Saving
Cinderella
poems to go home with
[1 of 365]
The wolves have my heart.
They are grinning and slavering in secret
woods.
Long vial smiles
where a wind
of nothing
invades the breath
Long eyes, yellow and forlorn.
The pack is musky and quiet
under frozen pine boughs...
Long nights have come
ranging to these woods.
Pine needles stick to my shirt-front.
I do not now where I
or the woods are. I only
feel this, and these eyes
restless yellow.
Long breaths, deathless strength,
and I know that out there
in a dark I do not comprehend,
a heat, a black, a panting mask,
something deathless
has my heart.
[2 of 365]
No poem today
A miscellany of stray days
The folded gold of hay straw;
Flies stumble and buzz-
already
I look to my lapsed vow--
I
can't hold out till summer
My remade ardor
and ingenuity of foolish failure,
a remade grave
dead
again.
My lover's face worn like a wet mask
drowning my own original pig one.
I see it moving between us,
pink
pig -- stuck fucking
held at either end
wanted
or goaded
trying to spit and wither
[3 of 365]
Not ÒchipperÓ enough. Yes,
That's what I actually said to myself
--dawn almost in the window--
and nodded, right I was,
Wolfenstein fluffily chucked
under my chin,
safe in his mild sheepskin.
I am sounding almost sane on the third day
away from grace, third day of my resurrection.
Soon I shall be as sane as Death,
my life unfluffily reduced
to a single, passionless hue.
Tawny port and Wendy Wasserstein:
Full of prejudice and still not ÒbannedÓ
by forces of political correctness
-the only gentile with a job a Ònazi.Ó
Sisters bonding in a successful suburb
in a lesbian ideal of bitterness
, all that the world took away.
All that the world took away.
Your endless voice
and slips into chaos;
resourceful maudlin muppet
turning Òself-helpÓ books into manuals of
torture.
And proud you were, you always were.
Proud beyond beliefÉ.
Tawny skin
warm with self-reflective fires,
inner
infernos
and a bird-voice harsh as a tape-recorder
ÒWhy why why why why.Ó
[4 of 365]
There are no heroic elements in the story.
The jutting chin's followed
by a mid-age jowl's folly
jellied as cranberry sauce.
a
pig is a animal with a wide dirty face
his manners are a big disgrace
Again today the shower and razor.
My razor made hers in four slashes,
horizontal symmetry /
then draggling horror
Banners brighten at the Walmart
, the highway higher decibels than melee--
Old war in a new uniform.
She moved onto me backwards, crabwise
ÒI must have been fucking you in my dreams for
years.Ó
Cartilage and hard-ons, cooing mucus,
the eye a soft pure pore or labial well
full of sweet consciousness brought
to ecstasy and emptiness both
would you rather swing on a star
carry moonbeams home in a jar
Stuck in my horseshoe of Tuesdays,
repetitiously different, equivalent zeros
without the bobbed banner of her hair,
--the quiet legacy of a moment's dare
injuring grace and then gone
heroless into the none
or would you rather
be a mule
[5 of 365]
My lips and prick soft as butter--
Yesterday, floored at work and lulled
into
lonely jonesing
for jeremiad joys-- you called:
a dark icon on a static snowfield.
ÒHappy vulva and penis day.Ó
ÒHappy v and p day to you, too.Ó
ÒOh, c'mon, you can say it.Ó
ÒIt's crowded in the office today, baby.Ó
ÒThey've all heard those words before. C'monÉ.
Say it with me: Happy vulva and penis day!Ó
Conversation jelly beans for v and p day
from two shy nieces, a yellow one
I misread, getting Anger from ÒAngeÓ
instead of angel--how crazy, how profound.
How wasted is this empty
principate of my oligarchic heart.
