The Rose Lasso
By Gregg Glory
Copyright © 1996
Published by
BLAST PRESS
Text File*
Palm Reader*
Tell me who gives us these infamous gifts
to make such a promise
and make such a slip
--- Tom Verlaine
A drunken God has made us, if he made us,
marring our fineness
with alcohol-loaded thumbs.
Heartless Vienna bestowed on the dead composer all the honors it had refused him during life. "Never had an emperor a funeral to equal it," wrote Therese von Brunsvik. "Thirty thousand people accompanied him to his gravesite." They would have done equally well to listen to his music.
Damn the bastards!
--- from Beethoven, Composer as Hero
I read what I need in my grand Dyslexicon, if you see what I mean. Watch first the thumb that rubs the words, and syllabus the syllable second.
Nailed Longings
nailed longings
never told lovelier
in rainbow airs
a touched harp
awaits vibrant
one dayshaft---
virulent loves!
closed eyes
shelter opalescence
---wonderaroused soaks
tongues' duotone
scarred redshifts sear
life's emblematic tracts
The Phosphorus Stars
The phosphorous stars at your fingertips flower and pinch me,
Awaking dark milkyways like hidden veins
Throughout the sulking valleys of my breast.
"Throw the stars up! Again!"
Our serious laughter catches in the ceiling's maternal plasters,
Soft as the stars that have ached to arrive there.
I lie on the dazzled bed as on a silver pond,
My heart a dry pine tree reaching after the sky.
Fed pure starlight by your fingers
Anxious and cool as grapes, I shiver against you
Shaking the slender constellations from your hair
One star at a time. I swallow the tornado of flame
That still hides its little blossom of light, unborn.
I escape out of myself, dangerous, I run away with the night,
Anything, anything to trace the deep absence
That falls backwards into your eyes like a diver.
The small, mobile flagellants of your eyelids unlace me,
Make me plain and open as a burst fig.
Narrow-footed cats dance on the shards
Of the steep glass-crusted cement wall to view you.
I hunch in their shoulderblades, and spray with their sex.
The moon comes out of my mouth, a swollen white tongue
To give you this mysterious poem.
Alba
Sunset clouds in awakened eyes. Mysterious.
The day takes on what the night has dropped,
Everyday, as if it were only natural
To sink the things of darkness in so much light.
Before me's the luminous landscape of your back, turned
To its solemn and human warmth, like a sky.
I leap up to the lightness.
I am trying to draw for you an archaic theater,
Old stones rolling to an ocean voice, cracked lines,
But all I have so far are these inapt words.
The severe doric columns go under your eyelids, heavily.
Outside, March. Its universal brightness invades
All of my senses as I touch you, seeding brightness;
The devouring waters rush and whiten, so light,
Trying to become the wind no one can see.
Speaking, ceasing, speaking. The light goes on inspiring
Tragic antlers in their brown clashes. I look,
Again, at you, lying there heavily as a good watermelon,
Trying my waters, leaping, leaping, loving you.
You Have Gone
You have gone, you have gone
And left only your shadow tarrying.
It is in all the penumbras of my kisses.
The scalloped darks of your locks
Drag after the feet of children running in leaves.
The undersides of leaves cling to your memory.
Light undoes itself to touch you, remember you,
Your wildness like a reverse fire, searing lightlessness,
Whole continents of shadow and dark parlance.
This talk between darknesses has entered me,
Entered me and blossomed, so now within me I have
The solemn spaces between the stars,
Your face under the rose shadow of tresses.
Your shadows, formless as freedom, numberlessly large.
The birds, no matter how high, cannot rise away from them
And I do not want to, wildly electric, escaping my fingers
Like sea-foam turned suddenly to wine.
The Night Winds
The night winds, so big, grow small when you sigh,
So full is your breath of their sowing,
Even the sea's necklace of rocks cannot measure you
In your camisole, although they measure the sea.
A vastness resides in your glances
As if all the earth swung in one dew-bead.
Your body has the lustrous strength of a horse
Thundering on the midnight headlands.
I look near you, around you, searching for edges,
Sides, spaces, but you are edgeless and endless,
The sweet air that lets me hymn praises within her.
Your foundations are final beneath and above me.
I am flung into you like a golden rope
And never feel myself falling. You are the mast
Oceans dissolve to arrive at. My island, female
As the deep scents of the jacaranda
Each night holds open to kiss you.
Because You Took
Because you took me to bed, I love you.
Because your sex wraps around me
And my body falls out of myself
Like a flower, I love you.
