Quicksilver

Follow the godling of crossroads;

the impudent psychopomp.

He knows which roadsigns lie.

 

If you pay him with coffee

he'll duck you under

the low-hanging branches

and regale you with trivia

from inception to terminus.

 

If you pay him with lost objects

he'll prop you in the path

of the sweet, seething maenad

who'll rip into your weekend

and leave you stunned and stumbling,

two days late to work and smirking.

 

If you pay him in sad songs

he'll lead you below street level

to the basement bar where

he’ll introduce you to your diametric twin--

the one who calls youthe evil twin

for sacrificing happiness for safety.

The twin who can teach you your freedom.

 

Yes.

I know a sad song.

Listen carefully.

 

 

No Exorcism

I can feel you gnawing and I am tired of it.   I have lied to myself; insisted you are separate from me but now I see:   a bowline and a sheet bend are the same knot--                 one twists a rope around itself                 the other twists two ropes together --let's twist; come coil around me and lash your glistening stinger.   I am not afraid--                 not of your poison                 not of your sting                 nor of your rows of gnashing fangs.   I can feast on your flesh too, you see; pull brimstone-smoked strips with my teeth from your serrated spine like meat from a wingbone.   I have fasted too long and you are smelling savory.

Point Freya

Part I

In summertime, on calmish days,
Arthur would have his driver
pilot the cabin cruiser around Point Freya
and out to a spot where
the current would drift them back home.

He'd spend those days writing music,
drinking beer, and shooting his empties
with a sawed-off, double-barreled twelve gauge
which he liked to call “the Devil's Derringer.”

Whenever he needed a second shot at a bottle,
he'd switch to writing lyrics.
If he missed his second shot,
he'd quit for the day and have his driver
take them back to the cottage.

Usually, though, temperance
and a steady aim would keep them drifting
through a breezy afternoon
and they'd sight Point Freya
in time for dinner.

That was decades ago.
The glass has been tumbled by the current,
washed around the point and down the coast.
Sand and silt have rubbed away the edges
and calloused the faces.

Waves are now depositing the pieces
all along the public beaches.
Children gather them;
ersatz jades and smoky faux topazes
and the precious, rare sapphires.

Part II

A mother and daughter
trapped three days by rain
in a beach house.

Intolerable to both
so the daughter, Violet, fled to the attic
while her mother painted
in the sunroom.

Bundles of National Geographic
occupied a day and a half;
day three, Violet found a few hats she liked
and several boxes of notebooks
filled covers-to-margins with music.
No author attributed.

As summers came round and around
the mystery drove her to improve;
to practice at the piano;
to untangle the pages of notes.
She emptied the attic and made it her woodshed;
she saved up for a used four-track recorder;
she drove herself to mastery.

And songs which seemed unrelated to each other
seemed more and more to be related to a third song
which she simply hadn't found yet.

So she wrote it.

She laid down tracks, mixed and mashed,
and the shape of the missing music
began to resolve in her mind.
When she hummed this newer tune
other songs from the notebooks
would slot themselves with a visceral click
into the melody.

She worked urgently
and as the spiral of her song climbed,
she compiled concertoes and fugues
from the pages she'd found
and hooked them to it like ornaments onto a tree.

The music flowed
like a cabin cruiser drifting home in the afternoon;
like pieces of sea-glass
tumbling through the surf off of Point Freya.

Five Card Blues

Come and tell me what's your pleasure
What ya want that you ain't got?
Oh, I wonder what's your pleasure
What ya want that you ain't got?
Let me dig through my bag of tricks
It might be something that I brought

You looking for someone to kiss you
Or someone to pull your hair?
Are you lookin' for gentle kisses
Or a fist clenched in your hair?
I'm a man of many talents
Sure as full house beats a pair.

Everyone at the table will tell you
How I went all-in and lost
All these women who won will tell you
How I went all-in and lost
They raked in all their winnings
And left me to count the cost

So now I play for pleasure
Nickle ante, nothing wild.
Come and deal a hand for pleasure
Nickle ante, nothing wild.
My poker face is a winning grin
And all my change is in the pile.

