Risky is the wire
I'm dancing on while sober.
Arabic, the robes you wore
when jumping on this train,
and shouting, take
'No prisoners!'





Maybe It's The Moon

How can I describe
the cow
like, bitched-up heat
I get now
and again, when I don't
even know myself
what sets that thermostat
to climbing. I know there is a
feeling of hollowness,
wanting, thickness, older than time, drumming
in my DNA.

What can I say
to the way my
breasts
already feel fingers

or how the
hint of you
lingers
on my skin
when you casually
touch, but I want
so much more.

More
is
what it is

and from
behind. Hard enough
to shake my teeth loose:
hair seized, arch my neck
back,
one hand gripping hair, the other
jacking hips to force
the jets
from you. I want you
dripping down me
when the
moon
is finally a
sleep again.





The Apprehended Moan

I look at you, you're like a conch.
A conch that blows a single note,
your longing's plaint.

You're a saint's sigh
that dies when staunch faith
shoots prayer into the sky
to find it bounces
'gainst inpenetrable clouds
and clatters on the stone
beneath saint's feet.

You eat me with your greedy eyes,
a keen starvation realized,
as hunger prowls your berth
your bier. Your Narrow Space.

The tethered place
that you've allowed to be your earth
now growls with wakened appetite.

You bear your empty entrails in your hands;
your mouth's a hole. Your eyes are wounds
and I am mezmerized
and fixed
upon those wounds.

I'm raped of my complacency
and weak
before the want in you,
my throat's sewn shut, I cannot speak
I cannot move-(I dare not dream)
but somewhere on the rising air
a thin scream
from the heavy coffin of my life
flies.
A plea so soft, it's spider's thread
is caught across your newly opened face,
not soft itself, but spiky
hard with need. A cry is freed,
a conch, blown.

In truth I see you tense and strain
to apprehend the moan.
It is mine---it startles so.
I drink your eyes, they feed
feed. And in my quickened terror
see that they are merely
seen more clearly
mirrors
of my own.





Love Among The Neanderthals:
A Celibate's Song

"What do you know of love?"
I answered,
"What do you know of the need that's spun
in wells of amber lamplight?
Desire can breathe and breed and stroke
the solitary air,
when moonlight turns to umber
then to rust."

(They strummed their egos as they asked
and rode their pied and personal pasts
like smugly chauffeured dilettantes.)

What do you know of the need that stung
in moonlight that is amethyst
and palpable and vast?
Have you stood alone in moonlight?
Have you stood in such a shaft
with such a need
and brimmed and gasped
because your heart could hold no more?

I am a lover
full to bursting
with remembered looks,
and haunted feasts,
the tracing of a fingertip across my want
(across my cheek) alive! with tiny suns
that danced and burned! How do you yearn?

Do you huddle
just to feel your dearly-held,
escaping warmth coaxed back again?

A knot of need
a fetal curl
a clot of love
whose flood is stopped
whose urge is stayed?

Those who couple, never sparing
and who spend their lives uncaring
never sting. Yet never soar.
Where are your visions?

I have felt my soul atremble
with the swelling of a sigh
and the secret swish of silk
that whispers soft against a thigh.
A worshipped mouth ashimmer
with the glimmer of a tongue
that glides along its slickened span
can conjure images of Eden.

What can you,
who've sipped and supped
and drained your cup profess to know?
Where is your thirst?
Where is the pained and pulsing,
bitten poignancy?

You have never felt desire first
(and never slept 'apart')with a heavy
yet a splendored girth of dreams about your heart.

I know of love.
Love knows of me.





Kisses In An Old Mill

Twelve years,
nearly thirteen
the summer the bleeding started.
Mute with shame,
enraged by change I alternated
moods. I held my arms
wrapped tight against my chest
-protection from the world
that held the men.

Ovaries panged in me,
and on my chest
two cherrystones.
My walk would beckon
when I wasn't beckoning.
Fuzz grew
where moist began,
and all I knew was anger.

But riding in a musty boat
through the dark
of an Old Mill
at Kennywood
on picnic day
in 1964,
my lips felt velvet
lips
press
warm
press
soft
scared, but not
really. Hairs found
hairs of bare leg
both so close
my heart flew
through my mouth.

That boy
was dead at forty three
of a heart attack
that passed that day
from me to him.
And when I heard he'd died
I felt
velvet,
smelled wet wood,
felt the rocking.





Optics

Watch my eyes-
watch
the pupils.
Hard to see
because they are so dark,
but get in close-
I want to
feel your breath
across my cheek:
these eyes
are portholes.

See
how large
they are?
They widen
when seeing
a thing
they
want-

they'll open enough
to let
you in. There is
a
sea
inside-

no, don't
be shy-
just roll
in close-

tonight

I need

a sailor.





Priest

Rivers are rites of passage.
Twain on the Mississippi,
Caesar's rash reach
across the River Rubicon
and Washington, with will of ice
braved Delaware in winter.

Lee faced the Rappahannock
raw in his defeat
but you, a kind of ferryman
slow-floated down
the Nile of me
in self-forgetting Lethe sweep
a delta crowned so soft, so sweet
where Tigris
and Euphrates meet,
you found your co-redemptrix.

And never from the River Styx
the marble fonts
of churches filled again.





Recurrent

One year; creeping into the livingroom
at grandma's, one year long
to peer at the stickman
scary
in his dying.

My aunt said the 'f' word
when the priest,
who was humping
his secretary wouldn't come because, he said,
"Your father is a vegetable."

I remember how that made me laugh
while all the adults
just cursed and cried.

Can't breathe,
except through big hole
black
in sunken face.
He saw
Pope Pius the Twelfth
in a fireplace brick, and carried on
awhile with him. Later,
I approached that special place
a place of visions, and put my hand
against the cool
to feel the last, faint breath of both.

"That is not my grandfather,"
I thought.
"That is just
a dream I had."
I have it still; the faces change,
that's all. The brick
has moved from house to house,
but the needle
the fucking needle
that brought quiet to the moaner
never comes.





Seeing You

Know what I like?
I like the way your
hair
curves,
a subtle wave of
jet
peppered white.

The slow, long fingers when you eat
do such ballet. Just to watch you
cut your meat and handle
silverware
is tea
ceremony fine; fine is what you are,
and mine- the marvel
of it all.





Springlock

There is a tendon
behind my knee
that if touched, will open me like
a hidden room.
The kind whose door
is silent almost, swings in on itself
with sibilant swoosh of air.

There are things inside this secret study
the kind from an old William Castle movie

everything velvet
or rich dark wood,
burnished caramel,
oranged
and fire tongued.
You're the one who's the keeper
of Technicolor.
Why have we
given up
such
amazing
shades of redness in our lives?
Is it perhaps
you know of knees
and secrets?

Or are we afraid
of the way the celluloid
melted when stuck,
as we are,
in this room you've
somehow 'Sesamed'...





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