Good Morning

A good Sunday morning:

cold eggs,
cold bacon,
cold hashbrowns,
cold coffee;

pajamas
discarded 
in the bedroom doorway. 

Black Glass

In the interest of better bonding
we’ve taken to making love
on panes of black glass.

Roiling the sheets,
on and on,
tumbling through a longing
for something to crack,
for stinging
cuts,
for lubricant
blood.  

So help us,
pain is that feeling
accessible when no others are;

what’s been severed
speaks loudest
just before
it dies.

Getaway

Firepit
under the Cathedral Ledges.

Long awaited re-weaving
of parted threads.

Voices grown calm and untested
for the moment.

A full moon the size of
everything we’ve forgotten

about the genuine animal faces
under our routine human masks.

Here’s to the mammal dance
of honest escape and joy,

here’s to the winter
chasing up onto tonight’s autumnal heels.

 

Never Stop Improving

is the motto 
for a warehouse store
selling lumber and spackle and lights
handyman that you are
you are always paying attention:
it’s time to go to work

rebuilding the shelves
in the bedroom
rebuilding the bedroom itself 
then improving the kiss
the response to the kiss
the response to the response to the kiss

let’s get to work
let’s improve something
this is all
too linear
too many
logical steps

let’s get to work
gapping the frame
inserting the chipped marble
stenciling eagles on the mantels
rotating the architecture
around the range of solutions

let’s improve something
settling the ape
into the new cornerstone
suspending the dove above
charming the octopus into singing
finishing the pain threshhold

never stop improving
long pauses
short breaths
driving of angel nails
let’s get to work
housewarming

 

Subduction Zones

the largest quakes 
roar forth from where
one tectonic plate
slides under another

let’s do that
dance
geologically

shifting positions 
wrecking our puny house
tearing the roads apart with
sonic booms in the bed-
rock

the axis of the earth
a few inches askew

spins oddly
and the stars
not quite the same –
do it
again and again 
until we have to change
the myths we make to explain
the pictures in the night sky

 

Foreign Exchange

You’re so pretty,
she said,
touching my cheek.

Because I knew it was
the last time we’d see each other
I did not try to correct her

by saying I was a man
and so could not be pretty –
I laid that bullshit aside

and let the sentiment
burn away the culture for once,
and damned if I didn’t feel pretty.

Relationship Advice

He
flows.  She
flows. They
– you know, they
flow.  

Not that
ripples
from drowned rocks
don’t shock
their surfaces,
or that
their faces
don’t show it.  
Not that, no. But
they flow, go
forward, those
slow them
only a little.

When
what is downstream’s
the driver, the dream
they work toward,
they flow — taking
the breaks of current
and banks in stride,
watching the river go
from narrow-swift to
slow-wide.

Nights
under silver-lit moonshine,
days baking bright and dry,
some days the river
nearly gone from view –
no matter, they flow,
they go, he flows
with her and she with him
and if you see them, 
follow as long as you can –
that how it’s done,
that’s how slow and present
cleans and carves through
trouble and pain —

flows
along, coupled, joined
in progress, aimed
with no effort at the end
where the flow
joins the ocean
and disappears into
what encircles all. 

Old Love

Their hands
fold into one another
as do paper dolls:

not two separate but
one continuous; this
is not the love
of silk and
fire

but that of
welded breaks made
strong, stronger
than before,

steel
that may yet be defeated
but refuses to lose,
becomes plastic
under pressure,
reforms, sculpture
garden hands,
could be called
great art if it were not
natural for these two.

And their eyes!
Set into mapped
faces, clear
as seafront mornings
after fog’s burned away,

but they are so still,
so still…

Alive? Yes.
Whatever comes next
they are alive now
and no telling,
they may remain so
after what we call death.

Whatever you say
of this, however you
call out or disregard
the forged hands
and the still eyes,

old love is alive here.
And to prove it,

with his free hand
he
(trembling)
brushes a crumb
from her chin.

Head On The Table

At home in the world,
I frequently sit down exhausted
with my head on the table. 

What’s nice about it
is that I can leave it there
and walk away
if I so desire
because in the next room,
there’s a person who won’t mind
my headless stumbling
and the constant
falling over.   

She’ll help me set it back
on my shoulders, sometimes
playfully spinning it like a basketball
before reattaching it.
I get so dizzy and rattled 
but it’s not all that bad
to be that way
after spending a day
pushing it through mud
and manure and
slop I won’t name. 

Love, they call it,
when there’s someone there
to do that for you –

I would call it that as well,
and will
as soon as I get right
and stop giggling. 

Writing A Poem Without Thinking

INSTRUCTIONS:

pair things
allow the audience to connect them
let them create causality from correlation

brand names and quick reference tags help
multiple meanings help
odd juxtapositions help
abstract wedded to concrete helps
rhythm helps

THUS:

moonlight and Chevy
blues and remarkable charm
arm of the beloved and wind through the window
star and broken bough
lip and trembler brooch
mystery and candelabra fern
fumble and reach
whisper and Rihanna
arch and last wisp of cigarette
heaving and bucking
still faced brook pool and eyeshine
Buddha and leaving behind
long hours and silence
comfort and ice cream sandwiches
the sleep at home,
and 
the recounting to oneself
endlessly rocking

 

You’re Right, That Party Wasn’t Any Good

Step up, 
don’t pout, don’t
fret.  You are, I assure you,
worthy of remark.

