Air Show

The residents of Chicago’s north side

Gather in thousands on the stepped rocks

Which form the western coast of Lake Michigan.

The bright sky is a perfect frame

For the airplanes that will spend the next hours

Cruising up and down the coast,

Displaying the prowess of human technology.

As I stand among the milling thousands,

Joggers, bikers, and rollerbladers flow past me.

I wonder, is it like this with the walruses?

Do the caribou gather similarly at the river’s edge?

Are the penguins festive in their tuxedos

Among the rocks and sprays of mist?

Look what nature has made!

Consider the beautiful bipeds

Who populate this place.

The sleek green grass,

The sky-scrapers,

The planes and boats and trees;

All are manifestations of a single nature.

There are children crying beautifully

In their bright clothes,

With bright sherbet smeared

Over their beautiful faces.

We hear the whine of the single engines.

Five winged biplanes parade past in formation,

Bright scarves of smoke trailing behind them.

Off shore the water is filled with boats and crafts.

Jet skiers dip between the rocks near shore.

The sunbather’s pink lip gloss

Beacons my attention to her beauty,

Outstanding against the bright blue water.

Later the jet fighters take the stage.

We cannot hear them approach.

They flash by with a deafening boom,

So low the water is seared smooth beneath them.

As the sun looms low behind the city,

The air begins to team with swallows

And dragonflies who gather to feed

At the edge of the lake.

At one spot they are thick around our heads.

Buzzing and roaring past,

The wings of the huge insects shimmer

And whir past me in red and purple smudges.

I swear some of them have on pilot’s goggles

And wear little leather helmets over their interiors.

They buzz loud around me,

Zipping past at astonishing speeds.

The swallows are stealthy and full of verve.

They swoosh and circle in brown blurs.

They look small and fat in the air.

I do not know why they can fly at all,

Like winged puffer fish bobbing in the breeze.

Now colors begin to rise on the eastern horizon.

Bright oranges and reds spread in a slow explosion.

As the sun falls down behind us

Colors deepen and rise in violet over the lake.

At dusk I return from the water’s edge.

All the children are dirty and thirsty.

The breeze blows warm between the thousands

Who meander back to their apartments.

Cleopatra and the Clown

                         1.

Procrastination saved my life, or--

There's nothing more pathetic

Than a procrastinating suicide

We'll either do it or we wont

But the depressing thing is

Every possible method has been done

And done to death.

Our suicide says nothing

Our attempt to stylize our death is meaningless

Our attempt to get the timing right

To execute the details

Causes us to delay and say:

If it were only 1850 again

And a romantic suicide were still possible

If only the motivations were still pure and honorable

Like they were for Tchaikovsky

Whose homosexuality and deep melancholia

His creative genius and his bad forced marriage

Swirled together a tortured brine

In the river of his mind

Who can imagine this scene without the theme

To Romeo and Juliet?

As Tchaikovsky wades out into the freezing torrent

His large muscular wife striding after him

And fishing his skinny ass out by the trousers

She pulled him back and made him live

Wouldn't let him go.

But eventually some years later

Death and Tchaikovsky found each other

After a second attempted drowning failed similarly

He contracted cholera and went out on his back.

Even in the modern era

An artistic suicide was still possible

Vachel Lindsay reaching for a bottle of lye

And drinking it down.

A horrible death. Unimaginable suffering.

His poems out of style, himself defenseless

Against criticism and poverty which is criticism.

A country bumpkin in an urbane era

What it must have been like to realize

That no one cared about your work

Or about your lifetime that you spent

Singing and preaching the gospel of beauty

To an ugly generation.

By the sixties Hemmingway's suicide

Had taken years to accomplish

When his bottle of gin was no longer accommodating

His favorite shotgun was.

Whatever else can be said

A shotgun suicide is at least not vain

Harboring no pretension concerning

The state of one's corpse

But every suicidal artist is finally

A variation on the theme of Thomas Chatterton

Whose suicide by arsenic in 1770

Accomplished the goal of all his plagiarists,

That is, he shamed his society

Into an admission of guilt.

Into an acknowledgment,

Not that the artist has trouble adjusting

To the way the world is

But that the act of adjusting to the world

Requires a sacrifice that some are unwilling to make

And those of you who have made it should be ashamed

Of what you've become.

