Futile Efforts (53 page)

the grandeur of your credit report,

the precision of your manicurist, each light of your life.

For they've built a bridge beneath every mall,

on every corner,

on the way home from every school,

right beside your bed and next to your sleeping head

and I'm waiting beneath them all.

Don't ask me that again

You're eager with death and muscle, choosing to place

your damage up against mine, our arms thrust together,

the burns bright and pink, stab wounds healing

but not closed,

never filled—we've stepped on the same nails,

chewed the same gravel,

bitten off the tips of our tongues, mine yours,

yours mine, we've loved the same woman, and now,

now she lives in your attic I'm told, rocking with one

baby or another,

the ghosts of our uncollected promises drift on the

ash-strewn wind

and swim in our bathtubs

Your tears aren't as wet as mine, you can't compare—

sniff this air

and tell me you still want to share and shoulder another's

load,

you act concerned but you're not, and it's cost you

your hair

Don't speak, don't say another word,

you've got nothing left to tell, just sit

there and wait, another moment or two, be patient,

it's coming,

just the way you wanted it, here, open wide

wider,

I owe you all of hell

Nunzio
, Sixty Years Dead, Lying

at My Side, Staring

Rivers rise just high enough to drown our short regrets,

the tall ones, the weighty ones are harder to hold under—

I roll them

facedown in water but these bastards have lung

capacity, they

can hold their breath—I've given them great strength

the way I make

everything much larger, more looming with doom,

but maybe I can kick them to death before my chest

needs another rib-spreader—my heart's been massaged

by some prick who never washed his hands, my

organs have been toyed with, my spleen set aside

in another

room—I am a vassal located in many vessels, my shoes

have tassels,

my mouth is taped shut, you'd think that by now I'd be

used to seeing

the pieces scattered over the floor—I can pick mine out

of a lineup,

look, there's my pancreas, my left testicle,

my medulla oblongata—the hell?…it's my mother's

hysterectomy

come crawling after me—some

grow back, some are sent away to college,

and a chosen few know what to do when

they climb back into the world—my sins

are accomplished, they are time-consuming tasks,

they are sweet as ether

from gas masks—Grandpa went loony during the war,

this was a dark secret

let out by one slip during a drunken family meal, no one

took it seriously

but me—Grandpa, give me your hand you old fuck,

you've passed down the same shit luck and bad knees,

a leaning towards diabetes and heart disease,

a love of boats.

Nunzio
, perhaps you're my foe,

Grandpa, pat my head, pat my back and help me down

from this ladder,

out of this hospital bed, off with this plaid shirt,

away from this rack—I am taller

than
you, I can tear off your small ears and put them

back on

again—I have your red hair but only in my beard, which

I never grow.

I am lagging, ragged and gagged and de-fagged,

we share the same frayed nerves—maybe they called this

a quiet condition once,

but now they just wrench out the bloody bad worm in

my guts

as I stop being so uptight and nuts and quit shrieking,

learn to smile, and

start ripping out throats.

A Symbolic Interpretation of the

Worst Day of My Life

Without a hat he wanders in the rain, down by the water,

searching for sea monsters and finding them—the sands

are full of beached demons, with shipwrecks and broken

necks, with mostly-eaten apples—it's been a long time

since his birth, he's even older than the beach,

he has a much longer reach, reaching backward

through time

to a morning when the surf ran in a different direction—it

came out of his eyes,

carried away a whole world that looked something

like this. The swirling sunlight means nothing, the moon

has .air, it stalks and hides and schemes, that

is what the depths await, for the game to begin. He isn't

without sin but sometimes almost thinks so, it's easy to be

persuaded by a fervent voice—they ring around the moldy

posy off those who are prochoice, they scream and chant

and throw red all over the bed, and hang dolls from

short sticks

and suck off fifty dicks. He's here to tell you all the truth,

you don't get that every day, as he smacks the squeaky

clean faces,

the guileless leers, glaring down each of those well-trained

sneers,

raises his arms into the air and the grinning beasts of

the deep

stumble ashore and climb into an infant's hair

and descend into your dry mind's lair.

So much of this concerns fear and hate and the bad

dates with rage,

but what of love? I hear you asking, wondering,

underlining, circling,

hoping to find some small egress into the meaning

behind such images,

beneath all vision, above the clean-cut cadence, and

around each sound.

I talk often of you and us, and not enough of me—

it is a distinction

I wish I didn't have. Almost all of them murmur on

about I, I, I,

and I know how easy it is to lump all words atop

one another,

in the sump, into a mound of well-trod ground.

I understand

how easy it is to fall into song without consequence,

filled with

hard-earned experience or just dripping with

catclaw
fantasy.

I will not rhyme this time.

I won't discuss Italy or tombs or the hospital again,

you've seen

too much of that sort of thing before here. We're

trying to avert

boredom, we have a mission to underscore storms

and thrashing

willows, brainpan wars and the edges of chewed pillows,

hideously

torn hearts and other inner parts, big cuts, big
cunts
,

assholes large

enough to drive a truck through. One day, when we're both

in better shape we really must set all our separate

deaths aside,

hide the murders, the bitten off tongues, put the gin bottles

in the closet,

bury the crushed dogs,

and speak at length of love.

We are the whispering forces set loose in hometown dark,

of closing clubs, the last-call bars, side by side

down the narrow musk-laden halls

leading out to rain-soaked parking lot hells,

where they, like us, pause behind their steering wheels

staring out at Route 231, listening to church bell peals,

cops doing a slow ride-by, easing past like oil. We will wait,

we'll hold court and services and our
seances
here

while the engine thrums. The heater hums

and the radio is stuffed with static and call-in love shows—

there are voices you recognize, shades wave from

the other side of the final highway, and they know

where the substance of reverie goes.

You're not that far off from your first love,

you've never moved on and she's gone and come around

again, and again, and more. You tasted your first bitter beer

off her lips.

There was a time when this was no greater than you

could dream,

when the world was no larger than a tank of gas—

she ushered you in through the back door,
tippie
-toes,

silent,

just for a moment, the heat of her cheek in autumn,

the smell of soap on her hands. That was almost enough

for you, once. Dead leaves and dead men drift

along the curbs, stuck in sewer grates, the ice-cream trucks

speed by neck-in-neck with ambulances—there is dying,

and then there's merely waiting the wait.

The glove box contains your 4am life: a foam can holder,

pack of condoms, lint-covered mints, nickel bag,

poorly folded maps of poorly folded places, you recognize

every street sign, every nest, all the car bodies up on blocks,

and the rest, the suburban loss of charm like an amputated

thumb or leg or arm—we have circled

and circled and run screaming

in circles, there's no need to look in the mirror—we all have