ITS ALL PART OF THE PUNISHMENT by Jimmy A.

Lerner ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Fence Skeptic appeared in the Winter 2000 (issue #14) of Rattle. At The Hebrew Home For The Aged: 1957 appeared in the Winter 2000 issue of Weber Studies Because They Would Not Give Me The Golf Cart, Convict Carping, How Shapiro Got On My Shit List and Writers Block appeared in the Summer 2001 issue of Weber Studies. And Shapiros Little Dog, Too! appeared in the Fall, 2001 issue of The Massachusetts Review. The Day I Forgot To Take My Prozac will appeared in the Fall, 2001 issue of The Cedar Hill Review.

I. The Punishment Isn't Working 1. FENCE SKEPTIC 2. WRITER'S BLOCK 3. BECAUSE THEY WOULD NOT GIVE ME THE GOLF CART 4. CELLMATE 5. CONVICT CARPING 6. EX-CELLMATE 7. PENITENTIARY DISPATCH 8. HI! WE ARE YOUR PAROLE BOARD 9. IN THE PRISON WAITING ROOM 10. HOUSE OF FALLING DIMES 11. MASLOW NEVER MET MONGO 12. THESE DAWGS 13. EXISTENTIAL PUNK 14. DEATH ROW 15. YOU DIDN'T LIVE WITH IT 16. FELONIOUS PHLEGM 17. ONLY WHEN HES DOING HARD TIME

FENCE SKEPTIC Mommy warned me not to do it Jimmy, dont put that bobby pin in the outlet daddy drove me to the emergency room, mommy still in shock. Daddy warned me not to do it Jimmy, dont touch the hot stove, youll burn your hand mommy drove me to the hospital, daddy still steaming. They say the fence here is electrified that this is how some of us learn, beneath the guntowers behind the razor wire. I stroll the yard, my keen convicted mind wondering if the fence to freedom

will really deliver 50,000 volts. WRITERS BLOCK because I wouldnt shut up, after 6 days in Suicide Watch Cell No. 3 the prison shrink pronounces me sufficiently stable to be entrusted with a pencil stub suitable for 9 rounds of golf dull, no eraser no mistakes! and one blank sheet of paper slides under the steel door; the old terror of tabula rasa, the strain to say something . . . Significant (which has driven better men than me to unsupervised suicide) spawns this tired graffito on the cinderblock wall: THE WAY OUT IS THE WAY IN. but my backup plan is better: an origami airplane to fly through the cell door and over the guntowers. tomorrow I think I will ask for a bowl of chocolate ice cream and a golf cart.

BECAUSE THEY WOULD NOT GIVE ME

THE GOLF CART or the chocolate ice cream, I spend the next four days banging my head against the wire-mesh window of the cell door (How do you suppose they thread that heavy metal gauge into the glass?) til my face is a tall ship sailing inside a blood-streaked bottle. What do you want, six-one-six-threefour? The cops face coiled at the window, clenched tight as a waiting fist behind a trick question . . . What do I want? Lets see . . . I want a Presidential pardon, a Papal blessing followed by a ticker-tape parade down Broadway. I want 10 free piano lessons, high-speed Internet access and a pony for Christmas. I want my head to stop hurting, a trip to Disneyland, an icy mocha Frappuccino from Starbucks. I want a time machine I want my mommy I want that magic summer when Suzys sweet sixteen lips brushed mine for the first time . . . Not for the first time I answer: Sorry, officer, I just want a roll of toilet paper. CELLMATE during the Jerry Springer

commercials it likes to boast of all the bitches it has boned (and how they liked it) as gray underwear drips from paper clips it has taped to the cinderblock wall. Later it will eat maybe shower definitely shit then wet dream of the girl who reported it. CONVICT CARPING in the convict chow hall (grapefruit and gravy) our pasts secure in ruin, we build the wreckage of our futures with little plastic spoons. Caint even vote for prezdent mourns Mongo (our reluctant recidivist) caint keep no guns (the litany unfurls) caint get no god dame liquor license (like a fishing pole). While I scoop out the grapefruit (it does not glitter pink) grateful that my children will be spared the truth the sight of Mongo drunk, armed, uninformed at the local voting booth. EX-CELLMATE

