Famine Wall

How long it must have taken to build 
This wall, that snakes among the hills
Waist-high to us where it’s intact, 
Though very often shorter than that
Where rocks have fallen off and lie, 
Some near, and some as far away
As those who stacked them — not, they say, 
Half joking, to divide not much 
From not much more, but just because 
There were so many of them, and 
They had to put them somewhere to use the land.

On a Statue of Hades

The space the god behind the glass 
Beholds holds me, but see me he 
Does not. Imagining the throng 
Of souls the wind like sparks has passed
Before him to the dark beyond, 
That he has ceased to notice seems
Appropriately divine. His right 
Hand holds his hellhound’s chain leash tightly, 
While in his left his double pronged 
Staff of office is resting lightly. 
In life, he would have worn a coat 
Of gaily-colored paint, or so 
I’m told; but glowing here, a ghost 
In cold white marble, suits him most, 
Now that he’s joined his silent host. 

Conscience

The daylight seeps so slowly from the sky 
That you forget it’s going till it’s gone. 
It’s dark, and you are sitting all alone
In your backyard. You can’t remember why. 

There’s no one home, but no one said goodbye. 
You don’t know where they went or for how long. 
Your neighbor’s singing that Hank Williams song
That says he is so lonesome he could cry. 

You brush aside the feeling something’s wrong. 
It’s cooler now, at least, you think, and sigh.
The night is so much softer on the eyes
Than glaring day with all its floodlights on. 

Broken Clock

Its hands still move from time to time, 
If the wind is up and blowing;
But not without a creaking sound, 
And only very slowly. 

At three and six and nine and twelve,
It swears a solemn oath.  
At half past one, it tells you where 
Instead of when to go. 

At one and four and seven and ten, 
The weather will be fair; 
But if it strikes eleven, two, 
Or five or eight, beware. 

A Pox on Careless Readers

Let their names be tattooed on their foreheads. 
Let their clothes always be covered in coffee stains.
Let their ears be folded down forever. 
Let their eyebrows be highlighted in yellow. 
Let all of their thoughts be marginal. 
Let their jackets be torn and discarded. 
Let them reek of cigarette smoke. 
Let bugs infest their crevices. 
Let dust be heaped upon them. 
Let the hinges of their joints be loosened. 
Let their spines be cracked. 
Let their remains be stuffed into a cardboard box in the garage and forgotten. 
Let a cat piss on that box. 

The Tower

Rising out of a restless sea
Of rustling leaves, the lighthouse heaves
Its bricks a hundred and sixty feet
Into the air, and bravely glares 
Out at the endless, surging leagues 
Of tireless ocean laying siege 
To the tiny strand of rocks and sand 
And trees upon whose back it stands, 
And scans the waves with its rolling eye, 
And points its finger by and by 
At everything and everywhere, 
As if to say that there and there 
And there the shipwrecked sailors lie
Who had it stood would not have died. 

Fare Game

Bippity boppity 
Thomas Sean Connery 
Once told a cabbie he 
Knew his way round. 

“I was a milkman here.”
“Yeah?” Said the cabbie un-
Enthusiastically — 
“Whatcha do now?” 

Abracadabra

If written right and uttered well
By someone with the proper skill, 
A formal poem is like a spell. 

Take the winding villanelle, 
Which conjures spirits good and ill 
If written right and uttered well: 

As when they’re rung correctly, bells 
Can summon, sadden, warn, or thrill,
A formal poem is like a spell 

For working magic fair and fell;
And there is little doubt it will, 
If written right and uttered well. 

Like fortunes only time will tell,
It may take many years until
A formal poem is like a spell.

So if it doesn’t work, don’t kill
The messenger; remind yourself:
If written right and uttered well, 
A formal poem is like a spell. 

Cerberus

Roland, headless, steeped in gore. 

Pin-striped waiter’s soup du jour. 
Machine that made the twenties roar. 

Organ grinder, piano, drum;
Trench broom, street sweeper — better run;
Chicago typewriter, Tommy gun. 

Muzzle foaming, breathing fire. 
Tail a-wagging death for hire. 
Nostrils smoking, funeral pyre. 

A Thousand Cuts

A locomotive whistle welling up 
Like screams from a charwoman’s bottomless throat. 
A bathtub as a thirsty porcelain cup 
Whose curtain rings unbutton like a coat. 
A name no one remembers in a glass 
Of disappearing dust and garbage wrappers. 
A crippled peeping Tom with time to pass.
A dog who goes down for the long dirt nap. 
Plane as Grim Reaper; leading man as grain.
Fifth column dentists; marksmen made of clay 
Pretending to be pigeons. One man’s vain 
Crusade to stop blondes falling in the bay.
Macabre, suspenseful, droll, unhinged, absurd. 
A man assaulting actresses with birds. 

The Vase

A priceless object handled with 
The utmost care will break, 
Or weather past credulity
Catastrophe, if fake. 

Canyon

My hand goes out to grip the rail
Reflexively, to cope 
In some small way with an unexpected 
Spell of vertigo. 

“Oh yes,” my mind is telling me, 
“I’m sorry, I forgot 
To say the world is old and vast,  
And you are young and not.” 

The last time I was here, I was 
My son, my now-dead father 
Was me, my wife my mother, and 
My sister was my daughter. 

The sky keeps changing channels. We 
Don’t have clouds in the valley. 
The ground shifts underneath me like 
The foredeck of a galley. 