Knucklebones

Unfold your last dollar
Ain't thick enough to keep you warm
Unfold that last dollar
Ain't thick enough to keep you warm
Then whisper to the knucklebones
Sway the lady with your charms

She loves to smooch and nuzzle
Sometimes she'll flirt with you
She enjoys the slap n' tickle
Some nights she'll dance with you
But that other guy's looking handsome
And she's trying something new

You can ask her twenty questions
What she wants she'll never tell
Go and ask a million questions
What she wants she'll never tell
You'll never find her desire
Till you see how those knucklebones fell

So listen to the knucklebones
No promises, no lies
Yes, listen to those knucklebones
No promises, no lies
They just rattle out the numbers
Don't care who laughs or cries

They just rattle out the numbers
Don't care who lives or dies

Step Into the Circle

Today's ritual will let you
pour out a shot from
the crystal decanter
of other people's feelings;
will steep us in their essences;
will let seep into our psyches
every trace of their flavors.

This is not a popular spell.
Not every flavor is tasty.

Taste the rain.
Taste the dusty musk of pollen
washed out of the wind and
down into the hungry funnels of flowers.
Tase the rancid-vinegar agony
of crushed love lashing your palate.
Taste satisfaction like green blades waving;
like braids of grain and the
decadent soil from which they sprouted.
Taste ten thousand slights;
rage and humiliation
stinging the sides of your tongue.
Taste peat and oak, the smoke
of twenty thousand fiery triumphs.

This is not a popular spell:

To sip someone else's elixir
means you may never again
be able to hide from yourself
the myriad flavors mixed in your own potion.

Still, for those who dare,
this ritual will reveal
how small even the mightiest feel
and how mighty
even the smallest
(even you).

Still interested? Steel yourself, and
step into the circle.

Demeter Responds

Spend a season
as a dandelion does
calculating the colors of sunshine

on a supercoiled
double helix
abacus.

Tease text from
the signal hidden in
a summer of noise.

Look at a single seed
then try to tell me
wildflowers have no secrets.

Persephone Explains

Down here, where the light can't lie,
the different pitch of every drip and drop rippling,
the clatter of rocks spalled by ice,
the groan of faultlines grinding,
are syllables, filtered pure
like the water perking through gravel and cracks.

I spend my winters stacking syllables,
touching each sound with my tongue
while the ages erode the stone grain by grain.

No wildflower ever knew these secrets.

Oracle

This week Kira has been dreaming--

dreaming of smoke signals
puffing gray out of
a lake of pale fog;
a ravine half-full of mist;

dreaming of graffiti
scrawled underneath the eaves
of the tower of a subdivided Victorian;

dreaming of the staccato chatter
of a freight train
swaying over a truss bridge
tapping out a prisoner's message
from she-knows-not-which cell.

Now she's listening
and her waking day murmurs to her--
oak trees snapping in
the hostile cold of a February shortcut;
wind off the lake
strumming the guy wires of a phone pole--

She is a child in a circle of children
whispering corrupted data.

Morning Glory Tea

Never again,
Paul promised himself,
will I ever mix
Morning Glory Tea
and acid.

Not a bad trip,
but deep,
deep as only Rose could take him
and only Rose could bring him back.

She'd dragged him sleepy still
through the last gray minutes of night
up to the top of the old colonial watchtower.
She tucked a tiny paper square under his tongue
and they watched the wash
of the red end of the spectrum
as the sun began its climb.
They drank bitter, dizzying tea and
traded koans and non sequiturs
back and forth with the tiny steel cup.

Rose grew restless
and hauled Paul to his feet
and down into the tangled yarn ball,
the streets and alleys of Edgemere
still tossing pointed questions over her shoulder,

Her follow-the-leader game
wound through the cramped corridors
of secondhand stores and sandwich shops
where black iron pipes hung from the ceiling
chattered with flowing water
carrying rumors to the sea.

Then they were dashing across rooftops
and all of Paul's senses blended
he ran his hand along the texture of her questions,
all silk and gravel and polished steel;
savored the crushed spices of her songs;
now nutmeg; now curry; now oregano.

Rose wrenched open a door
and they pounded down endless stairs,
willing their feet to keep up with
their flying, gyreing bodies
until abrupt level flatness shocked their knees
and spilled them into the street.

