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.