The Siege of San Marco

The event staves off its message / each picture begetting another on down the isle / a day’s work / done the humble meal / a fire at night / no doubt, in winter / Savonarola’s tears / on the pulpit to come  //  Staves off the decision / marks down the outlines / on down the isle / images that return / “The same damn saint,” says the American turning away  //  They won’t be able to blame us for bullets / resting assured of some king of kings / for whom they have voted / and all that judgment crap  //  They hire / executioners all day long / up against these walls / each one with a paintbrush / and then to sleep / in the simple cell  //  The making and the undoing of the day and the night / stacked out by the outhouse / grinding glass for the red (bloodpaint) / soaking in the sin / to contain the sight, the stare / looking into the sun / or hugging a cross / with blind faith  //

6/26/1990

Florence

CATHOLIC WILL: A Perfect Roman Poem

Roman Fortune (innately
Mannerist) smites a curb-
    side tournament, its turn-
    stiles timed to mimic
land mines, whilst tragic
fame, mitred in disguise,
prizes suicidal maidens and
allows demijohns decisions—
                                  to decant tanks, for favor,
                                  to take arms against
                                                  a sea of turbines,

                                    which
by all rights should have been
shed by Fortinbras' cat,
                                    whilst
hopping over Roman bric-a-brac.

                           However,
                           tout court, our tongue
had strangled all our firm intent
and lent its charge to chance
    (said Cheshire to the waif)
of interactions all, both small and large.
Therefore, onward friction's
shoulders!      Bearing the boss
across the bridge of bad
humor (angels!)      to Papal precipices
'n' grumbling, placated
    Tritons & Britons
in the rain, we trod on.

And just like that!
A spat!
Between perfect strangers.



1/6/2010
Rome-Florence, in transit

"Velvet wet precaution..."

Velvet wet precaution, a savior

salivating over dampened greens and golds

and soggy grey, grounded olives past

passengers far, far away in hopeful

sleep.

            Those ravines dividing Tuscan sun

From Latian solarity, the revelation

that there is no particular one, no center,

despite Peter’s rock and/or Orpheus’ egg.

The circular line of expiational time

expands, mocking clocks, drenching benches

and presiding over all—‘though there are no—

second chances. The gist of arable fields,

fallow shoals soaking up the thunder

of another era, a Roman sojourn

                                                 surrenders

to the thought that becomes this velvet

wet precaution: that you might get caught

in the rain.

                        8/29/2012

                        Florence-Rome

"The Heart..."

 

     The heart deep-sixed this dark again

    as my whole weight tilts through

    the spider web you spin around the frame

    of the door that holds us in. You stake your claim,

    summer ushers it in, for hearsay’s plans

    and your private plane tips me over;

    my guts fall out, overboard

    with all of the other failures

                                5/9/1994

                                NYC

San Salvi event poster

HOMO QUISQUILIAE (JUNKMAN)

 

HOMO QUISQUILIAE  (JUNKMAN)

Jest another cranky cobalt crook, a tethered brat’s one-trick pony trapped in a propped-up crack, cobras break her fall into all this paradise, and we are content to seek the one step before beyond—hands that held the head that cried human tears. There was a prize for cropping hair and drinking beer. A knight, a rook to queen’s pawn one, to rack and ruin, a young man’s only honest hearth and home. Such crumbs rumble like thunder in our hearts. Once in a lifetime he runs over her thumb and fumbles with the locks—hairdressers, window dressers, undressing becomes us, our only honest crabwalk towards that opening, love.

(No! I will never thumb my nose again!)

We run instead, comrades, screeching cables and brakes, labor over levers, throated throttles to ‘at toboggan’s banking ‘round some curves woven by breezes blown through sometime summers. We vote for the hive of love and arrive at this; we’re done, have been left out in the rain, timeless bicycles, unnamed dolls, our itchy scalps above shock-rimmed eyes rolling open and shut, open and shut, our Humpty-Dumpty grins a sin to each and every one of the king’s men.

A heap! A heap! My kingdom from a heap of trash!

Love is still the most revolutionary debt we could ever call in. Without usury, a first step towards the use of life and the evolution of value. No slogan, but the only surviving form of the word “interest” draws me in—fragment of a whole, the only alliance worth re-realizing, the mote that the eye knew as the measure of its sight, the parameters of entropic erotic enterprise.

Life! The timer ticks and we make hay—if we’re luckily disposed to do so—by breaking wheat up into flour, fruit-flowering ourselves inside-out for each other; we turn suitors without suits and ask for 31 favors, tear ourselves asunder, rending our dues, aping our axes, suing our lawyers for lax black graft in heaps out back, and we sit favorably influenced by another female-named hurricane called, appropriately, L-O-V-E-Y.

As the wise man was once wont to sing, “Love, it’s a broken thing.”

It mirrors all of my cracks.

12/2011

Florence

LIBERATION

 LIBERATION

There is nothing so liberating. Nothing. There's nothing. There is nothing so frustrating as that. There isn’t even that. No, nothing’s so liberating as the frustration of waiting. There's nothing so frustrating as waiting for liberation. There isn’t. Because we forge chains. We forge chains because we’re afraid of nothing. Except frustration. Except liberation. So? So what.

Because alone is not alone, because nothing is just so. Because there’s nothing so liberating, or there wasn’t once, as a chain. And chains are real. Rings are real links and there’s nothing so, no, nothing so real as our own forged link in a chain. Anglo-Saxon tradition even here—and there’s nothing as frustrating as that.

When nothing is so, or as it seems. When there’s nothing as it should be because of rings and links, because of chains and time—time takes shape in rings, time takes shape in chains. And then there’s nothing, nothing but time's image round our fingers. Well, there’s nothing so frustrating as that. No, nothing. There’s no nothing as frustrating as the forced nothing of a liberation, of losing a ring. Because chains and rings are real. Because real rings go round and round.

Chains and rings are real because chains and rings are forged in time. We forge them in time in time’s image—and there’s nothing as frustrating as breaking a link, as breaking the round ring of a chain that we ourselves have forged in time. No, nothing’s so frustrating as that. So? So what. Nothing’s so, just so, so liberating as that frustration, as waiting to break a vow, because it breaks up the rings of your time of day.

1/22/1997

Florence