AWAY WITH SHINING ALL
is the aerosol-sprayed consensus
of graffitist editing graffitist
at the southeast corner of Tompkins Square Park.

The SHINING ALL is here,
raked by leaves and gathered by branches;
dark trunks pump sunlight
to the roots, knotted into the ground.

The AWAY WITH, too, are scattered here.
The twisted match with the charred head
contorts under his newspaper blanket,
on his cardboard pallet, on the wooden bench.

BURN IT DOWN! commanded
the turquoise slogan at the western exit.
It's been dispersed across the civic sign,
a letterless smear with a smoky fringe.

CUTE

It's pleasure
when measured in inches and weighed in ounces
to suck the world in at one end
and squirt it out the other,
to be a passage for milk and pap,
ocean and mud.

The plates of the skull are open
and easy to breathe through;
kundalini unimpeded
flows through the flexible spine.

Every pore is an eye
and every fold of skin erotic;
the pleats appear and disappear
as the arm waves — more.

4 limbs and a head, all grasping hand,
happy glove that doesn't know
palm or fingers or thumb.

Knowing zones us,
like a butcher's chart:
rump and breast and leg;
piece goods fit
for the tailor's violence
of dart and welt and gore.

The artful butcher joints the meat.
that means to take it apart.
No matter how clever the tailor,
the sewn garment is never
as whole as the uncut cloth.

Knowledge is closure.
The skull's plates fasten
and dam the fontanelle,
meat and mind on this side,
the world on the other.

IT WAS FASCINATION, SHE SAID

We're moving from one house to another.
I'm helping my mother pack.
I lift a sheaf of silky blouses from a drawer
and uncover a coarse, gray-blue cardboard box �
smaller than a pinochle deck,
but heavier than shuffling cards,
intriguingly heavy with metal.
What is it.
A music box.
I slide it into my hand,
it's as shiny as a mirror,
I can see my face in it.
It plays the Fascination Waltz, she says,
and is surprised that I don't know the tune.
She lets me wind the spring.
The key, a tiny lever,
cuts into my knuckles as I ratchet, tick tick tick,
and then the waltz uncoils,
a humdrum melody with a surprising jump in the middle.
She tells me it was given to her
by a boy she was in love with
before she met my father.
He was a pilot, he died in World War II.
If not, she would have married him.
In an instant,
the self coiled in me
that I won't play out 'til my teens,
name 'til my twenties,
resolve 'til my thirties,
is replaced by Fascination Waltz.
I'm the same boy,
but in another house,
with another dad,
with another tune.
The same mom.

The tunes don't move with the fathers,
the house doesn't move with the fathers,
the kids don't move with the fathers.
Mom's the keeper of the tune.
The children come from the mother's house
and with the mother's house they move.
Sorry, dads.

SMOKING HISTORY

By match's light, smoke's banner unfurls from cigarette's post.
By flame and breath, a history is consumed.
Inhale: The Europeans meet their Indians
And slaughter them. The rolled leaf,
Alienated from ritual, will be fuse and weapon, both. Exhale.
The culture of cotton and tobacco demands slavery �
Inhale: 50 million Africans are imported as implements.
Two hundred years pass. Exhale: Emancipation, industry:
A new invention rolls, pastes, and cuts
One hundred thousand cigarettes in a day: Inhale.
Cowboys, gangsters, and fallen women blow
Black and white smoke, exhale, as flammable stock captures
In flickering squares, the unpredictable coil.
Inhale, exhale. Life goes to war, and American cigarettes
Become currency in Europe. Inhale: The man who'll be
A hollow president endorses their healthful qualities.
My father smoked, but did he first, exhale,
In New Guinea or under tenement steps in Brooklyn.
Inhale: Every Sunday morning of my childhood
Smells like eggs over easy, bacon, ketchup and smoke.
Constricted veins and tarry lungs stopped his heart, exhale,
But he survived, and resumed smoking, inhale, only to die
Of an unrelated cancer a few years later. Exhale.
I took up the habit while he was dying, inhale,
But not, as my mother still suspects, as a way
Of keeping him alive, I think, exhale. I blame the woman
I was living with, who said "why don't you buy your own?"
When I bummed hers between lines of coke. Inhale.
Exhale. She quit me, I quit coke, but not the cigarettes, yet.
Too available, perhaps. Too addictive. Too seductive,
To watch the smoke rise, a flag in the air, and then
French-inhale, to furl it, convergent, inside. Exhale.

NO THROWING STONES

On the one hand,
my best buddy
recently dedicated his life
to advancing the proposition
that this rock of a planet
is attended by
an eternal omnipotent
and all-seeing curator
who so loved
the mannikins he made
of breath and dust
that he dropped himself
in a virgin's ear
that he might keep them near him
forever.

On the other hand,
I myself
when the hair had barely
thickened on my pubes
dedicated my life
to the scattering
of twisted sickly markings
on bleached sheets of pulp
and to the utterance
of coded sequences
of barks gurgles hisses and sighs
that I might modulate
the mental jellies
of the umpty-grandchildren
of lungfish.

He might believe in a virgin's ear,
but I believe in everybody's.

No stonethrower, me.

THE OBJECTS OF THE CITY

Discontinuous
are the objects

of the city
and the city,

discontinuous
to the city
and to themselves.

1928 jostles
1983
and 1972 is the second story
of 1937.

Red brick's half hidden
by brushed aluminum
gummed with posters
for last night's triple bill.

The foot stumbles
on the fault between
last year's deficit
and last election's renewal.

A bottle-cap,
cork up,
skitters across granite.

Not even the sky can
meld a hole as
dissonant
as the wrecking ball's riot.

Only

the furnace of the sun
can melt concrete stone and steel
and pour them into
funneling eyes,

Only

the fusing brain
smelts memory light and thing
and knows them, discrete, continuous,
as the objects of the city.

ASIDE

I went up to the border.
I was searched.
I heard gunfire in the distance.
I didn't go.