In the Season of Ginkgo Biloba (first draft)

In awning’s shadow, the scrap-lined gutter—-
on the shul’s aching steps urban devilfruit is ripening.
Beneath the project’s empty swings they appear in
perennial gloom, sour gumspots in the concrete.
In the season of gingko biloba
I hate my neighbor, whose curbside B-52
drops five dozen pungent golden pustules
reeking on my curbside lawn.
Dreaming the red dream, I bring down the tree with
a hacksaw I do not have, eyes watering in wild
lust for the fracturing collapse to echo in
the apartments, then the postmortem hush.
The harbinger stays—- in cool sun ginkgos bake.

The Chinese man, who has no lawn,
collects them in his cart, those stinking pearls not yet
exploded into my soles, antioxidants
preventing Alzheimer’s, arousing squirrels,
sends flooding through my nose the noisome message
that says: tomorrow you turn back the clock but
withdraw from the hour, respire in the freshness but
long for the memory, show no one your ego but
find it mended, realize in the sharp, instant moment
the speed in your chest that says: this is the season,
the rotation round my history mimed, the hopeful
screaming kid hurling bricks at day one in the
calendar year Biloba; then the submission to old haunts,
the receding tide and the elastic mechanism
growing lesions from a voice that only speaks inward.  This is the season:a bus path rerouted for the frost—- keep staring at the
pinch-nosed carina in the corner, share your life’s story;
Brooklyn, one week draws chance between summer and winter,
why the Chinese know ginkgo silage must be stored.

At Night (working title)

Machine gun roiling of the tick-tock ticktock;
Literature doesn’t supplement my
one-and-a-half meals a day like it should.
If I was into biting my nails,
by now I’d be munching on bone
flambéed in a blood demi-glaze,
but I don’t choose that path.

I am bored to death.
Quentin Compson and Esther Greenwood
were bored to death, with those horrible
standards and their sad, sad intellects.
Berryman was really bored to death,
but at least he found a way to occupy himself.
Language became bored to death, too,
when someone let it in on the secret
that it was long dead.

I refill my glass of water now
and sneeze when a girl wanders in zonked.
I hand her her coat and watch it drop
from her non-existent grip
like a live boneless chicken.
Something is wrecking my generation,
what I call speed, or exhaustion.
Something seems jaundiced and undercooked.

If only my whiskers would hurry up
and grow like the beard of a lynx,
then, with mage-like prowess,
I could cast my orb into the
center of the room, to slow
everything down, to bring all
to a cat-like pace, until we seem
racing alongside the savory filets
of dolphin upon the foamy tide of sleep.

Ode to a Locksmith

Stepping through the brick
        storefront—mute holeinthewall
between a bodega
        and a bank—
I thought I’d behold
        a workshop of telescopes,
        clocks,
        and funny gadgets shaped like
ornaments for a dusty shelf,
        but I barely saw
even locks.

I climbed the little hills in your floor,
        saw an old chair, you,
        and a tamed beastofablock
        of bit and drill—
back behind the counter next to
the rows of hooks of rings of keys—
        perfumed with metal and oil,
        a taste that left my mouth
salty, fixed like statues in
the warped wood below.

But why your beard wasn’t
        dirty white, to your toes,
        or even existent at all,
I don’t know.

Mr. Long Laboring Man:
        I thought your hours modest,
hard, but modest—
your near ancient art
        shaves meat out of copper
to put on the table at night—
        could your sign really say
        Open on Sunday?

Soon you’ll sell it and leave
with your skeleton key
        and your petrified bit
        and the 0.125 inch idea
in the twenty-first century already fleeting.

One day the whities will just ship themselves off somewhere else all on their own

Times sure have changed. Or, time has changed and so everything along with it follows suit. I had prepared myself physically and mentally before going to hear poet, playwrite, and radical revolutionary Amiri Baraka read, fully expecting an onslaught of (convincing!) reasons to jump into a vat of hydrochloric acid in order to do something about this pasty white skin of mine. In fact, warnings for the safety of my psyche and self-esteem had been issued beforehand by knowledgable professors concerned for my well-being: "Make sure you sit in the back." The one thing I didn't realize was that this guy was born in 1934 and now looks like:
Old man, I fear you no more! These days you can barely walk with that damn hump protruding out of your back, like you've been carrying around all the woes of your people for too long and now they've just turned into big sacs of fluid. Which very well may be the case.

Nonetheless, the man can still write, and read, like a mother. It was like witnessing the last herald of the only generation that knows how to properly use words like cool, serious, dig, out, and gone, or coin phrases like "out-telligent" because in-telligent jus don't cut it no mo'. He writes prose like a two-headed street poet/intellectual. His words were sweet, and even though he didn't rip on the crackers too much, I felt sort of guilty for wanting to get ripped into. This man obviously has no need to bother with a small time whiteboy like myself. Again I'm humbled.

Smash a bottle of champagne on me-- I'm off

English poetry made from "trying" to "translate" Polish words. Better word: transliterate? Maybe not. But I have to post something. Might as well be what's probably the most absurd (best) shit I ever wrote.

Pristine Pan-Cognition
(raped from Zbigniew Herbert's "The Envoy of Mr. Cogito")


It’s taken (possibly) tame chi to see him go crazy—
(poor shoddy ruin now goes he) to you in absentia not grown.

It’s pro-stowaway viceroy, this co-nascent
wizard of reconnaissance: placate me, I obviously watch

Aeschylus’ nipple to the abyss,
the marshmallow cause, a trip to the dock sweeter, delectable,

that offends me, good rosen wood that offends me,
what’s that name (raccoon?), yet to the cyclic sea—

a new toy that was silly. Nietzsche yaks morbidity
like a rock, usually glows on the beach,

Nietzsche’s opus sees woe, you sister-guard,
the slow canto tortures each figure.
The poet ‘twas progress, if vulgar, crude,
a cornic lapse, toy: Zamboni Sisyphus!

Even pristine ceases, never woe, Mercy!
Principle of a menu of tics, torches street zones, or switch.

Stress, see yet the dummy possibility,
I’m glad your lust sways. Blast in the sky was
powdery, in absolution: power—it’s not below leprosy—