The ocean has been emptied; naked 
Islands climb like cliffs 
Into the sun, then crumble slowly 
Into the abyss. 

A single muddy puddle barely 
Visible below
Remains in which to drown, if I 
Am so inclined to do so. 

The Garret

(An Ekphrasis on The Death of Chatterton)

He’s draped across the bed as if asleep. 
He looks as if he’s had too much to drink. 
As if to prove that he was right to think
It wouldn’t matter, dawn’s begun to creep 
In at the open window. There’s a heap
Of torn up paper; an empty jar of ink;
A burned out candle; and petals from a pink
Flower. Beneath the limp, romantic sweep
Of his right arm, there is an empty vial
Lying on the floorboards; and in the corner
The bright red coat he’d worn the day before. 
The ghost of something strangely like a smile
Plays on his lips, as if he were a child
Who knows no one can hurt him anymore. 

The Architect

Doors in the ceilings, windows in the floors,
Stairs going nowhere, decoy bathrooms for
Confusing vengeful spirits not confused
Already by the racket, seventeen
Chimneys for forty-seven fireplaces,
Bats in the belfry, crowds of dead men howling
Out in the endless, God-blessed, skull-bedecked,
Blood-soaked dark American wilderness,
Out past ten thousand panes of pretty stained
Glass she tried in vain to hide behind,
A room festooned with gleaming rifles, one 
Automatic electric elevator, 
Gold chandeliers, and hand-made spider webs.

Lacunae

All but lost for a thousand years,

It wasn’t Yorick’s skull
Or noble Alexander’s dust
They found but poor Catullus
Stopping a bunghole, stained with wine
(Or so the story goes),
Whole passages erased by time,
In a cellar in Verona. 

So soused he was, one witness said 
That every other word
Was garbled, and you wouldn’t want
To hear the ones that weren’t.
But this was for posterity, 
He reasoned, so he wrote 
Whatever he could gather down, 
And added, in a note: 

You, reader, whoever you are 
Whose hands this book may find, 
Pardon the [blank] corruption [blank] 
It is no fault of mine. 
Transcribed from an exemplar [blank]
Was [blank] corrupt as well, 
I did the best I could. If you 
Don’t like it, [blank] yourself. 

Lo, My Boot

A symphony of chainsaws, 
Cacophony of dogs,
The roar of passing fighter jets, 
Cuts through the peaceful fog 

Of morning like that thing 
They used to use to cure 
Insanity but think not right 
That do they anymore.

Portrait Gallery

Staring down from their elevated place

Upon the wall, with something like disdain
For objects as ephemeral as plain 
Human beings, the finely rendered faces 
Frozen like flies in amber in thick frames 
Of gold leaf, in their collars of white lace,
Try less and less to look like those whose names 
They have assumed, of whom so little trace
Remains that soon the people and the paintings
Will be so different they will be the same. 

Doppelgänger

He thinks that he is someone else — 

Someone famous, someone wealthy, 
Someone handsome, someone healthy — 
Someone less like...well, himself. He 
Put this other person on 
The way that you or I might don 
Our clothes. He’s worn him for so long 
He thinks that who he was is gone. 
I see him on the bench across 
The platform sometimes, looking lost 
In reverie — a lonely ghost 
Alone with what he wanted most. 

On the Statistical Improbability of Your Apathy

The likelihood of anything is nil. 

Call it something stupid, say, the Big 
Bang, but either way it’s an uphill 
Battle and not far from flying pigs. 
Stephen Hawking didn’t give a fig 
For how: “What can’t be measured may as well 
Mean nothing,” he declared, and that’s just swell, 
I guess, if you ignore the shocking lack 
Of curiosity and all of that. 
According to Hoyle miracle or not, 
The stars igniting, light, a pale blue dot, 
And you are so far-fetched you’d roll your eyes 
If someone told you that you were alive. 

Atlantis

A continent of cloud begins to break 
Apart above me. Sky comes rushing in 
To form an ocean. Ragged islands swim 
Away alone, or separate and make 
Up archipelagos. A tremor shakes
The wind chimes, or perhaps it’s just the wind
Bearing the cataclysm on its wings.
The gloom disintegrates, and in its wake 
Warm sunlight floods the garden. Children’s shouts 
Drift faintly from the grammar school nearby. 
A drop of autumn foliage trickles down. 
The youngest will forget it by the time 
The bell rings. Even I will have my doubts
Tomorrow, that so many people drowned. 
                                          

— November 2020

South by Southwest

It isn’t hard to understand 
How this place passed for Mars, 
Or a hundred other alien planets 
In Star Trek and Star Wars. 

The slow green-tongued agave fires; 
The spiked six-armed saguaro; 
An endless sea of sand dunes the 
Arrakis of tomorrow. 

It isn’t far from Tombstone to 
Spahn Ranch, and then from there 
To Westworld’s killer androids and 
Yul Brynner’s icy stare.

Queue

You’re standing in a gloomy cave beside 
A river bank. You’re last in a long line 
Of downcast people stretching out of sight. 

The line moves very slowly. By the time 
You reach the front, you’ve left all memory 
Of who you were before you died behind.

About the Author

Hi, I’m Nobody. You may know me from such runaway bestsellers as Nothing and Nothing Else. After much deliberation, I’ve decided to forgo the millions I would have made placing my poems with a traditional publisher and share them here for free instead. I hope you like them. 

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