Mongo swears there is a little green worm growing inside his head. Our prison cell is too small to contain such intimate sharing. The worm feeds on his thoughts, bulks up on brain blood once it glows it will become a snake that will tell him to do more bad things. Because good cellmates should bond over time, I finally tell Mongo about the chatty yogurt-fleshed creatures that once lived in my refrigerator, razor-toothed and ravenous for the little green worms they ordered me to bring them. Mongo does not share with me anymore. The medication must be working.

PENITENTIARY DISPATCH #3 From the concrete caves deep beneath the surface of Savage Planet, your convicted correspondent stands ready to file his annual report key learnings gleaned from a few dark years unliving among the tattooed tribes: snobbery will get you killed almost as fast as humility; showing fear will get you hurt but not as fatally as compassion. Its best to go native in dress and speech Yunnerstan what Im sayin, dawg? Never refer to a tribesman as a punk-ass bitch,

even in jest. Given enough time you can cultivate a bad-ass goatee, a Satanic demeanor encased in iron, worshipped at the weight pile. Lose your teeth (amphetamines will help), gain a tattoo- a small tasteful swastika on the neck is the current rage. When it is your turn to play lookout at the Saturday night gang rape, hosted by a new reluctant guest, always bring some cell-brewed pruno (fermented oranges are a good choice) for the party organizers. Be generous to ensure you are not hosting this event next weekend. Above all, tend to that secret holy place, the uneasy sanctuary of a soul in escrow. Sow the soil with half-remembered snatches of songs and poems and childhood prayers, perhaps the gamy Sunday smell of your first-born kicking in the winning soccer goal, or the sweet salt scent of a once magical lover. For each of us it is as different as the type of armor we wear one mans clich is anothers epiphany his love, her fear. It is lonely here. Do not descend to the dark place unarmed, alone.

HI! WE ARE YOUR PAROLE BOARD You squirt out of convicted wombs convulsing with grievances, contorting yourselves with painful notions of justice, squalls of redemption and born again nonsense, forcing us to sever your umbilical delusions with the slow scalpel of supreme indifference. So in the interest of full disclosure let us make this as bold as the fresh tattoos that bloom faster than your beloved bad-ass goatees: This is about as personal as taking out the garbage on Sunday morning and if anyone still does not get it try this recipe for insanity: Lock yourself in your cell for one hour. Breathe in fear, contemplating the concept of fairness, then repeat next year.

IN THE PRISON WAITING ROOM The woman waits for her blue-shirted hard man counting the Ziplocked quarters she will feed the machines for candy and cigarettes, the microwaved chicken wings they always share for lunch. The man will kiss her and smile,

will try to fill the years between them with the sparkling promise of parole and the memories of Prom Night, his hand brushing her cheek, a pale canvas for his glowing plans. The woman will nod bravely, soft hands not straying to her left breast where a walnut hardens and waits, a last dance waltz.

HOUSE OF FALLING DIMES Here at The Penal Colony the resentful guests luxuriate in manly martyrdom, blaming it all on The Bitch Who Snitched Me Out who also goes by The Bitch Who Dropped a Dime (on my sorry ass). Her name is Legion this treacherous girlfriend/fianc/common-law/wife, pronounced Be-Yatch (two syllables, say them fast) startling in her ubiquity this Oz girl behind the curtain that darkens a righteous mans life. The Be-Yatch will be there for him when he saunters out the gate, her skirt short, stretched tight as her smile, her eager purse still bursting with dimes. MASLOW NEVER MET MONGO

who has a semi-private prison cell, a warm dark place to defecate and defile himself, the 13 inch TV flickering like a cave fire of Saturday morning cartoons. In a season or two, perhaps in Spring, his tumescent thoughts will transcend TV and turn to Love (the tough, unconditional kind). Years later, slack-jawed and sated, he stumbles across the Discovery Channel a special about crude paintings discovered on cave walls the precise moment when Mongo (tattoo gun trembling above his muraled chest) self-actualizes.

