Come on All You Ghosts Read online

  of every face every three seconds or so rippling

  and producing in turn other feelings. Oh regarder,

  if I call this one green bee mating with a dragonfly

  in pain it will already be too late for both of us.

  I am here with that one gone and now inside this one

  I am right now naming feeling of having named

  something already gone, and you just about to know

  I saw gentle insects crawling in a line from a crack

  in the corner of the base of the original White Castle

  towards only they know what point in the darkness.

  Screaming Skull

  Near Geneva the Hadron Collider

  lies underground. Almost

  complete, whispers the giant

  screaming skull. Your species

  is obsessed with the search

  for tiny links in the chain you do

  not know leads to the collar

  of an enormous dragon. You

  have fallen completely in love

  with metal thinking. You are in great

  immaculate aluminum vats

  that make the tiny workers

  in their suits and helmets glint

  a ferocious silver cooling

  sections of the giant collider

  and preparing to send pulses

  of proton beams through it

  in opposing directions. Detectors

  will sort the microscopic

  particles searching for the elusive

  Higgs boson or strangelets.

  For years beneath the sea I have

  been dreaming of the proper time

  to emerge and signal my ally the Sun

  to rain fire down on all

  your towers. Together we

  with our retarded cousin the Moon

  would watch your cities sink

  into the boiling oceans. You search

  for the grand unified theory

  but will find only a tiny black hole

  we will all be sucked into.

  And now I will never have my revenge!

  Ceasing to Be

  The idea is simple. Lucretius wanted to rid

  the world of death fear by writing

  On the Nature of Things. He says we fear

  death only believing the mind somehow

  continues even after the skull that holds it

  is broken and harmless vapor leaks out

  into everything dissolving. It’s

  true I fear my death, but I fear

  the death of others more, because that’s

  a death without death through which

  I must live. Or I fear my death

  for the death others will have to live through

  without me. That and probably pain

  are why people are afraid. Anyway a world

  without death fear would be even more scary.

  Not that it matters. Death and fear. One

  hand of steel, one of gold. Even you

  wouldn’t know which to cut off or reach

  out for first, Lucretius, because it is always

  very dark here in the future.

  Sad News

  We have some sad news this morning

  from Mars. But I’m thinking about lions. Someone

  said something salient and my head became

  a light bulb full of power exactly

  the shape of my head. Sinister thoughts

  at the Xerox machine. A chat with a retired

  torturer. Now the sharp blade. Apparently

  some solar wind pushed a few specklets of actually

  not red but grey Mars dust through the seal

  into the vacuum where the very tiny oiled hydraulics

  of the light from the distant future collector seized.

  What was it my brother said to me once? Like

  a vampire bat on a unicorn Change rides

  every moment. Houston is full of dead elephants

  and empty labs experimenting on silence, open any mouth

  and out blows some hope in a binary data stream.

  Poem for Jim Zorn

  in the photograph you are holding a green helmet

  and smiling directly into the future

  but the straight and the square rarely advance

  a Chinese poet working a minor bureaucratic post

  a few miles north of the capital

  wrote 1200 years ago

  when they called the emperor The Immortal

  I know you tried

  but a falseness runs through all our dealings

  a seahawk is not even a real bird

  and somewhere it is still 1976

  and I have just lofted

  a football over the head of my very cold brother

  who turns in his blue down coat

  that used to belong to me

  and runs with his arms stretched

  out as far as he can

  towards the pine trees

  and I fear when he comes back

  he will tell me something everyone knows

  The Pavilion of Vague Blues

  In the airport bar the lady singer’s

  voice reminded him of a blue

  praying mantis he had seen

  in a painting riding on

  the shoulder of a very young

  knight into battle. She was

  singing about how she felt

  always full of emptiness. He could

  almost physically grasp what

  that meant. Then he did.

  Then he knew he would never

  be happier than when he was

  living in that medium-sized

  Midwestern city, writing stories

  about the lives of the inhabitants

  of its highest skyscraper.

