The hairs on his fingers
do not curl anymore
like worms. They, too, are old
and arthritic as the fingers
themselves. Yet, together
they hum steel scissors
about many old heads spewing
stories of their war, their action.
And in his two chair shop-
only one of which is ever used-
he mumbles on in foreign tongues,
somehow coherent to his customers,
of his youth- his hazy past
lost amidst the others' vivid tales.
And as The Chairman croons smoothly
in the background a strobed siren streaks
by and off his front window barber pole
yet beaming the noonday glint of sun
so brightly that he closes his eyes,
momentarily, and is back in his village
during the raids. The sun burns
through his eyelids like an incendiary
fire which lighted his parents' cellar,
where he had hidden, from within
and he recalls the shadows of life
lost inside the brilliant glow
of mid-night bombings: the ash,
the noise, the heat, the used-to-be's,
the stench. In the distance of his brain
it is, now, almost comforting. So
when he goes to the window to draw
his shade it is not out of a fear
that he spurns the light, or the kid
shot and bleeding down the block,
but rather the growing apparitions
of evening crawling across the street,
like rodent remembrances canvassing
for fresh flesh, towards his shop
dwarfing ever-smaller to their scurrying
silent thunder:
and it is this simple act,
now, which unleashes the fires of life
from rock on a far away world
six hundred million years from now:
the complex genetic of beginnings
reborn from the simple psychology
of endings; as if invention,
or fear, or the cosmos,
really knows its own course.
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider
Alien swishing at the root
of their fears. In the black
light of day he remains
a voyeur of night's white cover.
Is it cold?, he wonders,
Or is it just the neighborhood?
Vamping along the boulevard
he turns egret-like into the wrong
way down an alley. Hisses quill
his spine like nothing
since Anthony left.
From a shadow over his shoulder
In the mucilage minutes he bolsters-
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider THE FILM GODDESS
Over and again she was made like marble
Yet she was loved, truly,
There ten million men desired
But now
he senses the feline lumber of a pride.
Gleaned off a wet dumpster he catches
the hard bat of some lion's swipe.
Chuckling, their fear descends
like the sun's eclipse by skyline;
scattering like mice driven
off poopdecks. Rivering down
the nearest sewer's iron gullet
his blue heron blood carries
their laughter, their taunts,
and some porcelain plumage
into a vast crimson underbelly
fed upon by the roots
of silenced concrete sequoias.
Death is just death, not defeat.-
fearing both the fates of his rose Dresden china,
alone, and the trail of azure one beastly rat
will track through ravening black eyes, twitching
gray nostrils, ruddy hands clawing
sharply up decades of steel.
*for Sharon Stone
out in the others' pitiless eyes.
in a way, for the Nordic perfection
of her self controlled
as a mannekin behind glass.
her, deeper than a Cyprian king,
and repeatedly chipped away at her
to renew the beauty, slowly rounding
into realization, she delighted beyond
the regal cipher of her youth.
it is her age which splendors
her grace into humanity;
her eyes' harpsichord razor cuts
the cord of her ivory birth.
And now when she moves
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider Ten. Twenty. A few hundred or more.
He is anxiety itself. In the darkened house
Five years o'clock.
Into this drama
Twelve years o'clock.
The curtain rises, the lights are cast.
Seventeen years o'clock.
Days and weeks and months tick by
Now o'clock.
The audience has grown to several hundred
Another curtain rises.
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider She remembers mama's calls of "Le-na!",
In the blurring tides awash within
The girl would cry, alone in her room,
Outside, the crisp waves of leaves from foreign branches sang to her
Now, in an older mirror
Distantly, he says,
Laying naked, in a bleak white bed,
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider Return to Cosmoetica
in the passage of dreams,
And now when she feels
in the fruits of the prosaic,
it does not all fritter away-
as if something easily disposed of-
into the unknown eyes
that unclothe her, still,
it is that which made her,
this votary of Venus,
now dizzy- for the first time
in a life undefined- and giddy,
simply, with the notion.
He has lost count of the notches
in his brain. He knows nothing any longer
of the world beyond. This small theater
is all that is left of the drama.
each creak of the backdoor is taken
for a cheer. The stage is set:
a dingy saloon, a lone fly buzzes about.
Gray mannekins people the scene. The clock
marks time in years of age- somehow appropriate.
sits an audience of one: Death.
An appreciative fellow.
Suddenly, a body materializes; the face
is indistinct yet familiar: unformed
yet like every man's he will ever do.
slowly. The stagelight burns. The body
ripens into his own lush with maggots.
A standing ovation from fleshless hands.
He bows, but sensing something long discarded
he turns to run but in all directions
is stage. A mist of thick flies now blots
the limelight. At this moment he realizes
his life is not his.
in applause. A tap on his shoulder.
No one. A gun now lays on the bar.
He grabs it and puts it to his head.
The dark cloud buzzes gratitude.
He squeezes.
billowing down the block, for supper, and seeing
the soup steaming their kitchen windows-
behind its warm mist lay sustenance, life,
and the swan: at once her pet, her protector,
her lover.
she recalls the perfection with which mama laid out
herself in the dinnerware's placement. Each utensil
in its own parameter. Always four settings: for mama,
herself, her little brother- long passed
by the silence of sharp feather upon wrist-
eating, with real fork and knife
but with phantom manners, the swan- he hates
mama’s ceaseless screeches. She would clean her plate, always,
so good she was- unlike her bad brother the swan ignored-
then his beak would nip at and taste
for her. His neck's silken advances glimmering
with dew.
Love is pain.
Blood just its price.
as the swan's wings covered her tensions,
wanting to enswan her
in love, a silent blackness beneath white
feathers caressing some whiter flesh.
as they swept against her bedroom window. The moonglow, off her
mirror,
evaporated her tears. Beyond, the swan’s coal eyes, one with the
night, always
shimmering....her hair
so golden, long and lovely.
she combs it, still
golden, long and lovely.
Behind her, in reflection,
grins Sammy- haloed by the neon glow
of the sign, the strip, the streets outside.
"I'll always be with you."
Yet she knows he cannot protect her
like the swan- she is still
his little girl (she still has his scars)-
his pinions spreading darkly
as the tides of trees whip through the signglow
crashing onto unfamiliar windows where another
strange bird's plumage awaits her
for a price Sammy owns.
a weird mist steams through the ceiling,
like mama's used to; only this one is cold-
eternally so- and while she lays
helpless as frigid feathers
grope and stroke for her goldness
she quietly floats up into the mist
where she thinks she hears her little brother
at play, closer, towards the other side
of dawn; and after passing through it
so happy and assured, from far above,
her face now deigns a smile.
