The Rules of Attraction
Leaning forward on his barstool
he telegraphs his best move.
One so obvious she wasn’t sure
if she should duck or counter punch.
Could see that he was an assortment
of all the bad DNA left over after
the good stuff had been handed out,
the mediocre stuff claimed and only
the dregs remained.
Was kind of shocked when he asked
asked her if she’d like to see his rubbings.
“Rubbings, huh? That’s a new one.”
Thought, maybe, he had conflated
erotic etchings with rubbings, whatever
that meant. He seemed dumb enough
not to know the difference between
Erotica and eratica.
So, she went thinking, what the hell,
she had taken more self-defense courses
than this guy had high school credits.
Found out rubbings were impressions
taken from headstones in graveyards,
like you actually took paper and rubbed
charcoal or something over the paper
and inscriptions appeared.
Was actually pretty cool and he had
a big collection.
Wasn’t even paying much attention
to the fact that she was in his house,
upstairs, where the bed was.
Requiem For A Dream
“She’s a maniac-a maniac
and she’s dancing like she
never did before—–“
Dancing the Samba
The Mambo
The Marimba
The Assassination Tango
Ballroom Dancing
Dancers Without Partners
Dancing in the Streets
The Locomotion
Step Dancing
Fox Trotting
Waltzing Mathilda
Slow Dancing
The Stroll
“Ellen Burstyn, how could you
play that role?”
Wired on high test speed
and no sleep, cutting holes
in the rug, dancing to a jagged
music of the spheres, a string quartet
raising lumps in your skin,
tumors new music is formed
from, plosive as the game show
host’s imploring of new victims
on stage, “Come on Down!”
and join a ghost play version
of Life no one survives, least of all,
you, stuck in the final phases of
of a lost requiem for dreams.
Ellen Burstyn, after this, none of us
will ever be the same.
Richard Farina Been Down So Long Looks Like Up to Me
“—listening to Judy Collins
Country Joe & the Fish-Buddhist Chants-Pink Floyd-
Richard Farina’s ghost-classical spanish music
my skull cracking wide open—“
d.a. levy, suburban monastery death poem
All the spinning lights, emergencies rendered,
highway skid marks, paths of patched rubber
leading nowhere;
All the twelve string guitar pieces, harmonics
for tainted voices, broken limbs, elegies for rusted beer
cans, discarded refuse by
the cluttered ditch of dreams;
All the tattered road maps, Routes marked 66 like
jagged veins all along the battered highways
of your chest;
All the false proclamations like, “I am King fucking
Montezuma and this is the coin of my realm,”
the ravines it was screamed into, the unheard
echoes;
All the Life Magazine pictorial features with Mimi,
promise suggested and never kept, the smoked
tea, fractured skull, no helmet laws necessary
then, the massive hematomas;
All the facile, forgotten anathemas of a doomed youth,
45 rpm singles in your collection like the one
by the Cheers,” He wore a black leather jacket
and motorcycle boots”;
All those lyrics that sound, now, like something sung
by the possessed, “He had a hopped up ‘cicle,
that took off like a gun, the fool was a terror,
of Highway 101″;
All that was left of your life reduced to a jagged red
line of blood on black top.
Terror in Brooklyn
The streets are a back lot movie
set, a western ghost town, are
designated to be called Brooklyn
in another lifetime, a twilit
zone where the widows of a Plaza
de Mayo are imprisoned beneath
an inverted bell jar glass, all
the names of the Disappeared
lost in the deserted, unnamed
streets of a city without an alphabet
for expressing grief. The formerly
clear skies are temporarily free of
industrial wastes before an inevitable
soiling by an unexplained presence
of unnatural clouds; the white ones
suggesting scars in the shape of weapons
used for separating limbs from bodies,
of funeral fires for lost loved ones,
warriors, whole neighborhoods;
light poles shapes as giant awls, spears,
on empty sidewalks pointing toward
unidentifiable skeletal remains pinioned
against prominent brick walls for public
displays of where we are going, where we
have been and why.
Yo Soy Porteno
The floating bodies in a sea
of foul weathering are super-
imposed upon a dreamer’s
hat, an Escher study in mixed
media for forensic evidence,
chalk-line scenes of the crime
cutouts and imbalanced Nature.
Even asleep, the artist’s intentions
are revealed by colors he denies
in the dreaming, slow tangos for
gitano lovers, tele-novelas for
everyday living–betrayed by
Jane Russell, Rita Hayworth, all
the Judy Garlands of the underworld;
after the last kissing of these spider
women, imported from a Martian
outback of faraway places, only
the much-abused fedora of a
no longer singing, no longer
capable of laughing detective
remains.
Dumpster Fire Press 