after frank furness

plain brick comes off honest
frank furness holding on
to his medal of honor
and asking for another
from a nonexistent
country while trussing
his turrets together and
offering them to us—here, flowers
from the machine
that raised us—trust
them, the civil war
        his underbite
and then he just saunters
out the old post
office i stand in
for god knows how long
with my letter
        this geezer
in front of me:
        they should privatize it!
        they should privatize it!
his little public
        spittle
        skin
        speech
        of day
the crying
        baby
up front
        the constant
        customer we tickle
        our nickels for
                circles
                thrift—

                        buzzards.

                        crickets.

                        crickets cricket.

                        the president smiles out of the wall.

                        we’re getting there.


****


on al-jazeera cornel west imagines martin luther king
would say to barack obama:

                get out of that golden cage


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        a bunch of angry people just roared out of mcdonald’s again.


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        when my wife started calling the house “my baby” that’s when i knew i had to get out.


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        here’s my dream:

        some dudes chase me around town trying to stab me, and they finally do.
        a hot dog at mcglinchey’s remains 75 cents. i wake up and write a letter:

                to my bitches:

                in the united states “cooperative” means “obedient.”
                for an american, that’s a bitch, if an american is nobody’s
                bitch. america is everybody’s bitch—which makes us
                all what? what should we call ourselves?

                        yours,
                        the first nobody


*****


i stand in line for a stamp
and frank furness
builds a building
w/ wind and flowers:

it’s philadelphia, and we try to demolish it.

the quaker rowhome of all-
indians-no-chiefs makes a lie
inside my chest, a convulsion, a debt
to abolish thru convulsion after convulsion after convulsion

        rains it pours
        the people off
        your brows arched
        gothic—headache
        raised and razed
        by taste (so called)
        the deep
        shadowed
        entrance to your
        city, mind we walked
        thru w/out much
        of a bother

all the organs of your body
are sound, said the doctors,
self-control alone is lacking.

reading the introduction of furness’ biography i get bit by a spider, twice, and within two days i’m limping, venom spreading down my leg, purple, pink and painful. pain in the ass.


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tired of waiting
i walk and walk
and run into debrah—happy
national train
day, she says
and we talk time
off, and it starts
to rain, and i go
to a party

it’s the kentucky derby, too, and i bet, as always, on the fifty-to-one horse:

                watch me go, it’s called this year


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outside last drop in
the drizzle moms
grope for their minivans
and get wet anyway—
rains it pours
the main line dribbles
down the dog’s leg—
        we’re all gentlemen.

who flipped your car
and set it on fire?

frank furness of
churches, banks
and stations, one
once on the schuylkill
described as an insane
short story of a castle—

        demolition built
        to last out
        of our lungs was
        the genius

a hundred years after his death
i’m a breath of what, falling out
of fashion w/ septa tokens dropping
thru holes in my pockets. i grasp
for some religion, any obsession
to make my soul into a house. how
ugly, this aborted subway system.

        dear emerson, i’m stuck
        in the seasonal aisle
        of cvs and the poets
        are calling each other
        brave—what should i do?


        hold no fact sacred?

        unsettle all things?


furness once said to his protégé, louis sullivan,
that “his great ambition in life was to get his
clients into the academy of music so that he
could come out on stage and tell them all
to go to hell.”

for furness, the inferno made the difference.

that some pretend there’s no such thing, no civil war,
that their plain brick pretension lines the city, owing
the world how it is.

that some wait on snyder ave for the sugar express and say hey, it’s a free ride.


                 buzzards.

                 crickets.

                 crickets cricket.

                 the mayor smiles out of the wall

and so do i, betting on
his self-destruction as
i bet on the letter
i'll score into the days
i lay waste to—stones
                           trees
                           clouds
                           history, which outgrows

our cheapness.

i drop out
        of it
looking like septa
for the laughs
i drop by
to see how you’re doin
for the laughs
that echo up 22nd
as breezes rock
the feathers
back to earth
i drop in
a cloud aches
a prayer by
paid off nobodies
like septa
who walk the ghost
town up and down
how many dead loves
how many times
manly in brittleness
and broken want
anyone might say
to you: i want to
hold your face
and cry into it
until i disappear
like you did