Coathooks

Blue jeans freshly washed
hang by the beltloop
from one of a golden row
of coathooks, legs crossed
and stiffened with starch,
fly gaping like a mouth.
The awkward way it hangs
it is a big tuna of cotton
hung up at the lip,
its zipteeth gasping, frayed
threads spread like whiskers,
the pockets turned out
white gills drowning in air
as it dries above the radiator,
fat and salty and beautiful,
good enough to eat, or wear.

A jacket hangs by its side,
battered, burnt leather
like a ghost made of chocolate
from a kind of funhouse,
a cow's hide stretched over hooks.

Wake-up Call

"Morning is a dagger."
Easy for you to say
with your grubby hands
in the toolbox night
calls dream, easy
to grind that out against
the dawn, you super-ego,
you unwanted Zeus
hefting a Black & Decker
at the margins where
I'm sleeping, easy enough.
Waking my pillow is wet
with tears, piss, electricity,
—what the devil—
I reach and touch my head,
find it all trepanned,
part caved in part drilled,
a stream of bloody words
spilling everywhere, over
my hands, oh yes you
like that awfully don't you
skully apparition you
your unholy face there
like a briefcase of bone,
Loki, whispering
"The dagger is a telephone"
or was it Zeus, or Loki,
is words or what was it
night or drills or blood
or trombones you bonehead
what was it what are you?
Answer.

Colourblind

He stumbles into the snow
—furies trace the dark
where the snowclouds come
up from under the hill
his footsteps fall behind
the road, the night, long—
stumbles into a drift,
the streetlamp drops
a raft of cider light
at the lee of the curb
tethered there in snow,
edge of an ocean
overcome, dreaming,
a world costumed yellow
for a dance under light, light
like a Baltic king
fishsmelling and sallow,
a dance the rushing drifts,
outer night, threaten to swallow,
light grown replete,
and beyond, in sleep,
in sleet, houses bunched
like grey mushrooms,
a kingdom of the monochrome,
blinding, dressed in weeds
of white, a crown
and an ivory throne—

but the boy is lost
and he will lie awake in
the bathing halogen until
his gills are full of snow.

*

Napoleon
III
awoke
to the
exploding
timebomb

DO NOT INGEST THE UNITED STATES

THE MIDWEST FOLDED
LIKE A CHOCOLATE PANCAKE
THE BADLANDS GAVE ME GAS
FLORIDA WAS TOO SWEET
TEXAS TOO BITTER
THE ROCKIES HURT MY ASS
THE GARDEN STATE WAS FATTY
THE EMPIRE STATE WAS RAW
VERMONT WAS TEPID
MAINE HURT MY JAW
OKLAHOMA CRUMBLED
INTO DELICIOUS BITS
ALABAMA WAS HOT
ALABAMA GAVE ME THE SHITS
NEBRASKA WAS PLAIN
VIRGINIA WAS SPICY
MASSACHUSETTS FISHY
WISCONSIN ICY
I COULDNT FINISH CALIFORNIA

FOR DESSERT I HAD
BAKED ALASKA

Smile at me again

and you'll get one
right in the eye

said the horse
to the horsefly

Black

Ho um
black as blackness
midnight shadow
windowless room
locked safe full
of coal of coal
what a sweet
darkness open up
at night it goes
invisibly into them
your bulbs until death
puts on two coins
the world's red eyes
sink black inside
blinking volcanos
leave this poem behind
it is too black
even for you, friend,
glowing lights dance
before your eyes
you feel cheated
by this dark
and you write letters
to me or to
no-one at all
they pile in the dark
so black it hurts
so black Norwegians
get terrified and light
candles in church
and tell ghost stories
in Norwegian, I
well never be scared of
—I don't understand—
the language is simply
dark to me,
dark as the bottom
of a tin bucket
when water pours in
and that I call
ladies and gentlemen
the eye of the sea
looking from its bottom
through a fathom lense
into a vacuum
into a galaxy,

What a sweet dark
it is, ho um, what
a world of chalk

Sweet of

Oh kitten me—
world
you have far too
long
sung out your
heart,
hung out to
dry
laughing at your
fate
with a ripe
bellow
like a ghost of
fruit
oh take me,
pip
on your tongue
that
I may blossom in your
gut
and escape it with
wit
I am a fatted
calf
a maybe man, a
one

The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady

The back of the world is broken
Saint Charles has spoken—
out of a Panic cloud
the hordes of Hades crowd,
tyrannosauric martyrs, blood rain,
incubi, necrophages, fauns,
the four horsemen—a world of pain
elaborated into many forms,
and at their head the queen
a skeleton of evil wires, contorting
sickeningly, surveys the scene
and blights the land with fires.
The gods surround the planet
to watch its catastophic ellipse.
"The hordes of Hades have my bet,"
the black saint said, "That's what
I call a goddamn apocalypse!"

Through A Glass, Darkly

In the space beyond the window
worlds commune
hinged on a pane of glass.
The fading blue
of dusk, the dull moonlight,
the grass—thoughts
a nearer scene assumes—
then, double glazed,
a pair of halogen lit rooms
living through
the unconsciousness of light,
libraries
hung out out in the night.
The glass
invites its dual selves
to burst
like branches from the shelves;
a fire escape
climbs from a haloed head,
pages falling
heap about the eaves, the dead
wake inside their books,
the streetlamps softly calling
their stories into flame.
The unnamed sky is full of light,
full of the windowframe.

You stare through the glass,
through your ghostlike image,
as if looking for something lost,
until the windows of a building
beyond the trees, long dark,
illuminate.