All that kissing,
and nothing to show?
Not much to say about that,
true.  But as for you –

head down and tripping home
doesn’t cut it, but it
sees you through to the stairs, 
so go ahead and indulge that

gloom.  Once you’re home, though,
banish it.  Stick it outside 
the door where you keep 
the shoes that still need to dry,

the ones you won’t wear inside
for fear they’ll muddy and mark
the whole house.  Why would you bring
similar gunk into your spirit?  Exactly –

you wouldn’t.  So give up
melancholy.  Put on
a little music — puff a little Parliament,
a small taste of bubblegum, settle on

rocking out or whatsoever else
works.  No prescription
except one: party you up.
You are always worth that.

You may not notice, always,
but you’re always noticeable.
Put up a banner
that says just that.

That party really wasn’t any good. 
All that kissing? A total waste.
No grooving going on there.
Not without you.

 

Gratitude

Thanks for the shrimp
and the butter on my chin.
Thanks for the way they pop
going in.

Thanks for the momentary,
the transient, the true
for a moment.  Thanks for
sharing my ineptitude.

Thanks for the level gaze,
the fingers tip-tapping on my wrist.
Thanks for the falling, the landing,
soft focus, pulse, resist.

No knee to take, no head to bow.
Thanks for the upright posture, your stand
in favor of receiving my difficult offer.
Thanks for open ears, open hand.

Gratitude’s a piece of charred wood
with a core still sound and deep grained.
Thanks for your willingness to burn
when you lifted it from my flame.

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Mars’ Love Poem

I would like to write a poem
full of butterflies and rainbows
and chirping, and I could dedicate it to you,

but instead I write the poem of love
that is industrial, that steams and clatters,
is filled with tiger blood and red-eyed anger

because I do not believe in love as beautiful
gentle sweetness all sparkly and whee,
I am the Lover who sees the war of charmed claws

and raking fire as more beautiful,
who understands that an ever-certain pain is better
than an uncertain ecstasy that may end

with a whimper and a good bye folded
into a card and a bundle of soon-dead daisies.
I roar the love like Charlemagne’s armies

sweeping back across Europe, of Crazy Horse
raising his rifle to sight in upon the usurpers,
the love of how I am when I’m bleeding in your arms

and you are bruised in mine because that is how
we sleep best.  I would like to write the poem
of pastel and lace, of average joy, of something suitable

for a movie theater full of easy children, but I’m the poet
of loveflood come a-carrying corpses
and the ruins of lives, of animal stink in the street

when the water sinks away.  I want to be the obvious
but I am the other, as you are the other, skin soft and flushed
fury, teeth at my neck, deep in my flesh, roll me like

tobacco to be consumed.  I want your poem to be
the pen tip’s open gush of too much to take, and I want to handle it
the way I barely handle the massive storm of us.

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Old School Want

A lifetime of data.
Almost none of it information.
I want to go back to school –

I want you old school,
high school,
no mature fancy wanting here.

I want to remember what it was like
to just want you
and ask for what I want.

I want to relearn
how to yearn.  How to show
it with no parsing of millions

of internal rules and sifting of
reasons.  Just to want again
old school, hallway glance,

brush-by, staring for hours
and hours.  Want awkward
but obvious.  I want you

old school, smell in the air
of crucial locker notes and incidental
books notable for covers doodled full

with obsession.  A lifetime
of data hasn’t turned into
information of any use; I want you

old school, want to carry
books, lurk around your schedule.
I want every friend of yours to whisper.

It ought to be obvious to you
how I old school I am.  It is to me.
I’m still twisting my toe

in the schoolyard dirt,
and I still don’t know what to do
with my hands.

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Boat-Floaters

Come get me
off my shoal.  I’ll do the same
for you sometime.  We both need
water under our keels.

We both need more flavor
in the diet.  Salt in the milk,
blood in the fresh cheese.
We both like the faces we make

when we taste things that seem
raw and wrong.  Always go back
for a second try.  Make the same faces
again, try again, declare it not so bad.

Back on our boats, quick to declare
we know nothing of the sea
but love the way it feels. Love to rock
and grind against what’s under the surface,

sticking on it occasionally but that’s
what the other is for.  Gimme a shout
sometime when you’re stuck out there
afraid of foundering; I’m waiting.  Got the salt

and the milk and the blood for your cheese
waiting when we get to the dock.  Got a rock
for the pillow and a chain for the feet.  I’m
your boat-floater, you’re my boat-floater, let’s see

where the tide take us when the rudder breaks
and we’ve got no compass, nothing but ourselves
as weird as meat and old potatoes doused in acid and the wind
to drive us ahead.  Boat-floaters! Extreme eaters

with appetites we don’t dare define
for fear of losing them; sailors who are never seasick,
never cold, always in danger of drowning,
but never too far out of earshot to miss each other in the fog.

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