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The coast guard says it is continuing to search
For more Haitians in the water,
Said the national public radio.
Fish and hatefodder,
Swimming without gills,
Stuffed with the starch of our perceptions
Their eyes yellowed and moonstruck
By the glare of our national eye;
Peering in,
We turn heads into lost cemetery numbers
Frenzies of swollen and salted eyes,
Festering in oceanic fear
The U.S. is a jerk of the knee and heart,
A baffling leap of mind.
Good Night, Macneil-Lehrer,
Good Night.
Remote controls
Fade out and faint out
Into suppertime America
Little Haitians, though, little Haitian-things
Scurrying across the dinner table like lice
Seeking asylum in the warmth of mashed potatoes,
Jockeying for sympathy amongst the peas,
Sucking the blood from my London Broil.
Those Haitians and those Cubans.
During the lunch hour, I am gliding
Along the silvery sheen of escalators
Soaring in the grandiose public eye of Washington,
Catapulting me onward toward the presidency.
The sheen of perfume credit card and shopping bag expense,
Of careers and responsibility,
Shimmering at me through resume eyes,
glittering from American Expressed Honolulu Vacations..
I felt very presidential today,
Striding majestically into the break room,
Doing my multi-tasks with style;
Held a press conference at the Coffee Urn at noon,
To outline my strategies for peace in the Middle East
and Eastern Europe,
And for a New American Order.
What was Bush doing meeting with the pope on a day like today?
His sidekick, career lapdog Eagle-burgher
Busying himself
With the blood-enraptured Serbs and Croats:
Crazy fat Greeks and scowling empire Turks
Stuck somewhere in between,
They are fired up Mongrels,
Dirty and unreasonable,
Like Arabs.
So many tribes to worry about,
Eager-Burgher said.
Those Serbs and those Croats
Building little empires, killing little people,
Just a little bit bigger
Than the flailing Haitians
Of miasma overpopulation nightmares
(Detention and detonation are similar worlds);
Meanwhile,
Silent oh-zone seethes away
Like a hissing snake,
Microwaving fields of cancerous corn and cattle
and Miami, Florida early retirement deaths.
The news today seemed more burdensomed
Than the average toll of deaths and insults
Probably because I listened to it all day long
Everybody kept killing everybody else
Over and over again.
In my carpeted downtown makework office,
Afternoon time pours on
Slow hand,
Small hand,
Drifttime,
Lunch sifting through the veins.
Everything here sticks to you:
Cremora and Winston-salem on the throat and lung
A veritable swamp down there these days,
But who is worrying?
Oh!-Zone seeps and pushes through late afternoon,
Presiding in giant silence
Over the clattering of mega-bites;
It lurks and sulks behind the timeless questions,
Such as:
Which is worse, anyway,
A broken law
Or a broken heart?
Afternoon updates:
The horrifying bath of bloodwater death
In the Phillipines
Makes poetry obsolete.
You should not listen to the news all day
The dead can really get to you.
I wonder if they have found any more Haitians
Writhing in midnight nets
Amongst the starkist tunas.
Somebody ought to sift them out
From the slithering pile,
They make for good laborers.
It is nice to get a paycheck on a Friday.
the division of infinite space / conferring
the mind's childhood what will be endurance
war on the subject museum of future tense OUT
of language acquisition
as you like / or a way that an infant relates
fixed to itself sexually exiting, leaves the walls
"The birds are drunk again
Speaking their own language" (Laura Moriarty)
memory
all air is up for grabs
conspiracy?
the need to know it now: field empty
to find the culprit / water's up front
the enemy, another front wrong way
do not enter ( this is a note to myself )
to remind myself that I'm here ( war of the roses )
I'm trying to translate the DNA / technical forces / the demand for novelty
field EMPTY
to exploit the new, the new has no historical baggage
old lovers, ripe flesh "It's this passion which one
could call white,"
( Anne-Marie Albiach )
Bring all the blood you got and if it's not enough
We'll make some.
Afternoon of another damn writer in a bad mood.
Don't these weenies ever lighten up?
Late into the night a grad student schemes
On how to increase the market share of poetry.
Imagine a board meeting at which an exec says
I think a little tastefully-done Dadaist image
Might serve us well here, open new markets.