CRUISE MISSILE IN THE PANOPTICON

for Stephen J. Walter on Oscar Night

You rattle some cages, set the walkways aflame.
Guards eat breakfast watching; your moon eyed
cellmate lover Paz warns "abren los ojos," as
in the spooky Spanish flick before Hollywood
remade it slickly with Tom, ubiquitous Tom....
who also appears in this Piranesi palimpsest
as the warden high above, about to vault past
every floor of the telescoping prison where
cellmates make love give birth & change sexes
in a colorized version of your own grey cells.
Locked down in the yawning atrium's dungeon,
looking up, awaiting your life's end, you wish you
could fly like Tom, until you guess it's an observer
frame problem, as in those Einstein cartoons
you never quite figured out, even with balloons above
the scientists' pensive heads offering gravity tips
for dummies, for the A-list actor playing the vector
X is firing and falling, free falling toward fearful you.
The wild part happens now, because right before
Paz pinches you and turns into frumpy Fanny Mae,
you feel more alive than ever; Tom's about
to crash headlong into you at a Galilean rate
of speed, yet this split second is pure joy.
You've figured out he's the bad guy, not you;
you've got your gun out, mission now possible.
Before the credits roll over your studio audition
nap break, it's payback time, the star's gonna die.

The 18th century utopian philosopher Jeremy Bentham's panopticon was a prison;
a circle of cells with windows facing inwards, towards a tower,
wherein jailers could look out and inspect the prisoners at any time,
unseen by their subjects.

GATHERING ROSEBUDS

For Angela Zack

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

Old time is still a-flying:

And this same flower that smiles today

Tomorrow will be dying.

Robert Herrick, “To The Virgins, To Make Much of Time”

Hesperides, Public Domain

INT. KANE'S BEDROOM - FAINT DAWN - 1940

A snow scene. An incredible one. Big, impossible flakes of snow, a too picturesque

farmhouse and a snow man. The jingling of sleigh bells in the musical score now

makes an ironic reference to Indian Temple bells - the music freezes -

KANE'S OLD OLD VOICE

Rosebud...

The camera pulls back, showing the whole scene to be contained in one of those glass

balls which are sold in novelty stores all over the world. A hand - Kane's hand,

which has been holding the ball, relaxes. The ball falls out of his hand and bounds

down two carpeted steps leading to the bed, the camera following. The ball falls

off the last step onto the marble floor where it breaks, the fragments glittering in

the first rays of the morning sun. This ray cuts an angular pattern across the

floor, suddenly crossed with a thousand bars of light as the blinds are pulled

across the window.

Herman J. Mankiewicz & Orson Welles, opening scene fragment,

Academy Award winning screenplay for the film,CITIZEN KANE, 1941

copyright, all rights reserved, RKO pictures, 1940; Turner Entertainment, licensee

I

The sacred opens for you the way you wish

And dream. Running when you should be sitting

Turning your lightning moves into mudras

Will take you into the garden before sunrise;

Can you stand the dark? Can you tell saguaros

From the shamans they used to be? Ask yourself:

Are you loping toward Lhasa, or Las Vegas?

II

We gather out of loneliness, and grope for fear

Of encountering no one. When you read my words

Don’t you find them strange, though the voice

Echoes your own, beckoning you back home?

How can a stranger help you do more than fix

your television or toaster? Yet doctors revive

Their patients in rooms painted bardo white.

Nobody dies before they live, once upon a time.

III

Your past lives are yesterday and the day before

if you pay more attention to the carpet stain

than the wine spilled. You disappear into smoke,

and your grand-nephews gobble cake and try

not to act bored. That is, if they are well-bred;

if they haven’t shed a real tear for a grey figure

now gone; if they can’t see the cord rise from

the coffin in effulgence, sensing that it’s you.

IV

Whatever gets your attention gets you. Have you

Found your own words for this on a wet slippery day

You cannot forget, because you braked in time?

Or on a hot scary night when you saw him keel over

But he didn’t, since you sent your love through the air?

Will you place rude stones by your path or cultivate

rosebuds? Will you do it in waking sleep, or not at all?