THESE DAWGS buried alive beneath the wire below the guntower, these wannabe hard cases (pale trailer trash faces) blaze alive kicking it with their dawgs their homies (Yunnerstan what Im sayin?), craving dental attention they smoke and joke Old Home Week

at juvenile detention within the cave walls they chisel stone torsos paint temples with tattoo engravings tribal ravings splashed on arms, legs, chests they etch the names in blue, in black of girls who have already faded to Sancho to Jody and Cadillac Jack but these are joyous dawgs! righteous dawgs, relentlessly praying jackals braying for candy, coffee and smokes (yunnerstan what Im sayin?) howling on the phone up in the mix never alone these dawgs, once lost now found still damned, these dawgs are home! EXISTENTIAL PUNK Hell is other people. Sartre He went to college and wouldnt believe it; went to war and still couldnt see it. Even in prison, withered by the tyranny of routine, he thought that Hell was just places and things, like his 8 x 6 concrete cage or the slow gray exhalation of days, the razored waste of sky.

It took more than books and words, more than the war and the wire; it took the iron embrace of a cellmate named Mongo, 300 pounds of pounding heat and tattooed sweat to convince him what every 3rd grader beset by the schoolyard bully knows: that Sartre was right. DEATH ROW One might mistake it for a holy place hushed, cavernous, the walls moist with the tears of a million unanswered prayers. This is the place of unholy ghosts, the place of the shadow people shackled to the cave wall insensate, beyond the succor of self-pity or God. We gauge the time til lunch by the jangling of the turnkey, a death rattle. YOU DIDNT LIVE WITH IT We heard you singing last night somewhere outside these walls, righteous candles raised to Heaven, you marched and prayed while they strapped him down for the last time. Perhaps you thought it was human because it loved TV and chocolate and children, enjoyed the blueberry pancakes they shoved through the food slot

for the last time. It could not read, but it liked to tear out the pictures from the magazines of all the pretty girls it admired and hoped, one day, to kill.

FELONIOUS PHLEGM The prison yard is dappled with it like a shooting range where the ejected dead cartridges lie everywhere. At first I thought it was the chain smoking, the harsh hand rollies congesting the lungs or maybe something hanging in the barbed air where the desert banshees howl sand into silent open mouths or even (God forbid) the food, until years later impoverished by this abundance of time and the futility of words, I realize it is just the Spartan language of the powerless. ONLY WHEN HES DOING HARD TIME On certain nights his prison cell fills with bright music from across the lake, the laughter light and young, skipping and spilling over the water and the miles and the years, the waters rich and sparkling with promise, the girls voice calling to him from a sailboat

her legs tanned against the startling white of summer shorts and billowed sails, her voice a warm embrace across the years. He thinks now there may have been a time when they shared a secret language and he could have called out to her, could have bound her to him with the right words or a clever touch, could have reeled his courage and hope and pride into a tight line and yoked his life to hers before she sailed on and the world moved on without him.

II. The Therapy Isn't Working 1. ECT SESSION #3 2. HOW SHAPIRO GOT ON MY SHIT LIST 3. SYNANON DREAMS 4. THE HOSPITAL ALSO HAS A SANDBOX 5. AND SHAPIRO'S LITTLE DOG TOO 6. THERAPEUTIC COMMUNITY 7. 13TH STEP 8. AT THE SUSHI BAR 9. THE THERAPY DIDN'T TAKE 10. BIMBO REDUX 11. MAYBE WE SHOULD JUST UP THE DOSAGE 12. WHY CAN'T SHE JUST WATCH JEOPARDY? 13. LEPKE AT 50: IN LOVE AGAIN 14. NEVER SAW IT COMING 15. THE HUSBANDS OF THE FRESHLY BATTERED WIVES 16. THE DAY I FORGOT TO TAKE MY PROZAC 17. LEPKES (NEWLY EMPOWERED) BRAIN

