I do it at least once a year.
      Try it.
      Have you ever tried it?
      Try it.
5     Simply unzip the skin
      And emerge
      Like a girl removing her zebra bikini
      A new, improved you,
      A bald gold bone;
10    New flesh unfolds like a suit of clothes.
      It carries faces and hands and Lord knows what.
      It carries the past like last year's packages.
      The titanium skeleton is full
      Of buoyant, swirled
15    Alloys tough as an ant.
      It smiles and smiles, a thing of grins.
      It smiles just like ice,
      A mouth of acidy statics pure as a cloud.
      A shellacked heart or shellacked limb
20    Won't hinder it---
      An embalmed tongue
      Means nothing to such indestructible metals.

      We are all in the hospital together... all of us.
      The IVs rattle above us, see-through gods
      with their jingling rattles, bodiless, pure...
      Why must we sink and sink? The lead allays
5     the hurt of its thrust; rubber hands pull bullets from my side.
      When did the first enigma enter? Its pulsing yeowl
      spurred through a lurid kidney, blood ripe blood
      aching to black against the crystallized innards.
      Near me towered and grimaced the great man,
10    his heart-pouch slaughtered while the cameras whirred.
      The anesthetist's mask crouches at my throat
      hissing its green dreams of health. What cure
      will come slurring from my ribbons, white
      and clean as a slug? I remember a young man's
15    fanatic face and tanless untrembling hand....
      Its purely pathological, I'm sure of it."

      "Coke bottles float in a grid of blue joy,
      the spray paint hisses and skids, pseudo-gestureful,
      pseudo-pseudo, in fact, for I wept when it was built.
      Graceless audacity in the kittened crush
5     of the New York art scene ruffles my feathers still,
      one must have the economy of the surgeon, and double
      the price! A feted stack of Reverse Marilyns makes
      one corner dark as a swallowed pill. Staring through
      the repetitious window Jim angled and killed himself through,
10    my wild faces punctuates its gasping stab of hair,
      a cigarette stubbed in its hoarfrost of ash....
      What can I see? Disasters, foghorns, flares, the wash...
      I wallow and skin-dive in the elucidating trash.
      Soupcans stutter to the shelf-edge still, canned elves...
15    The Hudson boils in its gum of sludge. In my last, stitched
      effort, two washed feet patter off the continental shelf,
      patter off, patter off.... America loves
      my handcarved off-the-rack! Beneath my retching heart,
      my lapsing gall bladder's turning in me, neon green."

      Dionysus in confinement at the leper's ward
      In Louisiana, on an island hospital
      Plongs his purple fingers plucking grapes.
      Bacchus at the pianola moves his mind.
5     Swelled music from his swelling digits poured
      Wine to the chill willows hanging crepe.
      And although the music, wine-induced, is less
      Than the musky forest through which it moves
      And less than the vatic profusions out of which it soars,
10    Irretrievable, large, and of the hugest heart hung high,
      Is less than that, a mincing of its human portion,
      Shrunken from a Greek intent, a skeleton on the keys,
      The leprous ladies in their spotted gowns still sway.

      "I sway drunk and liberated from the tin green tank-top
      spouting my bright brand of Nevesky's Napoleanic 'Liberte!'
      Yesterday, I ran away from poverty to fame,
      a circle clipped... by lies, by bliss...
5     Brezhnev signing in my subway bill after a solid round
      of boilermakers toasting his longevity! Such dull, glum rounds.
      Am I the hero of my nation-state? Giving parliament a kiss
      and a whistle for their censure of my too solemn unsolemness.
      Soldiers fawn and come to humble silence
10    when I spill the beans about the independence we've won
      from ourselves. Who needs psychoanalysis now? They smile
      and cheer in black, ironic, loving, loved street-jeers;
      good ethnic-russian boys to the riven core!
      I weep with bilged courage into hot salt hands
15    when I declare The Coup a Coup Decapitat... those guys
      couldn't hang a cat! The bear dances mincing on its paws.
      The gilded, false shuffle of our flighty republic's shifted
      once again. At my slipping, bootblacked foot
      some Mother Russia holds her infant up to the AKs ricochet.
20    What will Yevetshenko think up to rhyme with this?
      A cab-man in his busted cab crammed with madcaps 
      putters by and sings: 'Puling Pavlov, Pugo and Yazov--- manhood's appalled...
      70 bleak years of the Commies' trawling haul...!' "

      "Hitler once appeared to me in dream, grim,
      repentant, towing cowed Eva like a swallowed soul...
      a hang of flapping hair shut one demon-eye in, dimmed,
      wrestling with itself, whirlwind angels laughing in his skull.
5     We killed him eventually; a few, true things
      penetrating to the innermost. I feel the arrow still
      my brother lumbered from my leg; atop a joyous swing
      I rubbed where its rubber cutting nose had thrilled.
      Our afternoons were resplendent, unhurried, vague,
10    as we tumbled as cowboys and indians in an unholstered rush
      killing the shuffling vegetation and lizards that plagued
      our simmering summer patio. They would blink and push
      their low bellies in and out, alien, slow,
      themselves. I wish the doctor would come and kill my tumor now."

