Folly Beach
I don’t know if Folly Beach is bad luck or what
I guess the name says it
I’ve seen terns there rippling like flags
I’ve watched how they flop into the sea
as if it were only a stunt
as if they didn’t want to catch a fish at all
I’ve swum there naked at night
under a blue moon that looked like
sunset on Mars
my hands smell like vinegar
I wonder if I’m christ
I probably am christ
otherwise why all this pointless bleeding
that’s a nice tattoo
thanks I won it in a hot dog eating contest
my girl and I dove in naked
the sea kept slapping me in the face
when we emerged from the sea
our clothes were gone
we thought they’d been stolen
a little dog came trotting up
and sniffed my embarrassing parts
women
don’t mess with them
Book of life
I fucked in a church once standing up
you know it, the Little Church of St. Anthony
just off Hwy. 9, down the gravel
there’s an old book there that everyone
signs their names in fading away
the Book of Life
I’m waiting for the server
to refill my coffee
at this diner in the middle of nowhere
why can’t it always be pleasant and quiet and still
instead of horror and annihilation
instead of smoking ruins
my soul is a coin of cheap disgust
somewhere a sea is shh-ing on a shore
as if its only purpose were to
lullaby lost souls
Saturn, saturnine, stars jingle in my pocket
when I walk through the morning streets at last
looking upward, blinded
Small Black Stone
it’s bad luck to close the bedroom door
in a house where you’re all alone
I await the devil’s knock or some other miscreant
the soft call of the moon and the sea
I’m so weary that I’ll welcome whatever comes
I don’t dare to pray
too tired, tired of waiting
my uncle said God isn’t the Great Vending
Machine in the Sky
why the fuck not
he’s that vending machine that
gives you the wrong thing
ask Huck Finn
put coins in those are the prayers clink clink
you press the coin return and nothing comes
some people shake the machine some people punch it
I’m unforgivable my heart’s a small black stone
Jesus knocked and barked his knuckles
San Juan One Morning
here in San Juan morning about to come with a
feeling of trembling sea shakes the air’s tambourine
all the sidewalks are upended by the old trees trying to
shake off their fetters
all the coffeehouses and all the money and rum and marijuana
men racing their engines up and down Calle Loiza
how can there be cereal and park benches and swings and
old people and canes and sunshine and clouds and
Schubert’s lieder
how can these things be why give us allow us only to
grind us down into dust into woe and misery, Lord
why not just fucking get it over with
why allow us this sunlight this rose this bird
I don’t know how things go
if I could snap my fingers or whistle
but I just stand here leaning against a tree
ineptly grasping at the light
Caper
I’m the deliquescent man the diaphanous man
as if I were becoming pure spirit
my shadow used to nimbly caper all around me as a boy
but then it gave up
as defeated as a clown in a terminally ill
children’s hospital
it taught me how to adumbrate, distend, attenuate
until with the wee-est squeak like the merest tip of a tree branch
on your windowpane I can get inside your Nightmares
my shadow’s the one who put it in my head to be
shot out of a cannon
when your shadow leaves it means you’re dead but that’s just a
drippy old wives’ tale
just a cigar burn in the head of a tambourine and incidentally those
jingly things are called zills
they harrow the moon’s spine
I adumbrate I percolate I leap within though outwardly
I’m hobbled as a rocking chair sans a rocker
something within’s growing deeper it could be feelings