SIMPLE MATH

Left knee to queen’s bishop six:

the renowned Polish ploy to save the connubial chess.

And the Copernican does hypothesize

his private junction of X’s, Y’s:

Marriage is an intersection of curves;

ergo, we mate with the which who’s most available

at some point, A, where both wes’re most vulnerable.

Zen Mack Sennet monks tell this Pollack koan deep in the abbot’s office.

It ends with this punchline proverb:

“Within the novice virgin, nine mobths after she’s hit

with the-old-man-on-the-mountain’s holy stick,

           wisdom is born.”

And the white bride glides down the stainless aisle

past pews of naked delicatessen racks

like a boiled swollen sausage

as she synchronizes her calendar and stopwatch.

“So now who says that this Kamasutra’s Polish Position is back/to/back?”

And the new kielbasa mama splits into a smile.

“I guess I took too serious what he only poked at me in fun.”

SOUL’S ADVICE

“Stop hiding,” urged Soul. “Get close.”

In love and hope I strode unclothed

to your home — you rushed doors closed.

Disarmed unmasked raw revealed —

And all hope of love shrinks, reviled.

“Bewail,” Soul whispers. “Reveil.”

DESCENSUS INFEROS

Our day closes with roses and gold

and soon we’ll night

by a river of silver ores

beneath a banner

of christmastree stars

and we’ll exchange us presents,

tinsel medallions and

lovingcups of liquid chromium,

and one well will fill another

while, beyond the where-we-are,

your world still worlds its way.

Our tomorrow too will resurrect

in a flamingo and salmon dawn

and then

eventually

end again

in honey and

blood-oranges.

SYMBIONTS

An oxpecker and its rhino.

Lovers in an inexplicable bird cage,

opposites caught despite themselves

in an intimate unity of self and other

becoming other and remaining self.

Strong talons in-digging tough hides

hunting for those hidden ticks

that neverend neverend

However many these lovers may be

they are as trinitarian as time —

a divine Now invisibly linked

to the Not Yet Now to Now No More

becoming self remaining other.

EGONOMICS

This I between my left I

and my right, Is divided from themselves

by the selves I am not,

by the identity of their opposites.

The well of self is narrow and deep,

the sky of soul is wide

and deeper,

and they are joined by a shallow rain.

This is how the All coheres.

The now is the what between hull and coral.

Nothingness is just another existence,

a choir that accompanies my dances.

Among my many ises,

in order to anticipate my pasts, I can see all the futures that used to be.

The present is another sequence of wases and willbes,

a passage between being well and killed,

one way from sleep to sleep,

a blurred and fading journal

of my vacations and my trials,

of webs and webs of sometimes.

The past has many paths.

Life is a flood of poetry: a line of thin rain

followed by lines of sunlight

and lines of more rain.

I live within the caesura of my skin

but my plural bodies wear

too many faces,

store too many heads.

So, I am this uncertain shadow,

a stranger to myself,

the corpse between my mes,

a confused collection

of doubtful witnesses

and contradictory laws.

(Or, rather,

though my molecules stay in flux

I’m almost always myself

even though I’m not the one I once

was

and not the one I’ll be.)

I endlessly create myself.

I lodge inside the impersonator I call my body,

I forge this counterfeit worldly disguise.

I never go home with the I I left with.

My mind is the smithy of all idols.

The symbols it imposes are blankly neutral

at the first before they become the crowds of gods.

I’ve clothed these naked signs with universal aspirations —

for justice/mercy, foreordained free will,

for blending all-power to my desires.

The wise magi

found a god

in a feedbox;

so I can locate mine any where

and then I can exist slowly

like mountains, seas, and stars.

I am lived by beings (my genes)

who incarcerate my existence.

Though the rituals of seduction are usually mutual,

generation nevertheless begins as corruption.

To proliferate this me

I need poetry and conception:

I need your body of verses

and I need your erogenous one

to unfold and spread like morning lilies

while starlings sing their Sumerian songs.

Then the urgency of the mind

meets the wisdom of the flesh,

the cavalry in my entrails

encounters the fanatic in your womb.

In the organ dialectic

the Old I disappears into a new text.

Thoughts hide inside words and words within thought.

Wordthought erects evolution,

poetry engineers environment.

And yet, the poet precedes the poem

and is yet the product of the page,

as the poem also precedes the poet

in the merger of image emotion and happenstance.

My language speaks itself

but as a mirror that must reverse.

It fixes and flatters, divulges deceives displays detects distorts,

memorializes my veneration of self-lies,

encourages my construction of shadow.

This is why

I confuse reflection with appearance (honesty with vanity).

The All comes in many fashions, styles, and designs.

My cradle is my casket, I that corpse between my mes.

Everyone lives with death, one of many infinities,

though both death and life are empty phantoms.

Death lives even before birth,

and our final death is not life’s only one —

and not even its worst.

But this instant is my only eternity. So,

dispose of my corpse as you will, w

ith coals or shovels.

The I between my left and my right

will unite at last!

But after immortality, what?