      "Black candles throw smoke to the throne room's corners,
      hissing and spitting, mad as wives
      yattering their lecherous husbands back to bed.
      Quiet this light that curls blue above the Nile;
5     ghostly tapers flicker in the marsh, moon_misted, watched
      by slippery moons rising in my crocs' slow royal eyes.
      And I, bare_breasted, caught, without my golden wristwatch
      in time's rich tri_cornered delta, stand to gasp,
      paired snakes black as mud spilling from my Medusa dugs,
10    my hair on fire; Antony, the kingdom---
      Everything burning that had made the city or river glitter,
      everything burning that had given love a face and taste!
      Flamed barges twinkle doubled in the water,
      my wet slice of heaven. Stars, men, all conquered
15    by a crust of lust as fine as any sweat."
      Benedict Arnold to Peggy Shipton
      "Let these soulful travellers quit travail
      On your cold lips' firmament; restful earth,
      Let me stretch out my full measure on the ground
20    As final mortal toil all lies down to do
      Even to this last particle of desire.
      Taste this measure of my life's content
      Which tasting stirs contentment to a rage of love,  
      Beneath which, vanquished, I'll calmly settle 
25    Among blushes, encamped as a pilgrim in the wilderness
      Studying out the flowers how they bloom
      Or how dull whippoorwills take punishment of rain
      Beneath the starry barbs fixed in your glance.
      On this grass field that tombs up men
30    And builds no further monument of dust
      But wild everlasting weeds, I'll lie down
      And become myself some substance of the grass."

      When I came to my laurelled rest at Dai Ichi,
      overlooking the grey, plain, immutable quadrangle
      a crooning Tokyo Rose had sworn I'd be hanged at,
      giving the timid botanist-emperor an American-made smoke
5     in his claw-hammered tux, he mumbled gags
      about his own execution through his stuttering translation-man!
      My marrow went white with fire; I was abashed
      to see such an elegant little fish as himself
      fluttering against the grainy, post-post-war land.
10    My nobler soul followed his rollercoaster's flash
      from artificial heights to the Lay-Z-Boy my officers unfurled
      beneath him; how had we skidded together to these digs?
      When he told his people he'd forgotten how to be God,
      scratching a nimbus of lichen from some sea-rock, we won the war.
15    He waved goodbye like the xmas pine we buried in the sand."

      Gold Don Juan in his enlarging pride
      Glitters under maidens in the countryside.
      Sleepy roosters in their streaked sheds
      Stride by musky hens lolling in their beds.
5     The moon observed him from her dusty height,
      His colorless shadow, his advancing hand.
      The maiden fainting is not less herself
      Because of her pale feigning and fluttering eye.
      Piebald roosters and their mates grow cold
10    Under a moon emptied of light,
      Emptied of fond looks, and emptied of ashes
      Aunts ferry from the fireplace every morning;
      Her looks coarsen,
      And the wind grows rough.
15    Gold Don Juan in his enlarging pride
      Strides by maidens exhaling their finicky sighs.

      "The placid green tank rambles against my cause,
      trembles my squelched skull in its combat hardhat
      squinting out the cool black fish-eyes in the crowd
      of press-men. I won't smile for applause.
5     How many times has the future groaned and ceased
      beneath my feet? That ice lightning stalled me blind
      but unlike Oedipus I remained unchanged, chained
      to my loving Kitty and her scrambled passel of cubs.
      Bush and Willie Horton register like stars, crooked
10    like unforgiving hooks into the milky heart
      of my campaign-cosmos. When Willie went killing
      on his blood-spritzed spree, funded by the Furlough's goals
      of rehabilitation for the apolitical psychopath,
      Mr. Ailes had me sighted in his hateful geiger
15    fat on his media-consultancy and pool shark style
      of cynically 'manipulating the Mass...'
      I feel the edges zero-in and narrow at my throat....
      I was like a tree when I was green, like Alexander
      at his dashing bastard best, played by Steve McQueen.
20    Now hot on the overheated tank churning at my hips,
      the minotaur of my class with an eagle's face, I feel
      the cold motion rifle through me. What is left to say?
      I love my wife even when she's high."

