An inside view of your privacy

You'll be glad
to know when you go under
the surgeon will slap
your naked thigh in a friendly manner
and comment on your fat
or genitalia

starts up his ipod,
and you'll be happy to know,
if you go it will be to the greatest hits of the 70's.
classify this with
"body, celebration of."


From a patient high on Versed
and painkillers
come offhand words: "What's amazing
about when this happens is how
my bones are just like everybody else's."

what a shame she won't
remember
and I am sworn
not to reveal her name.

Sleeper Hold Me

My little wife wanted
to take a class
in self
defense
and learned the sleeper hold. She thinks
it's funny to come
up behind me now
and squeze my
artery
while I watch TV she
cuts the blood
to my brain
and I sleep
again and again.

Taking it on a walk

As we passed
the river with its boat
wake veins like
flexed arms

our breath
brought mosquitos' noses
our words carried clouds as of gnats after rain

And as we crossed the bridge
toward home
I looked down at the water
and understood why death
is called a river crossing.

What Good is it to Chat with You, Third Cousin to the Muse?

I instead will write a poem for every
hour, for every minute
and spread them all like ash
back over the world

I will write in characters
small, making up a character
and collect them in a database
and make them available online for free

poems like the innocence of young boys
who run after their fathers
(if you see this you will know what I mean)
poems like infant speech

a poem is meant to be honest
like George Washington telling
one lie only
beautiful, quotidien poems will be lost,
will be bled for fever
and leave behind wooden teeth and tree stumps

belonging to no one
like "Footprints," worth so much
when it carries you, printed again and again
to be remembered

remembered like childhood
in memoirs, like life in autobiographies,
like speech again whispered meaningless in a lover's ear

So what in the world got Zidane so pissed? It has to be said that the Italians don't quite deserve the cup, as France really outplayed them. But the Italian defense should be given a lot of credit for holding tight for 45+ minutes of French domination in midfield and seeing their way through numerous French chances. And, I suppose, for one of their number sending Zidane home early.

I'm definately going to be watching for more info on the exchange that led to Zidane going mountain goat.

to think
i might come to the end of my ability to create
new neuropathways
as i have done since childhood
there are too many things
i saved saying i would later learn more

and my secret hope lost
to some day come into my own
to finally scale
heights closed in clouds that swirl
and whose glimses I would forever uncover
in gusts of verbiage or in the dawn
of warming mind or evolved eyes

peaks separated
like neurons i would leapingly
traverse in electric bursts
now represent the parts of mind
unused like old stage scenes
large, gaudy, dim in storerooms

even hillocks i climbed
and deep valleys of memory
dug are fog filled, obscured

brilliance
(never seen, true,
but felt like the sun
behind cloud membrane or eyelids,
remembered in the heat of burned skin)
is unavailable even to the imagination
even to reconstruct from books
from another's words

here i have the brilliance only
of driving in the city
playing host, telling gossip in breakrooms
knowing the good parts of town
and what plants to eat