August 15-21, 2005: Judy Kamilhor and Luke Buckham

Judy Kamilhor and Luke Buckham

city haiku: Skyline scrolls before me, as elevated F train curls its tail back, 4th In New York City, who has time for seventeen syllables? not me Catatonic on the F train: knees assaulted by huge Conway bags Tree on Charles Street is illuminated by street light, golden flowers Questions, questions: who am I? why am I here? what’s for dinner? Sign on Bowery store window: “everything is subject to change”

let us gather now around the meat 1 There’s too much dead air coming from the bars and churches and coffee shops, too much dead air coming from you and me and main street and our scorched apartment here in our tiny blinking abyss The spirit of the human race seems to be temporarily snuffed out This afternoon I found a card taped to a bulletin board that said “this is a message from a frightened person” and couldn’t remember whether or not I was the one who had posted it 2 This was static, this was fire, an infinity of yellow-lit lakes expanding in the back yard We met at a barbecue grill and tried to exchange painful messages but the words poured out and flowered in derangement, we couldn’t understand each other’s poetry This was fire, this was static, the holy ghost reduced to a pork chop roasting in the late afternoon while both of us stared through the smoke grinning nervously like strangers, after years of blind lovemaking 3 I see you’ve been making some improvements on your body The creases beneath your buttocks have disappeared Ridding yourself of friendly sags and bunches, you’ve become evermore ruthless and aerodynamic I wish I could say that you are more beautiful than you were this winter, when we loved each other’s cerebrums out in a dirty attic The windows of your gym glint at me as I walk the streets past your arsenal of treadmills I can hear legs screaming from a mass of oiled bodies, climbing trees and fire escapes, lacking mountains, to get away from your scent 4 There was a heart floating in the air above a coffin of moss that I refused to grab when I was eight years old I’d wandered in the woods suspecting the existence of such a heart and wondering if it was mine but when it bloomed bloody from the faint air and faded the surroundings I didn’t grab it though my chest felt empty– and feels empty now, the forest behind my old house having been felled and made into toilet paper wherein I blow my nose, remembering how gently the heart throbbed and how much of my own gentleness I have rejected 5 I want to do something new like weaving a web with my body today, and string myself up in the air between anonymous trees Perilously self-absorbed, twenty-five, broke, homeless, having been kicked out by a beautiful girlfriend for cheating with her inferiors, it occurred to me today at work while flipping quesadillas that I might be that animal referred to as a Loser I want to hang myself from my own glistening web outside the bedroom window we once steamed by making love until all four half-beautiful eyes rolled back so far in all our multiplying heads Thank you for not throwing my salvation army clothes and tormenting music out on the lawn along with the tan overcoat I let you borrow the night we met and started this which hurts mildly like a yellow rose run over by many lawnmowers 6 As fragile a balance as the substance we breathe, rock-climbing without ropes attached to his diaper, my alternate-dimension father’s hand found a grip softened by lichen (a generic fungus I’ve always liked for its greyness, its knack for blending in) and slipped down eleven stories of mountain smashing like a grasshopper under a toddler’s curious boot the lower half of his body, then wandered around for years bleeding on crooked legs, pumping gas, trumpeting the proofs of Thomas Aquinas to total uninterested strangers, something supernatural with thirteen senses of humor having spared him in his brokenness as an example to his son not to trespass the heights Someday I’ll dig up his legs and bring them with me to a peak above his blood-stain decades old, touching many a mountain, never carrying a rope 7 Having applied directly to the White House for a cosmic college degree, he sits on a couch, his island on the surface of a red sun hotly imagined, picking small tree-frogs from his nose and smearing them on the couch Every time a national election comes up he writes in his favorite Buddhist monk for president The terrible relaxation of choosing only hopeless causes sinks into his skin, yellow as the walls of a smoker’s house 8 Summer made me feverish on a park-bench and I napped through several day-jobs daydreaming of my favorite journalist, whose blushing anus I rimmed under the throaty gasp of air-conditioning in her third-story office while the Sunday edition crumpled in the press and burned downstairs Despite the fire heating the floor, and my lips now made a legend of gentle violation, she turned around and kissed me on the lips So drunk on small-town apocalypse that we couldn’t tell the curtain ripping off the window was not her skirt, her office opened like a godlike eye holding the first couple and the scandal rocked the town above the fire 9 What did the tree-stump say to the man who sat on the circles of its chainsaw-shortened years? I think it sang a song about the wide eyes of owls who sat in its branches, their down-curving beaks, the cold helicopter cynicism of their eating habits The man, shaken by the wood’s description of dark nights swooping down upon a mouse scurrying through straw, torn from the fields that were its home, went to the city, where owls are rarely seen or spoken of and the wood compressed into less immediate forms tells quieter stories 10 The ocean licks your balls, then tells you you don’t exist Nature is a cruel ex-girlfriend, but the city towering behind its waves is worse And what will the sea-turtles do today, except be turtles? Their majestic monotony soothes the child of a middle-aged couple groping and darkening in the sun, the lines they wish to erase being baked in deeper like an India landscape The poor child associates lovemaking their whole life thereafter with scents of suntan lotion and the sight of lumbering turtles 11 “Are we cruel? We’re cruel! Are we spiritual criminals? You bet!” That’s something like what he said so radiantly at the bar last night, alienating all his critical and very artistic friends Even the neon lights seemed to waver in the flow of such sudden and neurotic honesty Even the much-needed outbursts now are “negative, spastic and