying the last chip
He slips her into his pocket,
Finishing his lunch at the café
He has an appointment to keep

History

The atmosphere in the courtroom was dingy
Questions, questions
Questions to be asked and questions made of smoke
Hanging like elephants or paper cuts and bookshelves
Or a half-day of work on a Saturday.
Order screamed the judge in English
And this would be a day to line the holocausts up against the wall
To bear witness to a book as it was written
Its author dressed in the densest black
Words words and pen-like movements of the hand
The rest is fate, the rest is wolves and bloody meat

A Call for Silence

The sky is full of white doves
Enter implied tears
Your experience for experience sake
So sad and white and wonderful
I want you to shut your fucking mouth

The Sun King

The devil in the backwards of a song
A door framed in red
Like lipstick crimson
And lists of people on lists
Those lines and lines of black static
Marching like bayonets
Shaving razors for the soldiers

Smashed tomatoes and white starched pants
Sunday dress and Tuesday’s mood
When my wife asks for cutlery
And I only have hands to feed her
There will only be enough sweet smiles
To last the honeymoon
Quietly, quietly the birds

With the Wind

The sharp tips of tall grass consider her whisper
The soft voice of late daylight while exhausted trees bare their fruit
And their arms filled with a yawn and the breeze
Of a child blowing soap bubbles, floating, sighing, hoping
The trees filled with blood like sap
They lean with the growing blue grey of dusk
Leaning like a row boat touching the line between water and dry
With the leathery faces of dead medicine men
Mouths opening and closing in selfish prayer
Like a porch screen with a broken spring or mouths
Before and after church, but only if it was
Painted with white paint that chips and only one pane
Of stained glass, which should sparkle in the Sunday morning light
Like the water and the tall green and yellow grass
Where dragonflies send loud communications and crickets lay down
To love this summer to love this south
To love their fathers and mothers and birthday cakes and sweat
That you can only get waiting in line for ice cream
Or pulling someone close under Appalachian trees
And between smiling tall grass that laughs like seashells
Like a mother with index to her mouth
“Shhhh”

She Said I Am The One Who Will Dance on The Floor in The Round

We have a 1980’s synthesizer love
Brown-eyed thriller zombies passing diner milkshakes
There are books to tell you what teeth are for
Books to carry home from school
Like tube sock walks and large black sunglasses
We are a tribute to hand holding
Living in one perfect day with no past
And a fluorescent color future
We’ll flirt in glances all through class
And the professor says “Bite marks
Were a sign of peace in this tribe”
Our love defined the lemming craze
And our looks changed with cans of Coke
Like one part fabric softener one part fading black denim
I’ll do one better than the poets
I’ll put her name in concrete
Then guard it with a broken bottle
Our love is dewy grass and a stereo held head high
Yelling “I love you!”
And we’ll smile to moon walks
Telling each other “She thinks I am the one”

Night Cap

In this dream there is a man
In a black suit, white shirt,
And black tie like a detective
But he promises in a deep voice
That he couldn’t even be a spy
If he wanted to.
There is a record player
Like the Sixties
And I sip a cold beer
Whiskey in his eyes like an old man
But the scene is irrelevant as bleach in a black hole
A hand grenade in a flower shop

Only his words, his words
His unshaved Kurtz rattle in a jungle
Made of lime and concrete
Remain on the jazz stricken side
Of my young mind

Lighting a cigarette with each new song
And winking at the well dressed waitress
He always said,
“A new south light and Jack
With a moustache and an erector set—
Just hear me out then
Here me out I’m getting
Away from the point—
It’s Broadway and the curtains part
A life in three acts but the stage is empty
And the playbill and shoeshine boy
Beg you to keep your seats
And silence.
I promise you before the night
Is up the streets and alleyways
Will yawn and spit
Like Champagne in the hands
Of last month’s silver centerfold
Singing happy birthday
Smiling and smiling and trying to smile.
The bubbles make a frame of gold
But not like the Louvre or Met
Just cellophane
And oh her calendar eyes big blue
Just looking at the camera flash bulbs
And mine like Russian space
Search the black between her iris
And I promise you will never
Come out
Like a pilot lost in a dark cloud
But not from rain
Or empty boxes inside others forever
And you’ll realize the water inside you is not alive
Faster than the wind could lift her skirt
Like a blinding light in a subway tunnel.”

