In Which, After Substantial Delay, Frank Meets The Coked Up Doctor And His Shoes Are Mopped By A Complaining Orderly

When I’m gonna get a break?
These people such pigs: woman
whose job it is to clean up after the E-
mergency doc who ripped into the
tourniquets with abandon and splashed
antiseptic and blood
all over the curtained
corner of the ER where she could not
position my gashed thumb conveniently,
I thought doctors
were supposed to know minimum how to do this,
situate the injury for optimal medical
access, but her glasses kept falling
and the coke kept dripping
down her throat as she wrapped
the rubber around the opponens
the short abductor the short
flexor. Enthusiastic pressure then if not
adroit binding staunched the flow
I’d been waiting for hours,
the wound like a mouth burping blood

My doctor sought to secure
an apology for having been called to
stitch me up but
Let the new mouth cut in my thumb
say it’s sorry, you might as well wait
for my wound to speak. I yelped
as she scraped an instrument
along my theretofore uninjured
tendon: my lidocain-numbed
thumb made a tightening jerk,
as by electric shock.
Perhaps I had neglected to
sign something to the
effect of I’m sorry for bleeding on
your floor. Perhaps my doctor,
by application of her scraper,
would animate my drugged hand
in remedy of that signatory lapse.

My nice
clothes, rumpled as a debauched
aristocrat’s, nightclubbber’s hair,
white face and stylish
shoes, these may have provoked my
black doctor’s judgment
that my need for treatment was more a
demand by a Have for resources otherwise
more properly allocated to Have
Nots, who Have Not private doctors Have Not
insurance Have Not, always in line
behind me. Now it’s my turn
to wait except I Have Not
white time nor black time.

I Have a book
once serialized in chapters with long
summarizing titles,
diversion of an hour,
but I’d been sitting for 3 in a waiting room
whose corner television shows a violent commando
injured far more severely than me
my thumb wrapped in Bounty
Little girls whose mothers
Have Not bounty nor babysitters watch
the man die then get back
to their Pez. Playing with candy
in the nadir of the night
A family who’s brought
Triscuits seems unduly
prepared, inured to siege, and another
the first among us to venture
a query of the laconic Eastern European
head nurse with the Chechen stare
has discovered that while
her chart says pain in the knees she in fact
awaits treatment for pain in the kidneys
From the airier hallway they try to shoo me
back into the waiting room
where cinematic weapons discharge
We are going to war
and we are not to be discharged
the waiting injured spread
into the surrounding corridors
limitless need growing tentacles
Every head turns like mine,
up from my book,
each time scrubs walk by, seeking
if not mercy then news though what CNN
has to tell about us going to war
is entwined with the story just ended
of the special ops hero and his blood
is our blood and that’s all the news:
We are going to war, we are in a war
between infinite need and infinite greed,
or maybe the finitude of mercy is immutable
we can’t care any more than we do.
My doctor you’re nobody’s doctor
Once a well-bred girlfriend lamenting my
poor prospects said she needed lots of
luxuries. Luxury by definition, I said
is something you want, not need.
Want is need, she replied
by which I was to understand
that I couldn’t have her either.
A bead
of greasy fat squished out between the
edges of my gash when my doctor pulled
the sutures. You have fat
all over your body, she said, meaning
that I was fat with privilege whereas my studies in
human anatomy confirm that a pad of fat
sits at the tip of your nose, a drop of fat
hangs from your ear
Fat is your clay

Black time and white time,
sunrise only embers
to warm the winter wild,
when rough New Jersey seeks to cloak his form
in the meadows all dusted with snow, Giants
Stadium, the Arena, the Track all
dusted with softening snow as if to hide
holiday pounds.
Most days a bus carries me into New York
on a bridge arcing
over the tall grasses, their brown stalks
tufted at the tops like lions’ tails,
snow like cotton in the dead
seed fluff crowning the weeds.
But stay you in New Jersey at least while the sun
climbs orange and low-heat like something going out,
not something newborn in the winter wild,
past the wet furls of Decemberish clouds.
Stay you while people scrape the ice
from their Navigators and Broncos,
stay you while they quite forget
not to rave at each other as they vie
for the shrinking suburban streets
built when there were less of them and they
were more genteel. This
is the real war right
here. But do stay you in New Jersey while the sun
hides his head for shame of his inferior flame.
A greater sun is my hope, most laserlike, most hot.
One SUV cracked off
another SUV’s mirror and neither me nor
the woman in the broken vehicle
realized till a few minutes later
I got out of my little
moldy coupe, climbed like someone
reaching the top of a cliff. She
descended in a gold velour
track suit, stepped off the pedestal
of her running board, said
These streets are so small, at which I said
The cars are so big: she looked at me like
You don’t have to be a dick

at the exit 151 McDonald’s
the girl suddenly came back to the counter
behind which she’d been assembling a
30,000 calorie order and said “Now wait.
I gotta stop” It was a plea
An older guy engaged me
in criticism against the regime of
pictographic cash-registers their purpose-built
icons replacing the richer system of
multi-use glyphs the power of whose
abstraction comes at the price of having to perform
basic arithmetic;
No, I say. The human brain should
shed the tedium of numbers, should
outsource computation to computers
except the girl behind the register
still feels like a slave
except I Have Not
white time nor black time,
sunset only embers
to warm the winter wild,
when rough New Jersey seeks to cloak his form
in the meadows all dusted with snow

