The stage is a promise: I promise X.
Here is a girl named Laily,
the guardian of a T-62 tank
parked in Kabul.

I blame Ezra the scribe,
brushing up against the truth
and passing it by:
To say the sun rises, when it doesn’t.
He played maitre d’ for the Kings pleasure,
revising the Sacred Books
signed with thee pseudonym Moses.

With the energy of prying
(fond of definite articles)
I am a child as question-machine:
What can a body do?

After tonight I will never say,
“I am this, I am that.”
I am the stage, and I am the promise.
I am autistic lines of drift.
want: to exorcise war colors.
I can never be sure I will be strong enough.

I pry open the vacant spaces,
all that passes through the pores of the schizo;
the containers of rooms, beds, buildings;
the veins of the drug addict;
swarming, teaming, ferment.

I am an American searching for the living word
--irrefutable
as only something sensuous can be.
Windowless, you become the monad.
I=I=not you.
This is deafness, aphasia and laryngitis.

I am the lone host of the Kabul Zoo.

To Keep From Feinting

In a photograph
Of the last time I saw grandma,
I was 3
holding her gift of red shoes.

I like to stare into this photograph
until I enter her.
Il s’agit de l’amour. If I faint-
her eyes break away in a glare.

The first time I as she-
grabbed things to throw
off the shelves of a Theater dressing room.

Next, I as she-
clung to a capsized boat
as a shark killed the captain.
Another time I as she-
feared death threats
fleeting to a point of déjà vu.
Take a word like fascist: x, y and z.

In free fall I wore red shoes.

I as she cried writing a good-bye letter.
point de fuite. It has no relation to flying.
I pulled grandma into me.
She as I-
put things back on shelves,
steer boats steady, and avoid homicidal men.
She as I paint red shoes violet to keep from feinting.
I refrain as a content in music.

I sign on, where others sign off.

My grand-daughter,
she as I-sing the world.
Critical purchase of the in-between:
touch her quivering distance, strong as a weapon
with out need of a fuse or point.

Tarantula Dance

My great, great grandpa
was born in the city of Llanelli on the Celtic Sea.
My other great, great grandpa
was born in the Danube River of Bavaria.
I hold his blue panic I in a pyramid
from when faith became the brainwashed masses.
I learn how to deprogram mind control every summer
I escape the Bohemian Club.

I clutch the answer to the question:
How do they enlist registered men?
You can rotate an image in your mind
at a rate of 60 degrees per second.
If anyone here strategically bombed
the water systems of Iraq, raise your hand.

I visit Freud’s couch at the museum in London,
that has lost its adjective.

I overcome the viscosity of air;
the lift, drag and thrust
of the Golden House on the Tiber River.
I have analgesia-an insensibility to pain
for this exactness of insight.
100,000 years of editing and
there is nothing to skim.

I consider Plato’s longing for the promise
Of how things were first experienced.
Who faked the data for the lie of gravity?
I float a sound block down a liberated line unleashed
in space, that no longer has a point or origin;
free from the ancient shudder.
There is no love outside the sense
of being limited or held. Words-w1, w2, w3

My great, great grandfathers
teach me the crime of insincerity.

The Human Story

I kissed the ground
thirty minutes off the boat,
the first step in naturalization-a clock.

In a game of charades
I symbolize lover by stroking the air.
c, contact;
nc, no contact.
Born in the tea houses of Odessa,
the names are not the things named.

I pretend the lover in my bed
Is charged particles from solar winds,
colliding with molecules and beginning to glow.
I sense bomb planters setting long fuses
Inside the hearts of the sincere.
I sharpen my mind on white slaves
from Rue de Charlot.

To find out if the equal sign is identity,
I measure the dust on the moon.
I discover Bible Dolls “the doll with a purpose,”
and a baby contest featuring 1,000 contestants.

I hang black crepe out my window
on the day I take myself in hand,
and begin my life anew.
Walking requires contact with the ground.
c, contact;
nc, no contact.
I depend on the inventors of numbers
and the makers of dictionaries
who sell the world.

points, edges, surfaces
wide as the field of mental vision.

I embrace it.

