Listening to The Moonlight Sonata During
	a Mohs Procedure

Thinking the last time
I saw this piece performed
was at Saratoga with Andre Watts
backed by the Philadelphia Orchestra,
an outdoor performance one humid
August night sitting on the hard packed
hill, all the grass scuffed away during
rock show crowds of twenty thousand
plus, all of them amped or strung out 
after scoring big on drug alley, the place
we think of as the promenade, outside
of the Hall of the Springs; the moon
low in the sky, the pianist caressing
the keys, the surgeon not even born yet.
 
All those Virgin

Island nights
I couldn’t sleep
listening to mother
play Chinese Checkers
with her selves
in the dark

Six voices arguing
false moves
phantom jumps
quantum leaps
over clogged
northwest passages
to nowhere

Her cat’s eyed
marbles polished
until they gleamed
in the darkness
as they played

The unnaturally
colored ones
pale blue greens
like death
or red irises burning

in a nightmare
that stays with
you when awake

 
I was stuck in a single take

tracking shot like a Russian Ark 
movie but instead of The Hermitage
I was on a set designed by interior
decorators of the Red Room on
Twin Peaks, then twenty-five years
later where all the carpet mazes
interlock and transport the unsuspecting
to an Inland Empire then the ballroom
of an Overlook Hotel and I’m following
Danny, the hot wheel kid, on the impossible
mobius strip carpets that lead so far into
the past even the dead people dancing
haven’t been born yet and I’m stuck
dumb, made immobile by whatever
Laura Palmer is whispering into my
severed ear, all her words dissembling
into tinnitus white noise static like
nine inch nails in between stations 
chanting, “She’s Gone, She’s Gone…”
and I’m back at the Road House drinking
skunk beer ignoring Mr. Booth exhorting
me, “Heineken, fuck that shit. Pabst Blue 
Ribbon!” and the scene shifts to the back
seat of Frank’s speeding car and I’m
squeezed between Frank’s under-dressed
droogies from a clockworkorangebluevelvet
in a noir nightmare neither Roy Orbison
nor Ludwig con can save me with a chorus
of crack whore angels singing and dancing to
Little Eva and Alle Menschen are waving
their hymnal and speaking in a language
that hasn’t been invented yet like space
age revenants from a futurama fourth reich
I can’t be rescued from until Billy Pilgrim
makes the scene in a Slaughterhouse Five
of the mind in a Twin Peaks diner where
nothing is as it seems. Not even the coffee.
Not even the pie.
 

 
Work Anxiety Dream with Lydia Davis in it.

I’m back in the tavern again
and its wall-to-wall humans
though it could be worse as previous
night terrors have shown.
Everyone is smoking clove cigarettes
to cover the smell of hashish hookahs
emanating from the blind corner
to the left of the bar that I can’t see
in my back bar mirrors. 
We’re all in the midnight witching 
hour, stuck in jukebox hell, listening to 
The Best of Patsy Cline,

” Worry, why do I let myself worry?
Wondering what in the world did I do?”

Then the new general manager is
behind the bar introducing herself as
Lydia Davis and I’m thinking what
the hell is she doing here? She doesn’t 
even look like the 70’s version of Lydia
despite not knowing her then, I’ve seen
photos of what she looked like.

And she assures me she is the same
Lydia Davis so I just go with it and try 
to find out when she changed jobs 
and why but she’s not interested in 
anything I have to say. “Read this.”
She says and turns to walk away and 
I say, “Watch your step.” But she still 
isn’t listening so I’m not surprised 
when she steps in the place where the wooden
slats we walk on are broken, turns her ankle 
and would have fallen flat on her face
if I didn’t catch her.  
“I knew you were trouble from word one.” 
She says, pretending
she can walk on a broken ankle.  
“You’ll pay for this.” Lydia says.
And I say, “You can’t fire me. No one else
can run this place.”
 ” Watch me.” She says.
And Patsy is crooning,
“Dreams I know can’t come true
Why can’t I forget the past”

And I wait for Patsy’s plane to crash. 
Planes have crashed here before 
as I saw first-hand outside the tavern.
Patsy may be gone and I may be fired
but I’ll be back. That’s why they call
it jukebox hell.

 
Her cousin saw

mother in the City
a week before she died.
“You’d never know
She was that close
to passing on. Of course,
she was thin but
then she always was.
Seemed happy and
talked like there
was no tomorrow.
How did she die?”
I told him that
when they opened
her up, after finding 
the stomach cancer they 
didn’t look any further.
Was enough cancer there
to kill two people.
“Stomach cancer.
That’s supposed to be
painful, isn’t it?
She showed absolutely
no signs of pain.
We went McDonalds’
and she ate like a horse.”
“I expect her dissociative
personality gave the pain
to someone else
What did you do
when she started
talking crazy?
I mean how did you
handle it?”
“I just laughed and
laughed and eventually 
the subject changed.”
He was the kind of
guy who made the best
of things. He just dealt
with stuff. He identified 
the body for me too.
He was a better man
than I am.