Fountains

Pick up that shoebox and come with me--
the fountains have all gone strange
and either no one has noticed,
or everyone is ignoring them.

See? Here in Edgemere Park
the reflecting pool has grown something strange.
A pile of broken stones littered with cringing imps
makes a raceway for pouring water
gushing from a wound in the side
of a great, snaky, scaly Eastern dragon.
The dragonslayer poses just below
armed and armored as a Roman legionaire,
hasta grounded; butt-spike down at his feet,
point up over his shoulder;
plumed helm under his arm and
hair tossed by the wind.
His face is featureless.

Take out a chunk of sidewalk chalk;
I will draw a fist-sized circle
on the pavement. Genuflect, and
touch your thumb to the sacred spot.

I don't know why. I know only
that it's the right thing to do.

Follow me along the Blackstone canal
and through the cluster of converted workshops
to Webster Square where
the fountain has gone strange--
yesterday they were heroes of Labor:
three muscular men; African, Asian, European;
now their hammers and prybars lie cast aside
and they hoist steins aloft in a joyful toast,
water pouring out of their mugs,
into their mouths and out over their chins,
down over their chests and into the pool at their feet.

Take out the tiny box of kitchen matches
and the skein of embroidery floss;
and that bundle of twigs;
I will tie the twigs together just right
and we'll have a bush suitable for burning.
You light it on fire and tuck in this slip of paper--
don't read it! It's not for you.

I don't know why. I know only
that it's the right thing to do.

We need to be careful now--
follow me through undeveloped lots
and the basements of decaying buildings
paralleling Quinsigamond Avenue,
then down into the business district
where a fountain has grown up out of the ground,
strange and disturbing, in front of the Post Office--

Similar women
daggers in hand
face each other--
one wild and hateful,
one calm and determined;
a man lies face down in the pool between them,
hands manacled behind his back.

Take out the harmonica;
the chorus goes like this:
“Did Your son redeem the sins of gods and men?”

I don't know why. I know only
that it's the right thing to do.

Garden of Flame

Through sun-baked days
I built a garden of flame in a barren land.

I have trucked in crushed stone
and swirled its many colors
in spirals and arcs across the footprint
of a burned lake.

I have shaped pillars of obsidian
and stood them up
radially and concentrically
along the gravel swirls.

Through the chill times of night
I kindled campfires for light
and sawed and split and stacked
great runs of fuel between the pillars,
walls of wood twisting knots and paths
from the center of my garden to its edge.

Any garden of flame
must also be a garden of shadow
so I have twisted steel rods into fantastic shapes
and interlocked their curves
so their shadows will writhe like slithering graffiti
in the dancing firelight; a clutch of cobras
entranced by a bottle gourd flute.

I have hung
oil lamps and gas lamps
and torches dripping pitch.
I have mortared together rounded river rocks.
I have welded together grated braziers.
I have stacked stone circles.
I have propped up slabs of granite.

All of this I have done to cradle great flame
leaping red-gold and blue and green;
all of this dancing glory I will start with one spark.

Wear this twisted little trinket:
rest the metal between the knobs of your collarbones.
When your flesh warms it, it will open doors to anywhere.
Try it; open this door and step through with me
into my garden of flame.

Subconscious Music

Ten churches in Edgemere
have human bellringers.
They know the perfect acoustic spot
and invite with a tiny card
one person per month
to sit there on the night of the new moon
while the ten of them
with synchronized watches and metronomes
tap out the notes of songs
with pennies on the skirts of their bells.

Listeners say the music is so subtle
you think you're composing a song in your head
and they're scribbling lyrics to go with the music,
writing a line or two on scraps and napkins;
the backs of business cards and bar coasters.
They're leaving them on tables in restaurants,
under passenger side wipers on parked cars,
dropping them into suggestion boxes,
or (with a donation) into donation boxes.

The waitstaff and department managers
who find these snippets of song
sometimes toss them without reading them
and continue their tasks,
but more often, they read,
and the verses murmur in their underminds
through busy afternoons.

And after, in the evening,
when they've digested the fragments,
and they're busying themselves
with their quotidian rituals,
the phrases change things.

Edgemere has, over the last half-year,
become a city of narrow, crooked streets
with ornate signs jutting out from doorframes
advertising fortunetellers and curiosity shops.
The buildings grow embellishments;
denizens are waking up to discover
rooftop patios and two story porches and
basement tunnels which they'd never noticed before.
People living here wear more masks
and dance more often; they block off streets
for a block or two and gather for impromptu festivals of
food and wine and music.

They spend less time in church
and pray more often with deeds than with words.

Hedonistic Missionaries

Someday, when I have too much money,
I will pay someone to print
a remedial Kama Sutra
on several reams of
eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheets.

I will collect from my friends,
now that they've happily entwined with
real, live, sweaty, enthusiastic lovers,
the stashes of pornography which
they haven't thumbed through in years
but haven't bothered to recycle.

