"Now that I have seen Boniface"

Now that I have seen Boniface

In his niche at Orvieto

Along the solitary thread of Italy’s

Appennino, of Pasolini’s imagined

Homeland and its search for the meaning

Of material history, of Dante’s “serva

Italia,” anyone’s date for a buck…

Now that Edward Snowden’s

Contribution to free speech

Has been eclipsed by dirty

Cartoons (of the prophet’s anus)

And Nietzsche has eaten

His own feces in the absence

Of a living God, and the best of us

—in this first world bubble in which I travel—

are only marking time

‘til things get better, putting

our faith in struggles so personal

they are all but invisible

on the outside—even in Orvieto

on its tufa-stone island

high above the floodplain of the Paglia

like a rudderless rock lost

in a sea of millennia, all

its secrets sunk in caves

hidden beneath the day-

to-day business of business…

now that I know nothing

shows on the outside, nothing

is real—between the intention

and the act—I’m more or less happy

to lay down my belief

in the concept of “a future.”

                        1/8/2015

                        Orvieto

Lilith

My short story "Lilith," from the forthcoming collection Poison and Antidote, was first published here on pg 79. So pleased to have been included!

the Bicycle Review # 30

Novel fragment

“Dear Love, 

Today I’m sitting under the porch of the Pantheon. I haven’t been writing to you enough, I know. A year has passed since the last time we made love and the Pantheon is the only imperial building left standing in its entirety in Rome. It was raining that night. I followed you through the streets in it—in one of our hysterical scenes—and it’s raining here today. Thunder, lightning, the whole show. Try to say it’s different now, sitting in another continent. Still, the Pantheon is pretty beat up, rather the worse for the wear. Time has let most of the bad memories I have of us together slip away. Maybe it’s driven them off. This far away, now, loving you is easy. 

Agrippa built the Pantheon and—if Shakespeare is to be believed—he also suggested that Mark Anthony be given Octavia as a wife by Augustus, her brother. (I’ve found a cheap bookstall here with many pocketbook copies of Shakespeare’s plays.) That way they felt they could rely on Mark Anthony in Rome. But they could never rely on Mark Anthony. The only thing I can rely on is the emptiness of my mailbox. So I leave; I’m not going to sit around an empty apartment, going over the walls again and again. People come by, stop me from working. After this year away I could make you into an angel in my mind; all I have to do is strip away the wood like a sculptor. Why is it taking so long for us to say goodbye?

Mark Anthony left—both Rome and Octavia—and gave up everything for his love of Cleopatra, to fight a war against power, against empire.

I met a woman the other day I know I could fall in love with. But I also know, too, that my love for you won’t let me do it

(This is a fragment from the novel I'm working on that I've decided to cut. Just putting it here for safe keeping. Enjoy.)

Three Poems for Bill Gainer

 

This Economy


I can use this blade
one more week
if I draw it hard across
my face, ignore
the nicks and chafing.


               11/9/2014
               Florence


 

I think of each
warm Autumn sun as the last
of summer

Consequently,
I enjoy the fiction longer
than any actual season


               2/10/2014
               Florence






Florence is the corpse
of a city crawling
with frat boys and blind Japanese
tourists

Bologna teems
with living, breathing Italians


               2/10/2014
               Bologna

Poison and Antidote

I know that things have been rather quite here on my blog this last year and I can explain: I have been busy preparing my second book and moving towards completing the revision of my first novel. While these pursuits have rather preempted the production of the shorter and musicated recordings of the kind of work that filled much of my first book, Sojourner, I am proud to announce that my second volume, a collection of nine inter-related short stories of the artists, musicians, Bohemians, strippers, and druggies of the San Francisco art and music scene of the first half of the 1980's is mere weeks away from publication.

If you're at all intrigued and want to browse in the collection, seven of the nine stories have already been published in various magazines and journals. There's a list with link on my website. Stay tuned for more details and the release date!

Summertime Blues

Saw this sarcastic meme

been bothering me for days

implying that looting was not

the most caring response

to the pigs shooting another

unarmed child. And my dad

Says, “It just makes them look bad.”

—accent on the “them”—

and I thought, what’s wrong

with looting? Maybe your attitude

towards the word is a litmus test

for your social class.

I am all crass

and my dad, the soldier

is a traitor to his.

8/30/2014

Florence

Doing a spate of performances in August before I leave the States and head back to Italy. The first will be tomorrow night in Salt Lake City with the irrepressible M. E. Evans. If you're in earshot, show up!

Coming up later in the month: Inside Storytime in San Francisco (Aug. 19) and Poetry Unplugged in Sacramento, CA (Aug. 21)