  He could see exactly what

  it looked like then, shining upward

  like an ancient lighthouse

  in the snow. He saw a man

  with a beer reading a book

  called 8 Amazing Things You Do

  Not Know. Now she was

  looking at him, singing about flying

  in wondering circles above your life.

  On the placard it said she was

  available for all events except funerals.

  Her name was Lady McDust.

  Fortune

  I went last night to see a Chinese movie

  with an old friend who seems to love

  everything. Equanimity I can only

  aspire towards like a leaf or a reflection

  of a tower in a pond. The entire

  movie took place inside a storm

  of totally synthesized feelings. A father

  and son leave the city on a desultory

  journey out into the countryside

  for the mystical purpose of dropping

  a stone into a well. Periodically they are

  assaulted for a time then joined

  by monks who guard citadels presumably

  filled with riches or ancient instructive texts.

  Every time just as I started to like

  a character he would be assassinated

  right before my eyes by ninjas or meet

  some other horrible unjustified fate.

  One particularly mild Shaolin monk leaned

  against a wall and his shoulder fell off

  and his hair attacked his face. Fortune

  said the subtitles is a giant dragon

  with flowers in its antlers. A widow

  in a white dress appeared in the father’s

  dream then emerged into the actual

  world and caressed the face of the child.

  They walked off towards the well. The stone

  glowed in a close-up. Decades passed.

  Then the music suddenly stopped

  and I found myself holding an empty

  bag of popcorn I don’t remember eating.

  Goodbye I
said to my friend but she

  had already long ago gone off into the future

  to feed her brand new digital snake

  a couple of digital crickets.

  Charmer

  That man looks like a snake charmer

  Rufus said, holding his beer. That

  man has skills. Rufus works

  with me at the university. Border

  wars, rebellions, inspectors. Like

  a 9th century T’ang Dynasty bureaucrat

  Rufus had survived them all. He

  told me about several attempts

  on his life disguised as practical jokes

  and birthday parties. The department

  secretary it’s true does bare

  her teeth when you come near

  the Xerox machine like a beaver fearing

  an enema. Years ago Rufus read

  a book about Zeno of Citium and invented

  a brilliant infallible system of relying

  on divine intelligence to organize

  university forms. No longer

  did he try to shape circumstances

  to his desires. The world is a blindly

  running machine. Now he is ever

  more slowly coasting towards

  without reaching total stasis. His desk

  is a medium sized wooden lake

  on which float two staplers. I don’t

  even remember where I was born.

  I might be a replicant. How would

  I know? The snake charmer was sitting

  at the bar, holding a glass full

  of ice and clear liquid, watching a game.

  I had to admit he had the air

  of someone wearing a turban.

  Any skills he had were very well hidden.

  This Little Game

  When I’m washing my hands I think of a name

  of someone I don’t know. Like Evangeline

  or Rufus or BobBob. And I sing Happy Birthday

  inserting that name at the proper time,

  stopping only and turning off the water

  when I reach the end of the song. This

  little game ensures I am washing my hands

  just long enough for the little soap particles

  to bind to all the nasty dirt ones

  and wash them down the drain.

  Which makes me feel protected.

  Like going to what we called “temple”

  but actually was a church we shared

  with some Ursulines, an order of Christians

  dedicated to the education of girls and care

  of the sick and otherwise needy. We

  used it on Friday nights and Saturday days

  and they on Sundays of course, sometimes

  Saturday evenings all full of emptiness

  troubles and peace and done with our final

  service we saw them crossing the street

  and moving like phantoms towards the building

  already no longer ours. In the lobby

  there was a giant baptismal font made of stone

  and at Christmas little carvings of Jesus

  on the cross hung up on every wall. None

  of us cared and we thought ourselves

  good and brave for sharing and also safe

  from all true Christian soldiers. Never

  with terrible swords made of virtue and light

  shall they trouble us, they shall pass us by.

  To a Predator

  I woke up early and saw a fox.