Elegy of the Bewitched

We begin with the response
of a 16 year old girl
dieing of hysteria in 1657.
Simmer, well up, overflow
a dubious slogan:
the cross is the ladder of heaven.

Not on display is the flower of the winds
a game of “show and tell,”
the “once in a while,” a not yet-ness.
Dusk: unheimlich, breach of etiquette.
The quixotic town crier-
boil over, erupt, and explode.

Who were the birds of Juno?
The bewitched assume one pose: waving hello
(the ghetto of our language).
How much more important is the eye than the color?
Lupine blue, Jaal goat, the verb, “to live.”
Affection in its deepest meaning
becomes an experience.

Nor is there a display of the flexible brain
gestating, quickening, giving birth.
Just the starched cap and apron
white: the color of sanitation.

We end with the response of those
condemned to hang
waving their arms to be called on.
Trompe-l’oeil: the only common denominator,
ancient sacrifice of the paschal lamb.

“I am bewitched,”
it starts with a feeling, a tangled imbroglio,
tickled by animal spirits
in the space between seeing, and what is seen.

Ode to the Accused

Who are the spell-makers
who violate our expectations,
as they inhale the scent of danger
to feel the scent of sight?
Most were lynched for outspokenness.

There was witch-hunting in West Bengal today.
Yet I want to show you the fraud
of a delirious girl in 1657,
when cause and effect got all mixed up.
I want to hand you the currency
of holiday specialists who name
lynching sites.
No casino has ever needed to ban
seers from the game room.

What is the sense of belonging?

It is a baby who tries to walk,
tries again, and again, and again,
until a new world opens up.

I have memorized the goals of lynchers
Ritual purification, deaf to the cries
numinous objects: lynch ropes,
the American flag, hot coal oil and whiskey.
Their deepest fear-spiritual possibilities.
Their only relief comes quickly,
once the inquisitor is convinced
that she does not believe in her own powers.

The souvenir of my body-
so elegantly enunciated: Provocation.
Looking past the visage of a previous sense,
tingling in the back of my neck.
translating the final stanza as
only the sound of the gasping rope.

Touche of the Quizzical Boy

With the pulse of syntax luminous
of rasping and clicking alphabet,
I taught you an underwater language.
I gave you the dance lines of your body
In whose transparent waters
swim shoals of eyeless fishes.
I gave you my hand as a subterranean lake
beneath the Caspian Sea.

As a defender of the Deep-
conceiving infants in my head,
and giving birth through my fingers,
I gave you a town of changing locations
no one ever reaches.

I gave you what took root
In the Bronx, Harlem, and Brooklyn
encountered in the hotel lobby:
le choix, le monde, l’existence.
relax, unbend, smile
Here is a dictionary of imaginary places.

I gave you an Animal Republic
(left behind by Noah)
where falcons fly wing and wing with the pigeons,
and parrots are the interpreters for religion fostered by buffaloes.

I gave you an earthquake in Iran,
a Tsunami in Indonesia, and a tornado in Texas.

“I love you,” was all you said.

The Violet Dress

Most shades of violet are logical
as the skirt of stiffened frills
and the satisfactory houseplants.
Only one shade of violet
is the future on my forehead.

I lock eyes with a stripper dressed in
devastating flanks and thighs,
assuring me that full disclosure
is still possible.
Most languages are not spoken in English.

I reply in a corporate gray suit
dressed for success.
evening cocktail sportswear
I crave revelation.
I wear the ephod as the high priest
of the eucharistic desert.

I dress in Polish with no strict sequence of tenses.

America is longer and larger,
more various, more beautiful, and more terrible
than anything that has ever been said about it.

I reject the regime of subjectification
“I love you,” as a previous beginning,
then another, and yet another.
I wear a patois of logic shreds:
transexualities, feverish improvisations.
The cries-whispers, continuums of intensity,
becomings-animal, becomings-molecular.
I have only 50 more years to live.

I remember the value learned
by children in kindergarten-“sharing.”
I consider the paralyzing relativism,
“Judge not lest you be judge.”
I swallow the French aphorism,
Rien dure que le proviso ire. My color violet.