Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Love Song










I want a flower
That is a part time dog
I’ll crack your skull
And share my dirt with you
We’ll stink together
We’ll eat off the floor
My nose where it oughtn’t
Hair in my teeth
Taste me when you’re dying
Die for me
I’ll pick up your bones
I’ll hold your hand while you sleep




Morning Glory (waking from a restless dream)




I am 
Leg and cock
Am hair
And snot
And teary eye
And
Weary heart
Left weary
By lie
And helpless want.
My breath
Is sour
From 
Mornings in your  wetted wood.
Who will 
Let Me
Re-draw
The dream
Reclaim
The good?
I have heard 
There’s a man like that
With word for face
And wish for hat
He stands by
The corner
Waiting
And unsure
While in the harbor
Dark craft 
Blow warnings 
Of their departure.
The day will be
A sunny one
Already the dream 
Is burned away.
Another day then
To discover
The man
And if he is my brother.








you live in me more than you live
such is the cost of loving
to never really know a thing
to know a thing too well, then nothing
I’m only awake in your dream 
at your mercy, nothing at all
Heaven is the hole I live in
your heart the hand of my Fall







I saw it down south
No first I saw it reflected north
I saw it down south
A single strike to the ground
Then I noticed for the first time the F-train
At its highest point
Down south at Ninth Street
From here, the ninth floor
Lightning lighting up the window
Reflected in the dirty window
Of the apartment where my brother died 
Then I sat in bed
More reflections looking north
Buildings in the way
Then it came
The rain
Like a train
From the south.




Saturday, September 4, 2010









The pages are gray dreary dreamy.
My ideas not there at all.
Forgive me for not forgetting
            Shoes should be left in the hall.

The dream forgets its pages.
Ideally we are forgiven.
Dreary doll gray and all.
            Shoe is good to be living.






Thursday, September 2, 2010


Every goddamn day
The same thing

Or else I go crazy:
Sit and eat

And think and drink
And try to remember what love is

Then
When it gets too hot

Sleep
And dream of love

Wake up hungry
For love

Work towards love
Until the sun sets

Then sup on love
Then wash my face

Turn out the light
And listen for love in the dark




I come to you fully formed
Not with word but with sword
Fully drawn
            In the image of a song

Ready-made
Free of wrong
Sum total of accepted law

Engorged
           
            With virtue and virtuosity

Witness: Precocity
And precious specimens of
Luminous love and atrocity

Fully aware
And fully present

Peasant
            And proud to smell of it.




Tuesday, August 31, 2010





The poet is a beautiful man
And appears in the mirror enthusiastically

But nothing changes
The image of a rotten inside

Perhaps it is a condition of Hope
To lack faith in the evident
           
Perhaps seeing damages the eye
Just as love breaks the heart

He is beautiful
Upon reflection
            But knows not to trust a second-hand light


image: John Dugdale



Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Ghost




Stubborn, but still a shadow
So still cold.

Face, self, shade, breath –

Fade with my delirious dream
But never gone
            For good.

Better to be misunderstood
Than stand
One foot

In a grave
            Mistake.




Sunday, August 22, 2010


Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Define: Equal.

The fatigue that follows transgression?
The hunger after rage?
Humiliation and honesty?

And a poem,
            What law does it obey?
What follows
The opening created by a patient heart or mind
Whose only aim is stillness
And its own disappearance?










Left with nothing
I did,

Barefoot
Against the crashing edge of the world.

What is there that is not against my skin
Or in my eyes that I need?

The wind is confirmation
For the way of things:

Be nothing
That can’t be blown away.

The sand is strewn
With what was once wanted.

The gull
Is graceful scavenger,

The beach ours,
Together walking, bearing nothing.

She is hungry,
I am weightless,

On the edge of things,
            Collecting stones.




Thursday, August 12, 2010

Beach Muse







Brown and ready to split you,
To fit you over
            My willful sunburn tickle
And to instill you with a trickle
            Of the vinegary sinful issue.
I know you are hungry and coy
But I like being a boy and you will learn
To play along.  After all it’s you
Who wrote this song - I only sing.
I only hammer out the ring of your design
And pour the wine that makes us both
            Go mad and dream,
Another potent stream to which we are both
Inclined, to love.
So drink and doze
While I  remove your clothes and gather close
            Your skin and hair and shine,
Bend and turn and learn your lines,
Both of us afraid and whisper -
            You are mine.