The boy Chatterton just eighteen when he died

In desperate poverty

Being ripped off by his publishers

Literally starving, he finally spent his last pennies

On the poison that killed him.

                       2.

“The dead are just dead,”

My friend Harry Haller used to say,

“The real suicides are the living,

For whom the thought of death is a continual comfort

The suicide knows death is available to him

If he turns the knob and opens the door.”

But what is behind the door?

No one can say

And the finality of the thing

And the mess we would leave behind

The financial mess and the moral mess

And those who would be inconvenienced

By the bloated corpse of it all

The image of the Mexican steel worker

Crazed with jealousy

Who drove his wife at knife point to the mill

Embracing her he jumped into the smelting furnace

With its radiant molten ore

A leaping flame

A brief puff of steam

And a steel a little richer in carbon

Than the engineers had intended

One possible definition of living

Is putting off death for another day.

Each breath pushes death back a step

Into the future.

                   3.

In the garden at night

A young man in anguish

Sweating big drops of blood

Prays while others sleep

What is the source of his conflict?

His spirit at war with the will of his flesh

The flesh that wanted to live on

To bib wine and eat great portions

Against the gnosis of his father's will for him--

His conscious choice of death

And who can guess the motivation of his betrayer?

Who spent the silver pieces on a bit of land

On which to wring his neck and spill his guts.

An old man centuries earlier could have escaped

The death proportioned for him.

His friends had made everything ready

A prison guard could easily be bribed

A boat was ready to whisk him away

Under cloak of darkness

But he preferred a dignified death

To an undignified life

Though his arguments ring hollow

And tinny to our ears

For his gift was not reasoned argument

But rank stubbornness

He drank the hemlock and paced

The floor of his cell

Until he went cold

                           4.

“A gift of figs I bring,” the Clown said to the queen.

And in the basket find a remedy

For her who asked of the physician

An easy way to die.”

“Put your basket down,” said Cleopatra to the clown.

“The gift of figs you leave with Aspic venom found

Whose bite will leave no mark upon my breast or wrist

Whose kiss will leave the bloom of death cold upon my cheek.”

Akin to wedding

Akin to Wedding

In the future it is customary

To have an elegant death

A ceremony akin to wedding

Live with colors and flowers

You will be old

Aging will be much harder

If you are beautiful

Beauty does not fade in the future

Until just before your ceremony

When your friends will gather

To see you peeled naked of beauty

And prosthetics

The veil is torn

You are stripped of vanity

A naked cavity

Your body is a withered flower

Everyone will smell your odor

What created you out of itself

Has been waiting to absorb you

You are broken like a sacrament

Your family cries in a circle

The wind chimes wretched with violin

You draw the heavy breath of ritual

You will recognize yourself in the dirt

You will recognize the animal

That you are

You will find beauty in the eyes of that animal

You will slide from yourself into that beauty

Butterflies will dress your body

Does Basketball Have a God?

On the playground, the men laugh and swear.
A young man receives the object.
With half a frown he takes the long shot.
His opponents scoff as the ball sails,
Careening down the back of the net.
Back-peddling, the man scowls to cover his pride.
Later he says, “It seems to go back and forth that way.”

A small boy waits just outside the base line,
As the men finish their game he asks,
“How’s come the really close shots always rattle out,
But the bad shots seem to bounce in?”
All the men stop and look
As if he had said something very profound.
After a few seconds the boy’s father says,
“If it hits the rim, it’s your own fault.
Try to never hit the rim.”

The sweaty guard attends the game.
The shooter sees his pass before it is made.
A quick flick, and the ball carves a curve to the goal.
At a time-out, they meet to slap hands.
“You are a creator,” says the shooter.
“And you a prophet,” answers the guard.

The long black man attends the game.
Palms up with wide open eyes.
Neatly extending he snags the ball.
“Mine,” he smiles as the nine race back.
A minute later he slaps a poor shot
To the hungry crowd.
Raising a clinched fist he shouts,
“I am the judge.”

At the line of judgment they all pay homage.
One man mumbles superstitiously.
Another pounds the ball against the floor in ritual,
So he will not forget.
After, one lifts his eyes in thanksgiving.
The other recoils with shame,
His offering rejected.

