Poetry

I want to be mentioned more. I want to be able to be dramatic: a sculptured Renaissance mouth fifteen feet high. I want all the pistol fingers. I want to drive up in a Bentley as big as a boat. I’d like somebody to see to this pretty quickly.

You don’t sleep in the house that stands for happiness. You dance to the music of its cracks, flexing your lonely muscles like a priest, pretending your body is a ghost come to haunty yourself. The closets, with luck, remember you as moths or shelves & kiss your open mouth with years that taste like…

I’m tired in my hands from tearing at walls and my feet are bored with kicking, but the head stays open and empty. Some dream crowbars and files, steel fists and paper parapets, the night watch blind in the searchlights, but if the doors opened they’d root in the stone like ivy; they’d lock themselves…

There is a city block but the streets are canals but it’s not Venice and there are swans gliding around the corner I’m following this girl who has love-handles that really are handles she goes into a drugstore where an old woman in dark glasses and            powder blue Sunday clothes is dealing smack I…

Strindberg shouldered a cross and climbed two giant snow-covered breasts. In the crucible of his palms he said “Lead: turn into gold!” In a rooming house bed he felt the walls closing in, the roses plotting against him. And something else Strindberg did — when he drank pernod or anise, he watched a small child…

Tarzan refreshed. He completely emptied his mind for two minutes lying in underbrush; not even “rhinoceros” the word remained. His open hibernated eyes looked for snakes and other jungle effluvia. I’d settle for that power if I could also be handsome like a slightly chubby blonde folksinger. And my non-publisher likes my snide frivolous tone…

once they were algae eaters sucking at the drama matted around bone coming from one hot drop now little more than a shriveled black spot it has been funneled down to their clay: tons of treacherous fluff every spec fleeced from the world not a memory left to piroucette & brag

I don’t like watching the news. Today’s thefts have nothing to do with yesterday’s; there is no brotherhood of victims, no handshake of loss. It is as unexpected as love, and as private, indifferent as California to Iowa’s harvest queen. But the weather, earth’s continuing serial, binds us all with questions asked in every language:…

I walk On human stilts. To my right lower leg a man is locked rigid To my left a woman, lifelessly strapped I have to heave them up, Heft them out but they’re so heavy Seems all my strength Just to take the begin step All my past to broach a future. And so on…