Writer’s Block
Houdini and the Dead Letter Office
Building a Circus on the Sound of Wings
Speech is not dirty silence
Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
—Wallace Stevens
The Creations of Sound
THE SKIN OF MEANING
He was late to the party and without directions,
though his invitation was secure, and his instincts
keenly honed to an acceptable edge, and as we are
waiting to see if the fates will hear our ode to joy,
we are given the sound of a man losing everything;
this is the hissing of his agitation, the sound of his
broken heart as it is given and fills with shards,
a piece of stone in an overgrown garden, a stiff,
bitter, life-long secrecy tipping over a robust
single indiscretion and no one is witness to the
villain, shaved to a shadow in that moment,
letting the sail of his love loose in a ripping wind
and that lost direction reducing his reflection to
a splinter as he spends his summer cutting down
the grass which grows right back and when the
colder weather comes to drive him down he trims
the fat of his summer words and their loose darkness
swims round his leather chair, the garden vines
emptied of tone, their edges’ innuendo snarling,
the hidden realities so carefully furrowed in shy
smiles and feigned deference which fasten his
fading future, slowly shot through with the wrinkles
of original meaning that he has never outgrown.
WHY PLUTO IS NO LONGER A PLANET
for Alan Moore
Of course, my belief
in culture is a sham.
I’m mining this shaft,
nourished on red velvet cake
and scrubbing the live walls
with a ShamWow that
I squeeze for emeralds
like a wizard on holiday.
Don’t ask me to explain.
It would only force you
to turn on a television.
There is an outcropping,
a bitter pill hanging onto
the cliff of the universe
like an old icy tooth.
It tastes of burlesque and
Aqua Velva, soft shoe
routines and bent spoons, went
the way of the Andromeda Strain.
Imagine an unnamed finger
grew out of the heel
of your hand and froze there.
ET IN ARCADIA EGO
When the trees bow
and bushes curtsy, as
the silk wind brushes
through my bramble-
cluttered garden, the
claws of the field mice
and piston-powered
rabbits scramble the
unbroken dirt, the
untended roses groan
under the weight of
their thorns, the
untethered tomato vines
sprawl and dump their
fire-red loads among
the robust weeds.
At one corner, Japanese
hornets have assembled
a gray colony the size
of a watermelon and
ward off semi-serious
excursions
