Love Song

People love to talk loudly in the street
early in the morning over idling trucks
people love to talk loudly in the street and whistle
in the morning sectioned off
from night by expressway traffic, streetlights where
the stars are hiding, where bosses hide
waiting to claim the morning in the name of
immense productive potential

People love and hate a bus for showing up
that presses toward the day on time
people Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
whether people love any of this
Saturday people and sometimes Sunday
we have the morning everywhere and bosses
still asleep, still whistling their own dream
dreamt every night of unlimited morning
delivery trucks and a little room to sit on the bus

People love to talk loudly in the street and spit
on it too, appropriate salute, I salute it with you!
and rest my head a few minutes on the bus
which people love to do, their heads
against the window while out the window
it stops being night gradually then once and for all
love here as ever has been the wrong word
though this one planet glitters, it is the bus
and the bus is late

Permanent Vacation

Everybody wants love
                           I want be in Paris
Everybody is looking for a good time
                           but I would rather be in Paris
Everybody votes for love and a good time when all I want is
an affair to carry on for two months
               and then torch, tear down
stay friends and have dinner in the ashes every other week
take all the books and lacquered beams from
               all the gondolas we stole and build
a library
                     Who do I mean by everybody?
               Who knows, I would rather be in
Paris setting fire to the furniture in a bank
for love and a good time and everybody who wants love
               but finds it tied up
in rent in the gas bill, distillery and packaging costs
built into the price of a good time, a property tax on
               love transmitted to the purchaser of
love wood dinner books but
                                          That’s why you build a library
however many months you want the weekend to last
That’s why
               tunneling through the walls of rowhouses on the
main streets could change everybody
               You tear down the museum like
               you tear down the columns like
I changed “everybody” when I realized I didn’t mean
                           everybody in the first instance
Everybody together under the canvases of great paintings
like big down blankets
                           or they become our shoes in the last instance
               or the snow gets in, the situation flips...
Everybody here posts pictures of the smoke
In Venice there’s rain but in Paris smoke

Against Deathbed Conversion

                                                         "...shrill ganglia..."

1

Some mornings I feel I am full of corners
some sleepless dreaming damp square sod
steam and sirens across my waking
                                                              and waking
I come stuttering sun to sidewalk, cross under
the shuttle train waddling south on two pylons
five sidelong cross-shaped shadows

And some mornings a knot in my knee


2

And some mornings I’m close to weeping
and some mornings I do! weep
the complete experience of all of it
when crossing a pavement I see dog shit
smeared as if in homage to the movement of a trowel
some shoe in whose movement
I see the mortar, somebody setting all these bricks
walling this city that makes everybody
so miserable in the folds of their faces


3

And the sun glances
at the thigh-sized slot between the platform and train
between subways cars opening up and smacking shut
under the river
where leaning on the pole
I go moving in the steps of my poem
living in it
                    a grand commonplace


4

Where a paper bag spilling french fries
splits as it goes
skating the wet linoleum
So rare to be left alone
mornings on the train, and the smell
of damp shoes
damp coats lingering
a body smell from an old man
who hasn’t washed in a long time


5

Chide me again, poster
MTA presents Poetry In Motion
for not respecting the epic of
tunnel construction
in your locked metal cabinet


6

There’s no poem on the belly
of the broad blue band
big mean hell of a city

At a certain hour of the morning
any avenue appears to end in a bridge
or sky bloated a tunnel


7

At work they roll the shades down
on the sunny side of the building

My side there’s a yellow mist
hanging on the river the harbor the bridges

That granite looks like plastic
in any light non-Walker Evans

The mist enacts that delicate dance across surfaces
gulls circle the flag

Doesn’t thinking bridges make you feel
like Percival?


8

Santo
my great great grandfather
swam once in the upper harbor

The story goes when their steamer
went past the Statue of Liberty
he climbed up the railing and jumped


9

Santo
whose wife discovered him a year later
on Broome Street
barely a quarter mile
having accumulated two new daughters

He swam and came ashore and got right to it
my great great grandfather


10

It’s important to adhere to the company style guide
so that, ha ha, we look like we know what we’re doing

Important to drink coffee until your stomach feels full of chalk
refresh the page with every update

Browse the MoMA catalog at your desk job
appreciate one resolutely subpar painting from any great painter


11

Watching the number on the walk sign tick away
there goes my lunch
Fallow thoughts
But the performance of anger
this toddler’s putting on at her mother’s side!
She turns away
undissembled confusion and frustration
her cheeks flushed
eyes searching the sidewalk
shrieking, twisting her hands
“What are you doing”––her mother
As if it isn’t clear!
This is anger! This is how people act
when they’re angry! This is how that dour idiot feels
in his chinos waiting for the light––in his guts!


12

At the window buildings step to me, fuming
but now the phone is ringing

Zeal to promote the common good
gulls cold to steel towers except as surfaces
to sleep on between meals
and voicemail chiming

Mom had answered
“can’t you write a poem about drowning in work?”
How spectacular is that?


13

The panorama afforded by this position
flat descent of airliners
tugboats and barges in the harbor
would have given my grandmother agita
bless her

Time was
there was one 17th Street my city knew
now I know of two
and never see either
a blessing this excess
which obliterates experience


14

The Chrysler Building is rusting
the sun is rusting it
pulling the silver clean off
its spire, spilling it
into the river

Hello, vestige!


15

Old eyesore water works
sun of bricks

The less I walk aimlessly
the shorter my unpaid breaks
the fewer singles I give away to bums
               fierce in their admonishments of despair

the more is stolen from me
removed beyond a paystub


16

I'm not going to quote the beatitudes


17

Mom
seeing it like you do would be nicer
work related to joy in a meaningful way or
work having something to do with virtue

Instead it's
                      Work hard all your young days
                      and they'll find you too, some morning


18

Important to learn the names of things
commit them and move on
for when the multiple meanings
of things become inoffensive

Important to be describable as disgruntled
to keep fair weather friends on edge
to not be positive what day it is some days
important to lose some days

For all you know there will always be more
which is most important
most immediately true


19

Cheap looking redstone and glass towers
on the other side of the river
eating into the blue, the sky too

You catch it in whiffs in the gaps of buildings
the ammonified austerity of their dreams


20

Suppose an excess which is superior to fact!
The calendar math of personal myths
that never quite adds up

It is that narrative befitting utopia
where everything happens at its perfect interval
toward the perfect effect
speeding images of a deathless Easter . . .

Poet
                you have no idea
the sky is three-foot-three above you!


21

Pause
pause your walk
what you’re up to one moment
and look, really look at
this bridge
this big
blue
goofy
baubles
bridge
Yes there are gulls
they fall and work the surface of the water
with their mouths
                                    Ignore them
It’s a big blue bridge hanging there
a rainbow of spray paint and bird shit


22

Here you are always “out with people”
people the populace their energy
nearer and dearer than anything
our joyous configurations over dead bodies in the bridges
starry convergence
as we’re turned out of early tomorrow’s bars

But never “our humanity”
which is not
“humanity” which
is one more circumscribable thing
for your boss to make scarce


23

So that you make a point
of actually believing every subway spiel
the perfect and complete truth

This man has just arrived with his six year old daughter
off a bus from Scranton yesterday
four days in a row

It is the truth


24

                                    and your soul——
out!


25

Poet
                you can't distill this
any more than you could contain it
                                                             Nor can your art
your poem contain or manage it
no matter your diagram
from the event of every instant you emerge
singular

You can't be outside of it
even if the world you want seems to be
outside of it
                          Nothing
not even that Heaven
which is your need of order is outside of it
And all of this for free
                                         like I don't even want to hate you!