With a Mouth Full of Candy

He stands in the mirror
With a mouth full of candy
Like from Easter
And there is one from father
And several from his friends
Colors and shapes melting in his mouth
Which reminds him
Of summer afternoons at the pool
Grass stains in the shape of smiles
An itchy, salty back on return from the beach
When he got to sit in the front leather seat
Of the old Volvo next to Mom
And there was Maggie in the backseat
And a Maggie in the next passing car
With head and tongue out the window in dog’s dream

Colors mixing like sprinkles on ice cream
Like a room with kaleidoscopes as windows
Or a sidewalk painting under a funeral march
Candy from a movie from when he was younger
And leaving the theater shocked by the blinding brightness
Mom unlocks the doors and warm leather seats
The ride home is like popcorn in teeth and perfect forever

He doesn’t look at this in the mirror
But watches the sweating glass next to the sink
Sweating, imagining it going from completely full to half-empty
Deciding to give his sweet tooth a rest
Deciding to race the sun with a chocolate bar

Delicatessen

There are two slices of tomato in my sandwich
Similar but different cuts
Sharing juices and mustard
Pushed together and in full of each other’s insides

The meat is at communion with the lettuce
Like a sea cow and its cud
Little is said
But no words are really needed

The bread is a wonderful metaphor
Which eludes me
And I can feel it smile
Like old wallet pictures

A cold drink completes the countertop
Like a sentry at a wedding
In a time of family war
It drools and yawns like an afternoon spent in company

I open my eyes
And another note has disappeared
From the desk in front of me
The ink is in my blood
The paper gone with heartburn

A Deep Breath

My anger is the exit wound
In the backseat of an old car
With more than the usual amount of blood
Slowly dripping down the glass

I am screaming and begging
For them not to kill me
But my winking eyes
Betray my desire for a shattered mind

I am laughing just laughing
But no sound except
Broken teeth and
Happy gurgling gummy blood

My hands are woozy
But they are playing
With the slipperiness
Like finger-painting

The real Andrew
Is sitting with his hands
Folded across his lap
Being told to smile
In a room full of fools
By the kingliest fuck of them all

The Longer You Stay

Nostalgia is a room just before you enter it
And it is dark outside and somehow you have already
Turned on the lights that are low and leave shadows in the corners
There is a song playing loudly around your arms and in
The veins in your arms which sounds like another time
Though you never knew it

Maybe earlier that day if that day were years ago
Mother would only let you swim after the sunset
And there would be something majestic about hearing nothing
Underwater, seeing the green pool light and thinking about a girl
With chlorine making your eyes red
The one night when dessert came first
And the boats were shifting in the ocean which was darker
Than all the melted chocolate and night mixed on the table

I’m in the nostalgic room right now with my eyes closed
And I am dictating this poem to the shadows that surround me
From time to time the pen stops and I ask what is the matter
Nothing says the darkness
The darkness says nothing and starts writing again

I can remember the desert of the southwest in this moment
I can remember how upset I’ve always been
Like when I read the wall in a the bathroom which said
“Blowjobs here Tuesday and Thursday at eight AM”
And just below those words in another color ink
“Thoughtful political conversation here Wednesday at five thirty PM”

The music that I bought at the small record stores in the southwest was angry
Like the dust of all the Indian ancestors stuck between the spaces of my sock
And the inside of my shoe or when the only word you could think of was “gun”
But that’s because you have tourettes and watched John Wayne movies after
You got your wisdom teeth pulled and couldn’t even call your girlfriend
From the gauze and spit and silly little thoughts

I’m dictating all of this in that room and the other part of me hesitates for a moment
Commenting upon the obvious writers block like communism but without the cay
Which has gone on long enough
Longer than a book but shorter than three abbreviated dusty epics in dead languages
And without colored pictures
Dizzy from the songs in my arms so I past out and went in


“God love him he tried his best” suggests the empty room around me
But I don’t listen because I pray everyday that walls don’t talk
Because then I would have five things more than none to worry about

If I had put a TV in that room
And I had turned it on, I can only be sure of one thing
It would be at that part just before something happens
When people are glancing at each other as the camera cuts here and there
And there are no audible words but just quick movements
Guns held at ready, shirts unbuttoned, slow motion choir hymns
And your heart is beating just as fast as those on screen
And you are scared
You are so scared
And you’re fumbling with the remote trying to change the channel
And just then you think you hear footsteps outside the door
Or maybe the handle turns
Or the sound is coming from just behind you
And there are suddenly a thousand warnings you realize you’ve ignored
And you are scared
You are so scared
You’re afraid that when this music finally reaches its climax
That nostalgia is just the strange misfiring of a dead brain stem
That reminiscing is just an unending sadness
Empty like why oh you
A darkness full with more monsters than the most pleasant memory can sustain