Sonnets

Countdown to divorce in snowy January.
So much friction to apply like brakes on spinning tires,
sleds called torpedos. A bankup of ice chunks and snow hunks
keeps sleds from grating on aqueducts where the road
humps under the slope. Snowboard kid dives off as board
continues trajectory into harm. He rolls and bounces,
board rolls and bounces. Sharp crystalline spray wet with melt,
wet with what snow is made from. Gravel and slush mix.
President proposes job training for non-exist-
ent jobs, non-existence training. Get used to it, get used to ice
implanted granular in the wimpled skin of the winter wild
a coat on the riot of grass, and weeds sere and stalk.
Some birds flew from one wire to the next under a low
cloud ceiling, no zoo. Grey lid of sky which is sometimes open vast


Because you work hard you’re not good enough
to beat the Italian who handles balls as though
they were tied by strings to his feet. Just because you
try so hard you want to start a fight
I heard you called me a Mary Jane, kid.
Explain aviation, the sweep of lightning
brightening the cloud masses out over the South
Pacific, kid. A passionless woman who smiles
My heart is a bag worn thin in patches so you can
see in, kid. Are you the kid who will touch my face
and make me draw away when your hand alights on my
coif? You work hard and you’re not good enough
Because you work hard you’re not good enough
to call and say I love you only yell you are gone

Someone is talking to you and her words are like raindrops
on your windshield. Her “egg yolk” congeals as footsteps
in socks approach from across blasted fields, weed withered
and winter sere. Hammers hit drums with soft
brushes. A step closer is to decide to divide and beyond
equal is not equal. Like that roseate backlight which underlit
the clouds always clouds the enlacing, the interlacing
winter boughs. On this lone highway only the kiss of drops
and the spattering of soft melting gobs of roadsnow like touches
human touches women’s touches whose sensations spread
on a meniscus of liquefying ice, slick and impossible to cling
for the substance of the touch is the snow falling on the road
losing its energy as it melts on the car on the skin.
Someone is talking to you and her words are like silence

Moolooboola street-island sawblade leaves
the plate of bacon and the womanly flower
and this does not prepare you for my beloved
corps to visit you in loneliest hour
You with your no spirit, your no soul no aura
but you want to get fucked not view endless porn-
o. My beloved corps will deliver my heart
in ziplock, adoring you and desiring you and your
adroitly slipped bonds, all the attachments to things
mundane and corporeal that you have eschewed
in the misguided notion that escapes
have proved you worthy of my beloved corps.
Ants bite the feet and jellyfish sting the ears
You fear the earth you walk through it unseeing

You’re going feminine— out not in
as if it were some kind of jail. Jail-
break saying years choked you. Feminine out
direction through clod soil hard and tough pale green
harsh and relentless and as stupid as anything that grew
unheeding of the medium through which it pushed
Behind a boat furls a wake and the water shapes
lyre legs squeezed together and a bush
Some feet are fair to me some not, some socks
approach across blasted fields, hairy with stuck
grasses brown and sere. My life spurted
from under foot as if in flight on a time line
at angle to ours, the angle opens seconds to years,
a door opens a doorway widens like a smile

Unworthy project, effort wasted with shame
A fell foot affronts facades washed with fire
Behind a boat furls a wake and the water shapes
the lower half of a woman and my brother has a gun
in the cockpit for shooting obstreperous crabs
who might crawl from so-called pots, traps, buoyed nets.
Some pot is calling kettles bitches yo
“Slim Shady you listen to Christian rap!”
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Between a goat with a tire and a dead shark
the pageant of modern animals.
I wanted once to wear the burlap brown
St. Francis, oh St. Francis please to bless
our sympathetic taxidermies.

To A Boy

The fire brightens the wood and the night-mind
drinking at the snow-line, hard togetherness.
My son prepare for weather
                                                       she love you
the crater at the impact site

My son prepare your cabin she find you
the back-bent wing marks the fall

The ribs vault the heart and the night-mind.
The weight of her bones, hard yet soft breath

And the January fire 29

My son prepare for the tricks,
my son prepare for the true secret

Super Hyper Natural Porn

What if there was a kind of sex
that was only your sex and bore no
resemblance to any other, and had no
relation to human pornography
I took a bus from your corner
The trees slid past, distance inverse to speed
and the various velocities of the moving elements
gave their own unanalyzed pleasure
precise and contingent on every physical factor,
mere and immeasurable.
When it’s dark and my night-sight
finds you like a white bird
I grow like a root in your head
There are plots I could follow
You made them with string and small bulbs
Maps that overlay maps like webs
In your “Andromeda” nightgown
splashed by the sea, chilled by the wind
My love wants to come
My love wants to run
and write my signature on you like
wind blown wire, bent struts
the sea swallowed up
the car and the passengers and all
because a woman haughty with a dare,
adoring a dare, because she chose to walk
in the woods in a crocheted poncho (called
“fella” by a guy cruising for
witchy looking boys)— there are plots
you made placing small objects
incongruously in woods—
because a woman mocking with a dare
flared up in the headlight’s glare
In your “Andromeda” nightgown
barefoot on the cliff

the gas line is crimped
so the flame is colder
drinking beers by a
blue wall of fire