A Few Poems from Heartworm (Moon City Press 2023)
I Want To Be Jeff Goldblum
I want to sweet-talk everyone I meet.
I want to have a silver tongue.
I want each time I sit down to write a poem to think,
This is going to be a Jeff Goldblum poem.
I want to murmur and stutter like butter like velvet.
I want to be the nice Jewish boy that I already am, but raised to an art form.
I want to wear dark glasses and leopard-print suits,
be so affected even I can’t tell if I’m full of shit
As I dodder on exposing an inner vacuousness
that, admit it we all have, but
That I, Jeff Goldblum, in my best moments, rise above.
I want you to sneer at me, then laugh and feel good in spite of yourself.
I want my former costar Glenn Close to call me “charm personified.”
Let me wake in the middle of the night, feeling a pulsing throbbing
desert of bare worry in my chest,
And say to myself, It’s okay, honey, you’re Jeff Goldblum,
and be 100 percent correct.
Let me be injured and carried on the back of a pickup truck as it floors it
away from a tyrannosaur.
I want objects in the mirror to be closer than they appear and I want to be that
mirror.
I want to save the world from aliens, with Will Smith.
I want to be a smarmy sea captain whose white whale is Bill Murray.
I want to slowly morph into a fly, growing hundreds of compound eyes,
and becoming more and more grotesque, less and less lovable, until
my lover puts me out of my misery,
But then wake up from it all like a bad dream
and then win best actor at the 1986 Saturn Awards.
But I fear I will never be Jeff Goldblum.
I fear I am no more Jeff Goldblum than I was ten years ago, that
I have made zero progress, Goldblum-wise.
Though I have watched all seventy Jeff Goldblum films, I have not
grown an inch taller or more charming.
That is the tyranny of fandom, of being a fan,
Which is to wave cool air over a being who disregards you,
Who lolls about eating grapes in Egypt
And can’t really help you except to enjoy them better.
And I know if I live a million years I will never ever be Jeff Goldblum.
That there is only a terrifying stretch of me-ness waiting for me day
Upon day until I wear out.
Florence, Kentucky
So what if the old man
on the bus is trying and
failing to remember his dead
mom’s face, as if the past were
not a cartoon tunnel scratched
on a wall?
He’s still trying,
and when did we forget our
cattle-shoes and feather-parkas,
how we carry with us a lowing
sadness, an extinguished memory
of flight?
Today I’m going to count all the
blackbirds between the prison
and the Walmart where, right
now, in its galloping sadness
a bald man who sounds like
a car horn is hector-lecturing
his infant-hushing
girlfriend—as her unhappiness,
radiant as a cleat, sharp as an ice
skate, sprays to a sudden stop.
Right now, at the emergency
crisis center right next to the
gun store, the nurse feels entombed
in hours like a fly in amber
as the waiting room TVs
spin despair’s golden honey—
and I think of the ice I waded out
on as a kid, of how often the world
seems like it’s going to shatter,
but then, miraculously,
mercilessly, does not.
A Case of the Mondays
Don’t you too feel sometimes
like the circus has shut down,
that we’re a pair of
giant red shoes, sitting
in the dumpster decades
later, hearing the garbage
truck rumbling up our street,
& thinking, wildly, elephants!
Autocomplete
Why does it hurt when I pee, my stomach hurt, my eye twitch, my throat hurt
Why do I feel dizzy, bloated, empty, nauseous, weak, shaky, depressed
I’m so frustrated with myself, with my husband, with my acne, with my life
When will I finally die, get pregnant, find love, get a boyfriend, be happy, go into labor, get over him
Why are flamingos pink, sloths slow, firetrucks red, flags at half staff, my feet swollen, my eyes red
Why do we yawn, dream, have seasons, hiccup, sneeze, celebrate easter, cry, have eyebrows, sleep
What does it mean to be human, to be queer, when you dream about snakes, to short a stock, to be anemic, to be a lottery pick
Why am I attracted to older men, older women, feet, redheads, emotionally unavailable men, losers, my cousin, alcoholics
Why does death come in threes, happen, scare me, hurt so much, row exist, make us sad, hurt
Why does everything taste salty, hurt, give me gas, taste bad, make me cry, taste like metal, taste bitter
Why do I feel sad all the time, for no reason, after sex, and lonely, when I wakeup, after a nap, and empty
Why do I feel happy after crying, when it rains, at night, all of a sudden, but empty
A Few Poems from A Dog's Life (Jacar Press 2016)
Contemporaries
Every dog born at your birth is now dead
every bottlenose dolphin and beaver
every mallard and mountain lion.
In the first 30 minutes of your life
all the fruit flies your age were dead.
Death started small:
when you turned three the last ant
your age turned its six legs to heaven.
When you blew out your first candles
your fellow bee ladled itself gently
into a flower. Now in spring you
meet their great-great-great-
grandson in a rose or hyacinth.
In 4th grade, the last prairie dog peered out.
As you had your first sexual experience,
the last goat born on your birthday
rubbed its itchy head against
the fence, bleated, and expired.
In your 20s, death snuck past
the last porcupine’s quills.
The cats and pigs like Virgil could only take you
half way through them too,
and turning 30 the long-faced
Beatrice of bison left you
as they left America, were hustled out
by drunk poachers firing bored
out of train windows, as all the tapirs
will go without your ever seeing one of them
(though they apparently live alone and have sex
in and out of water).
In your middle-years the last chimp
chucked his banana, the last Macaw
lost its luster, the last toad croaked,
and the last Asian elephant,
more fragile than the African versions collapsed,
was buried in a spot the younger ones,
trunks swaying like chimes,
refused to step on as they tossed the sad, cooling
earth onto their backs.
