Nosferatu is Sold Out

Here is the truth:
Although vampires exist,
they do not
Suck your blood like everyone thinks.
Instead
They suck your life away
Like a vacuum cleaner on your soul.
I am not beautiful
And I will sing in spite of you.
Streetlamps flicker and I almost see
The moon,
Denied for an orb that glows artificial.
She pales in comparison.
Someone appears in the doorway of the Angelika,
A raving lunatic with Lennon spectacles and
Zoot Suit shoes.
Nosferatu is sold out!
Nosferatu is sold out!
Still available with limited seating:
Pulp Fiction. The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Sanity.
When I asked if you remembered the Cuban documentary,
“Si” and vapor billowed from your mouth
And you thought of your mother alone at home
Cooking beans and rice in a tiny blue kitchen.
I can’t breathe, but I can wonder.
I can hang my arms over the sides of the bed
Even though a monster might pull me under
And down
Into black infinity.
What now?
The Anjelika reclines on the corner like a bored starlet
While lines of eager souls wind down the street
Like a tail on a kite, waiting for
Sweet escape from panicked lives.
Occasionally the night exhales in a weary sigh.
No matter
What you say or what you wear,
Who you kiss,
There you are.
One hundred black wool coats huddle on the stairway.
One hundred yellow taxis push forward into destiny.
Two men kiss.
Jack Sprat could eat no fat but
Loneliness would have driven him into the nuthouse
In spite of himself.
The psychotic usher reappears:
Cinema Paradiso is sold out.
Let’s go now amid groans
Down to SoHo,
Past the lime-green El Camino staking its claim
Half on the curb
Half off.
That much rust should be against the law.
Eight dogs on a leash at midnight,
One sliver of happiness poking out of the madness.
It is late.
The moon moves on, hidden, humming.
We wander.

Journey to Freezer

(cold)
door opens down into nothing but
dark and nothing
ghosts sleep everywhere especially in the basement
where
old stone weeps like a wistful castle
(arthur calling his love)
I enter
they hide under the stairs
crumbling monument of mildew and mud
seeping through the cracks in the wall
a hand will reach out and
grab my foot but I walk slowly anyway
to tempt them
(run fast-stepping toe-creeping)
one more step
glow from above the rectangular moon
breathes light into dank
into slithering underground wilderness
I creep downward
shudder at each sound mouse scratching tiny claws
in the corner or
slick salamander jolted into view by the angry monster
behind the stairs
awakened by a cold draft
baby cries from above so far away it may as well be
outer space
beyond uranus dark and vast as here
mold alive underfoot
(watch out for the nails)
salty lips dreaming sweet
I am not afraid
I am not afraid but
I am bone-chilled but I am
Darkness
wicked laughter from above
and a door slams in a parallel universe
death stench rises small deaths have nowhere to
retire no earth womb to return to
only stone and cement
rotten
cold feet reluctant
breath reluctant
voice calls hurry up down there
I cannot if you run the ghosts chase you
and devour your soul
never fear
open the ice-packed mausoleum
(dead body inside juliet) grab the
ice cream and
bolt

That's Me in the Corner

I wish I could.
Just do it
(or so I’m told,
and so on and so on and so on).
Can’t we all? Just get
A long way to Pasedena or Punxetawny or Pensecola
Or some such place where
I’m a maniac,
Maniac, and
I will raise my hand if I’m sure
I’ve fallen
And I can’t get up.
I ask not what my country can do
For me, but
Never mind.
Be good.
I want to fly like an eagle.
I want to bang a gong.
Whatever.
Whatever, I said.
No.
New taxes, Auld Lang Syne.
I look marvelous,
As if I believe the children
are the future,
But I can’t believe
What we have here is failure.
To communicate, I don’t know
What. A feeling.
I only know. I’ve got the right.
Stuff born.
To run, baby, on.
Bored, I am strong enough
For a man.
I’m going to have to.
Face it -
I’m addicted.
To love, I am one hundred percent not guilty.
Oh, what?
A relief, it is.
I am not a crook.
I made him.
An offer, he couldn’t refuse, for
I have the power.
I am the Piano Man
And the Walrus.
I am all. That I can be.
I am the resurrection and the life
And the material girl.
Do you feel lucky?
Well,
Do you?
I hate:
Snakes. Designing. Women.
I have a dream:
I want to be an airborne ranger you
Can’t handle.
The truth?
This is me, All of me.

Elements

This is what I love about the world:
The sun in September, warming my arms
Like a blanket from the dryer,
Like a bonfire blazing in a frost-covered field,
Or copper, in a sky and all hot,
Turning the insides of my eyelids into rusted infinity
As I listen to the silence of sundown;
Like tomato soup.

The wind kissing my face
Like a wisp of stray hair,
Like a woman grazing her lover’s hand in forbidden touch
Many lifetimes ago,
Or a gentle breath that confirms life amid quiet slumber;
Like perfume.

This is what I love:
The sun and the wind as I sit on a curb,
Elements
Oblivious to imperfection,
Unaware of chipping paint or unpaid bills
Or ugly schoolgirls with broken hearts.
The sun, warming me just the same as it warms
The waitress from D’Arlecchino with the long chestnut hair
Or the old man sleeping in the alley.

Dancing with the Sun People

It wasn’t until later that she realized what had happened, much later, after she had been sitting by the fountain for some time, one hand holding a Styrofoam cup half-full of cappuccino, the other brushing windswept hair from her tired eyes. Periodically, she sipped. A stiff October wind forced her to breathe in a lifetime of insignificant events and blurred priorities, but for now, in this moment, they did not surface and only passed over her like a rainy-day shadow. Across the quad, like a stoic guard of old, stood the old law library. Its crumbled staircase climbed somberly up to the entrance like a Greek temple she once saw in Life magazine. For one second it seemed possible that she might someday touch the pillars of some such Parthenon or dance naked with the Sun-people as they worshipped dancing gods.

A trail of somber, robotic students rushed by like an out-of-control assembly line, blindly searching for their classrooms through hangovers and desperate all-nighters. I am solitude, she wondered, unaware. I am. A curly-haired man walked around the fountain, and then back again, and she imagined having slow sex with him underneath the moon, slow, deliberate love without names or conditions or complications of the familiar. She crossed and uncrossed her legs. Took a sip of cappuccino. Then crossed her legs again. She didn’t remember to think about job interviews or homework or growing old, about her clock ticking, so many clocks, or the dishes piled high in her kitchen sink, a monument to procrastination.

Forgetfulness can be a glorious thing if you don’t realize you have forgotten.

Someone yelled, “Fuck!” and she returned to now, sensing a pending urgency of some kind, something that needed to be taken care of right now, that she should be doing instead of this. Something dire and more important than cappuccino and gods.

Somewhere, in that brief eternity between awake and unaware, she couldn’t help but laugh.