Paul began to flash back,
his mind replaying the morning
so Rose hauled him again to his feet
and retraced their path,
this time with her reciting poems;
torches and tygers burning bright
and something about walls.

Then they did it again;
this time Rose revealed and
disappeared small objects;
a peripatetic magic act
winding through the city.

Each instance of their journeys
overlapped in Paul's mind
and he watched, enthralled,
as multiple Roses,
invisible to each other,
synchronized uncannily,
like a record album and an old movie;
the needle placed at the lion's third roar.

It became too much for him; too many.
She brought him to her place
and lowered the blinds
and he pawed through her playlists and discs
and played hours of gentle music
in the cool dimness of her living room;
cuddled with her on the couch
tracing spirals with his fingertips
on her forearms and cheekbones
and the along the soft pulse of her neck.

“Have you ever gone so deep,”
he asked that evening when he noticed
the trickle of reality reasserting itself,
“ever gone so deep that you had to have
someone guide you back?”

“I have,”
she replied, nipping the hinge of his jaw,
“and thank you,” she murmured,
“for guiding me back.”

Polyalphabetic Cryptograms

This summer she's indulging in equilibrium;
letting power pool around her,
certain that, when the ripples subside,
some psychic coriolis force
will start to swirl around her center.

She's been studying secrecy
--not secrets, but the keeping of secrets;
the talking-around-a-subject
that sends a searcher spiraling in deeper
from truth to truth.

She has twisted the texts of her spells
into polyalphabetic cryptograms.
She has charged the cells of her Vigenere square
and tangled her incantations
to work up a whole new ritual.

Tonight she'll climb the Kundalini Fire Escape,
a fountain of force writhing up her spine.
She will dissolve this twisted magnificence
with a jolt of regenerative chaos
to send a shockwave of arcana into the world.

That transubstantiation of impulse
will randomize nastiness and purify our urges.
She wants to encipher scorn so well
that not even the most irrational cryptanalyst
can unscramble it.

Cult of Zeus, Hedonist

Whenever an electrical storm rolls through Edgemere
a third of the city pauses,
stretches every muscle,
shoves aside the busywork
and does something.

Men square up their shoulders
and swagger a bit more;
women stand closer, brushing accidentally,
or find lower tables to lean on.

They can feel the storm
spilling down the slopes
of the mountains to the west,
feel it advancing as the rain
pebbles the surface of the lake.

They can taste in the freshening breeze
the storm's galvanic power,
feel tiny tongues of white fire
barber-poling
along the long strands
of their euphoric nerves.

This is a time to do great things.

A time to miss meals in the workshops;
for tempestuous trysts or midnight road trips;
the time to fire up epic all-nighters.

Listen! Thunder grumbles: Now is the time;
the time when you can pelt full-tilt along
an eight inch wide board bridging two buildings,
confident in every springing step;

the time when the end of the alley
twists the dice to eleven
whenever your dollars demand it;
the time when both of you realize
at the same moment
that the answer will be yes,
so you can both savor that unasked question
all through the evening.

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.

Burn

He wears natural fiber clothing
because, while cotton may burn,
nylon melts, sticking to skin.

She loves that about him; that foresight.
He keeps a stainless steel lighter,
always topped with fluid
and always in the right-front pocket of his jeans.
She reaches in often, even when
she feels no urge to burn.
The metallic click of the cover,
the sweet fumes touching her tongue-
these things send a thrill all through her
almost as sharp as when he comes home
smelling of sweat and ground steel and
welding residue.

She knows he's been playing with plasma then-
nothing is hotter than that.

Off Your Meds

Wander through a sunny afternoon off your meds
savoring the signficance of every gesture.
Each glim and glint seems to peak and trough in its pattern;
car radios sing jingles to you then dart away,
distracted by the cycles of the traffic lights;
blind men tap six feet of surrogate senses on the sidewalk
and cellphone solipsists wander, focussed inward,
listening to voices of their own
as invisible and insistent as yours.
Listen to the whisper of studded radials
on dry pavement, or the
sixty-cycle hum of a transformer
stepping down the voltage
to something mere mortals can conjure with--
Remember:
Ohm's Law tells us all that
resistance isn't futile—it's
something you just have to factor in.