Friday, August 6, 2010



I write my letters in the sand
And right away they disappear
As expected
In a world
Where everything’s in working order.




Birds again in their insistent assertions
Unflagging advocates of facts
Hungry!  Terror!  I am!

What lesson then for the poet
Who doesn’t cotton to such naked squawks?

Retrain the ear perhaps and know
There’s nothing true or beautiful
That isn’t a matter of life and death.









Lord Buddha
I offer you the afternoon
Because you have offered it to me

In Brooklyn
Where the afternoon was born
There is a place for you

It can be reached
By broken bicycle
Or bare feet

The sun is still high there
It is still
            Afternoon

That heaven
Waits for me
Even though

I am but a dirty feather
Having suffered
My days in the world

For you, Lord
It will
Open itself

Its mysteries illuminated
All history
            Revealed

If you come
Lord
I will meet you

Waiting
Joyfully
On the corner






I love pale skin

Frail imperiled
Hitherto unheralded limbs
Delicate and drowsy
Pasty and blousy
Marked by hair and mole
And insistent red cell
Eager beneath translucent sheath
Icy bone
            Hungry for heat.

A fruit you want
Ripe and red
Ready to rot at a moment’s hesitation -
True there is joy in suppuration
But it shouldn’t be too easy.

I can be the sun that warms you
I can burn knowing
            Onto your surface
Coax the stone from your flesh
And ready you           
                        To bloom.













There is an end to everything
And it is to that as men
Which we are drawn

The ocean’s edge
Thrills us
A sharpened knife to the palm of the hand

Its blackness though
Its deep middle darkness
Is the terrifying oblivion of origins
            All too much of one thing to bear

Men want the end
Crave the thing becoming the other
Blue sky to slate sea

Find us where we live
            On the perfect, unreachable horizon



Vuillard

In this room
Light and shadow
Die together
            A sweet rot
No different than our own

In the same room
There is no dying
There is no room
            No table no wall
No afternoon at all

This room
Is empty of everything
Except what is absolutely
Necessary:

The eye
In its dissolution -
            Entropic
            Joy and truth
            Everywhere






On the nobility of writing poetry





How noble would it be
If I swallowed my pen?
            The bus moves so fast
Drawing me away
From last month’s
Improbable Eden

            Also I am hungry
And trying to mouth the words
That never made it out with me

A thousand impressions
Left on the porch
Where I left them
Along with a few ears of corn.





Thursday, July 22, 2010


This is the moment I have dreamed of
And like all dreams disappoints

Wishes bloom in moonlight
The dawn, no matter how soft

Burns away possibility –
The moment, irrevocable remains.

Still one is born of the other
Moment from the dream

And even the most unchangeable
Truth
            Has its seed

In the formless dark of desire.

Waking then does not  mean
The end of wishing

It is only the flower on the stalk
Pale and plain
            But fragrant

In endless abundance, noticed
Only when the sun in her insistence

Draws a shadow between the world
And its enduring disappearance







Of all the things that make me lonely
Birdsong is the best
Beyond my reach, Out of sight
Emphatic longing in tiny breast
And tiny breaths devoted to hope
To hunger, to melancholy notes
Of nothing really but to say I am
I am I am I am I am
And wait for the inevitable song
That sings I too, I too, I too
In tree and cloud and endless blue sky
I am, I am, you too.

But unlike my own hesitant noises
That mostly in the nighttime sound
It is sunlight which alerts the birds
And awakens their insistent rounds –
Not me, not me, not me I call
In shadows and dreams and unmade wishes
In limitless silence and dark, dark darknesses
I say Tis all, tis all, tis all.










So many poems about death and now this:
Bubbling brook, perfect light
Wind through sibilant trees

How nice if this is what waits for you
I am there already
Grown impatient
            And ceased to believe.













Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Window Dressing (First Go)


1.

The story of a Boy is the simplest story of all
“Pick up your shoes from the hall!”
That is all.


