Sep 142011
 
"The rat I wrangled from my womb has wronged me!
Bit me! Bled me!  Hear a mother's cry to kill her kid!
Choke the sopping monster who goes glued to Fate
By my very blood!  Sucked from my very teat,
	milk and blood both-- bitter, bitter!
O Aegiesthus' ghost-- where are you? 
	Hold my breasts and fuck me!
These same breasts that came with my pubescent blood,
Oresetes nuzzled-- his skull-top as soft as his pea of a nose.
Unfinished he flooded into a turgid world,
Torn by troubling dreams;  I built him from boy to man, I
And I alone touched him wonderingly, wantingly:
That this star should fall from my fuckholeÖ.
Damn him!  Damn him!  What is it to be a mom
If men may treat their mothers thus?  Curse him!
My identity's stripped to ifs without him;  without him
Numbered and known as my son, my son.
Hard the travail, hard the happiness, and now
	hard the death-time
Of mothers and their motherhood.
Sleepless across the groined earth I groan,
Loneliness airless and endless.  Not mother, but murderer
My son--that damned man--proclaims me to finally be.
His insistence on Justice is a sinkhole of sorrows
Burying his Mommy for God.  Ah, God--
No;  no refuge there;  no clouds, no angels, no respite
For a woman torn and scorned.  I'm jammed into my gender:
First, pollution of the menstrual punch, then sex
Wished-for in waiting, not sought in warm arousal
But closeted and kept close, moldy with hoping--
Thin mystery of the singing clit mixed with sorrow-oh!
Known then as Agamemnon's woman, addendum to majesty,
That which cleaves and is cloven--flickeringly split in loving--
His arms the margins of my seacoast--no more, no less.
And no woman knows another; slakers and takers of the defining phallus--
Competitive finessers of the clamping circumstance.
Came Helen, and away went our hairy thousands,
All the wood echoing like a troubled drum.
Men marching into the sea!  Seaborne, sea-torn,
So many with no fluff on their chins, little wrigglers.
War-widow I was then, alone as a lion,
Stalking the beaches at dawn, clubbed and stunned
By the night menaces;  the sins of the dreamless hours,
My mind a shifty shuttle on no holy loom.
What was I in this absence of passions?  Unkicked, unlicked.
No nobility rolled, lucid and lovely, from my hurt hollows.
I was uncoiled and void;  knowingless, dirty, and numb."


Sep 142011
 
An old-time, small-town hardcore "con"
polite enough to jigger mint juleps in tinking silver cups
rubbed smooth by lips ribbed smooth
with talking.  Politics, aesthetics, jeremiads,
history's candid tangle of catastrophes
--any subject that nights ripen and split
enough to show the sense of meaning 
at the snapping seams;  thought stretched taut
until articulation sang.  O the million nights
chattered ruefully through to human truth!
Rhythm's doubled thrubs send the heart-beacon out
beneath the boards, like your troubled and beloved Poe
moaning lonely for his Annabelle Lee, lovely
ideal resurrected from the dead real.

Your life-plot's coiled as Rosencrantz',
a labyrinthine mind of steel and twine
following each God-doled bread-crumb clue
to God's appointed apotheosis;
intent as a atheist pimping out a principle.
You loiter with stories forever unfinished,
once started, not knowing "how way leads on to way."
Each enunciated principle's broadened
with tributary amendments, altering
precursor and course upon reconsideration;
Rabelaisian babble nipped and tucked tidy
by a laser-guided philosophy.

Long ago in your yeoman youth you started
dreaming past the dragon's hiss, the dragon's tooth,
to inner virtue's unvarying, vibrant truth.
Now an earnest father gone haggard at the world's lies--
you sit a spastic Little Hamnu down to talk--
and finish grinning and whistling in the dark,
stuck, like Coleridge with his quaint Constancy,
or an aim-awry Orion facing West,
stark as a marker in the stars' fixed rigging.