where's a policeman when you need one

everyday gods with their everyday bodies and the everyday week
there’s a word, weak. you weak little gods. you absent fucks.
you non-revealing scene stealing extras to a life
suck in your stomachs and act like gods
take another long-legged huka hit
half-pipe, just another newspaper avoidance
smoke the smile she leans in with
don’t enjoy it too much
especially what you want most and only sometimes get
your fleeting center
your halfway across the room and forgetting why
yes, it leaves you unsure, which is not a coming attraction
not a builder
surrounding streets with people you like to look at and would rather not speak to

berrigan

               LXXXVIII


            A FINAL SONNET
                                       for Chris

How strange to be gone in a minute!    A man
Signs a shovel and so he digs   Everything
Turns into writing a name for a day
                                    Someone
is having a birthday and someone is getting 
married and someone is telling a joke   my dream
a white tree   I dream of the code of the west
But this rough magic I here adjure    and
When I have required some heavenly music     which even
    now 
I do   to work mine end upon their senses
That this aery char is for  I'll break
My staff    bury it certain fathoms in the earth
And deeper than did every plummet sound
I'll drown my book.
It is 5:15 a.m.            Dear Chris, hello.

                           (The Sonnets, 1964; 1982)

from South Dakota

v. Red tinted highways, bumpy mediums. Road construction can be so present. A turn off into a one gas station town. The bank has no ATM. The teller blinks. A fat child in a jumper is walking along the painted yellow lines. vi. The middles of everything are fat and dangerously round. It might be the heat. Drops of sweat are beading on my back. They fall in intervals. This feels no closer to the start or end of anything.

Catherine Wagner

A Poem for Guideposts

I made a pie of light
Sat me down in front
The glaze sucked all the blue out of the air
I was a pilot search
Went intrinsically backward
The moss of my feet booked me in
Moss and wet cold
I held my spine up natural head natural like a top spins
Will God deny me anything
God will I eat a piece of the world
Piece of gone
There was a steaming wedge but it was not a piece it was
The whole boat
It was carried
Our shoulders dirt our shoulders smell like come
Swerve round this round that balancedly
The one plate and the other at varying levels till the table comes

The Hole (Robert Creeley)

There is
a silence
to fill. A
foot, a fit,

fall,
filled. If
you are
not careful all

the water spills.
One day
at the lake I took
off my bathing
suit

in the water,
peed
with pleasure, all
out, all

the water. Wipe
yourself, into
the tight
ass paper is pushed. Fatty

Arbuckle, the one
hero of the school,
took a coke bottle,
pushed it up his girl.

But I
wouldn't dare,
later,
felt there,

opened
myself.
Broken glass,
broken silence,

filled with screaming,
on the bed
she didn't want
it, but said, after,

the only time
it felt right. Was
I to force
her. Mother,

sister, once
seen, had breasts.
My father
I can't remember
but a man
in some building,
we were all swimming,
took out his

to piss, it
was large. He was
the teacher.
Everywhere

there is pleasure,
deep,
with hands
and feet.

I want
to, now I
can't wait any
longer. Talk

to me, fill
emptiness with
you, empty
hole.

(Words, 1967)

am I on the train today?

that was the year that every new shirt I put on felt novel, amiss against my skin, with
buttons that never looked reasonable.

that was the year I wore headphones everywhere I went, not because I was listening to
music, it just made it easier when people talked to me to point at my ears and
keep walking.

that was the year that things never looked so good.

that was the year I stayed up all night most nights, scouring the city for women with
really bad skin. the streets I found them on seemed like they should have meant
something but they were just streets and every time I turned around there was
another one in the offing.

that was the year the woman with the worst skin I’d ever gone out with told me her name
was team. she had a friend with her who called herself summer. they seemed too
young for the plunge because it’s not as effortless as some make it look. you know what I mean, the way you become fascinated by someone in an
underground station and then the train happens some magic, a disappearing act, flowers in your hair. or the way you tell a lie in a bar, like giving a false name, and you’re stuck with it.

that was the year I fell for a woman with the worst skin ever and breathed her in. there
was no way to get close enough. I’d point to my ears and try to keep walking
but most of the people who seem missing turn up sooner or later.

that was the year I woke up at four in the morning and found her sleeping so I watched.
it creeped me out. sometimes you’ve given all you can give.

that was the year her father sold newspapers above the stairs of a muni train stop. he had
a picture of himself on one side of his booth with a caption underneath that said
once there was spring. he had the same picture on the other side and underneath
that one it said you’ve seen this face somewhere before. he was a grizzled old
bastard with gray curly hair that he never washed, or hardly ever. he wouldn’t
talk to you or ever look up from his book when you bought a paper. he’d just point to this five gallon plastic paint bucket and you’d hand over the fifty cents. every morning I’d throw the change in violently and say to him take that you fucker. one morning I took a paper out from under the brick he used to hold them down. the red brick dust got on my hands and on the paper like it did every morning, but I just stood there this time reading. he pointed at the bucket and I kept reading. he pointed again and I said you smell old man. he reached into his pocket and dropped fifty cents into the bucket without looking up.
I slept with your daughter last night, most nights actually.
team or summer.
team. I never knew they were sisters.
that one, he said, that one has always been hungry for blood.

am I waking up at all today?

Not sure it fits on a postcard i'm not sure sentiment is worth one fucking stamp, when a younger man i was no more happy though once i watched the pink broad sky, alone in a far-off sand and surrounded by the shadows of coyotes, one gets weak with linebreak, one doesn't have the heart to end it, as if believing perhaps one line might finally solve it, as if there might ever be one final line.