      Archaeologists after lunch
      Are picking through the litter
      Beside tin shacks
      Flashing under dark palms.
5     A white shard emerges
      From the lifted dust.
      Reversing its Greek intent,
      The thick lines
      Show fluttering women
10    Melodious beneath
      A darkened moon, lemur-eyed.
      A white shard emerges
      From the lifted dust.

      "Our docks go rotten with the unsold grain.
      Let Russians eat cakes! My fields have weight
      of wealth enough to feed thin ideologs.
      Until the commies come round to Adam Smith
5     and every Black Sea dacha lilts to 'upon the fruited
      plains', our Uber Alles, let rubles flit
      to Little Rock, Ark. Fresh wheat feeds Free Enterprise!
      Fresh wheat on the sea-drift skims.... All night
      I phoned my phoney congressman at The Mall;
10    his hands are tied. My head is in the sack!
      No stomach swears allegiance to a godless cause,
      all money loves a capitalists' warm palm.
      Beached here by our timid wish to feed
      and democratize the Slav, we hop, foot
15    and foot in hand while the White House consents
      to Bowdlerize the press, and so sacrifice
      events' true shape to rumor's inflating word
      that blows dragons from water-wings, and spills
      fertile fallacy from an honest palm of grain."

      "Dew sweetens the orchids on the abstract balustrade;
      my rich eye spouts to the sky's rafters, seeking Allah.
      Seeking Allah, black tanks bristle on our border;
      water_fat Americans sweat in the shade of a water tower,
5     Hussain putters about in his bathrobe with a globe
      dreaming on the spinning quilt of colors, rich as spilt oil...
      his stale mustache and chemical stench
      more like Il Duce or Saladin than Hitler,
      less like Saladin and Il Duce than a wayward boy
10    dawdling in the new mosque with his new top;
      the entire desert piled like Picasso's charnalhouse.
      When the one unwelcome moslem sweeps in with dawn,
      high on his probation from sanity, will enough
      F16s lower from heaven and provide oblivion?"

      O the damned inroads of this my conscience
      On my infinite flesh! what substance in the body
      Does daily death to these stellar essences,---
      Performs abortions, drags the brain by its one
5     Long blue hair to the electrifying brink
      And puts it to pieces with a rockinghorse's
      Fluttering motions as though an unsteady child
      Had giggled in its saddle with too rich love?
      This is how our haloed lord appeared
10    Fallen from his rocking sphere
      Of light too intemperate for dull day
      Where criminal and saint decay
      But crimsoned round him with a power
      To dissuade death of his rude takings,
15    As when he bends his executing breath
      Of frost on flowers, and gives life back.
      Like a mountain every day my body breaks
      From the sleeping smoke of rhymless night
      Creeping its umber calumnies round the globe
20    Useless as rumor, to have all my dawning skin
      Gilded in a flash. 
      Dropped mercury lolls to its leaden level.
      My human heart out of this constricting vial
      Must fly, and find some profounder habitation;
25    When the mirror shatters in an ache of glitter,
      And the moon in shards comes hacking back at earth,
      What sultry lotion from the lagging air
      Will be my heart's balm and my soul's repair?
      Panic with her hair outspread
30    Strode among the shocking dead
      All wounds and whispers as she choired
      Them like mice to a humid quilted mire
      That pillowed every festered skull
      Among anxious reeds in one soft hush;
35    In their dead eyes blazes a watery fire.
      A rotting hand undoes my buttons at the throat,
      My trembling ribs fold open to disclose
      Red wings of an infernal bellows beating
      Around my closed soul, the one gold
40    Globe charred black; a charnalhouse alive
      With scolding fires rasps the black corpse blacker
      Until my bolting Soul and Will, all one,
      In the burning majesty of their abrupt destiny
      A charcoal homunculus remain, rudely carved.
45    If the envenomed world would fade,
      Diminished and pulled back every shade
      As if skin were the harborer of some pure light
      Waiting ecstatic cues from the vibrant hum
      Of this compelling air, perhaps she---
50    Perhaps her translucent limbs
      Falling fantastic from fantastic air
      In paused cometing oblations
      To a sincerer self left unimagined
      Until realized, would then unwind and climb
55    Out of every morning's desolation
      To its true atmosphere and ice sublime.
      As when a cloud a dream of joy imprints
      On eyes' retaining paper, all one gild
      Of silver, she steps, love, to me, in sacred vision
60    Of a field, all wild in a fever of wildflowers;
      She steps, and with her beauty all one bower
      Recalls the sweetest seconds of drawn breath
      As in deep spring fields after short showers
      One feels love's fondest hour grown longer.
65    Love, thou breathless sphere, thy
      One white wound in eternity's side
      Bleeding light into every eye,
      Perennial form and substance of all grace
      That refuses to decay, falter, or lay
70    Waste to the imagination's projecting
      Powers, infuse this wrack again as once
      You made midsummer's day from my breast's dust.
      What you look on once regains regal
      Solitude of love, by your connecting glance---
75    For essential form perceived once aright
      Can never fade, or suffer loss,
      Or lessening as if moving into shade
      Where differing whitenesses are all
      Congealed to one grey shade. Never
80    Suffers this breath such cold effects
      Speaking like a stream that cannot know
      How to say other than its self's soul
      But fathomless rushes in a sunlit glen
      From source to intermingling reeds
85    As alike as water to itself.
      And in a hushed and holy whisper
      Formed air creates and men decipher
      This shape undoes its native bonds
      And as the sighted sun itself does fray
90    Into water_freighted mists as bows of rain,
      Both disappears and pleases at one stroke.
      Or so the melancholy monster curled
      Between my eyes had, as if by imagination
      Forecasted into the unfinished future's shape,
95    Made me think my sun_like fortune failed,
      Dwindled to one grey drop of pearled dew.
      So deeply retreated to a shadowed cape
      The chill ligaments of my cold temper
      Throws round my shoulders, furled as sails,
100   Have I run back as casts my white face
      Into a single dark. And still I hear
      Those ghosts my former selves cannot shake
      Burn and purge in a distant gap or gape
      The unmended mind crowds full of guilts
105   Bearing the tumultuous heft of exultant faces.
      These scream, and blast the natural grasses black;
      Spiteful curses or blessings only
      Exit spirits with such exceeding force.
      This troublous diurnal duty of breath and life
110   Plunges with the itchy reiterations of a heart
      Or a glossy vinyl album of compressed time
      Restricted through material fault to this
      One cool mouthful of notes.

