A little glowing picture box
killed the Western Renaissance in 1950.
Leonardo trotting Florentine streets passed
lame, dirty little puppet shows
where plots were ignorant murders
or paternalistic, dastardly rape.
It should've been that, in those cobbled streets
(glowing like the tiles in Billie Jean, with true magic),
as a wise wife ended some boisterous fight,
one of those puppet stages shot from a high window
and fell through the painter-lord's full skull
as he went from his own last supper,
and landed a gory 600 years wide!
It's a simple premise, you'll say,
but what is simple?
What is human
that is not basic?
Only deception.
I watched public conscience scatter
in a year after Kurt Cobain died.
What is it worth
adding causes to a tragedy, like tax evasion
to charges against a mobster?
Storm Poem
We
are the tenth floor
financial
survivors
This
morning, our white
highrise
ashens
beneath
a chocolate
layer
cake for a sky
Isaac
says some things
Just
through the office door,
"The
sky is falling"
His
face is grave
Noting
the brightness here
terminating
in the black
swirl
just out there,
he
thinks of a lit movie set
Wagering
that the storm
will
fail to kill them,
and
probably right,
our
coworkers are out of sight,
telephone
ringers rise from behind
the landscape of cubicles
like
MIDI bird song
thanking
the floodlight
Roger Ebert
I'd
like to stick around, Roger Ebert
I'm
sorry, I can't
It's
too eerie how you've changed
Since
you've beaten your multiple facial bouts
of
cancer –
which
you have just so banally described to me
as
a series of bullets
from
the tip of an Arthur (yawn) Penn prop
–
you just have lost
something
And
in such a sheepish, desperate way you spoke
I
know; I'm terrible
However
I have to give this proposed conversation
on
this wispy cold Chicago street corner thumbs down
Sorry,
Roger, thumbs down
While
I wish you the best of health,
when
you were laying around in your gown
on
your recovery bed,
you
saw nothing, didn't even brush up
on
the resurgent Magnum
P.I.
Man—how
can you not've seen Children
of Men!?
I
love you, you feisty, articulate brain,
but
you're already in the ice at my feet
I
want to rock your boat
I
want to talk to your ark,
hear
it like an Ent-become-Ancient-Mariner,
grumbling
and shifting his jaw of logs,
melodies
of fowl and livestock drones
when
he yawns to speak
I
want to bask in the long yowls of
a
baby calf lost to its mother
while
your ark pauses, mouth open,
on
course to respond to my comments
with
something his first owner told him
in
their months together on the flat infinite sea;
something
he agreed with
when
his holds were much less depleted,
the
sea, proud and accomplished, rubbing his belly;
when
his fit breaths
bleated
and cawed with the variety of a great garden,
the
heft of a church organ
Poem With Plurals and Mixed Metaphors
Simple-dressed
men taking family photos
with
basic, square digital cameras that they can't
operate,
gaping
at the crisp review screens with eyes that are
of
the highest professional grade,
stuck
in their faces,
slick
with potency,
spinning
like novelties,
like
compasses lost at the poles:
untrained,
unable
to get their optical dogs
to
drop what they fetch,
so
it's all wagging stubbornly at the edges of their grasp
in
the brown-orange late sunset deep in its summer