SONG OF THE COMPARATIVE NIGHT
Your hydrogen smile dissolves me.
Tips my thermometer to an impossible
centigrade. C'mere.
My dowser's wand is more atomic
than sunshine when you're near.
The invisible gears of earth mesh
at the base of my want,
when supplication becomes a whimper
without a bang!
You are hydroelectric power and
that turbine of night out there
reminds me of the hydraulics of hips
and eyes I call your big combo.
I am blacker than a new moon in winter.
SONG OF THE LIVER
I was trying to remove the splint
from my smile, while the moon
sank into the funhouse mirror.
Gee, can songs do that to the night?
I was trying to recover the sighs
of my hands, then the sun
threw a tongue across my back.
Could this be the hour of the clock?
I was trying to recapitulate the parks
in my spine, as the earth
rose to this lurnp in my costume.
Now I can never hide again?
What was the lesson of the flower
and will I go there alone?
Wiff the yoke drop and dance until
my fish rub against a thigh?
Who will resolve me of my shame?
O shadow! O scythe!
DESPITE YOUR NOTICES
This is my poem. The one I was afraid to show you. A
poem to provide against the voices that will ultimately
ensure my failure in this endeavor. This poem is a pillow,
small and embroidered, the satin death pillow used to
prop up the face for one last viewing. All attempts of
understanding finally and thoroughly erased. This is my
poem. The one I tuck under my eyelids when looking
inhibits the distinctions of what can be seen. And air
always present, always there to stimulate the hair at the
base of my neck. Insert this chill exactly where you
presume to have found me, only to uncover an aban-
doned parking lot for eyes. Look harder and you will
discover we are all matched to this swatch of steel grey
that is as wide as the seam on my scrotum but longer than
the chalk ray on the board in the classroom to represent
infinity. Silent and irreversible. A fault line running from
one hole to another. Forever. That we are drawn,
together. So see you on the other side. Even if we can't
represent that which we were hoping to resemble. But
for one day heaven. See the tips of buds swaying in union
beneath a spring sky so faint so blue that it could only
suggest a further devastation, as if we were fated to repeat
this day, as if we could. It came and went without the
anxiety of anticipation and its finality of passage and
unannounced significance stains us good. Even the
colors fade so we can only imagine we were once so alive.
Sad nothing can be held so thoroughly we might
assimilate it. Only in the letting go will the full concen-
tration of tone bleed into the periphery of our lives and
settle into a patina that can never be altered. I surrender
my vision thus. Because I don't understand. That joke
isn't funny anymore. It cuts me precisely where laughter
is a departure from this parlor. I live on flight 405
departing into an icy altitude--cold and detached. I'm
here despite your notices and obituary. That plane didn't
crash. It still hovers around my head. The constant hum
of its engines reminds me I still haven't landed. I know
this by the way a hand like a landing strip will reach over
to wave here, here, here. So here again is the earth. Not
the idea of it, but that dump of dirt and weeds outside
my door each day-humiliates me. So long. I'm off to my
job, alone in the clouds where my fathers live perhaps
younger than I am now. Having left me to dinners,
movies, books and with this incredible sickness you call
enthusiasm. It's a smoke screen though. For it was me
they stuck out there in that winter hole. Earth so frozen
it came up in slags that still get caught in my throat every
time you tell me you love me. So don't. I mate with these
voices on the other side. Their memos become the
mottos of my solo walk into emblem. As the tom metal
of all industrial accidents flowers in my brain. Yeah, I saw
the broadcast. Transmission deceived.
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Poetry from Web Del Sol