  It was leaping and dragging its glorious

  red and white tail behind it across

  the road. It held a grasshopper in its mouth,

  which it dropped when it saw the small

  carcass of a young javelina. Last night

  I was woken by their hairless rooting through

  a field of cactus in moonlight. They all

  stood together, ears rotated forward into

  the breeze, protecting the single mother

  protecting a pair of young. Their

  mustachioed labium superius oris i.e.

  upper lip protects a gentle tusk

  the color of greywater. I almost sympathize

  with their corporate need to snuffle

  and roam in packs until dawn returns them

  to hollows they made in the ground.

  But my sleep does not. Thus I shone

  a very powerful flashlight into their midst

  and watched them scramble across

  the highway, dispersing. Thus I walked

  out into this morning, wearing a shirt

  the color of a dandelion, whistling

  an uncertain tune about the mild unequal

  life I would like to know better of a rich

  acquaintance in the Mexican city of Guadalajara.

  Global Warming

  In old black and white documentaries

  sometimes you can see

  the young at a concert or demonstration

  staring in a certain way as if

  a giant golden banjo

  is somewhere sparkling

  just too far off to hear.

  They really didn’t know there was a camera.

  Cross legged on the lawn

  they are patiently listening to speeches

  or the folk singer hunched

  over his little brown guitar.

  They look as tired as the young today.

  The calm manner in which their eyes

  just like the camera rest

  on certain things then move

  to others shows they know

  no amount of sunlight

  will keep them from growing suddenly older.

  I have seen the new five-dollar bills

  with their huge pink hypertrophied numbers

  in the lower right hand corner and feel

  excited and betrayed.

  Which things should never change?

  The famous cherry trees

  I grew up under

  drop all their brand new buds

  a little earlier each year.

  Now it’s all over before the festival begins.

  The young.

  Maybe they’ll let us be in their dreams.

  A Summer Rainstorm

  Sometimes I am happy to be

  here in this bright room

  drifting through music made by others

  looking down on the heads of the people passing

  teaching each other that life is forgoing

  I think everyone I can see is partially sad

  because we will never be fully forgiven

  this apartment building has seen so much moving through the city

  well ordered troops

  many proud careful mothers and fathers pushing carriages

  many people holding hands or talking on their cell phones and crying

  hundreds of girls each wearing a plastic tiara

  carefully placed on her head by the mayor at the annual spring parade

  this building with the ordinary green facade

  no one will see as they wait for the storm to pass

  their breath creating giant cloud forms

  from my window I can see their heads

  it makes me smile a little with love how much they look like moose in the zoo

  how they stand very patiently close to one another

  under the door of the sky

  their memories gracefully blundering into the long cool forest

  full of shadows

  our life is the one we already have

  The Painted Desert

  Right now in the rest area it’s sunny and cold. Someone

  is taking a picture of the vending machine. I have

  never been sad for appropriate reasons. Never

  have I sat in the wet grass looking not at dark sky

  but blue paper someone had carefully taken

  hours to punch out in a shape invisible

/>   until the flashlight is turned on below. Earlier

  when I said everything is a switch immediately

  the interlocking gears in the self-hatred mechanism

  began to grind. Part of me is always about to turn

  in a direction I will never go. Trucks roar

  filled with things people need. Sometimes I sound

  to myself like a robot. Too many times as a teen

  I stared onto the surface of a mysterious

  solvable multifaceted cube. I can see you don’t need

  me to stretch out my hand to point to dread

  and its little button. The door swings open,

  one entire miserable summer I should have been happy

  flashes in the word molybdenum. I saw people

  mining cinder from volcanoes. Cinder

  is made into blocks lighter than cement to hold

  the plywood shelves holding one or more

  than one person’s books. To intermingle

  is so difficult to extricate. Shells marine organisms

  abandon dissolve into ooze. Found near waterfalls

  it’s known as travertine. Goodbye, someday

  I’ll invent the magic lantern, then music,

  then whatever’s the opposite of the need

  to control everything so it can be perfect for you.

  For You in Full Bloom

  In the park the giant gold head

  of some expired tyrant

  watches everyone

  breathing and thinking

  old mothers with their prams

  solitary lovers

  not realizing they are stretching

  out their fingers and grasping the air

  during the day the gold dome

  of his head

  grows unbearably hot

  then during the night

  cools when no one is in the garden

  but the trees