It all started the year I went as a cowboy to Christmas...
____

Kind of gazing out of my window, on the third floor,
with my lamp on behind me,
the contents of my room are quietly superimposed
over eleven p.m. Oakland.
My TV is 18 stories high,
and my head the size of the Mariott.

The suggestion is that the world
isn't a stage at all,
but a vast studio audience,
with maybe only the laugh light
burned out, or something.

Is every window like this?
so that the city sits like
a projected pile of faces

and personal effects?
Perhaps an interlocking grid of couples
making love in the dark,
pretending they are who they are,
for once, pedaling the other's name
through mouths propped open
by the other's name.
____

On the way here, I saw a kite caught in a power line.
I say: "caught," but I like to think: "perched."
____

"There comes a point, even by 'round-the-world
balloonists standards, the risks become just too high."
(SF Chronicle, 8-18-01)
____

Imagine my embarassment
on Take Our Daughters to Work Day:
this dollar book, this office of grass in Berkeley
where she might watch a bum move ten feet
every two hours to stay sleeping in the sun.

Will I point at a building ledge
and say: "line break in the cloud-book"?
or at an old man in a window
and say, "single drop of bottled father"?
____

A thing balanced how I found it.
____

An American Indian: a doublecross.
Reservation-born, casino-bred,
always thinking,
"They must have someone on the inside."
____

"On June 26th, in the magistrates court,
Rene Mons was sentenced to 3 months in jail for defeatism."
____

She was a stranger to being alone,
she told me. I thought,
what a truly monstrous name tag
we're talking about.
____

An interlocking grid of couples
making love in the dark.
Pretending they are who they are,
for once, pedaling the other's name
through mouths propped open
by the other's name.
____

Blacking my thumbs to inkprint
my reading-the-city-paper-in-the-morning face,
so that later in the afternoon,
in the police line-up of my daily selves,
I could recognize myself,

and I peel page after page 'till I've struck
the half-buried ruin of the Opinion masthead,
where every letter-to-the-editor begins,
"Editor-what short memories we have."
____

"We cried in front of our TVs"
that flashed alive behind the curtains
on a turned-off street, carrying a code
in the strobing of supernatural color
to the other curtains across the way.

Are the news, the commercials, themselves
mere semaphore? Is it all light and tube
on walls, through windows,
to explain to a bewildered midnight street
why one human boards a crowded bus
with a homemade bomb to their chest,
and another finds a living
in a wordless, uninhabited body?

Sometimes, when the patented "wind off the bay,"
blows blinds all wrong in the open air,
the message becomes,
"A mad model on a catwalk in the West Bank."
"A guerilla opens smile and ducks into the clamor
of the new fall line."