Miserly bean-counter: disreputable
misrepresented feelings:
ÒGive me back my penis.Ó
Softe as the jellie-bellie
jelly
beans belly
is, now, in my mouth
or as was, then, your mouth
rounding on love / evolve
before we ended on evil / valve
or whatever syllables
I would not say
and
you angered after
opaque
angel
phone / phony
[6 of 365]
I take my words from reiki and Rimbaud.
[7 of 365]
I sit in my Shakespeare slippers,
witless muppethead without a mouth,
bearded fleshtone globes blithe and blind,
typing you this poem.
What a wreck Sunday is; movies
are all I can handle, sightless sights
and my own silence, silent sitting
vegetating meditations
Last night the wings of the angel-of-death
had brish-brushed against the cheap jeep
; marks from the harping truck
were left light as moth's dust-
the sound was an ocean of sound
roar-rounding our heads round-round
as loud as you can swallow.
I saw your face, holographed on the black
windshield
,
fixated on that.
[8 of 365]
Light showeth the dust on my light glasses,
no-weight and all the things seen clearer
save for the dust I notice not
until the motes are golden.
Flecks of filtered dust,
flecks of light, flecks of starlings
I thought but dust--
flicker onward and away from me,
the windows full of them, if I
had but noticed.
How
golden.
I see you snuck in while I was sleeping.
Again.
ÒI put a message on your machine.
Why don't you answer the phone?Ó
How golden, golden.
[9 of 365]
My dream has left me at my desk;
nothing to report from the underworld
to the uberland of coffee and psychotherapy.
ÒUndressing the American Male,Ó
a help-me help-you book
purples the shelf, hefty
scrotum knowledge from the library.
I know less than my Dad
about
dirty things,
boweavil
feelings,
the knot under a god-man's cassock
or where a woman's bones
home-in on the uptight uterus.
Less
and less,
less
and less
Nothing comes with me when I come.
[10 of 365]
The Ism Schism
i
ain't got no-boooody
sad
n lonely, sadnlonely
I'm ready to listen, Cerebus, come what
devildogs there may, what forks in what roads
or slaloms to lingamless love
You popped your hat off like unfolding a map.
Ingrid Bergman on the screen,
miniature, meticulous
then woogly from her soul-kiss, undone
as yet, no lips, no crossings, no kiss,
but still the passion as in a ministry--
glossy looks and self-doubt
but none, none about the passion.
To feel's to live, that alone.
pleasure
passes; joy remains--
what's
gained in giving gives again
You talked like a tiger who smelt my fear,
licking your chops
with questions so granular
they had escaped my own notice:
-Òwhat's behind your not giving a ring?-
look
not without, but gaze
again
withinÉ.Ó
[11 of 365]
Here, There, Underwear
I keep seeing your underwear everywhere
Peeking from beneath my bonnie bed
or lonely among my mannish stock of black
BVDs--
a few forlorn pastels leftover from some love
vacation
some sultry summer thing
some once ago
--agone
aghast against
--agone
again
[12 of 365]
Gritty lamppost, dim world.
Here I am in Avernus,
no sound of birdflight
no sight beyond crass gray,
dim,
flightless
Kicked at my bedside, rocks at my windows--
no hope, no golden goal of reason
--human chimera in woman--
in you. Your voice a subtle
harrassment, elongating a night already
too long and hard with dicktease.
Spiffy finish on this lamp at my bedside,
an eagle holding a blank bulb in his mouth
while I hold you in mine.
When you go out
and the eagle gasps, I am left
lightless in the rain of this day.
[13 of 365]
Green raindrops under your hand;
Banked basement windows are your eyes;
Purple sneakers are just your kind.
Peacock lamp in blackness floresced,
Feather hood on a hot long gold cock-rod,
The bold brass base heavy as a lion's paw.
But now the world has run to ruin;
My room with paled pastels is drawn
And done-- done are all of my eyes.
The map of the world is tepid, tea-stained;
Brazil a diamond blot as sallow
As all I recall of what was pain.
So soon you have faded, so remote so fast-
The trees are telling me their secret at last:
Grow to the sky or remain as grass.