Wisdom doubles itself like a germ,
Adding body to body. Your eye
Adds itself to my eye, and we go on seeing:
New things, new newness.
Cicadas, windfall, our braiding bodies--
Tender, joyful, awake in each other,
Simple as forgetting.
A slow-crawl cross, holy and mossy.
Hesitant as a craving bee I explore you completely,
Exhausting the tassels of sunlight,
Removing valuable essences even by the powdery moon.
And its lonely magnet unites us, crests in us.
Stale, silly and small,
I return to the gorgeous orchard of your arms.
Your arms tensile and lively as if managing a sailboat.
The heavy sail red, full of bloods, wombs.
But agile anyway in the universe that blows it
Before your face, in the front of the dawn,
Your hair whipping!
Body Complete as a Planet
Body, body complete as a planet, our whole world
And no soul anywhere? Death, death complete
As a trainwreck, and no salvation from skeletons?
I stagger after your kisses that stagger away.
A million miles of purgatory and no heaven to end it.
Collapsed loneliness, a black velvet hole.
When our hands touch like torches, all night,
What floss of wire in our heads signals there's Deity?
The spellchecker in my brother admits His existence.
So why are all the gnats awake on my skin,
This volcanic island chain of doubts surrounding me?
Am I the only atheist to ever fall in love?
Without death, I would be content to kiss you hereafter.
Without death, your generation would be as water,
Mere water, water from water, a wetness, nothing else.
Simple as Sticks
Simple as sticks, we ignite. An algebra of skin
Commences with us; our aureoles vent longing.
The wind tears through our formulas and associations
Smearing the clean inks of our thought.
We kiss like two erasers removing errors.
Blue parabolas disappear when you wash your eyeliner off.
Vectored cones triumph and crush me in your thighs
Full of the tragic strength birth requires.
You throw off your garlands. My heart incinerates them.
We have played catch with the universe, reversed time.
Snapped the physicists' pencils, broken the old rules through.
You walk across the room from your mysterious center.
Or have I floated up from drowning to your face?
I look at the world the way a stockbroker looks at the paper;
In you, consuming ecstasies.
In you, all drugs, all hybiscus' furiously blossom.
In you... my words find shallow resting, like dust,
As if restless doves still circulated the atmosphere.
I measure all things by your measurelessness.
The stars, remote and faithless, shirr from your glance
In lonely sidelong birth, shivering in immensity
To have their long light, to have any light at all
Outside of your body.
Beside them, I, too, am shivering.
A Full Cup has Come to Me
A full cup has come to me, I cannot empty it.
In your unsteady hands you ferry it, half a globe
Full of suns that had run up to you mad as puppies.
Full of liquid geraniums melted at your touch.
I drink and drink, but I cannot get drunk enough.
My head reels. My feet tango on the ceiling.
You have been looking at me a long time already.
Already, between your strong legs, a spring has darkened.
Lying with you, I am light as a moon-man,
My silver umbilical moves like a rumor through the stars.
Tau Ceti seems so close, just over our shoulders.
What will our children remember about us?
Chance pulled us together with its rose lasso
But who had held its long comet's tail?
Your eyes are a mischievous dower, your tears
Soak my chest and leave no stain. I wipe not one away.
Who is the guilty one when passion is strong enough to bruise,
Too weak to blink? Am I too afraid of losing sight of you,
The miraculous ghettos that hold souls in your hair,
The tinted resonance of your shadow, where it has fallen?
The Lunge
Prodigal of laughter, stoned on your own
Adoring, lady, you come bearing white wrists
And white palms. Ensanguined chafes
Marr no innocence of your heart's marketplace
Where a thousand eyeing roads have stumbled
And one has come. Chartless, mapless, and alone
I pursued the drunken lily of your brow.
Forethought at the masthead would have me dread thy death
But I came with the starlight, seeking exit
When it dies, extinguishing with the universe.
Oh do not tell me of her face's radiance!
I have felt the radiant proof, and have confessed.
Her face has traced its cameo in my breast.
Spied waterspout beyond the breakpoint of my bones,
Glorious and golden, your daffodil surmise
Flatters my chaste hand in the obsequious sunrise.
You Stood Up
You stood up, and the world rose with you!
Astounding globe, charter of misty distances, held love!
From you, all things emitted their eternal energy.
From you, the sensual regale of lifted light, diamonds!
From you, spears of daybreak arose, laughing lioness!
Night abandoned melancholy, ropes of dew lifted with you.