ECT SESSION #3 We dont call it electro-shock anymore; Its electro-convulsive therapy. Dr. Irving Shapiro There is a hushed room at the hospital, a shock of white and slumbering cold metal waiting for Susan to surrender her clenched secrets. (Theres a tangle of them, the doctor whispers, twisted around her throat . . . her heart . . .) Beneath the rigid sheet her fingertips tremble toward the bone bleached bend of her face, the temples razed and violated so that the patient might live, kneeling among the ruins. HOW SHAPIRO GOT ON MY SHIT LIST Now that we are a nation where all roads lead to confession data highways of dysfunction, the unquiet mind the memoir noir I send The Wife away to the marriage shrink alone and blind (requesting she return with insights and a six-pack) while I fondle the remote control wondering where she has hidden my pistachio nuts this time,

already mourning her merciless return, resurrected, twitching with breakthroughs and pills: Dr. Shapiro says youre insensitive, you lack listening skills. How does a man explain that we listen but we can not hear over the music resounding, this endless symphony of self-love pounding pounding, pounding in our ears.

SYNANON DREAMS of her howling past midnight and reason another Saturday night Guilt Session. I flip over her hole card, Patty pulls the covers til she weeps in the approved primal manner, the bloated bag of imagined iniquity punctured at last: Pity, pity, for loves sake, the needles pitiless, a spill of pain, guilt, progress, she wilts cracking with the dawn a new day still unclean, reborn.

THE HOSPITAL ALSO HAS A SANDBOX Her head a bundle of bandages Susan plays in the backyard with a ball peen hammer and a bucket of eggs. The tapping gentle, persistent, a clinical curiosity. They give her a three-ringed binder to log the results - the key findings after seven years: hammer 42,513 eggs - 0. Preliminary insights noted: Whether the hammer hits the egg or the egg hits the hammer its always bad for the egg. AND SHAPIROS LITTLE DOG TOO Before Dr. Shapiro pronounced her bipolar (No cure) she was just a cranky bitch I could ignore. But a Disease, like Fashion, demands attention, even dignity for its Victims who wield their symptoms like manic swords. Tomorrow at four, Ill take a fifty minute hour with Shapiro

this is war! THERAPEUTIC COMMUNITY the whores name encountered on a slip of paper we found in The Resentment Box long after the blood tracked down her white arms beneath her shaved head eyebrows razored into the pot sink mute, shunned we scrubbed our sins for 90 days (the first step is to touch your own pain) til the midnight sisters came for her bound her shame to The Chair screaming (cum-sucking maggot dope fiend piece a shit) always behind The Love which they taught you cant keep unless you give it away.

13TH STEP (with apologies to Bill W.) Before the wondrous spreading of her cheerleader legs (dare I go there?) and always my cigarette

exhausted, after, the endless double lattes my forced Starbucks laughter (the things an old man endures for love). Aint the twelve steps awesome? she demands, (so pretty the mouth) you must be a cancer; (so lush the lips) Perhaps a mocha I always answer. Im a spiritual man angelic eyes raised to moist heavens, damp rapture in hand, but beneath her straining sheets the beast, unleashed this cancerous old man.

AT THE SUSHI BAR Gibbering with the glow of the Born Again, this New Age nymph holding forth: Whenever a door closes, a window opens. Spearing my sushi I smile, swallowing the epiphany of an open window (the silent crowbar), two junkies tumbling through with VCR eyes with butcher knives best to leave the door ajar.

THE THERAPY DIDNT TAKE at the Anger Management class we watch dull-eyed as the shrink, Dr. Nudelman, proffers punk-ass options, and empowering alternatives to the heat singing in my blood. (There are wounds that never heal with words with reason with kindness only the blood song) I am learning again to count to ten, that the twisted thought is father to the deed so I misshape a thought of Nudelman twisting from the meat hook in my garage, leaking options between screams. Count to ten fast, I suggest, so sweetly empowered at last.