[14 of 365]
Spoons and forks and knives-
oh my!
Olympic-sized cupcakes
É
ÒIt was called Willis, a small black dog
it had a high mild bark
almost like a birdÓ
.
The Bill of Rights on the kitchen wall--
more still to mourn
than I may dare recall
.
No Jane in the rain, among other
children's toys of mortal color
.
Hecate, Hecate, Hecate,
three times called
,
be my honey-calmer
'ere I hit the wall
.
Let Mrs. Chen from the Hallelujah dry cleaners
steam my unpressed soul
;
Hecate, Hecate, Hecate,
nothing is my all
.
When I get back, I'll try my experiment
dry and wet
:
Full of the here and now
--and yet
É
[15 0f 365]
Flammable Bananas
do you like circles?
between thumb and forefinger
the ring and the braid of gold
the ring a ruby emblem from great loins gone
Weezie cat's head green-eyed
at the swinging charm
electric fires in the waterbowl
the chaise gone over to wildflowers
and mole is mellow
and the zebra candle burns
hollow through as though
the tower had gone terrored down
and you will not love this poem
for it is not enough a one
about enough of you
[16 of 365]
I'm the boss of me,
not some arm punching my arm
while I drive, while I live.
Not some infinitely lovely face
locked in the nowhere of psychosis
while I make a right onto Riven.
Split
between our
love and our stupidity,
between
insight and inanity
How long must we loiter in the parkinglot
before we takeoff from our little blue dot
into all the skies we've not
yet got?
How much time until our skulls are left on
sticks
yattering and clackering
in bony argument?
How many wicked ticks do we get
before we come
to what we are not yet?
Your army-issue parka
rubs my leathered arm
where I am sore. Sure,
it hurts, I say
but you already knew that.
[17 of 365]
Bad poems
cramp my joints,
clutter my palms
like longwinded
tattoos.
My hands ache with the
weight of them--
--surely your ears are shot
with the high, unoiled
whine of their wailing.
Surely
some tea and honey
must come from our twinning tempest.
Surely
some ghost of unearthly rapture
must assemble itself
from our smokes
and inanities
Surely
Surely
[18 of 365]
I think that you should let me read your
journals--
All the fantasies, all the fictions,
false reports of a brain in pain.
Five hours skewered on a lovely day--
our boneless bodies left as wreckage
outside the harmless, blameless
park that stripped
our sanity to shreds.
Remember sitting on that golden wall
crumbling to ducks and geese,
the winter water
as molten as our knowing?
Sunset came upon us as a crime,
unbelievably, changing everything.
[19 of 365]
Corporations forget they need us.
But no mother forgets she breeds us.
Why do they want a gain without a loss?
Stockmarkets cannot shock us
if we do not stock them--
Can't we have a life and not a job....
--I dream of singing you
this stupidest of songs
Unsure
of your reaction--the if
of a tiff,
the whiff
of sulfur sifts
up from our pile of drifts.
Its our loss.
[20 of 365]
Oh, wow,
It's snow-
Ing now.
[21 of 365]
I lay in the dark and hold my chin
while a clock bongs
soft and thin,
--my jaw's still jointless, unjoined
the torqued hinge
raindrops run to rivers on these cheeks
finessed back
to drops at the chintip.
One hair on your chin begins a mystery,
your shoulders fine as a horse's
hold up a questionmark
--jutting, juryless.
There is no robed jurist to which to appeal
; not for knowledge (I am no purist)
; but simply for judgment
for some cease,
some surcease in this uneasiness,
this liquidy agony.
Tears have graced my agony
; and now every atheistic poem
ends like a prayer.
[22 of 365]
Anglo angels move in their
mysterious helicopters
as if Autumn still had us
and not February's tenebra marchea
tolling toward the ides of March
the birds come back like
black darts of dreams
w/ the eyes pecked out
little childlike screams
until even our God has
rewound to a sound
marchia tenebra
The reeds have rattled
their songs to mumbles
- on this small pond our faces
once leaned into skies
distorted by bubbles and fins
É.