Dark-headed iris of a thousand days,
When love comes before us we abandon everything.
Old harbingers, old hates, past truths, deficiencies and victories;
Miscarried words scrawled on a discarded cast.
The hour of getting here and getting here has arrived.
The clock has mounted up to your eyes with minutehand prayers.
Glissades and everglades tick also in your eyes.
Now the door of spring rushes open.
Winter's broom sweeps out its ashes and its tears.
Now it is the hour without shadow come again,
And the sun collects us. Us together in our nearness!
Guitars boom in the garden, struck thunder, sound-blossoms.
In your chest, high and light, orchestras promenade
Through galleries of just showing up. Like tulips.
Down your unleashed arms, rivers arrive at honey seas.
The mock turtle goes on in his heavy rounds, baying boisterously.
My heart has eaten up the days of us together,
Salty and strong in its thumb-made dish of red clay.
This arriving with us and within us does not stop.
It goes on and on, on and on forever.
Stations of departure, those old crosses, stand
Worn and gilded. They are empty, abandoned as lice.
Together we come dancing and solemn, two porpoises.
Our sides are streaked with blue universes of wet light.
Azaleas patch the landscape, color-dots motioning oboes.
One note the sorry, somehow sour acknowlegdement of our seperate estates.
In you, the first hello and the last hello. Hello!
In you, strange seagulls x back and forth.
Those who never expected to meet themselves do so.
Found dogs surprise each other, exchanging rushing tails.
In us, the swallows' songs entangle and beat.
The last thrill of their virtuous vibrato domes our sky.
In you, dawn cannot come to autumn. Shadows are always deep.
Hallucinations adopt your stance, but only you convince.
Let me stand upon your porch, a little old and rattled.
Let me travel like a shipwreck back to your anchorage.
Let me wash in your tender banks like a seal, and roll there.
Let me sink in you, hold in you, like greenness in grass.
Oh my sunlight, oh my day's-breath!
Let me transfigure you, like chlorofil, into my own body.
Let me suck sweet sips of air from the cups of your ears.
Let me drop my heart in your mouth with this tongue.
These words I use rumor your abiding.
And yet, you do not abide.
You rush through all dawns, all skies, all risings
With eagle feathers afloat in your hair,
An indian princess bartering for her bridehood.
A new danube charging her bankheads.
You groom the night away, particle by particle,
Until day stuns us.
Stone to Stone
Who had love right in world's history,
Love dowsered from stale books, old mythologies?
Who of all those mighty lovers once
Crossed unwatered that great stream?
Or could tell when they woke, when they dreamed?
A woman lay by me in my bed;
Golden nights forgot days of lead,
And all my intricate subtlety was turned
Away, as if it had never burned
With reality's cold questioning.
I call her image up that grew intense
Because so much of loveliness was struck condensed
Into those visionary, stone-still eyes
That knew the world must die away,
That they themselves would never fade.
Beauty like that of a prideful bird,
Burnt-out memories blazed intense at a word,
All look upon me at my life's one work
To sit, grow still, and to never shirk
This monstrous sublimity I feel.
I walk the long hallway questioning;
Questioning, I turn from thing to thing
An arrogant, restless mind
That I am tied to, kind to kind,
A stone leashed to a stone.
Memento Mori
Time's outrageous ghosts, griefs and sorrows
Rob stalwart hearts of their brave-faced tomorrows
And spasm us laughless toward joys unmet:
Agile life holds herself before us-- but not forever;
We gasp to get the least departing glimmer of her.
So cursed, and crushing, and stiff is grief
We must lose ourselves if we lose pleasure.
Our own trying lives chafe from burning coal to dust;
We grind on to do, not as we would, but as we must.
A wrecked auto, cancer's dark star, the tumor's bloom,
Seek us out on our various ledges;
We wander open-armed and upward-eyed, seeking edges.
The Bride of Sir Patrick Spens
Lip to lip and hand to hand we meet
Where wet moon drives down to drown,---
Eyes blown wide when the lightning strike
Silks terror to the ground.
Come away, love, court the storm
Our nights lay wrapped with the worm.
Say this tempest tempts me now
Who did not love's thought invent,
Nor I the one shall ever finish it,
Though it pull at the whirl of my brow.
Come away, love, court the storm
Our nights lay wrapped with the worm.
Say that lightning the night pulls down
Crosses like two hearts in love;
Which rich greatness first had the name
The other must content to be emblem of?
Come away, love, court the storm
Our nights lay wrapped with the worm.