      "The land lies rough beneath the oriental's tread.
      Such a winter makes retreat impossible. The yellow tide
      has crested the Yalu early; there's a commie in every weed!
      If I had beat the snappy Jap back on the Chinee mainland
5     a billion of the world's maundering masses
      would be bickering and free; if I were given half a chance!
      Manuel, bring this disaster's map, my royal purple pen...
      ...Jack... Once, aching for my little filipino princess
      in her blue turtleneck dress at the officer's cotillion
10    I felt almost boyishly innocent of murder and smiled.
      Her limp body passed through my hands like black wine....
      But immutable Kant's quintessential Duty called:
      you only know you're alive when you're doing what you hate.
      At Okinawa on the killer's field, lean and ready 
15    for the silent bullet to repeal my god-granted marshal's fiat,
      nothing pierced the scarlet of my commander's sunglasses
      mirroring the quixotic haste of dead men's actions in impassive plates.
      Take this down, Jack. Manual, thanks. Take this down:
      when the engraver comes round with his axe and chisel
20    say these words be cut atop my body, say
      'I was a born winner whose nerve didn't fail or turn blue.'
      You know, don't you Jack, that this is my last action?
      I played five card stud with my heart and groin."

      "I was too cool to rule with fisted vengeance
      beneath the swaddling velvets of my elegant green glove---
      tell the vets who took it on the chin at Iwo Jima to read The Book;
      God himself puts hubris to the sword. I start my day with prayer.
5     War makes one love what God hasn't wrecked.
      When I worm from my humdrum office to the ambassador's shack
      and back, I let the limo-boy drive in a slow lull,
      open to the assassin's asking; when Gawd calls me home
      I want to feel the tug. Let lesser men denounce
10    what means nothing to them, stuck with their existential hype
      and hysteria for reality. I've had my blistering fill.
      Glory, duty, honor, lilt me into longing still.
      Jean in her scarlet kimono comes ghosting in. Honey, please, my pipe.
      Ever see a wasted derringer fizz? Thanks. Smoke goes up
15    just like that. Curls like the starved howl of Arizona wolves
      I played pinch-pat with as a darling kid, on assignment
      in the desiccated wild west with my cavalry dad. My boy, goodbye.
      Kiss Daddy on the cheek, and he'll tell you a Pecos Bill lullaby."

