Where will all the music go if you bomb us?
Do the fashion magazines lie?
I hate to be serious, North Korea.

But there are stations playing all night here
and sometimes the disc jockeys spin
old dreams of love
almost no one knows, awkward frequencies
announcing us to the stars.

It was the dark black smoke of la grifa
that killed Nevarez one night in April
sitting in bed, hands on the only woman
who ever loved him.

            From the dream world I crossed
            into yours to get a haircut,
            but it wasn't that simple.
            The first time I saw you was after
            I had argued with the barber about
            the length of my sideburns

            Fernando Pessoa crosses the Atlantic and it's dark,
            dark like the river Styx. In the distance
            he sees the last lights, the rockets, the bright flares
            of the Titanic. It's before radio. Somehow, though,
            he knows that Leonardo Dicaprio is freezing in the cold still water, and that Kate Winslett is floating
            like an angel above him on piece of bulkhead.

            After twelve years, you’d think the long stretches
            of black birch and dogwood I’ve endured
            on my drives back East would’ve painted me
            the way they inhabit the long Pennsylvania winter.

            If it was all a dream of cute, mid-atlantic odalisques
            and deep chasms holding deeper rivers

            Fernando Pessoa crosses the Atlantic and it's dark,
            dark like the river Styx. In the distance
            he sees the last lights, the rockets, the bright flares
            of the Titanic. It's before radio. Somehow, though,
            he knows that Leonardo Dicaprio is freezing in the cold
            still water, and that Kate Winslett is floating
            like an angel above him on piece of bulkhead.

        1.
        Every morning
        I take little
        white pills to save me
        from rage
        rage against
        the fuckers who bought
        the election
        this time
        rage against
        the black
        cops who beat me

Out here in the midwest, in the Great Lake states, summer is tranquil and lush: there are so many lightning bugs on the lawn, there are hints and whispers of night birds chasing one another over thick corn fields and alfalfa fields. Among this season's certainties, the Gipper is dead, laid low by Alzheimer's, sent from us in a fitting Presidential tribute. He was a man who became larger-than-life for the sake of all of us reading these pages. The death of Ronald Wilson Reagan passed like a beacon-comet for those of us who grew up in the 80's.

            The last dance on Bayita Lane
            was like the fading night
            blooming cerus' memory, like
            the hothouse uprooted, replaced
            by cheap cane furniture

        The swell of mid-atlantic waves is not
        an indication of the love I found
        out of your reach on the the last pier facing
        the annihilating surf. El Morro
        still rises like a barnacled scuba diver