All night your hand blazes where it had slept;
Midnight's undone, and our kisses heap,---
For in the spirit we are tried and kept
And from spirit to spirit leap.
Come away, love, court the storm
Our nights lay wrapped with the worm.
O Love where's comfort, where's land, where's sea,
That touches not the nothing of your hand?
I am all things where all things meet
In the original of your eye.
Come away, love, court the storm
Our nights lay wrapped with the worm.
Spring Has Come
Lenten spring has come to town
With blossoms the birds sing round,
That all this bliss bringeth;
Day's-eyes in his dales,
Notes sweet of nightingales.
Each fowl his song singeth.
The thrush-cock threshes "oo."
Away is all their winter woe
When woodruff springeth.
Sweet fowls are singing fairly fair
And wilt thus all their winter woe
While the woods ringeth.
The rose arises, wraps her robe;
The leaves in the light wood
Wax all out with a will.
The moon demands her blue, oh;
The lily is lissome to see, oh,
The fennel and the chervil.
Wooing are the wild drakes;
Mares merge with their mates
As the stream strikes still.
Moody songs, some; so do more!
I know I am one of those
For love must like me ill.
The moon mandates her light;
So does the seemly sun so bright
When brides sing so bravely.
Dews dunk the dunes;
Deers with their dears run,
So hearts within them dream;
Worms weave under clod;
Women wax wondrous proud,
So well the spring suits them.
If I should want my way with one
This wondrous weal I will forego
And with the woods be done.
Florida Dawn
Tuneless bottles adumbrate the surf
Tumbled scuffed lines of water, angelus births,
Mammoth scarab portents... the sea disgorges
Venus and her tragic afterbirth;
Blue sand catches trash.
Haphazard in the palmtree's rooted moonlight
I thunder vortexing flames, half-bright,
All-solemn, tipped in cymbal carib air
And shear my acid tears for the slow sky
To advance by a single wasted page.
A green flash scolds, recharging time;
A coiled fire breaks
From the horizon's burning lime.
Claret's stripped indigenous light,
Byzantine and exact,
Laps and smashes this island's coral banks
And Venus' weaving shoulders come, and come,
Fusing silted light in the surf's recanting drum,
And I am trapped in light.
So imagination overtakes a death (my death)
And joy alone keeps pace.
This Iris Is
An iris' measure
Is given forever
Nor ever may be ungiven---
So two hearts have striven
To darkly top their stalk
With two hours' unwasted talk
And bluely blossom hereafter
Impermanent as laughter
Where sunlight stains
Their faces champaign
Above tall unsteady greens
Tilting slenderly unseen
Beneath the feather-petals
That soft as eyelids settle
Against each other's breadths
And kiss until their deaths.
In Our Mutual, Mortal
In our mutual, mortal
done undone, doing undoing
push me, pull you
racing to ruin
past our curfew
laughing and cordial
we collapse together
and make our midnights burn
with a thousand torching
touching suns, and when
the night clock is done
and old time runs
into new day begun
and cool spring is
into hot summer come
in picnic weather
we tongue and fiddle
together breathless, apart
no better-- my heart!
how we sweat to sighing
on sweet myrtle purple
and cry "no more,
we're sore!" and pant
like raced-out panthers
at skies and ceilings
on our wringing backs--
but like a turtle
we turn over
and swim some more
with sheets for water.
Are we making sons
or daughters? "None
of wily neither!" and
we chorus laughter.
What Newton
What feeling gives ground to stolen heaven's hours?
Where's the gain in ecstasy,
This scudless plus we connive from dusts?
This sinless winning that overtakes the taken
And in pure mind glows lightsome,
In intent outshining the divine?
Once the heavenly terror is over
And nerves and veins relapse from lushness
To the careless tiredness of a stuffed couch,
What lays in that drowse miming contemplation,
Or half-knots its cool eyes to unpuzzle
The tussling books on the bleary shelf?
What in God's name is the simply human?
What remains when we've torn down the curtain,
Sunk troubles and psalms, all gone, into one ocean
And stand static again among sandgrains
Amidst the ceaseless wash?
Bushwacked
Vanity in the bough
Vanity in the briar,
So saith the preacher
And prays his prayer.
God lies knotted in the bower.
Kisses, sweet messes and delight,
Sings the cold widow who lives by the bay,
On these my thoughts drink dry the day,
My hungry body feasts the night.
God lies knotted in the bower.
Priest and widow one pulpit share
And body and soul are tight,
What one rasps to the empty air
The other laughs in the dark.
God lies knotted in the bower.