I will buy a two-foot by two-foot by two-foot carton
of individually wrapped latex condoms.

I will acquire unbreakable containers
and fill them with booze,
of low, high and best quality.

I will roll a kilo of joints and
bag them by pairs, with a lighter in each bag.

I will hire a pilot
and on nights with no moon
I will fan whole loads of illicit materials
out the back of the plane and down onto
the tabletop prairies of Kansas and Nebraska;
of Oklahoma and the Dakotas;
and everywhere young men and women
get sent off into adulthood
with a bible as a guidebook.
Sent off armed only with hearsay ans rumors
from their near age-mates.
Sent off with no map, no helpful cabbie,
nor even a night at a table chatting
with someone who has visited
and lived to return home to tell the tale.

I will send out hedonistic missionaries
in converted cargo vans
full of inventive chefs and bemused musicians
and hotties of every variety
to deliver to the bewildered adults
who stumbled from self-conscious ignorance
to embarrassing error
to frightened uptightness
the good news and the bad news:
"Here's more fun than you can handle,
and a crew of native guides to blaze a safe-ish trail;
(ask us what you wish, and we'll tutor you;
but the best teachers answer questions
with questions.)

"We don't hide. We won't hide.
Our trails lead past your pinchfaced neighbors
and we all have our distinctive anatomies.

"What joy you reach for and how well you withstand it
we leave as an exercise for the student."

Kill Your Television

Last night Crystal and Amber,
patron saints of poor impulse control,
put a penny on the railroad tracks
of Tom's intolerance of television.

Blame it on the bar;
on tequila; on testosterone;
everyone else in the room had tuned out
Tom's Mind Control Rant Number 107
long before he reached his typical crescendo:
“Elvis Presley used to shoot televisions!”

but Amber interrupted with:
“Put up or shut up!”
and Crystal knew a pawnbroker
whose just-shy-of-nonexistent morals
could be subverted with a comforting lie
and an extra twenty.

Twenty minutes,
six emptied chambers,
two shattered wide-screen wall-mount plasma sets,
one enraged group of patrons
from a random sports bar
(Finley McGuinn's, on Miller Street,) and
one hastily chosen hiding place later,
Tom (alone and terrified
his instigators having wandered away,
no longer bored)
made the latest of many
after-midnight emergency calls
to Emily, an alchemist of ideas
who turns baser impulses to gold.

(Tom could avoid
a full portion of fear in his life
by calling Emily before he acts.)

As always, she first confirmed
that Tom hadn't hurt anyone,
then talked him through
her recipe for invisibility
and all the sensible precautions:

-set your phone to vibrate

-avoid the furtive hunch and darting eyes
of a frightened man, and
walk confidently, erect and relaxed

-vanish into the attenuated nighttime crowd
and ride with the faceless
on trains and busses

-ride to the Outskirts where
used car dealers and cheap hotels rule,
where no one walks
because there are no sidewalks,
and there are no sidewalks
because no one walks-
you'll have to walk

-as you walk, slipping over snowbanks
and through drifts, into each
of the sewer grates you pass
drop one of the six spent shells

-find the tiny local franchise
of the biggest fast-food joint on the planet
and load up, to go

-drop the hardware into your bag
of spent wrappers and napkins
then deep-six the bundle
into the depths (but not the bottom)
of the overflowing trashcan near the restroom

-then into the restroom
to wash the sin from your hands

Emily had plenty more helpful advice
but Tom's phone surrendered to entropy
drained utterly of charge.

He managed to find his way home
without incident, mostly due to the happy fact
that the officers tasked to catch him
had gathered their conflicting descriptions
and retired to the station to sip hot coffee
and process their reports.

Stream of Impropriety

I'm going to take the good karma I've earned
by paying for my sandwich (when I could have
walked away from two counter people
who were too stoned to blink) and spend it
licking the sensitive surfaces of a stranger's flesh.

The stream of impropriety is fed from bedsprings
and the artesian coordinates
of pickup lines and the curves which converge
just under the hip pockets of some hungry stranger.
After a quick baptism, you'll discover
powers of persuasion you've never had before--
with a word, you'll be able
to distract the rivets in this pretty girl's jeans.

To a few dozen people living
in Northern Kentucky,
skinnydipping in Knob Creek
is a perfectly innocent pastime
on a muggy summer day.

She is not
one of those few dozen.

She's shy like a shotgun activist,
and she knows how to coax me to rut;
how to run lust along the edges of my tongue
and up into the base of my brain.

Her implications and innuendoes
touch my mind like a single curl of smoke-
at first barely perceived,
then snapping me to total focus
to find the source of the danger.

And that's it, slithering up my spine--
her fingernail slicing delicately
sending a flare—immediate, then broadening.
A path of voltage tracing every nerve,
marking out where the flash flood of sensation
will rip soon through the riverbed.