      The heavy cannon are shouldering their men
      High, high and tinnily,
      Over the hill.
      Doused in the sun's reds
5     Their submerged torsos elongate to little screams;
      Compliant sheep stare stonily.
      Some of them are wounded,
      Some of them are dying.
      Some of them are shot in the heart.
10    Ravens leap out of the sky like icicles,
      Like little knives
      Bearing their shattering voices before them.
      Thundering cannon prognosticate
      No end to this winter.
15    The knives
      Arrive blindingly.

      "My heart the size of an apple all my girlhood grew
      then festered in Hollywood's tinselled wastes;
      hardened and enlarged, a red peppermint flooding
      its candied blood to flares in the leftover
5     gin drinks at Arthur's theatrical parties.
      Mondays we drain the scarlet tumblers til sunset
      to kill the hair on our tongues, flames
      of light dividing and writhing over the stuffed couches
      and oriental carpeting... but that was years ago.
10    A distant, powdered hand paddles a rattle from the bedstand;
      the fallen pill bottle clatters and cackles....
      My heart knots on a watery bed, black rubbery inches
      of overused innertubing, patches cauterized on patches;
      the pink pills make my loaded pulses shiver;
15    the slithery nighty in jazz aftershocks shimmers,
      thin as a reversed eyelid in silk, a clear
      red blood loss open from throat to groin---
      this soft lusterless blushing ends in a simple frill."

      "Histrionic, with a swine's loving heart
      larding my innards, I crash on San Francisco's docks.
      Unpacked from my Polynesian heaven I eye 
      the bruised head of the press; once, Shakespeare
5     without a throat, I had made the sexual
      mystery limp the boards, and grunt, grunt
      by glorious grunt in Paris Tango's sordid atomic dawn.
      Now old and sexless before the gawping crowd
      at the courthouse, my largesse mauled
10    by rumor, my sinning son unsentenced, I sweat
      my sty of causes dry before the cool blind stone.
      Leather-jacketed in my rebel heyday, I knew
      my hated audience like a hated father,
      all my patricidal punches sweetened by affection."

      The stilled rose
      And moon pallors
      Well the loaded pool
      Edges like a cut---
5     The one stone-
      Solid among darknesses.
      A bush of silverdust
      Throws tremendous capes, shadows;
      And now the moon
10    Cradles a candle
      Behind your face as behind a palm.
      Such luminescences
      Crave a cave
      To hide in, a filled well
15    To extinguish
      Such unbidden brightnesses;
      Some damp small spot will do.
      Any liquid
      Deep enough
20    To fall through a breathe like air.

      "Vishnu-handed at the last, I watch perched
      the world unravel from my needle-pile
      of discarded trophies; stretched reel to reel,
      my soul cannot fold. 
5     Swept by sweet victory into the electric chair,
      I listen to my own slick stammer and applaud. 
      Whose hammer beat in time to my wincing tongs?
      I held my grammar steady, and I stared
      TV-asphyxiated like The War into every voter's lair.
10    Now alone in my high estate with the jury's minions closing in,
      I listen to the mystery play my sub-subconscious penned;
      my Quaker's conscience holds me flinchless and appalled,
      I ached after my own interest and called that aching 'World.'
      What has the salutary commission convened to stage-whisper
15    into the nude mikes that flood their mouths like flies?
      I cannot wait! I click on the humming set....
      You know, when I was young, with the one hand inched
      out to nab the ribbon at the high-school track meet
      panting like a wildebeast chased to death, what
20    was Vishnu to me but a ten-handed castanet player?"

      Broadbacked noon has come humbling among our wicked spires;
      I came trumping in, Ike's prat-boy VP,
      flipped the sinister death-ace on its head in Laos
      to a vermillioned flush, a cornucopia of flowers
5     scissored off by dear Pat for my tweed lapel.
      Coronated by my foreign policy's jewelled accretions,old man
      of the treasons, whispers stitched to whispers,
      I age in New Jersey; grown familiarly bland
      I confer my Ovaltine-sweet opinions on the mass,
10    saddled with a politician's over-zealous over-friendliness still.
      Whatever has happened has happened.
      Smooth-trunked Atwater by a humorous tumor felled;
      How many more must wither and lessen? Stopped
      at the bullet-proof pane all day, I watch
15    the dogwood whiten and the rich magnolia finish...
      What love cannot conquer I leave to my will.
      The winning children still swing back
      to their crooked papa at Xmas... a few bright, colored lights.
      I am no thin-spined De Sade, adoring thorns!"