The Golden Ticket
Little mattered, and much pervaded
The antique living room too much sunlight had degraded;
A little heartache burned beneath his cassock,
And holy daybreak shattered at the blinds.
If Christ defied his fashions
And strode untemplated and rude,
If Hitler really killed them all
Then how dare I intrude?
My voice imparts and falls, toils and tolls,
Its happenstances and romances, its passions
Its trances of a certain evening in a certain loll
And on into dawn prepares some further wrong
Inconsequent, yet beckoning, a passionate
Lark backspread against dispassionate clouds.
(I have stood upon the Arctic zones and poles
Of certain yellow unlighted rooms.)
Among the wasted cigarettes and torn pornography
I have sifted and resisted so many
Facts and truths that harshly glare in so many
Wasted one-time afternoons.
Holding, holding
Our hands beneath the spider's pall were golden.
The hackneyed painter's ennui endures
Formulas of snow and absence, building sets;
Nailed in the aurora's tonic light, and stiff,
My red shoes stand steadied on a cliff.
(I sew my fingers backward that sew my shroud.)
And I have wandered lost and wondered found
And in a crossed broken shadow drowned;
(I have lived my life while floating upon the rood.)
Chastized eyes
Chastized eyes
Glare no more on inward wars
Accreted dusts that sharply crept
Down the pale defiles at midnight,
Or assembled dust tumbled from untouched dresser drawers
Spilling golden dirty light over all.
(I have seen them all, and touched them all
And thrown them all away already,
Golden crowns cascading to a wastebin.
I have touched the molten blots that blot within.
I have rearranged my clothes upon a hook.)
Here's some argument's half-misapprehension,
There, the moronic posture of a gesture
Gilding the broken indices of fate.
A look, a moment's condescension
Gazes back from above a moth-eaten bureau
To fall upon the blankness of a wall.
And I have longed and I have lounged,
Taking nights apart to tack the day together,
And still the terrorist dawn arrives, inflicts
Green and golden, and obliterates my weathers.
O fol de rol de rolly o
My bloodless feet are skirled in skeins of snow
Daybreak snaps the blinds. Bored, it leaves
Out through exhausted windows where I have thrown
How many tired glances into airs unknown?
And they are tired, emptied by seeing,
Glancing netherwhere, seeing, recoiling,
Seeing the thousand toiling hours of neglect
The glazed eyes of weary aspect,
Hollow yet disdainful, and rolled upon a bulb
Or blindly churched in the long, squared
Eternity of a ratty book that blazes
Trashed Byzantiums in footnotes obscure;
Or restless finds itself still climbing
To some even more forgotten shelf
While a quaint, antiquarian transcendence
Cool and numb
Floods moldy light upon the moldy carpeting.
And still the snow inquires
And still the day expires
Answerless, if my foot shall daedalus the fresh.
(I have killed and I have died for less.)
---No, no I haven't been. Is it near here?
What's it like? Is it extraordinary?
Oh, its full
Of quiet shades, thoughtful darknesses.
---My, there's no end to things in the heart.
Is there now? Now is there?
No, no truly;
There is never any end to things.
And the squeeze of nights, the evenings
Where so many eden days have sank entranced,
Collapsed so charmingly about an aborted heart
In so many unheated ochre rooms alone!
Oh I have seen and mourned the fabled light
Disastered in a rucksack crease of dirty pants.
And yet, how shall I begin, and how beget?
I have looked through ochre eyes and hollow rooms
Undeceived, and yet, and yet....
I am scarred and I am mastered in the garden,
Near the wisteria, iced by the moonlight's
Porcelain glances. How many years and days
Has it been, how many, since first, in moonlight,
We traded sudden glances?
Roses had maddened us, and we were glad.
Here, balancing the wisteria on a fingerend
Pointing past my agile nose to oblivion,
Cold leaves rustle in the ruined fountain;
Water's memory in the concrete bowl
Scratching over the water's ancient course.
A thousand points of light conflict
In a thousand parted dooryards;
Conflict, flicker, and then resolve
Focused into a single momentary glow.
(My eyes and I contain
A thousand portions of a thousand parted souls.)
O fol de rol de rolly o
My bloodless feet are skirled in skeins of snow
Elegy
The crayon-crammed sun, dear,
Roaring and soundless, fountains
A crooked rivering stalk to the grave
For it is summer and never
Among the milkweed floods of grass
Will everyday angels flame again
Dawn wise and luminous as thread
Out of the martian mysterious dark,
So tall was the flying sunshine
Spied in your crinkled eyes.