You break open for me your body,
sallow and loaded
the way uneasy ice breaks open
to accommodate a skater,
skillessly, coldly, fatally
[23 of 365]
Miro My Hero
Persons parlayed to pictographs
a startlement of arms or eyes
asterisked
to stars.
How narrow a sky becomes
honed to a word
the gate is straight, narrow the way
nor can a rich man make it
ungreased by sincerity.
Eye of a needle,
asterisk
of a painter:
all expression beyond signification
miniaturized into the materials:
the clump of paint
or texture of an X
suavity of a drop
drop
drop
How one we are in words!
[24 of 365]
The
bland big breasts of a lover
through tornadoes of simplifying
transmute to the goosing of a line,
the thickening of a wick
set burning
on a great green field.
Yellow arrows of stars, of eyes
race thickly through the green...
The referent's a pretense
a fence
to define artists and audience, lover, loved.
How easily a letter can keep us
,
keep us apart.
[25 of 365]
constellation:
crude cruddy hand on a star
[26 of 365]
How easily an eye engraves a gas
--a cosmic or more personal blast
becomes a sumptuous setting in a wink
--half as long as it takes to think.
Or as if that were not near enough
we ourselves are cosmic stuff
and come assembled by some eye
that knows how to make us die.
[27 of 365]
What am I thinking of, drawing
cat cartoons and dog toons
thinking of little more than
line line line
No matter the mission of the mind
all that results from the resolve is
line line line
No matter the content of any eve
all that results of all I can see/conceive is
line line line
Division without pretense of containment,
thought without warranty of attainment:
line line line
Two dots for eyes, ears
in recesses of scribbles reappear
composed of the something nothing of a
line line line
[28 of 365]
A bathroom full of colored bottles,
colored glasses,
semiprecious historical shapes
full of nothing, each nothing its own
peculiar nothing shape.
A bathroom heavy with personal movement,
close breaths, spills, groans;
a round sound will echo
like a tump in a kettle drum
before our ears will abandon
it to its nothingness.
Where there is nothing does nothing
want to be filled, want to want to?
Or is something there already
to make the nothing nowhere?
A water closet ties us to the earth
dumps us back to the sea
shit by shit by shit,
our ship of death,
navigating blacks
hollowing a lowness for our bodies,
those nothings of many colors -
upended perfume bottles stinking still,
full of light if nothing else.
Nothing else.
[29 of 365]
A Worship Full of Flowers
with tears streaming,
and I walked past her." --James Tate
We stood together, pretending to be alone.
I told her I needed my sleep.
"You're always sleeping," she
peeped.
I don't know how very long
I've been dreaming this
but it can't go on much longer
than forever. We stood together, pretending
to be alone. I told her she
needed her sleep too, not just me.
That we should sleep together
and stop pretending. "I'm always
dreaming," she confessed. We stood together,
pretending to be alone. Pretending,
with my hands folded prayer-like,
I mimed us sleeping together. First
I was me, then I was she. "Go on,"
she said, "it's a pretty dream,"
and moved infinitesimally closer
to me, where I was pretending. We stood
together, pretending to be alone.
I was silent; she took my hand. To be
alone together we stood,
pretending.
[30 of 365]
The artist had filled up a shotgun with eyes
and blew them at the canvas.
Sheep's eyes mostly. Cheap. Local
supplier.
Said he wanted to see what
it was he was painting.
After one night out late, drinking and
thinking,
he raced around his latest canvas,
baaing
and baaing.
It had been like this.
Having gessoed another square, and another,
for a double-barreled exhibit at the community
college
and the Whitney,
he motored over to the pub, run by an ex-Brit,
and began his thinking by cupfuls.
A girl, a Lucy, made herself simple before
him.