2.

Sinuous urinals and doorless stalls of a Tree Grows in Brooklyn
But first: here we are old enough to remember
Which insects we discovered in what order,
And which leaves die first
And which names of which streets are mysteries
And tell of scheduled visions,
            A three channel love affair adjusted with a fork.


3.

We are born into a crowded world if we are lucky
We are born into well-buttoned sweaters
And storied basement spelunker career moves

Before you even notice it
We are born into unassailable truths and paradisiacal futures
Holidays with a capital Ache,
Math for geniuses and
Meat is still a good thing.


4.

On the horizon anonymous marks on the horizon line
Two point perspective, me and the other me
On calamitous collision course with wish fulfillment.

“Hair and the increasing variety of the proof of our bodies.”


5.

It is only the body that means anything
Underwater or puffed up on sugar fried in the
Sanguineous oleagination of love.
Amazed we are not a nation of diabetics
Instead of the broken hearted moguls our
Supply side ménage have fantasized.


5.

The boy’s body – nowhere to go but up.
Follow it with spontaneous herald -
Social Studies is anything but
With designer jeans recessive in a few years
And the bathroom bolted against self-discovery.


6.

Dissolve then, so simple
Into the front and center lactations of little deathly collapses
Is it really where it begins? 
For the story of a man, yes,
Less simple but no more complicated.
           
            Lord Jesus Christ you never told me it could feel so good.
Hail the herald of the sun!
Compulsive milkyway emissary!  Galaxies within us!


7.

The price, a certain loss of control.  But submit before you are subjected
And learn to see in God’s inconvenient timing
The warrior potential in your stubby.           

Would it be cliché to speak now of pencils?  Certainly
One thing follows another, but what is good for physics
Does not apply to poetry
(But then again it does)


8.

Few things are as erotic as the mother son bond.
Pause
Instead, skip Church and save your soul.

I watched my dad urinate, you know.  I will spare you
The horrors.  Good I was already in the bath already
And could wash away, you know, the honor.



9.

The society of men: An essay in multiple parts by author deleted
Who is a Man himself and thus of unique qualifications to expound on the above subject.

Part one – The expletive deleted
Part two – The “brain”
Part Three – The heart and its conspirators
Part Four – Youth and pride
Part Five – Postponed till next
Part Six – The inevitable mistaken



10.

Free Association Therapy: Big 80’s
Whither the beef?
The Berlin New Wave
AIDS
Every breath– what a fucking disappointment
Freebasing that summer Susie sat-house with the pool. I dove and sloughed away our teenage skins for all of us.  Good as it’s cracked up to be.  Becoming:
            Weightless crystalline ambition, till half an hour later all was heck
The Downtown Scene (general and specific)
Off the Wall
My underwear is stuck to my prick, so good your
            Hips felt on the floor of the sunroom, blackened
            With ficus and wicker and Eames recliner
            And amateur masterpieces from a similar era when art was
            Something we all still
            Loved and knew nothing about.
Galaga
First smoked pot in the basement and after decamping to the backyard I tossed                             Spaghetti
                 Over The Fence to the neighbors
                But it was just an arbitrary boundary.
               A world seething with aliveness, interconnectecated, ya dig?
Drama class, Tea and Sympathy, pause between lines
    Because I am on the phone
Friday’s Mescaline;
            On the running track I became bird, curvature, Aztec wind
I am in love with my best friend’s armpits
Murphy’s law
Slaughterhouse Five
Oil of Olay
My dick my dick.  Am I ever done talking about my dick?
            Thanks Dad for being Italian
            Thanks Mom for letting Dad


11.

The Russians have taken over the neighborhood and now the math team
The chess team belongs to them alone


12.

Full disclosure I fucked a fifteen year old (I was seventeen she took my cherry but had prior lost hers to a twenty one year image who drove up from Florida on his bike and dumped her)  I fucked the Cornell barbarians too. A wooly Jew pussy at the time a wee bit repulsive but now such foresty cunts obsess me.  I saw mother showering.  The water ran over her breasts and rivulets off her own pubic mess and I thought she was peeing.  Doctor?

There has never been anything Oedipal at all, which is not to say
There haven’t been moments I wanted my mother
Dead.