BIMBO REDUX This time the bimbo assaults me with mindless optimism, the glass is half-full she bludgeons

with platitudes over plates of steak tartar, the wine steward scuttling, a smarmy twit stalking my wallet. No stranger to pretentious repartee I raise my glass (half empty) the crystal snapping: What is the sound, my dear, of one hand clapping? MAYBE WE SHOULD JUST UP THE DOSAGE because the pills dont work against a brain that flits birdlike between the nested pain of the past and the certain wreckage of the future, Dr. Shapiro suggests I try to Be Here Now, to Embrace Balance a puzzling concept to a playful mind that now wonders if balance could possibly be that caged thing I sometimes pass as I wing freely from one extreme to another.

WHY CANT SHE JUST WATCH JEOPARDY? for twelve hundred bucks Susan is the proud new owner of a pre-owned mantra: Let go and let God she shares with me

for nothing from the shocked carpet the EMTs revive me beside the remote control, claw marks still on it. LEPKE AT 50: IN LOVE AGAIN this time with the semi-beautiful clerk at Kinkos who sneaks smoke breaks behind the Dumpsters, snaps her gum and snickers at customers like Lepke who needs a new suit a better haircut an appreciative wife, but for today will pay $227 for two copies of the Manhattan Yellow Pages for the pure pleasure of watching her move among the machines, all the parts working in harmony a priceless reproduction. NEVER SAW IT COMING My little girl likes to visit Mommy at the hospital on Sunday mornings, the sun slashing through the blinds soft and white as the bandages on Mommys wrists. Later we will build sand castles on the beach, my little girls plastic pail her small shovel fearless

against the coming tide. THE HUSBANDS OF THE FRESHLY BATTERED WIVES gather in church basements on Saturday morning to share their experience, strength and hope with the Newcomers who are always in denial: The bitch had it coming, they cry, bitch needed a beating. The old Wife-Beaters, basement sages, shake their gray heads and smile because they know the therapy takes time. Time takes time, they like to say, between grim inhalations of Styrofoam coffee and Lite cigarettes. They share their stories til their faces shine with the light of better days, of bare knuckles bashing cowering flesh as the Newcomers tense forward electronic ankle bracelets tingling.

THE DAY I FORGOT TO TAKE MY PROZAC it seized me, gripping my chest like another heart attack, but more frightening for its unfamiliarity lasting just long enough for my Little League boy, my darkly troubled Bobby, to circle all the bases for the first time,

his small face a festival of lights as I stop breathing. This time I do not call 9-1-1 or Dr. Shapiro (who summers in the Hamptons), because the heavy chest, a sinking ship, is heaving, buoyant with a feeling whose name I am trying to remember . . . I think it rhymes with joy. LEPKES (NEWLY EMPOWERED) BRAIN We are worried about our friend Lepke (who no longer comes to the Wednesday night poker game) whose mid-life crisis is different from ours in the same way that each unhappy family is said to be unhappy in its own way. (Lepkes brain deletes the things it does not like; they say he sings himself to sleep at night.) Lepke claims his wife left him shortly after his laser eye surgery when (for two thousand bucks) they burned away the myopia like trash at the curb, his imagination rising from the ashes. (Lepkes brain is building a brand new past one searing anecdote at a time.) Sometimes we walk by his house on Wednesday nights, the music rising like light from the rooms like the womans dancing shoes and Lepke, soaring.

III. SO MAYBE IT WAS A TAD DYSFUNCTIONAL 1. RED-HEADED STEPCHILD 2. MAYBE SHE JUST MISSED THE BIG CITY 3. WHATEVER IT TAKES 4. ACQUISITION MODE 5. JIMMY HOFFA'S WHORE MEETS LEONARD COHEN 6. THE DWELLER IN THE CREVICE 7. THAT WOULD BE LENIN, ROLLING 8. GAY FREEDOM DAY PARADE 9. AT THE HEBREW HOME FOR THE AGED, 1957 10. DOES THIS DRESS MAKE ME LOOK FAT? 11. AT THE WAR MEMORIAL 12. A TRIBE, NOT OUR OWN 13. PRODIGAL SON #1: EXPELLED FROM THE SORBONNE 14. CALLE OCHO (OFF COLLINS) 15. HEATHCLIFF: HOWLING TO WAKE THE DEAD 16. HARRY LOST HIS FAITH ON DAY 49 1/2 17. BECAUSE I COULD NOT SAVE THE WHALES 18. HERE AT THE CORPORATE RECLAMATION CENTER 19. DECONSTRUCTING LOTS WIFE