self-indulgent” according to the one who used to kneel at his feet to fill her olive-scented mouth in the early morning No more shall he enjoy her spit, or the drooling of so many friendly strangers Malevolence lurks under the surface of every handshake, the soul of every downtown interaction is replaced by snobbery of secondhand euro-american manners 12 The ones we hate are the ones with crushed hearts– they feel our pain deeper than the ones we love are able Sensory overload having placed condoms on our brains; so anti-depressed we’re ready to kill the first person who spills a drink on our shirt, forgetting that their apparent attack is only a stumble If we were deprived of beer and loud music for a lonely hour, wouldn’t we stab each other to death with pool-cues? Have our eyes ever once met honestly across a table in this world? Let us gather now around the meat and see if it still has a soul 13 In the far corner of god’s eye there’s a black-haired girl who won’t tell her real name Light, that her body creates, shimmers through her clothes and through a ripped pair of jeans makes a glow respond from the bulbous outward heart of a man broken past love, past lust, and into longing to depart this place with some beauty seen and cherished by looking gracefully away 14 The respect of the spineless is not respect The respect of the wise is too humorous and knowing, too generous, to give any pride But even hermits wait for renegade angels, or some eye in the wall, to love and admire them That’s why my friend Wyoming killed sixteen people on a bus, using an old scythe– he’d had a dream of his image on TV, born in glowering lunar blue in a desperate girl’s bedroom And her worshipping his force, his fearlessness of blood, praying for him to kill her sex-crazed father Choosing fantasy, eschewing patience like a man pounding golfballs into green with a sledgehammer, they remain in their cages and cannot save each other 15 When I have sung my songs, and known my voice never to have touched the music, I ask you who know the murder of my hands to let me read to you until I break Let me mow your lawn without a metaphor to wear my shirt And cook you all the things we loved and killed in a large and blackened wok The chickens we wore as pets cannot be cried over with any dignity; we squawk as they squawked My ridiculous ran over my melodious A nondescript dog with error marked clearly on its teeth dragged it home backwards snarling, its hunger almost making it live in its floppy dance What my mind like a sentient drawer of silverware tried to jangle loose never found a hand And never need a war for songs to ache–a teenager pumping gas, a rickety porch where not even a skeleton sits, a convenience store morning broke my heart 16 The writer brags he’s gonna spill his guts he’s gonna make us all feel the birth of suns in our wrists the rhythm of Egypt and Israel being born and tangling as we spend our lives climbing the cliffs pictured on the cover of his book He’s going to put an end to war with his dick–different from other dicks! I can see why our resident genius annoys even the pigeons who stop to crap so lightly on his shoes as he stands on the threshhold of heaven ignoring their wings in the absence of Blake’s angels where the sun is a penny scraped free of yearly imprints; Lincoln’s face left cleansed of its familiarity, only a beard unknown, with its hat knocked off, little copper disc lying in a wide black parking lot 17 A small man having landed in this afterlife said “that last one got pretty crazy at the end” and though he appeared atop a heap of cauliflower with the black dots of antimatter dripping off him from the womb of space he’d meekly conquered just by dying, we, from a land of harsh accomplishment or else, didn’t know what we was talking about, so we didn’t believe him Luckily he was too confused this time to attempt teaching us anything, except for how to eat cauliflower as if it were an unfamilar gift, glowing manna fallen white from the supermarket ceiling 18 Now the end of a man is small and undramatic like catfood spilled on a kitchen floor discovered at sleepy-eyed midnight by a woman on the way to the bathroom shrugging off the weight of such a feathery universe not bothering to sweep him up until the distant morning 19 Girl-crazy, I’ll jump off any bridge to land in water full of women no matter how many bodies I break on the way to the bottom, not to mention souls, which I suspect I’ve never touched Though something shone once on a tiny morning from one who seemed hurt by my leaving and many trains swept through those eyes stung by departure, as if each glint of sight held many compartments of sleeping lovers obliviously swept feet-first into another city And the breeze changing their name the oceans slithering through pillows to dye their hair the bedsheets battered newsprint covered with rumors of a war on skin by stronger impermanence since nothing good or evil lasts just the sound of waves like smacking lips as if something just one layer behind this world has a good meal at our expense 20 Now you’ve had enough days to heal from the birth of the dragon that kills with your face these cinematic towns, until one grungy village left an island in the milky way in the wake of a lashing tail stands out like a comma on the glistening back of this jellyfish earth In a world where nobody breeds, the only penis left is a soldier’s bayonet And I know you are hungry to have your life killed like a chicken in front of you by something stronger than what’s roamed your life so far, its neck stretched further than the thought of what violence brought to these streets when the streets were just tears, streaks from a larger eye, and each weekend a little mardi gras, contained in one soaring tomato landing on a military parade But I’ll wait in the smiles of bark the swords of water and the ripples of long prairie grasses for you to kiss me like a wound opening under a wound The mocking lisp like turtles wearing lipstick but their lumbering drifts like a subway sound or skyscraper collapsing onto an acoustic guitar and the music of frayed wires on a bridge between flickering cities is the sound of a harp being strummed 21 When I’m on my ten-speed racing bicycle, following the white line with two humming wheels, channeled in the blade of wind between traffic and forest, getting honked at by cars whose drivers pretend to know so sternly their destination, I picture soul after soul, self after dead self, demon after demon, flying out of me and falling in the wind behind like a series of flung coats.