13.

Doctor
An aggressive strain of obsessive-compulsive disorder
Has taken over my room and I have lost my
              Eyeglass for good


14.

I found these magazines in the basement ceiling
And after you (only direct reference) died we found the cash and the grass

Cell differentiation
Gastrula blastula, preppy, jock , nerd, nuclear waste in overdyed
Canal street bargain bin awkwardness.  Other brothers in Jean-Paul
Or speedball blackglama VIP room snake pit cocksucker couture


15.

If a fork splits what is it called?
And then when it returns to the road,
What then?
I follow my pee stream over such
Cartographical anomalies
Back to myself because I am infantile and fascinated with the world
That begins and ends with me.  
            I bang, you whimper and this is how the world is made
            Architects, I am tireless pharaoh
            And a thousand sexy slaves in thongs raise my
                                                                                      Obelisk.
At night we worship Baal
Because it just feels so fucking good

I wrote the part of God and I will cunt her scenes
To fit the tale


16.

Now the afternoons are that much more predetermined
Fulfill bourgeois expectations in café reminiscent establishments
In a new century where no one knows what anything means
But what the heck pretend it is meaningful
Or just don’t care at all.  It is a momentous
If pretty lame choice to be left with. 
But that is the world at large and we were already deeply
Engaged in me.  And I know misery enjoys company
If it can wait long enough

I am a century too late, maybe a bit more
But there is no cure for
Chronicological distemper but patience and wine.


17.

Sixteen ways of looking at the same thing:
(To be filled in later)


18.

Metaphor
More all-purpose with the emphasis on all.
Don’t fall for it.
This becoming that.  An easy way out or in.
Four years beating around the bush

The sheet of glass.
Eyeglasses are a mask
So what is a window?  Some elaborate garment
All bustle and cage and seamless seams of transparent not dreams
Veil
For vain cowards.

We shall return to this theme in time.


18.

Hitting a milestone – why doesn’t the car breakdown then?


19.

I never dreamed I would make it this far with nothing
I run on fumes, dizzying and smelling like crap
My nose is like my prick, more like it even than the thing itself
So much more directly connected to feckless Eros
The little bitch himself summering in Turkey, not the real one but
The image of a perfect Anatolia
As historical and central to the development of western thought
At the picture of Wet Pink
Larry Flynt, long lost Papa suiciding
Spermy and horrible.
I have run out of steam many times, my deflated distractions
Stuck to my leg.
Remember thou art hairy
And thus a man but I am not made a man by my hair
But by my cowardice in the estimation of
A thousand blonde centerfolds and tax returns.
Know though, o wise one, that hungriness is reflexive
I have a taste for the food I am too.

Don’t bother.
I am done trying to figure it all out, isn’t knowing enough enough?
Lets pretend the mistakes are accidents
Lets believe in that mythic idea of the endlessness of love
And all its manifestations being
Right and pure but ultimately painful, sheer torture really.
Insert British accent here, all merchants of ivory despoiling the
Belle letters of better halves.


20.

Window dressing
And we have arrived.
I am naked composing and one day will decompose in a silly suit.
The dead man’s necktie redundant
And shoes an awful loss.

Five hundred lives behind the glass
The quiet one in the fraternity and not an idea what to do
With the fact we are all stars and tragic figures
Mommas stories is on and I am talented
The city pays attention.
She has never let me down even with the knee on the neck









Poet

The poet is a beautiful man
And appears in the mirror enthusiastically

But nothing changes
The image of a rotten inside

Perhaps it is the curse of hope
To lack faith in the evident -
           
Perhaps seeing damages the eye
Just as love breaks the heart

He is beautiful
Upon reflection
            But knows not to trust a second-hand light





I’ll be honest
I liked you better the way you were before

Sometimes I don’t even know
Who I’m speaking to

Weren’t you a minute ago
A ray of dusty sunlight

And now, and now!
You are a stray cat looking for sin

I know it hurts
I’ve been in the same position myself

Sometimes I don’t even know
How I got out alive

Whatever.  And remember
I am ash you are ash

Together we feed the wind.




