Dead Air

The one with facial hair, if a man
doesn’t talk with American accent, he can’t
be hired for pay as radio talk show
commentator, and hence, caught between two
negations, might not understand the reason words
are pronounced with pursed lips, ridge of teeth.
International language of smiles bares teeth.

He fails to understand rapid chatter,
only halfway through the first word of title
in coming attractions when full-length feature
ends, movie-goers leaving theater,
crunching noise as stepping on popcorn floor.
Riveting drama was engrossing thriller.

Every time the coffee cup runs empty,
as it must, to go to refill the ceramic
interrupts sending important message,
sculpting a lacuna in the text.
So, coffee craving stops communication.

So, a walk around the block brings new ideas,
images of green leaves on stem ascending
to a star-burst of color.  To see it
in the mind, no flower in sight, a pleasure
the Eurocentric mind abandoned, looking
for plot structure in an aphid shearing leaf,
antennae wobbly, a drop of dew.

Synopsis

pictorial smudge
                                     of figure,

   peacock tail under circumflex of a rainbow,
    translated from French using a dictionary

where complicating love makes lust more poetic,
                     Joseph coat of many colors philosophy Joseph
                                                        distilled into stigma
     Moveable parts—

the next morning, I finished the incomplete sentence

                                     —rubbing against pastel hues,
deriving my individuality from
                                                              the ancient past,
unchained but still as still as that flat lake
geese migrate back to
                                           every time the sun in the sky
reincarnates a petroglyph of the sun etched in a rock

magenta aureole around beet nipple
    lactating ichor

Poem with Robert Creeley Epigraph

                                    1

griffins clasp     serpentine scrolls in their
beaks, like         carrion that spell out a luminous
spot on a lunar              halo’s    always realist
               tondo:  the       iconographic flowers, lower
left, in both the MoMA               coffee table book of
art        reproductions and in the park
off West              58th Street,

are somehow neutral, Maoist, absorbent, in their

perverse,           bejeweled         sexuality. Their Martian War

of the Worlds organs sponge up bright solar

flares, pale               paraselenae, rutting
long distance on Procrustean winds, mating

rituals spawning a moon dog semantics, IMHO

                                    2

Or else

the glass table top on which it sits
so isolates this meager action

      —Robert Creeley, “Two Kids”

generic flowers in
both       imitation          Lalique vase and in

the poet William Carlos Williams’ somewhat awful poem, “The

            Yellow Flower,” are untitled.

—The flowers are untitled, but legible:

no known         antidote for—sick kiss.

—Ceramic        coffee mug       precarious at the blunt
edge of the       rhomboid glass table top, unstable

in a fallen world where the heaviness of

things unhinges them into trap doors, pulls

them downward from precipice
toward                  pagination in bottom margin