RED-HEADED STEPCHILD Because loving you is not part of the job description, he fills the space with pinball games in the basement toy soldiers bobbing in the bathtub, the attic a whistle of trains. In time you will learn to love the military school he has selected for you from a tangle of brochures: lush walls of lazy ivy, Elysian parade fields singing with boy soldiers. Here, the misty embrace of tradition will fold and lull you like Lethes arms, like the ghost of your imagined father his breath whistling down the attic stairs. MAYBE SHE JUST MISSED THE BIG CITY The silk veiled woman on the midnight train gazes darkly through the glass, a flicker of restless beauty choosing not to wave. Shrugging, she lights a slim cigarette and exhales the tedious weight of the mans love, her smoke weaving a soft shroud over this dying town, the deserted station where he stands, hand waving, eyes haunted already a ghost.

WHATEVER IT TAKES The new computers are wheeled into our jaded cubicles a week after the VPs memo proclaiming a New Paradigm, our merger with the mantra of global competitiveness and converging markets. We are now pronounced focused and purposeful, streamlined and empowered to do . . . Whatever It Takes! My old colleagues now crunch numbers with savage efficiency, pound and process stubborn words into Communication Vehicles while I double-click on the hidden game, releasing a little red ball to bounce leisurely against the gray brick walls, unfocused, mindless, serene. ACQUISITION MODE We never intend to harm her (we never do) we just want the loot her corporate resources ripe with low-hanging fruit. So carefully we court her this porcelain princess (publicly traded), so easy to seduce. Promise her rich synergies, hide away the noose. At last she succumbs (they always do),

chaste assets divested her war chest stripped bare (first the dry goods then the wetware). In the end we have to chain her up (we always do) behind the ancient Xerox, beneath the old mail room. On fiscal Fridays it is my turn to bleed her of secrets proprietary of passwords secure, to feed her first the mushrooms then the manure. Sometimes her old flames flicker by: Is she happy here with you? they ask (they always do) Is she happy now at last? Ungrateful, she decays (they always do), her foul stench scaring the janitor, bits of precious porcelain litter the leveraged landscape. Time to tempt another because we can (we always do). Perhaps it was the mushrooms, suggests our Marketing guru. But we blame it on the bitch herself, on the ingratitude, because we can

and we always do. JIMMY HOFFAS WHORE MEETS LEONARD COHEN Demanding an extra hundred bucks because she is not a whore and these requests rhyme with fetish, we agree on forty for just the foot thing if I promise not to play that song by Leonard Cohen (all night long) then having to write a check (its always the same) for three hundred, cause I screamed Suzanne when I came. THE DWELLER IN THE CREVICE Before the mercy of the last axe beyond the first blood of merger we fester in corporate crevices (whispering the T word) swelling the cubicles (not whispering Takeover), feeding on chaos waste and redundancy we dance the dance of duplication of alternate scenarios. We never go gently into the outsourced night, we rave and flame over e-mails, over lunch, pagers chirping promises of outplacement.

(We have always been with you) How we thrive! (bureaucratic cells subdivide) like toxins on the corporate titty we drain your budgets quarterly, cheerfully, like hordes of the homeless crashing the shareholders buffet. Still we rise! your spawn, your sucklings we have been downsized, streamlined, rightsized, restructured, repositioned and reengineered til at last we rise, Reawakened. Now the hour of our god is at hand, The God of the Cube we will come for you from out of our crevices, our cubes (plastic pocket protectors portending pain). We will come for you wielding institutional memories and the bones of your Marketing skeletons. We will come bloody, slightly bowed and we will be billions! for are we not your lifeblood, your inner tube of virtual progeny? (Oh my brothers and sisters of The Cube . . .) Arise! Up from your screen savers and logoed staplers! go forth and splatter the executive suites with endless memos, with white papers and eternal puling til even the Quality Division is buried beneath our carping,

our perfected detail. We are now the hard men the wrathful women, impervious at last to your hitman consultant your cash flow flirtations. We will come for you bastards bearing our first-born, our first born burning, for the hour of our god is at hand (the old religion) the God of the Cubicle and our name, Our name is Legion!

