somethng sawing on the spine
with rosin on
raw nerves. The birds outside
are singing.
No echoes.
Sounds are immediately close
before the flashfire. War's a thing
eats air
and swallows slow.
Occasion Of Sin
It may be the sweet
of the secret kept
that ferments the juice.
It may be just
hormonal spike
that leans toward moon
I know that I am
moving toward,
but now and then
the keyboard
seeks my voice.
The one so slick
with honey I can
launch my rockets
smoothly
into cyberspace
with path
as far from home
as I can go and still
get back again.
The throb that I become
can find a molten world
without a clock,
anonymous hands
and lips and pleas
and never-ending cock.
I get a room just barely
big enough to hold
those tightened gonads
till at last
they give their gout.
In whispers,
voices ask,
"I just can't sleep-
please, help me out..."
I send the words
to fan the fire,
trip wires to Kundalini-
as night implodes
I spin the tale to tease
those rising, reddened heads.
I take my time
to hear the groans
that tell me
they're released,
and then
a circle jerk
unseen, unknown
begins a shy retreat.
I type 'good-by'
and gently kiss
each faceless
stranger off to bed-
I power-down.
And only then
fear what
is living
in
my
head.
Sounds At Midnight
Manic
midnight
wondering how the all of it
fits together,
wondering whether the wheeze
inside my chest is really cancer
come to
kill me
or some word,
some thought still stuck beside
my heart
but tight, so tightly squeezed,
its animal noise- that saint who sits
in skin and looks like me- denys, while windows
are all black, and frankly
anything
can happen.
Supreme Indifference
The grass will grow
despite the bend of wind or want
or war. Spash of rain or tears brings naught
but rot of mushroom-sweetened Past
and last, the elemental smell of earth. Faces
turn to moss as grass
slips lean
between the years and grief.
And Woden laughs.
Inappropriate Muse
I have-
I'm afraid
that I have
words
just pouring
out my mouth and eyes and every
orifice; sometimes, there's no way
to tamp
the thing. They'll bust out, even if I try
to dam it,
dammit. Sitting at work,
hunched up
with coffee, over numbers, copying
precisely in a hum of
unencumbered concentration, I'll think- 'birds'
or 'Mohabi Desert heart'. It's like Tourettes,
the impulse, only
silent, so it's only me
to bear the embarrassment of 'they fucked
in church'- what word sounds just like
church...
Tethered
All my life,
at counterpoint,
a subtext
that reads
just beneath the moment-
Yeats, Whitman, Millay, Poe
plucking strings of love and woe.
I had a child.
I had another.
The Seventies brought on Reagen,
Jonestown,
bellow
of the Women's Movement-
I stayed home and drank,
the world spun on.
Yeats, Whitman, Millay, Poe
plucking strings of love and woe.
Casting strands of meaning
in a yawning
maw
of dreams.
Marriage ended.
Sober sadness,
new apartment,
clerical wages-
days with only me
to butter bread.
He moved on
to younger pastures,
I found friend
and lover both.
My children moved
from house to house
in chariots of guilt.
Yeats, Whitman, Millay, Poe
plucking strings of love and woe.
To the hilt, their sword, their words
impaled me
and I didn't
die.
Skewered to language
hard,
hypnotic,
gave me purchase,
I held fast.
Eighteen years
have passed and yet,
so recently
my mouth
has learned
to speak.
The Tooth
When you've rendered down
the fat of all your life
the part that's left,
the spare and hard
like gnawed bone
is character,
where truth lives in the marrow.
That is the bastion
from which you'll pitch the rocks
at anyone
who presumes to know
which tooth will hold
the cyanide,
and for what reason: it's what we are willing
to die for, claim in extremity, we call 'love'
in whose reflecting eye,
we hang
our heaven.
Traffic
Pigtailed tin,
reflecting sun
that's only out
when I am trapped
inside a car
dredlocks of metal
snarling
all the way to home
listening to some jacked up
juke box
the car beside me has become,
'stretch the neck
giraff-icking',
looking for outs, ogling every
ugly alley, never-go
without-a-gun
side street. Trafficking
in stalled out lives, exhaust
-ed.
Transparencies
You may say
you can't, but I know it can
be done: will your memories to fade
until they're just like little children.
Hand in hand- a string of
fading children walking up to palest crest
of shady hill, dissolving
under leaves and into sky,
their colors fainter, sadder; sort of tintype
print, then gone.
Waiting
Like children for a yellow bus
we line the curbs of life, and thus
the cogent choice slips wide of us
and so we drift.
So certain they are numerous,
we lose the gift.
Our beds are made before we know,
our dawns, our noons, the indigo
of many nights, so dark, so slow
have named our fate.
No path, it seemed an undertow,
and still we wait.
....From The Tree Of