Valentine From The Edge of The Milky Way

for Angela Claire Dotson

You are the cynosure of God's gaze
which rests forever upon you
You are your own blazing sun
whose fire and heat shall not be quenched
in ten thousand million light years
You are the worthy comrade of a gentle man
who will practice bonhomie and understanding
when at last he spirals inward to your heart
You do not have to worry he is out there
You can see him in your mind's starry eye
You can practice seeing him if you look hard
into a telescope and add a pretend mustache
You are my friend whom I adore from my outpost
at the edge of this easily traversed galaxy
You are my angel of thought my clair de lune
and today you are my valentine

A Captain of Industry To His Snoring Spouse, Upon Hearing Of The First Bird Flu Cases In Nigeria

for Isabel Cara Martin

You listening or half asleep? Fast asleep? Africa is free

To die in astonishment, up, down, across the continent,

since the drugs won’t come in time, and when they make port

shall surely get diluted, polluted, or looted by new ‘inheritors.’

Those to be cured will find Death’s maw opening for them

in every hut. May Death gobble them up without much pain.

Wake up! Kicking this globe about while night ticks down

how can I consume--alone!-- today’s tidbits of tragedy?

How can I disport in the forecast of the future damned?

EXITING AMERICA'S BRAINPAN FASTER THAN A ZAPRUDER BULLET

a sonnet for Stephen Joseph Walter

You, bloodstained neuropath, hail from a lust tribe

whose bar coded groupmind bleats: Inhale! Inject! Imbibe!

Why not leave off shooting thrill shit into its archaic pit

when you don’t like the limbic kill shot one bit?

Why not transmit honest aims beyond stunted whims

like uncaught limbs

on unbought trees, swinging free,

synaptic breeze wafting with ease o’er your spree?

Why not find some berth in the cells’ toxic earth

for growth of what merchants loathe: True worth?

Why not implore no more your core whore, dealer, liar?

Nor heed your inner judge, assassin, mummifier?

Why not halt mad urges for clout? End a grim self-rout?

Why not surrender the grey redoubt and scout a way out?

Feb. 3--10, 2006

Winterbourne Alive With Fever

for Inmaculada Cara Martin

This invalid's taken a powder;

the condemned line up in order.

Viruses, fall out!

Bacilli, prepare to die!

Winter consumes us all

down to the loneliest spark

pulsating through microbial flesh.

The leaky tap drips drabs of life

while I stand before the mirror,

gushing eye phlegm."It's cold out!"

I honk at the spout. "Cold! Cold! Cold!"

A misted face regards me, so weathered.
Oh, snot and blubber. I'm better!

NIEVE EN GRANADA

UNA MENTE BLANCA

para Francisco Bartolome, quiosquero de Plaza Nueva

Que mi mente sea blanca como la caída
De nieve immaculada de la Sierra Nevada.
Pero solo si la gente puede convivir vencida
Por la paz—¡no la pureza!-- en Granada.

Yo, Buscando La Verdad De Mi Mismo

find truth behind the pain, and you've got paradise!

SHE

for Marianne Beth Walter
(an excerpt from the forthcoming novel, IN THE SHADOW OF THE ALHAMBRA.)