THAT WOULD BE LENIN, ROLLING before they bulldozed the old Bolshevik baths in Brighton Beach, my grandpa Heshie, sage of the shtetl sweated pearls of old world wisdom (moderation in all things, the Golden Mean) that he claims Trotsky forgot somewhere in Mexico in the jazzercise joints the righteous sweat the immoderate sheen of stairmaster moms dreaming somewhere in Mexico.

GAY FREEDOM DAY PARADE

They flood Market street the music of a half million swelling with the sweat of liberation, early morning libations, colors exploding on floats of rainbows and scarlet letter banners, everywhere the sharp incense of musk, tequila, poppers as I hoist Rachel on my shoulders, an innocent bystander to this peculiar American history, homages to Harvey, salutes to Stonewall Daddy, is this the circus and where are the clowns? the wife smiling welded to me by the wilding crowd: I love a parade, she says every year, the leather boys now the studs and chains black tank tops emblazoned with Glory Hole Bar, another gay Alamo, an Attica of the mind. Rachel tugging at my 49ers cap: Is it the forf of july, da dee? as the Dykes on Bikes blast out of the Castro. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence cavorting in nun black habits. This year we told Rachel the terrible truth about Santa and the Tooth Fairy, Yes, baby, its the fourth of July look, here come the clowns I lie, because betrayal can be borne best in small doses

and this is not yet the time for more truth that our fathers did not bleed at Valley Forge for this.

AT THE HEBREW HOME FOR THE AGED, 1957 in the morning they wheel them out to the rec room soap opera synagogue so we do not have to smell the sharp piss and Clorox in the wrinkled dorms where the taped names peel off the lockers like flags curling toward dusk, the old ladies fluttering over grandchildren who hate them for having let it come to this a box of chocolates a bag of oranges. Better to have been raped and killed by the Cossacks than this slow death of strained Sunday smiles.

DOES THIS DRESS MAKE ME LOOK FAT? Be very careful

(But do not hesitate!) because you are a newlywed, unschooled in the use of social lubricants, you may still harbor warm childish notions about the value of honesty (without calculating its cost) and fail to see that unlike the casual relaxed curve of a question this is a poised ax, this is a demand, a test and these are her eyes glinting steel death as you hesitate before the cleaving. AT THE WAR MEMORIAL before the kids called him Jimmy the gimp the 82nd Airborne promised he could kill some gooks once he learned to sweat blood out his goat-smelling ass, humping an eighty pound backpack up a hill toward the sun, singing: A yellow bird with a yellow bill was sitting on my windowsill; I lured him in with a crust of bread and then I crushed his fucking head!!! so many times he couldnt wait no more for the killing got me and Del to bust his leg in three places

for thirty dollars and a carton of Marlborough he smokes in the park, backpack on his favorite bench humped with bread fresh from the mall, for all the birds who do not weep, for all the names engraved on the wall.

A TRIBE, NOT OUR OWN Were rolling out the drums again, singing the ancient songs of Self to the squeege hordes hovering like hungry ghosts over the weary windshields that have looked out in clenched exasperation at these squandered souls bequeathed bread sex and circuses; their tribal songs tuneless, not our own. Were rolling out the guillotines again, loosing the holy fire til the subhuman croon falls silent and we can sing again cocoon to cocoon choir to choir. PRODIGAL SON #1: EXPELLED FROM THE SORBONNE Now that youve pissed away your fancy Art Scholarship,