      The only political genius to ascend the stage, I
      jammed into a jockeyed-for corner of this glassed-in booth
      straining to read Johnson's lips over the broken phone,
      his Southern slurr.... Paris is stalled.
5     Expect nothing; I'm calling all three candidates,
      wronged by rumor in the waiting room.
      Hush-hush tiptoe is of the ultimate... you understand...
      I instructed Haldeman to pass the word.
      It was one of those paper nights, my name in stardust
10    at the annual Al Smith affair, Johnson stooped to load
      my rickety back with the new-mown low-down
      on the Vietcong; nix on fusillades; no violation
      of the effervescent Zone drawn between participants
      of the talks, etc., etc. The issue was soft-pedaled to a pulp.
15    Each night the bearded bombs come ringing on my sleep,
      my dreams are fire; someone's making political capital
      by my solicitude. But, of course, that was inevitable.
      When asked, 'There seems to be some movement,' I said,
      'but I won't disclose those briefings.' It was a weak answer.
20    I was campaigning in Missouri on October 16."

      Spider infants float above the noon waters
      filament by filament by filament...
      Strange, to reach that age, to have the timid pulses
      waver in a fatted neck, not the hangman's, not
5     the erect victim's, but your own blue tangle
      under the skin; wet winds comb the rushes.
      Uneasy on our haunches in the dingy we watch
      blue spines of fire leak into the lake
      from the fumbling alternator; our lax bodies rise.
10    We are almost ready to dive and dive....
      How long has the swamped horizon been
      so thin a line of red? Our fishing lines lie
      reversed to a clear spool in the bottom of the boat;
      we maneuver our middle_aged spider's bodies
15    to the wavering lip and kneel to leap,
      our hands have found the gunwales and strange strength.

      O love
      O paralyzed love---
      Somebody is entering our house!
      The heavy shutters heave open lovingly.
5     The carpets smooth themselves instantly.
      Glued smiles appear like stars.
      Somebody is coming into our house!
      Coming thunderingly up the steps,
      Rattling the moony spoons in their drawers.
10    And now your face appears,
      Huge and luminous
      Above the sheet's edges as out of a box.
      Your susurrations are aware and perilous---
      There is nothing that has not been said between us.
15    Frosts stiffen the window panes,
      Each chilled web a bullet's nest of fears.
      One counts the radiant moon-spokes
      Delicately, delicately.
      Our hesitations fill the flowerboxes, 
20    Each flower a little yellow scream.
      One fear, one fear
      Radiating into the next softly as flowers;
      This flower paralyzed and set blinking in mid_air.
      Out of what pool has it sucked its white dose of kirari?
25    The cross petals jar strikingly.
      The steps make the sound of an advancing crescent,
      Assured as Islam. The flowers shiver,
      Unloading their feathery pollens;
      At dawn they unfold
30    Eager as hypochondriacs
      For the new sweet pill that crests the hill,
      The red medicine,
      The sure cure.

      "The world looks level under my steel rims,
      crushed to bliss by God's giant green thumb
      which teems and redeems everything under its whirlwind whorl.
      We must ax out this cancer of Chance; the world
5     was built, I believe, and my book proves its true.
      A downtown D.A., I'll burn the palace down
      for the convicting clue. Professors are such soft,
      openended things, and besides, science is unproved.
      I saunter up with my bilged briefs from
10    the ribosome links of these stranger docks
      and penetrate the doilywork of the statistical city.
      Fly-eyed in the pulpit, I meditate
      on my haranguing lectures to the mass. The mass
      remains unmoved, pawing the ground. I don't know
15    what simmers inside myself! I don't know
      about that master fake-maker Darwin, revealing a world
      a blinded god had hidden, even from himself!
      His sideburns evolved from bad to worse.
      Maybe God made each mistake independently...
20    Our green genes shift and change like germs,
      our bodies diminish and age, shrink back to apes in smocks
      crooning in ape-ooohs around a glittering testtube.
      The people are finished with me, TVs off
      they return to the burning circle of their lives,
25    chanting gossip, politics, and news; but will they buy my book?
      I walk back to the docks. I love my life,
      my wife, my little ones I made in the image of God."

      One has lifted the white boat
      From the yellowish sands
      To skate out over the reef,
      Azure opacities and pinched purple reefs.
5     The corridors of barracuda in the sound
      The sharp, silver rows,
      Are like elegant fish
      In an immense bowl.
      The revolutions in nature
10    Are like revolutions in history.
      How many times
      Can the same Chinese man be freed?
      The question falls heavily with each slap of the boat.
      The question lifts and penetrates the air.
15    The mild clouds
      Revolve in bright corridors of air.

