The door gapped
just three inches- they were
unaware
they were observed.
The fourteen year old
gigglers,
showed off camisoles
their mothers didn't know
they'd bought with
babysitting money.
He stood hunched as
Quasimodo.
Fisted lust
thrust out.
Ashamed-
and burning
more
for that.
Not bothering
with modesty-
with puppy
friskiness,
they shucked their Carter's whites
and soon the softest,
freckled titties- one with pink rosettes,
the other, red,
bobbed free
and oh
so
young and
oh
oh
ALL
of him
turned molten- shot out
fissured,
secret
fizzing
rawest-
pumping,
feeling
guts go
gas
oline....
certain
they'd not
seen, but may have heard him holler
Jeezuz
as he kleenexed
them away.
The Piercing
It is not
to be borne, the sight of
a child
in khaki green,
eyes screaming through the screen
how scared she is, reaching across
thousands of miles of air space
to a mother's murdered heart. How can the world
spin
in such agony,
except it be greased with pain
and pain, it's propulsion.
Brian Harcum
Brian Harcum in the park,
his dark suit fought the lace
and green
of spring on stile.
The eye can smart,
the soul
can catch
while staring at the man alone.
The way he lived within his vest,
the tight look of the cheek on bone
before it found rook-top of teeth,
where speech might eke
but merely in a soft, "Hello."
Forty years he'd claimed till now.
He hadn't flung them
for a dance. He'd sat
all knees and ebon pants
while croaking crow,
and mourning dove
ate broken bits
of bread
and love
he'd carried there.
Silencing The Hole
Long after
you slip
out, in the blue
hour, just before dawn
I still
could feel the fleshy
thump of you-
knocking
knocking
at walls you'd stuffed
as tightly
as my maw
where you had wadded every pain
into a ball
to stop the sounds
I could have made. Loathe to hear
the frightening roar, the thing that
terrified
your toddlerhood, back when
her thatch was right at
eye
level.
Dugs so big
your head could dis
ap
pear, and she stole
every
inch of
space.
Hunger
Dipped in dread,
the day dawned
not brightly but inevitably
as the certainty that we are
blameless
in our collusion with chaos
-this horrifying story of birth and death.
Where every stroke and every word
reverberates
somewhere, causing a sparrow to fall
from a
dying tree, a monster
to look from the eyes of childhood
wanting to
eat
everything.
Inured
It's simply this:
despite the words
that trail as soft as willows
on my skin
they are
the cloud shapes
changing; trailing bloody entrails
like the trunks hung down from funnel clouds
before they take
the house.
In Any Wind
Things hung in trees
like hope,
love,
kites of childhood
stay up there
where no wind can dislodge them
they fly, are banners of the
ghostship
Gone Away
and I am there as well
lashed to a wheel: St. Catherine
with her bosom torn.
Moths of memory
hover
at the light;
pray for warmth, stay with me
whatever seas
may
lap this bow.
Many Mansions
There was grass.
Acres of it
greening
in the steaming Georgia stupor,
horizon ripple shimmer
in the heat. And stones
to mark the dead.
There was a 'deadline' demarcation,
poles of whitewash, stark
to mark how far a life could run
and still keep breath.
A 'sink' of
tumbled vegetation
woven in a century
to cover up the offal and contagion
that were air and ground
and everything
the three foot square to every man
who stopped there
understood to be the hell
that they would die in,
slow, before their Father claimed them.
The Father
who brought three hour crucifixion
to the One He loved the most
-but never this. This was beyond His bloody will,
this place
was Andersonville
and foul,
and oh so beautiful
the way it fed Him angels.
The Martyr
Litter-like,
the human discard
folded up against the cold
cringing on the metal grid
of sidewalk clung
to what she had-
the cats,
who homeless
clung to her.
She held a sign to beg a quarter,
'Cancer'- all it said.
For years I saw her
every season begging,
tucked below the crowd,
sitting on her spot beneath
behemoth corporate towers.
Dirty, more than halfway crazy
talking to her cats.
The limbic brain,
the primitive that senses
what is not quite safe
prevented me from ever
getting closer than a yard.
'Cat Lady'
we named her
and we wondered
where she went at night
in winter, coatless
in the dark.
Last week
they found a 'floater'
in the river by Point Park.
She smelled of cats-
a suicide but when I heard, 'her hands were tied'
it nearly broke my heart.
Deeper
parts of evil,
there are darker things
than homelessness,
than dying
by your shame-
sacrificed
to gods too fierce,
too monstrous
to name.
Monster
Diadems,
diadems I gave you,
and you crushed them down to diamond dust.
Glued them fast to heavy vellum,
used them then
to sand away my name.
You knew the way to find the ones that spout.
The limpers needy, ones who whimper,
wondering what you're all about,
wanting to repair the holes
created or invaded
by a parent or a cad
-you're bad, you know.
Blood, I gave you
rubied,
drop by drop.
Precious beads of being there
before I knew you'd vampired every vein
that came before me.
Words I shaped,
and wounds I shared, held nothing back
-the skin, the sounds I make
beneath the sounds I make
beneath,
as intimate as breath on belly feels
before
the press of lips.
I slipped away
the day I found
you'd coaxed the sounds
from other mouths,
blessed them just the same,
with such an
....From The Tree Of