CONFESSIONS
Everyone’s a politician
and everyone’s a journalist
and none of us has inhibitions.
But we all have our tales to twist.
I went to see my physician
in her office inside my tomb.
For practice, she writes out prescriptions
just to kill the kids in their wombs.
My preacher makes his confession
to the girls who are blonde and young.
He lays on his hands, as his mission,
and exhibits the gifts of his tongues.
Professors write dissertations
in order to hide all the facts.
And if you want real information,
–well, you needn’t even ask.
The lawyers brand themselves hired guns.
They court the richest criminals,
who transfer to them ill-gotten funds
to lie as far as laws allow.
I said I’d fill that thin co-ed
who said she hungered for new verse,
though she still starves though I’m her poet
and she’s swallowed my Complete Works.
Was Jesus tacked to an easel
so Romans could paint him later?
They staged all the acts of the apostles
just to build wings for their theaters.
And everyone had truth to twist
till they convinced me I was cured.
But when I asked, my psychiatrist
sneered. “Why no, I’m not even bored!”
METAMORPHOSIS
Brave audience caterpillar
agrees to enter
the stage magician’s magic box–
LOVE’S MEASURE
Although I know marble outlasts wax, longevity isn’t love’s measure,
and I know how to read with pleasure the artists, the crafters, and the hacks.
ZOMBIE VAMPIRE MUMMY….
One of us was born to die living,
one of us to live dying.
The one and the one
are one and the same.
And there’s one other other,
one for whom
living is dying is living–
each one is one and the same.
As we alternate these ones
we cling, otters, to each other,
to these disparate slices
of our pied kaleidoscopic whole.
LILLIAN THE OCEAN AND THE ISLE OF PALMS
Together in memory are soldered
Lillian, the ocean, and the Isle of Palms,
fused cubistically like frozen sculpture
of motionless craft forever becalmed
a picture of beach-clinging waters
hanging between the frames by their thumbs.
And Lillian the old skygod’s daughter
parades ashore on the Isle of Palms
followed by fleecy waves that slaughter
themselves as sacrifice for her balm,
crashing on the beach at her immortal
feet like jap endless squadrons of bombs.
Sun-sand-sky welded to ageless water,
seagulls shackled to the gulf like charms,
ocean as static as a krater,
and sands as eternal as the psalms:
my marble memories unaltered.
Lillian, the ocean, and the Isle of Palms.