He was one day shy of his seventh birthday when he had the vision that made him understand that the world was a lot bigger, scarier and stranger than his dawning mind or its half-formed, childish beliefs might ever grasp.
It was dusk. A smoldering carmine LA sun was setting behind a metallic haze over the city park’s baseball field at the end of the street. He and his nine-year old sister had been rolling again and again through the thick spurge grass down into the ivy in front of his family’s house. Running, rolling and tumbling across a sloping overgrown weed lawn into unkempt tangles of vines—the men who spoke a singing language hadn’t come to cut the ivy hedges in weeks-- then getting up again when they’d almost reached the gutter to scurry back to the top to start again. Both of them lost in whirling crunching contact with the grass’ wet mushiness, then the ivy’s crisp inertial tug of fronds.
Finally he couldn’t get up anymore. He was lying on his back almost hidden in the pungent ivy bed, too dizzy to make sounds beyond desperate breathing, his head still spinning after at least a dozen of his manic sibling’s singsong Jack and Jills go up the hill....time had slowed down, as it often seemed to do during the Angelus bell at school when all the pupils, big kids as well as small ones, were forced to stand as still as statues. He found himself much like a statue now, petrified by a loss of control over his body and his mind at the same time. Something went off like a bang at the top of his skull, leaving him seeing spots coming in waves instead of the waxy green fronds covering him. Abruptly, he could not even will himself to take in the slightest gulp of air.
Now he lay as helpless and motionless as an inanimate action figure whose owner had stopped playing with it and left the yard. He heard his sister by his side, giggling and breathing hard. There was a clapping noise between his ears. His jaw began to vibrate, and things started to happen.
He was looking up at a darkening blood streaked sky. Suddenly, he felt himself float up out of himself and up into the encroaching night. How strange! If fear had not already seized him, wonder might have won him over. For now he was looking down at himself from the outside, as if watching a film. He saw a small blonde boy in a grass-stained white T-shirt and ragged brown corduroy shorts staring upward with surprised wide open eyes.
Then the looking at himself changed. His face and bare arms and legs began to catch fire and glow bright orange and red. The part of him doing the looking floated further away from his own terrified face now covered in flames. He was hovering about ten feet above his own fiery body. He saw that his sister was gone; she had disappeared from the lawn, her mocking laugh no longer echoed anywhere. He was alone, buried in the entangling acrid morass of ivy vines, burning up!
Although he could not feel the heat of his flesh searing and unraveling, he could sense the agony he might have felt if he were not haplessly separated from himself at this instant. He knew he needed to—had to!-- get back down to his body, but didn’t know how. He flashed on his favorite story character: Curious George the monkey, who had hung from balloon strings above the city, unable to figure a way back down to solid earth. He felt like the grinning little ape now but in even worse shape since he couldn't grin and he wasn't just detached from the world but also from his head, his torso, his arms, his legs: every part of himself. He wasn't like the naughty monkey, after all. No, he was more like a ghost, floating above his own corpse.
Then She arrived. At first it seemed She was coming straight up from the ivy underneath him. Then he saw that Her fantastic presence was igniting into form out of his own blazing body. She was arrowing right out of him, a brightness rising up and taking shape into a gigantic dark-haired Goddess with a fierce crazy-looking exotic face and a bosom bigger than his Mom's and—strangest of all for his child mind to take in, despite its familiarity with monsters and dragons--long snakes extended out of Her belly, their mouths opening and clothing in dreadful resonance. Her legs wide open , and She was fully exposed in all Her womanhood, utterly naked in her ascent toward his dangling helpless view . He saw many things happening as She rose out of his body and lifted Her hands up toward him above the snakes' writhing copper heads glowing with swiveling yellow eyes. He tried to move away in full recoil, but after all he was only an empty place holder in space and She was materializing from pure light directly out of him, at him! He started to desperately recite the Hail Mary prayer in his speechless throat—“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord be with You….”—but there were so many fearsome snakes,and he was frightened half to death, and he could not hear their parlous hissing or the rippling noises of their coiling as they closed in on him.
She was speaking in a language he didn’t understand in a voice below him, perhaps into his body’s superheated ears. She kept rising slowly right toward him for the longest time--he was nothing but an abstract point of view at this stage. The pythons that grew out of Her midriff were swirling toward him frenziedly; Her own snake-like tongue wagging with urgent fervor while Her enormous cone-tipped mammaries jiggled and swung. At last, when Her incandescence was upon him, he suddenly collapsed into his boy’s body again. He wasn’t on fire anymore—his clothing wasn’t even smoking-- but his arms and legs and face felt scalded and raw.
Now he saw through his own straining, teary eyes Her ascent into the sky. He watched Her as if She were a spacecraft lifting off; Her undulating appendages emanated a greenish, purplish aura in their wake. He did not take his eyes off Her until She became the first and only star to twinkle in the bright smoggy firmament.
He lay there for a while, shivering, until he began to breathe again.
It was years later that he realized that this had been the moment when he'd lost all reverence for the holy statues in the church. In turn, he'd truly discovered the sense of awe that he would try to recapture for the rest of his life.
For She had been awesome. Yes, worthy of the awe reserved only for a god, or goddess.
There must have been a reason She had visited him. He knew this. It had to be--visions like his don't happen without a reason
She had reserved a mission for him. The mission still existed; it was as if time had not elapsed at all. As if he was still waiting for dthe Angelus bell to ring.
A divine mission, waiting for him to accomplish.
Only for him.
He alone.