The owner's son, Colin, proclaimed a fervent
admiration
and showed him some sketches.
As the night wore on, dim and glib
gave way to dark and darker--
fixtures
receded into paneling,
swabs
toned down to swipes.
The folk at the bar, diverse, invasive
readjusted themselves into the background.
Only their eyes remained intruding.
Their pupils elongated and shone,
a subtle music struggled to be overheard.
Round and around, dark swipes of coats,
long beings, swags of black, of dirty white,
circled the painter's attention.
He was the center of a sheepy maelstrom;
he was no shepherd, had nothing to crook,
no farm for home, no plans.
But still the hot bodies pressed and steamed
nearby,
crushingly, lovingly, crushingly,
stamping out obscure musics
looking up up up
at him
seeing what he was.
[31 of 365]
ÒAs long as goats can fart
and eyes can see, I'll love you,Ó
she said, her eyes all smile and blue
oilgleam.
ÒDid you fart?Ó I asked, staring starry
into her wild little goat eyes.
ÒLet's fuck again; let's fuck all day.Ó
And like a Chinese chicken she replied.
ÒFluck, fluck, fluck, fluck, fluck.Ó
My mind was all raw cock and taut cunt
in one second, the second second
I heard, ÒI could reawwy use some morwe
sweep.Ó Her hard hand coddled my cock,
and I crowed with a growing groan:
ÒFluck, fluck, fluck, fluck, fluck.Ó
[32 of
365]
How sweet the tender flip-flaps of your ears;
The long bones of your hand emerge
as tenderly as a seal's swaled palm closes
to its elegant rudder of fat and strength.
Your nose homes on its boneless scents;
your feet sweat in a mauve tidal pool:
anxious thoughts, anxious as fish
about to emerge into dry humps of breath.
Your rump's two loaves, like ruminant stones,
wait for the world's return to their round concerns,
the centered zen attention on sex
and nothingness-the stinky if of a
fart.
We grow glowingly from two things to one thing
that makes more things, and remodels
remorselessly
the thingness of the thing we thing we are.
[33
of 365]
A Vigil
All candelabra lay extinguished.
All prayers have gone home to bed.
All lie horizontal now, the living and the
dead.
Knees on crooked stone before a crooked cross
Are raw as mouths talked out to wounds and
loss,
Are sawn clots of blood soft as moss.
Here beside your steel-wheeled hospital bed
I look at you like you were one of my dead,
My knees as agony-open as my raw head.
How many hours lays this purpose till the
dawn,
How many days came our mutual loss heavily
along,
How many years lie sheared since you danced
upon the lawn?
Questions flicker in the candles' turning
light;
Answers lay about like shadows, lengthening to
night;
Windows let in worse things, dark and bright.
I watch a waxy mask creep into your skin,
Creep and grow where ruddy love did once begin;
I watch a waxy mask creep into your skin.
Soon the hour's midnight, soon it's half past
two,
Soon you lay like scripture underneath the
moon,
Drawn and pale and frail, whose only word's
"Too soon."
"Too soon," I take the chorus up,
although
It's only you and me, the hospital bed, your
arms of soft dough,
And silence. Silence thus, and silence so.
[34
of 365]
What was the look in the
last dodo's eye?
How graceful and final it
must have been.
How luxurious must have
felt the hunter's gun,
how the penultimate,
piggy pop must've been
so satisfying.
I look at you look at me,
last of my kind,
hair bandaged around my
head with sweat,
muscles in my neck
coiling like oiled snakes,
white static hissing
skullward from-where?-
You look so satisfied.
[35
of 365]
Òthese unsung hours
excite the inklings of poetsÓ
-Peter
Davidson
Liberating
viciousness--who would bother
to imagine it? Foam lips
hiss-spit against
the rough-good rigmarole
of coastal rocks;
this is argument's
synergy,
a new, rough-hewn word
for sin,
simple sin, easy sin,
sleazy sin, sin of guilty parties
without the
after-aperitif of contrition
--who would bother to
imagine it? Liberating
how time unweaves the guilt we felt, were
guilty
of in actual fact: pins
pinned in people, not dolls,
mock trials we hung
ourselves up on.