      "The petty strut of a peacock without a tail,
      or old men salaaming for drachma in the city's dust,
      so much scratching and disturbance of dust...
      so much strafeing and raping of the holy villages....
5     Here, year adds on to year, the camel chews as slow.
      Lifted from the dung fire by a ladder of assasinations,
      I climbed to kindle the deserted palace steps, and turned
      my unerring hand to the populace, coaxing to vex
      my nomad volk towards foam. Oily dollars,
10    skin thin, flutter as bats to the waste horizon
      returning at motor dawn in the hunched shapes of tanks;
      sea_anxious to return to the yaw and abyss of the sea,
      Kuwait halts our monumental, crawling foot
      and whines for a beach_badge from their simmered verge of sand.
15    I pet a captive's infant before the camera, swill
      the thick wine of Peace Through Annexation and stoop
      in my ill_fitting soldier's fatigues to plead or command:
      Surrender to God, whose white hand works through my hand."

      "I will go wash; and drown these desert honors
      that stick in my throat. Three weeks before the grand
      defeat of our enemies, I dreamt my tent squalerous,
      ruined lieutenants killed by infiltrating mustard gas
5     that couldn't sniff out the winning colors
      of our almighty flag. My aide snored on
      under his moony brow, refusing to wake
      for anything less than the Judgement Day; I'll pass.
      In the wheezing trenches we squeezed off rounds like mad
10    in an unending philippic against the damned.
      Dust-erased faces blink skyward from their rust lakes
      of blood, off, on, off, on.
      Now downed in a North Carolina airplane hanger
      and tired of the itching laurels that itch my scalp
15    I stare bemused at what our wanting has brought us here:
      Disinterred love scrambles up my lap."

      "In this drawing of an apostle's nirvana
      I gave a charming native girl christ's
      fivefold power hand, a santa rea item.
      The bone dice of fate are chiselled on her skin,
5     her breasts are docile rounds to those twinned squares,
      her pubic matt preadolescently slim. Note
      the use of black, another power totem,
      which oil slicks in India ink the right or damned
      hand side of the visual field; out of its night soils
10    burst pumpkins, and watermelons halved
      for the easy licks of the naked girl who lies
      with crossed arms at their side. Calabeza bianco
      says the stylized head joined to the anointed
      torso which hovers clubfooted in this dream
15    which I fancy St. Jerome on an off day may have painted."

      The stars drop
      Thin and sinister as pins
      Into the silver skin, the skin
      The skin of lions
5     Skins of seals
      Peeled back bleedingly,
      A washed eyeball, after the thumb
      And water have come
      With their pressure of good wishes;
10    The wet skins
      Shed silk bloods, I-dots
      That spatter the dry concrete
      So appealingly!
      Such pure dark washes of dropped blood---
15    Pure as the clean
      Simple things you say to me.
      Night's absences
      Recede
      And dawn breathes
20    Blue and new as a bruise
      In the vacant east.
      Strange, isn't it,
      How you and I
      Were each
25    Born with a mouth to pronounce death with?

      "The perpetual distortion and stabwork of the historian;
      stray pieces seem to fit or falter like Escher's birds,
      flying forwards, then backwards, on a neutral field:
      bright diamonds of effort, fletched like our Athenian arrows
5     sighing flaming to the Cartheginian flesh.
      Exiled to objectivity and the bad frost edging
      the temples whiter, failed strength having failed,
      my scoured gilt of generalship tops the dustheap,
      flashes and falls as I mope on words, the periscope---
10    a ladder of mirrors to spy the flamed dross
      of Pericles' ogling funeral oration as I polish it.
      All night my mind runs on the track towards the tunnel_mouth....
      Dark grapes cool on the vine as the new dew stiffens,
      one wakes to light as if from the cradle still---
15    the mind rises on fire, running downhill still
      till all the heart's an unceasing mill
      battering and yattering for the doomsday pill....
      Killing flies and time with the same rubbed thumb,
      how like this world's the world to come."