“Basketball is a discipline,” says the manic coach.
“And we are its disciples.
Are your feet shoulder width apart?
Does your elbow follow your wrist in a vertical line?”
Now he watches the skinny boys practice,
Smiling with a far away look he says,
“When they move like the fingers of a hand,
As if with one mind, one purpose,
It’s so beautiful.”
As he speaks, white froth shows in the corners of his mouth.

“I can smell the popcorn, too,”
Says the blind man in the front row.
“I feel it when the object thumps the wood.
I can hear each squeak and tweet.”
Behind him, the ocean pours a wave onto the floor.
As it washes over him, he finds himself standing,
Adding his voice to theirs:

In the final second a whistle has sounded.
The smallest man steps to the line.
On the left, the crowd hollers and waves its hands frantically.
They pound their feet against the bleachers.
On the right the crowd sits silently,
Waiting.

Later, as we linger in the dispersing crowd,
I ask the blind man,
“How is it that a shot can graze the very inside edge of the rim,
And find it’s way out?  Or it might smack the rim dead on
And ricochet through the hoop?”
Then the blind man laughs, and he says to me,
“Do you understand, ‘Art is Imitation?’
The bards of basketball don’t fling their shots,
They let their wrists recite from memory.”

What the City Eats

The city eats whatever it can catch:

Rats and cats
Crashed cars, garbage and sewage

The city relishes poisoned pigeons
And baby gulls that fall out
From the bottoms of highways

An old building groans
Like an elk taken by wolves
It teeters and creeks and throwing it’s head back
Crashes into the dust

Old people break like eggs when they fall
The yolk seeps between cracks in the sidewalk
Their shells are trampled by the young

 The city is fat with metal and brick
And bone and blood and glass

Newspaper sticks between
The city’s chain-linked teeth

The rain rinses silt from the street
Parched gutters gulp the dirty water
Into its concrete underbelly

Machines strip the salted streets
As the city sheds its skin

Tar and gravel in the gullet
Aid in its digestion

-The Mind Food Brain Maintenance Tool Kit-

-The Mind Food Brain Maintenance Tool Kit-

Volume 1: Nicotine Cures Alsheimers
* This poem is not intended to prevent or cure any disease or illness.
**These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA.

Your mind is in your hands.

Studies show that an active mind is a healthy mind.

In double blind studies

Laboratory raccoons who were genetically pre-conditioned

to develop Alsheimers were twice as likely to enjoy

Nicotine as non-demented control animals.

Lab tests prove a demented raccoon quickly learns

To roll its own cigarettes but it can't flick its bic,

Only a wooden match will suffice

As paper ones don't work in their little hands.

The study also shows demented raccoons roll

Twice as quickly as their non demented counterparts.

Startling results from hippocampal and amygdala dependant

Learning tests prove submerged demented raccoons

Had only 80% of the normal tau protiens

Of their unsubmerged non-demented cousins.

They displayed tangled clumps of tau proteins

And hyperphosphorlylated tau strands

Causing their neurons to become diseased.

Healthy Neuron                                                                Diseased Neuron

These results show that nicotine prevented the

Neurofibrillary tangles which cause memory loss

In demented raccoons, while improving short term spatial memory

In non demented control   animals.

                                                        Modern Poem

Today this poem fell out of my nose
Stopping a nostril with a thumb
I blurted it out onto the page

It’s trying to impress you
Like a coconut against your skull

Perhaps you could crack it
And suck out its glowing milk of life
But it will crack you first

                                          It needs to be ironic\
                                                                                     \
                        (Perhaps you should feel sorry for it)         \
                                                                                                     \About what it isn’t sure

Its tone is so amiable (and humble) that you can’t help admiring it

It wants to be an atomic bubonic bannana-fanna-fo-phonic
language poem

But it still can’t decide if it should try to mean
Or just be

Now its got an idea:
There is a white clothesline outside of a red barn
And its got some white chickens on it strung upside down squawking prophecies
And a shiny red convertible wheelbarrow glazed with rain water that so much depends Upon is driving back and forth over the broken glass of society and your life
And all of nature trying to catch the feathers

And can’t you sense the chaos?
The inevitable dialectic
Shaking the white clothesline of consciousness in an ironic earthquake?
And all those prophetic chickens, strung upside-down, bobbing like piñatas?