fouled your future like some drunk reeling and spilling at a banquet, you will be sentenced to your old room, your fathers scorn rising like clenched heat, a hammer over the house. After dinner you will impersonate a whipped puppy, whimpering your ragged tale of Suffering for Art (or was it Love this time?) until fathers eyes fade to mist, to wish: Better to have sired a savage dog, a jagged bone stripped dry of pretension than this tangled bundle of troubled boy, his future, your future a fountain of tears. CALLE OCHO (OFF COLLINS) (In 1980, Fidel Castro was accused by the United States of opening up prisons and mental hospitals to allow inmates to leave for Miami from the port of Mariel in Cuba) Vaguely human it fell from the mango tree behind Lupes gazebo. Dont touch it, dollinks, you dont know where its been, Mrs. Weinstein warning the children, while I mix the margaritas in Miami sunshine for all the nudnik neighbors. Pobrecito, maybe is a Marielito loss his way as the children sharpen sticks, maybe Lupe should call the SPCA

til an alien sun sets on a bicultural consensus: the Jews drafting protests on santeria scrolls, long after the children have paraded the creatures last shrieks, the sharpened poles. HEATHCLIFF: HOWLING TO WAKE THE DEAD Her gypsy princess blood no longer raging like a river of fire through your life, but pooling still and cool as her porcelain face, this bedroom dying strictly a private affair immediate family only perhaps a trusted servant or two certainly not for dirty little stable boys, not for dark gypsies such as you. (Whose soft hand will hush your savage cries and put the pennies on Cathys eyes?) It is left to your coarse and common arms to lift her up and lay her down, a pale wisp enswathed in heath; left to your rough fingertips to stroke and smooth her hair, left to you alone to howl midnight curses across the moors (Damn, damn her eyes!) sowing the heather with unholy tears and harsh prayers for her unquiet slumber.

HARRY LOST HIS FAITH ON DAY 29 & 1/2

Now that Harry is heavy with Recovery, he has a new Higher Power who answers all of his prayers: In Gods time not mine, is Harrys dry mantra. (We tell him not to quit his day job until day 30.) Ill pray for you guys, Harry threatens, his bathrobe and slippers trudging a spiritual path to the living room La-Z-Boy where he meditates before the big screen TV: Breathe in God, breathe out fear breathing out fumes of non-alcoholic beer, breathing in chains of Camels, hot dogs and railroad cars of Costco potato chips a 12Step Buddha under the Bodhi tree. After 29 days his holiness starts to bloat and leech on our nerves. Out of love, we wait til hes hungry then lock him in the closet, where Harry tries not to pray for a hot dog. BECAUSE I COULD NOT SAVE THE WHALES the last thing Susan says to me before hiding in the Peace Corps, the last thing this world needs is more bad poetry. I send a dark postcard to Africa

pulsing with rhyme, because someone has to do it, one last time. HERE AT THE CORPORATE RECLAMATION CENTER I. We fix the broken people, the burnout Lost Suits who have strayed from the flock of shared values, forgotten the faces of those who feed them. We are not doctors but we are trained to watch for the first symptoms cynicism is a progressive disease a slight discharge of sarcasm, the poisonous spill of profanity. II. Near the end (right before they vanish) the broken people will never look you in the eye; they smile inappropriately, nod at nothing seen, eyes sunk somewhere beneath a soft glaze of gossamer, a feathered wisp of neverland where the world is made anew each dawn:

III. The heavens heave shimmers of golden sheets above a greening earth so electric the air cracks like clear champagne, the seas giddy with new life,

with music that no human could make without dying first. IV. We are not doctors and we are trained not to weep while we wait, watching for signs and rumors, listening, aching for the music that haunts and wrenches like a suddenly recalled kiss. We wait for more to be revealed hints of majesty and the rumor of answered prayers. DECONSTRUCTING LOTS WIFE What turned her when she finally turned to face the fire and brimstone: a childlike curiosity before a Cosmic Burning? or simply the careless shrugging off of another holy injunction? Perhaps it was a womans weariness with the ways of Old Yahweh, heavy-handed and hasty, like Lot who would hurl her daughters like pearls to the swilling mob. Was it a turning to the fire or her face forever turning from Lot, turning to bear witness, turning to the sweet blind pillar of justice.