This is argument's
sin-energy,
a claustrophobic blown
for once
out of the closet, out of
the air, out of his cares;
out, out, brief closetÉ.
Who had bothered, who,
to imagine it? Collapsed
catastrophe. Who, who?
[36
of 365]
ÒSpeech, the profane
ghostÓ - Robt. Pinsky
Word, that comes
where nothing was
and's a ghost, iwis,
all but bodiless,
fickle as a kiss
aimed at nothingness.--
It cannot be, yet is,
carrying Time to this;
from the dead in tryst
comes that that cannot
exist
except that it is:
word, that comes
profaning sacred is
with mumbled, marbled
was;
but, no. It is, it is,
this word that shifts
is nothing but is
lifted from this is.
[37
of 365]
Never have I felt so lost and groaning alone.
So mapless. SoÉ roadless.
The million wicked licks and charming, damning
kisses--
You open below me in the chair
Hearts and groins groaning molten
My stomach lives in my mouth
My eyes are only inconsistently alert, sandy,
hateful
My fingertips frozen zenlike
My pricktip zipped in ice
No heat in my car, in my heart
Have we shared nothing between us, if nothing
is left?
I take my heart back,
unbearably altered.
Your hands ruined in my hands
My heart and my door locked against you--
How long have I been writing poems because we
could not talk?
Unbearably altered
I take my heart back:
"Vehicle has fuel leak problem.
It is--
dangerous to drive.
We try to fix, but
could not fix.
We didn't charge for
fuel leak problem.
But, customer need vehicle.
He is taking the vehicle
with fuel leak problem
with his own risk."
[38
of 365]
Where is yesterday's penetence?
ÒYou're a better person than me.Ó
ÒDon't say that.Ó
Where's the humility, the sobbing sincerity?
The eyes like a liquid sob,
arms and veins openÉ.
[39
of 365]
So I love you still. Under this tree,
unter der linden,
underground in my invisible way
aggravated, incomplete, partial,
corrupted by past events,
by my own lack of vision.
I cannot see how to love you openly anymore.
My love must remain a secret
if I am to survive at all.
And, of course, I am not to survive,
am not built to survive
but to die- to 'die the death'-
that's the truth all things repeat
while my body lies and lives,
lies and lives,
oblivious and pinioned
forever flying
in the nowhere of now....
Ah, God,
I love you, I love you
but not this pain, I swear.
[40
of 365]
It is equally important to
demand ultimate freedom
as to
give that freedom
in return.
I've been slacking
on demanding
that freedom for myself,
my winsome self
my sacred self.
O self I do not understand
I will respect you,
your integrity!energy,
your demands
your loves
that cannot
w/out self-respect
be pursued.
First will come your format,
healthy in body and brain;
demanding THAT
from timsspaceattention
then your will
holy holy holy
spirit and principle made action;
what will carry on
beyond and after me
into deathlessness
.
[41
of 365]
At the end of the field
where envy and defeat recede
and the snow goes down to stubble
there is little left
for the spirit to feast on
or for the heart to fester
into wisdom within.
At the end of the field
beyond the gross boulder
misshapen in sunlight,
and the agony of daisies gone to rot
a little chill water wastage
engages the shadows of trees,
the still dark
any life tall enough might throw.
At the end of the field
where the stale allegory of our argument
grinds down to groans
and unwonted silence settles
like the death of a car
rejecting its engine,
our newness begins,
begins again
begins always
begins forever
dark water startled
into rivets of light.
[42 of
365]
The ÒMore OrÓ Mirror Roars O!