At sixty the last eagle plummets.
At seventy, the parrot who repeated all your
phrases goes mute. Silence fills
the room. After we are gone
what will linger? A few swans
will spit on our graves and be hateful,
a few turkey buzzards
born in their season will pick
at the bones by the highway,
themselves soon crushed
and peeled back to feathers.
And then only the swimming
things will remember the 20th century,
the bowhead whale dodging harpoons,
the sea turtles playing in the
turquoise waves of Kauai, and almost
mindless in their dazzling pink
and white pack, the koi
who keep rising toward the
rippling surface of the lake
to take their food from another world.
Woman and Dogs
My girlfriend’s dog is small and fat and neurotic
and smells at night like an African meat flower.
It loves her more than some people love anyone
in a riddle of love it worries at, lying there on the floor.
As she writes it makes strange sounds:
lickings, sighings, suckings, shiftings
like the worrying-tide of the world, like the vast
dog-tide of the world in its love of the moon
and of fetching sticks. My girlfriend is very quiet
and very pale like the moon, and some people think
she is cold and uncaring just like it.
But her dog knows better, it knows she is quiet
like the sun as she writes her stories
tapping them quietly with her fingers, shaping
the messages she has heard of painful warmth
and love, quietly as a tree repeating the hard message
of the sun in its devotion of leaves and listening.
I have listened carefully to the dog. I have stolen
the dog’s secret about her. I have figured it out.
She is quiet and so she writes long stories
and I am loud and so I write quick poems
tiring myself out more quickly to look up at her
as lovingly and neurotically as the dog
perhaps never as lovingly as the dog
who unlike me has nothing to prove
who does not write poems except the thought-poems
of the chase, the sky, the walk, the meal.
Sick of the dog, I have had too much also of poems
petulant, filled with strange achings
I think of my navel which is too deep like a mine
I send my finger into it like a canary and feel sad
and weird and know I will die. But sometimes
she tells me she likes my chest and I take her
in my arms and feel for once superior to the dog.
Before this dog she had another dog I never met, a
golden retriever, who was not at all neurotic
who swallowed her childhood happily
like a white spiral fossil and brought it back
covered with a fine varnish fine slobber of evening
and died, and now is only a picture in a cheap frame
on the top of her desk as she writes. It makes me think
of all I can’t see: the long list of books she gave me
how they existed all my life and before it
and her story right now invisible to her too
like the idea of a flower to all the roots underneath
their gossipy brags and worries: how their flowers
grow tall as the spine of a young boy, go blue
as a nun’s lips in winter, unless the earth goes
upwards forever unbroken – but there she is
at least, complete: watched by the dog who is dead
watched by the dog who smells bad and is alive
watched by me, who am sick of poems and of life too maybe
but am alive and glad to look at her, at the tiny mark
on her cheek where the clamp brought her forth kicking
from the womb, to sit one day quietly in the
wound and fury of writing before the three of us
who cannot help, who wait in aches and shiftings
for her to turn round and speak gently our names.
Get a Dog
It’s good to see someone staring up at your nude body
without a sign of interest
and to have someone to share all your
vices with, giving a tithe of 10 percent of all snacks;
yes it widens and inflates the soul
to give regularly and not to feel braggy about it,
and to be allowed to bury a loved one in your
own backyard for once, beneath the outhouse of
their own favorite lemon tree –
even to see your yard riddled with curious holes the
gophers and snakes move into is healthy and
reminds you you don’t really own anything –
and gives you an excuse to be outside alone
without getting lung cancer – or frightening the
neighbors by your wish to be introspective;
and who but dogs will teach you an appropriate
fear of small children, or how to perceive
the ghost-world of secret smells like ESP
– so no two fences can be passed without admiration –
or pull you into the chase like a nature show
where you can hold the tiger back at
the last second so everyone can go home,
but still allow it the joy of the hunt.
Partner
Since we’re not married and
have been together so long
boyfriend and girlfriend is
starting to sound too hip, too sexy
for what we are, too Parisian –
like we take long strolls
on the Seine or make love in front
of mimes, like we tie our bodies
into balloon animals and float,
or ride the train under the
slimmest finger of ocean
to London, imagining Sherlock Holmes
hot on the trail of Moriarty
for the hundredth time too stupid
and obsessed to know his own
love for Watson if it hit him in the
face. They are partners, and I think it’s
time for us to steal their appellation
of dusty trusty hue that they stole
from Western Marlboro men
chewing tobacco and spitting
on cactuses, and not pronouncing
the “t,” as they moved
through the canyons, muscular
thighs draped over their horses.
We too journey side by side
on the trusty steeds of twin beds
or the single gigantic steed of a
California king, so my nighttime
imitations of a ninja won’t bother you,
so your thin form can be rolled up
like a cigarette in blankets
and be smoked by night
and the long plume of your dreams
can stay private. I love
how it’s all taken on faith,
the way day is partner to night,
or yesterday to today, knowing
no covenant keeps it all
together, no words stored
in a courthouse or promises made
before people who think love
is sealed by their getting drunk
for free, or by throwing rice on us
to plant in us a field we
we work all our lives –
I want you no sidekick or wife,
but choosing to be with me
and me with you day by day, stealthy
capable human partners planting
flags in a private happiness
without tiny sherpas of us
climbing to the top of a cake,
without the cake being sliced
into and floated out amidst a flock
of endless friends and relations
each jostling for the piece
with extra sugar – with the
frosting in which is written
congratulations and our names.