I WEAR YOUR NET
Empires live by iron and corn
and die in marble and famine.
You brought the starvation and war
that harbingered this, my ruin.
I cannot take my rightful throne;
you hold robe and crown and scepter.
All of my ghosts are made of stone.
I’m the quarry, you’re the sculptor.
When someone asks me why I wear
your net? I thought it my ladder.
I aspire into stratosphere
but you keep me in your cellar.
My voice and my vision are lost
among your parrots and mirrors.
You use your dust and mist and rust
to confuse merit with error.
SOME HORIZON
A poet sits next to G. B. Shaw, unopened.
Poet has no mind to drive his pen.
A momentary rickshaw draws from the mist
but is swallowed back in fog with a stumble and list.
Flirtatious Alpha Centauri beckons to the telescopes
but poet’s flaccid astronomer fails to focus.
All the usual muses are asleep,
the whiskey and the mistresses, strangers in the street;
neither the etchings on the walls nor the scrimshaw on the shelf
volunteer to help.
Empty poet begs along the Word,
laments poetry’s place as kickshaw at the smorgasbord.
And then — poet imagines
Humanity in its dungeon —
unbathed – hungry as a blight —
encaged in rags — in a hint of sunlight —
a detested defiled diseased
tenement for generations of fleas —
the cell’s metal, complicit embrace of laxity —
a skeletal thread against a mildew tapestry —
cornucopia of hopeless hope
that even a poor pen surpasses the sturdy rope,
that any desperate continuing
improves on the endless end,
–that hacksaws and pardons
may exist on some horizon,
dandelion the shackles,
and be lion to jackals.
ERGONOMICS
Sitting aside the curb a=nursing coffee and croissants, I can’t help but marvel at couples passing by. Nearly every boy is just-high enough that her head lies snugly in the fit between his face and shoulder. And this inexorably leads me to reminisce about baseballs, how they used to lodge so comfortably in my fingers’ arc, precisely like the exact hyperbole of your remembered breast.
FRENCH KISS, 1789
A girl like a powdered queen.
Man massive and lean.
A love like a guillotine.
As mundane, as keen.
BLACKENING FACTORY
Magpies harangue
jewelled peacocks
to picket the sky.
The river smiles
below
the pier.
The machinery of sex
processes
our progeny.
Silent silver moonface
ticks
toward overtime.
Dusk goes dark goes dawn goes day goes dusk.
The highway
prays toward
E N dl es ss s::
perspective. Every exit
becomes
just
another
road