Ritualistic prŽcis of precision
brought to bear on
divisive animistic indecision,
on whether one
is coldly nobler or has more fun
winning, losing,
or just fumbling the gun
back to unbecome--
rewinding the mind's timing
to Ònever begun.Ó
When the mirror walks at you
melting palms and melding minds
it seems so easy,
backing up into a discreter two,
to divide our problems
into you, you, and you.
But what does one become, what find,
descending into funhouse
distortions wavy-greasy?
Problems thought two, are one, and you.
[43 of 365]
Retched at the Nuyorican Poets' CafŽ
Where's the poem about adult anger?
Where's the poem about festering rage?
Where's the poem that does not engage,
That rips the reader and tears the
page?
Where's the murderous word we need
To feel ourselves and to bleed?
The salt that stuffs our mouths like
creeds,
Crammed and damned and horrified?
Look into your hearts, you hypocrites,
you lied.
-Said the poet without looking up, and
died.
[44 of
365]
Shouldering the Rudder
I'm a bad correspondent,
not touching
trust,
nor
having trust of touch,
neither the small caress a phrase
creates
nor its more minor outbound ripples;
one thing
that touches another
that touches it back in the backwash,
co-respondent to their existences
and not their petty insistences.
I've never had, even the hack, writer's
trust of
words, in buckets,-
that words thrown like rain above
the suspect patch of lawn will reveal
an invisible possible statue
standing
co-inhered.
To make a shape's consistent if
I've always
maintained
is a matter both of will and
wish
and's not a
wordy gift,
the Trojan joy of a seducer's kiss.
Work is what
it takes
ever since the snake: work and sweat
and death
to make of parabolic History's finesse
our human,
immobile mess,--
shouldering the rudder of a deep-draft
ship
that steams
on without us
kicking at the keel, our aquatic
anxious duty
to effort.
If one thing's touch may another touch,
I know not how, nor how much.
I've no faith in such-and-such.
No faith
that that
statue was already there somehow
on the played-out patch of wetted lawn,
undefiled by
dogs,
unseen by eyes.
Eyes, that
lightest touch
(or mock of touch that touches too
much)
that steals
the very most.
[45 of 365]
Have I forgotten, forgotten?
I have tried
and tired.
I have been to San Francisco
I have climbed the still mountain
I have clattered through Chinatown on a
cable car
I have returned in merriment.
And I was stuck in the Pittsburgh
airport
14 hours,
hours
And I was soaked to the bone dodging
lightning
And I was shivering night long on an
air mattress
And I was offered a sucking by a drag
queen.
And I have not forgotten, forgotten.
Nor have I forgiven you,
gesturing
In sudden solitary rage
And surprising myself with my intensity
My lightning
And my sudden foggy calmness
Afterwards.
[46 of 365]
This is not poetry.
This is emotional
journalism,
The easy parallelism of the
lines,
Everything declared
and nothing explored.
Poetry doesn't give up on
its own words.
The way these things
lie
languageless
Or like a saint aren't
interested
In what they're made of
only where they're going.
Poetry doesn't care to be
Anything but itself
part of the living world,
Alive.
Like these talentless
things, I became
Interested in your idea of
me, and not myself.
I was tangled up and drawn
on, drawn in
A kite in a jet engine
thinking of you, your
Idea of me, and not myself.
I
got lost
And, unlike a poem,
I got dead.
[46 of 365]
Hero du
Jour
My eyes were blinded by
hail and rain
And I was crying, my feet
soaked
In icy runoff -- the world
a vista
Of afternoon lightning and
snickering hail
As I walked off the top of
a mountain
Losing the view
that made my lungs ache
And slithering along frozen
rocks
Ahead of my useless crew
Until everything else ached
and ached...
But there was one skyhigh
moment
Standing with my eyes full
of mystery sky
And a flush throughout me,
I know, of eros
And I could see the world
thrown down like a cape
And the storm coming a
stain upon it
Just edging the silk with
wetness
And you ran along my
nerves, only you
hotly
And I did not forget you
when my bones ached.