I come to burn

I come to burn.  Not to believe
Nor to pretend

I come to song, and to kill
And to yearn all summer long

There are too many kings and heroes
Too many poets too well known

No one believes in anything
Beyond the broken bone

Youth is endured pretending
I come in the nick of time

Beloved for abundant luck
Saviors sing of drinking wine

Kings fall and poets kill
Singers with their last breath moan

I come to burn.  Not to believe
Home I come

With hero’s song.





"Poem"




limited in scope
abbreviated in size
and shallow in its overall depth.





Much has been made


Much has been made of
“The erotic longing
Of ancient statuary”.

It’s no big news
That as a species
We long.

Who needs
History
To remind us of that?

Still, the fragments
Compel
Our knowing,

Offer us the
Certainty
That we are made of parts

And keep loving
Despite
Missing ourselves,

And still look
Beautiful
Broken.





I loved a boy
And dreamed of his never growing older

In other dreams
The boy was never born

Both ways
My love was perfect

Being made of want
And untouched by time




Sugar Brain


Sugar brain
Is at the bottom of it all

The rot of it all
Trot along on the leash

And stir the oil
Learn the burn

Be reborn’d is all
Sugar brain

Holy middle name
Give us this day our mess

Meaningless, yes
A villainless crime           

(But brought in under budget
And on time.)




Saturday, July 17, 2010

Ghost


Stubborn, but still a shadow
So still cold

Face, self, shade, breath
Fade with my delicious dream
But never gone
            For good

Better to be misunderstood
Than stand
One foot

In a grave
            Mistake




Why is it so hard to breathe?
Is it because it is so easy
Or so important?
Either way it is forgotten

The same way it is easy
To forget the air itself
Despite how in love
With living you are.

I am in love with you.
Something I have never forgotten:
Your breath, hard
And easy and important.

The same kind of love or not,
Either way I am alive,
Breathing and easily forgotten
Without you.






I loved a boy
And dreamed of his never growing older

In other dreams
The boy was never born

Both ways
My love was perfect

Being made of want
And untouched by time






A thousand broken barrels
I have never seen such a thing

My world is too new
And too precise in its occupations

Of tiny lights
And tiny voices – I can tell you

The stories of unreasonable lives

But industry, commerce
I know nothing

The movements of men
Broad back and arms turning the world

Triumph and death in the thousands
Cannot touch the sofa

The comforter
Coffee in a cardboard cup

Children die
For the sake of blondes and hyphens and special features –

The glossy mask
Lain over the desert by lazy Eros

And his fat henchmen
Of which I must count myself one



Deep in the woods expectation howls.
Dogs in the night -

Fearsome hosts
And seeders of a restless dream.

Beyond the dense and faded damask,
The chill of unknown hillside

Calls and calls
Till dawn arrives with its click and whistle

And the dogs of want
Remove to secret places,

Their long and toothy faces
And ever wetted hungry maw
            At rest.

The black bird of day arrives
Big as ever.  Ever a reminder.

Ringing out Forever in her
Groundless flight from shadow to shadow.

I am awake
And wanting to be in love.

I am awake, and wait again
For the glorious sun to set.




The shape of this poem
Is defined by this page.
Where one ends so goes the other
Hold it in your hand
And feel at its sharp square edge the limits of all things -
Turn the page to end it
And discover another start to it all.

The whole may be narrow
But the chamber it conceals
Filled with light and lightness
And ceaseless sibilant naming,
The eruptive power and silent steady force
Of the eye drawing all things into
That same unending evanescence.

A stone is nothing but a song, a breath,
A memory left too long.
The wind nothing but the weight of the world
In its restless shifting and search for comfort.
And the words just spaces,
The end of things, their becoming
Made known only by their edge
Laid against the emptiness.

A chair depends on everything it is not.
My heart is no different -
Page and pen and illegible yearnings
Line by line
To be found in your hands.





Every goddamn day
The same thing
            Or else I go crazy

Sit and eat
And think
And drink
And try to remember what love is

Then
When it gets too hot
Sleep

And dream of love

Wake up hungry
For love

Work towards love
Until the sun sets

Then sup on love
Then wash my face

Turn out the light
And listen for love in the dark