Poetry

“What obsessed Hieronymus Bosch was not simply sadism but interpenetration and particularly cutting,” chittered the ferret as she sipped her espresso and picked at a napoleon

You starve yourself, your body as essential as the crust off a bread. Not me – I’m the whole loaf. I rise and fall. I tease the clock. A proud machetti tears me open, warm, white, steaming. Stuffed with tuna, devilled egg, curled like an intestine, I am greedy, Every pink pimento is a fleck…

I ought to have a good opinion of myself but from my unlucky education I cannot get rid of a mean timidity as to my own worth. I was very genteelly lodged. And then the century garbage: full of prying, deceitful, hateful people named geikie, bailie, ritchie or some other name It ends in -ie…

Don’t worry about my tongue being a biscuit of dust. Don’t think about my pillow which is filled with quinine. I don’t. My malaria is not contagious, nor is it hereditary. Why do I walk bent over like this? Because when they operated to remove my malaria, and found nothing, they became bitter and sewed…

Let us remember that unsung breed who send my likes to you – wisely: Van Elliott, Bert Kelsey, Fred Weed of Roxbury Latin; and the likes of Feathereye Mykey my uncle did so unknowingly. Let me remember thresholds left here to cross yours there; remember the clutter of the place that’s Feathereye’s junkshop where I…

I received a very formal invitation: written on an anvil, her name flew by me. A soliloquy was given. Pieces of barbed wire were lifted, like flags. Of course, the necessary wafer salted with magnesium was passed around. When she first spoke I summoned immediately the bondsman for the indignant. Believe me, I never knew…

Cambridge Mass Rain falls outside. The bulb’s ablaze in the kitchen Blinds down. Winter. My woman stands upright from our bed. My daughter dreams in another country. It’s only tuesday. Beginning the week, nobody’s of humour. I am wooden. There’s no contact left, somehow, with old friends.

The rooms live on. When we finish, they continue, the walls creating the same space, holding the same air that held our bodies when we held our bodies, preserving the scene when we have abandoned it for some novel sunset, some television, dinner at a friend’s. The bed is forced into it. The lamps compose…

(for Lynne) 1. My fingers will not function when your eyes are closed. They stop at the letters of your shrugging shoulders; your clothes whisper: “There are words better left alone.” At odd hours I rob you blind and hurry home carrying the ill-gotten loot as if it were the history of future civilizations. I…