You're a real big man, Naso, a real stud
            in public,

            At any given moment

            even language, which

            is not clear,

            and always dissolves—

            even language, which

            the mind created,

            Late afternoon, yellow light sideways across sand
            September sidles up to the season
            Days disappear into dust
            Kicked up by convoys conducting presence patrols

It's been reported that before his tearful plea for forgiveness from the family and friends whose trust he admits betraying, congressman and former flying ace Randall "Duke" Cunningham rather unceremoniously wore a wire around congress and spent some time talking with some of those very friends he later sold out. But that's not what I started out to write about.

            His heart the texture of a rose,
            his tongue a swath of sky,
            his manner delicate-now

            chatting with what many call
            a beast: the look in the eyes rabid,
            black: on the skirts of the village

            Use your eyes like shovels, dig through the smog, the muck
            in your head and see the mountains beyond the skyscrapers.

            Something is rising like bread within you, but the slightest noise...

            Twist your neck like an owl back to when you collected days like squirrels.

            When time was weak and green, unable to burn for anything.

            Wash your shoes, you've walked on all the dead of the world,

            and it's catching. Take time, as long as no one sees you

           The pain in my head is simply the wind trying to

                                                                                        spray

                            itself out of my ears     my eyes     my mouth     but they are so full

                                        of the blood of all the seasons before

            Turning creaks my bed.
            Nothing wakes me anymore.
            Where did summer go?

            Computer death clicks.
            That guy owes me a dollar.
            Dirty laundry chair.

            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