      "Pure squares of Mexican sky ease my exile;
      reviewing my post-dated Pravda like a parishioner
      fallen from St. Peter's gilded grace, the dome of Rome
      and NVD network that kept my clockwork ideologies
5     alert and au courant, I watch my clear marguerita evaporate
      in its harsh dawn of salt. My eyes feel blooded
      in their stark haloes of grey hair. I grow old, I grow old,
      the Party moults me in the general slough.... I'm sent
      here among the cacti for my pasturage, 
10    a missionary without a church or holy relic beneath my skirt!
      Lenin's parboiled skull would make a nice knick-knack;
      thumbing my wry digits between his teeth for a tongue,
      I'd make him say: suffering is salvation, for the mass...
      I stagger from my white beachchair sober and appalled,
15    Stalin with his ice-cream suit and dictatorial lunge
      scattering the pieces...! I read in bad prose
      of how he'll mechanize the Worker's Paradise,
      assembly-lining cool cubes of sweatless swimming pools,
      rototilling sweet compassion under, the hard clasped hand,---
20    Communism's true gen. The horizon's sere
      with unswallowed bile, baked brown. I falter;
      at my turned back a brother communist, Juan Love,
      undoes my brain with a pick or shovel."

      "All this deluded elegance's against me. My ripe
      man of youth, a plaster_of_Paris David, hangs
      in a gaudy corner of the Taj Mahal like a ghost,
      and reckons up the poker_faces my goliath ambition birthed.
5     Golden quarters tinkle from a showgirl's palm
      in the moon_blue changing booth; she frowns;
      all that titanic lust for money unveiled in glitters!
      I count the shadowed furrows in her brow; 
      the hot lights make her mascara leak. I pause and smile. 
10    Coughed smoke smears the wards of patrons. Alone 
      at the automatic door of the underground lot, swept
      by light, I hear the new cars creak and breathe. Who's so sure
      he can't find some solace in his death? I turn;
      she leans against me like a candystriper."

      The ritual errata and recovery of existence
      shocks us still. Wars horrors concentrate
      the false scent in the cloth daisy mailed here,
      pie_eyed and plangent by my breakfast plate;
5     the wrong NJ air smells cool_soulled. Things smash:
      Vonnegut in a cooler when Dresden's shelled---
      cold sweat flashed on his back, soaked.
      The uneaten egg must stare and water. Dry ash,
      dry ash, and the city flat as a pancake. Flagged,
10    alive and dragged back, he was glad enough to laugh....
      The eye rolls and fixes its sights, a white
      and blue prayerbead thumbed by a blue God. I'm glad
      enough for that diaphanous freedom to just die & glide....
      This chord of being's too dumbly thrubbed.
15    Saturated in cold sweat, and rife with rarity,
      I sing bird and beast, animal or man, trapped.

      It is this common, dirty love of all Man
      that does us in. When I was a puling boy,
      unloved and underpublished, I put my levelled scope
      to the crew-cut skulls of my class and wrote
5     Man and God at Yale, what a joke!
      Man's a bastard, and God is not his dad.
      All my soaring arrows jut suction tips... see?
      Jefferson's sky-high forehead's still red
      from where he plucked my one-sided life
10    of concourse off. I'm the best Catholic in my diocese,
      and when Mary was assumed by Pius X,X,X,
      I smiled at my blushing girlfriend in her dorm,
      posing for family photos of the Nativity. So what
      if God made me? I am what I engendered.

      "Rich in shrimp, and fed fat by feeding,
      my nouveau cuisine and halapino peppers stuff
      the moneyed throats of stockbrokers like a tickertape,
      quoting every appetite to the last eighth of desire.
5     On my empire the sun sets flaming like a peach's pit;
      inverted pigs stare naked and wrinkled from their hooks,
      flayed Bartholomews, while I boil the mother sow
      to a tasty vinegrette my salt palm spices.
      Others boil, teeming with a prosperous guilt
10    my low_cal meals can baptize and cure; slimmed
      by the communion wafer_sized servings at the steel counter,
      they smile. I smile from my orange hell of steam.
      My father was a butcher like the bard's, often said:
      'Let each man's conscience, sick, and thin with pining
15    like a scythe,
      razor his wet brains apart, in bloody pieces like spaghetti.'"

      Packed into my typewriter day by day, I thumb
      my prose squares on the rich and famous til I choke,
      dazed by the haze as my consciousness thins,
      getting high as I sniff the lighterfluid of my language
5     smoking over history's thick white skin.
      Allusion made them popular, but the verse must drag....
      Each day in my ribald trickster's mask, I soak
      the bilked body, and pray to the blaze's bray;
      I make my bee's circuit from kitchen to bandstand,
10    command Genghis Khan in his boudoir, Hitler to harmonize...
      Saints to outkill soldiers, flash their spiritual brands to ash,
      hug me in a Covenant, lash myself to the mast!
      When I'm buried like Poe's heroes will Parnassus kneel
      and scoop me to heaven, mailed alive in the velvets?