The milky sun hung up the sour day
With daylong hands played the harp grasses
That plucked our praise-soaked ears
There on the floor of light
For it was summer and ever
Our milk-licked unmanageable bones
Pounded joy and adoring down
The auroraed roughs of our breaths
Till silk-dripping souls announced
Heaven commences at our fingertips.
Oh it was dawn and noon, and night
Dropped his forgotten trunk of darks
Among the staggered stars as I came,
The sun's brother, halogened as haloes
Shining my wary wishes in the air
For it was summer come and never
In the pearly rivers of the grass,
Will I silk my grabbing eyes again
On the welcome-at-once loving
Of your eiderdown sighing skin.
Now ambergris and matchless
The mirage-trod moon emerges like a tear
Over a mourning soul simple as sleep.
And because summer is overthrown
And night has leapt up like a cat
Under the harp-tongued tree of cells
My vegetable hand now grows
Mannerly and large to grief:
O Time has denied me nothing
Of his licorice whips and nickels
Nor eboned one nightfall or fastness
Shut on your ghost-wasted alien eyes.
Pulled by the spoken tide of the clock
At midnight moonless rest I writhe
Resplendent in my bent vest of ribs
And hear both tomb and rumor tumbled dumb
By the mild handmaidens of your sighs
For it is summer gone and hollow
And sorrow's gone down with the moon
And though I tongue earth's dust floods
For all those romancing eyes gone under
Fate's timeline is still the grass on fire
Burning where the wood was wild.
And the crumpled sun, broken, bears
Funeral tears in the brain
That wombwise and graveward crawl
Down the fiery alcoholic face
For it was never summer or was it
Under my coal-thumbed universal eyes;
And only the bigsouled sourceless moon
Drowned and void in the jailhouse dark
Remains and grieves derailed sighs
Over night-locked trees tall as grasses.
Do not grieve, brave, with whys
Or hemorrhage one ear with a sigh;
No heavenhelp salves such ashes.
O Let instead the dear uncandled dead
Cry mercy up to my eyes.
Abide, Abide
(Originally titled: HOW LONG SILENT?)
When first I put my dreams against the tide
And against all the world's whorl,
Woman's word and world's spray and all
Did first my dreams deride.
O How long since my first dream had cried
'Abide, abide!'
When next I tided life's bitter wreck
And fingered the fathering ashes for mirth
As if the cursed grave alone saved worth
Along all the drear shore's long dreck,
Even then my quiet dream sighed
'Abide, abide!'
Thirty years' work and little profit,
So greedy is the white spray's strain
Rowmen must beat the oar and never ask for rest;
And when my burning arms unlock,
From their dry white sockets drop,
They surrender under a sigh:
O How long's silence since
My first, flung dream had cried
'Abide, abide!'
recharging time
lightning
as a good watermelon
I measure all things
And with the woods be done.
Simple As Sticks
Simple as sticks, we ignite. An algebra of skin
Commences with us; our aureoles vent longing.
The wind tears through our formulas and associations
Smearing the clean inks of our thought.
We kiss like two erasers removing errors.
Body Complete As A Planet
Body, body complete as a planet, our whole world
And no soul anywhere? Death, death complete
As a trainwreck, and no salvation from skeletons?
Thirty years' work and little profit,
So greedy is the white spray's strain
Rowmen must beat the oar and never ask for rest;
And when my burning arms unlock,
From their dry white sockets drop,
They surrender under a sigh:
SUNDAY NIGHT @ THE BRIGHTON
The Noble Hat
+++++++++++++
ePHEMERAL oDE TO bLISS ! !
Consider Destination
The ending to theis is THIS.
The flayed skin of Akkadians draped
on stone walls--
the texture of orchid petals
and wet silk
It drips like semen
deposited in orifices
unknown, spawned from regions eternally damned
bottled water that cannot quench thirst
mottled tongues &
bleeding gums
Chanker, oh fabulous chanker!
Hail the soreness
Of your puss-filled geodesic dome!
(It ain't mine, baby.... It ain't mine.)
The gesticulation of once-thought
ABORTED ABERRATIONS
Time to die, as we were
BORN TO DO.
---Yet, every day I wake up,
I thank God
---That I'm not Jack!!!
The blackness
of Death overcomes
even the orchid's sweet nectar as it drips
Quietly and Relentlessly in the burning heat
of night---into the pool of succulent bliss....
E n d
........................
O Ode to Bliss
next time
keep your
eyes open
when we
Kiss.
End