JUST STUPID, I GUESS — OR BLIND —OR INATTENTIVE — OR…
“So, Jean — (somebody), I said, “do you believe in love at second sight? I mean — Rum toddy, Waitress, for her; I’ll have a screwdriver — going dateless ‘s obscene! Dumb! Big crime to do! Shouldn’t I have realized the very first time?”
VAN/ITY (for Natalya)
The happy inconvenience of forced reliance on these, the sole tools I own
for prying below your oh so frozen golden skin,
The patient persistent application of these blunt lips, this inagile tongue,
trying to learn entire the inarticulate soul hiding within —
peeling it away layer by layer
from the long & blonde cool slim softvanilla Ukrainy icecreamcone
lying frostdelicious beside my pillow.
I (reluctantlustily) Bonaparte after you Kutuzov:
who hawkodineyed watch for every movement upon your flanks and
(engaging not, engaging, not) withdraw, withdraw
withdraw apace, another pace—
all communication broken,
knicking off my van/
/ (engaging not, engaging not)
/
/ till
/
/ suddenly
/
/
/ confront we :Borodino
/
/ frontal attack into your center
/ bodies blood contorted everywhere
/ ferocious punishment on either side
/
The c/ity of tsars ash against stars and ice
and our dreadful painful slow long extraction begins.
FISHING WITH A LINGUIST
I never claimed my German was good
but I can conjugate worm and hook,
and I can understand your language
by knowing of your hopes and anguish,
of your cathedrals and your ruins.
We all communicate in Human.
I’m not fluent in Russian or Greek,
but I practice my Reason and Grace.
PEOPLE LIVE IN CIRCUMSTANCE
Prophets
coffin fears.
They undim the years
and make futures clear.
Each instant starts new infinities and we want to learn our world before it leaves and the present in constant process of departure is all of time we possess and we want to change reality we say but won’t imagine others until prophetic language speaks itself and inertia is the prophet’s strongest weakness.
Poets,
clothed in words,
are philosophers
who live as paupers,
ambassadors of imagination, and their hands acting as mankind’s tongues make
the machinery that molds humanity and their chisels read our marble’s manuscript to free its sheltering angels. The poets’ sort of characters presses their texts on the stubborn world’s soft tissues.
Healers
seek to cure
the pains of the world,
improve the impure
with powders potions pellets promises prayers prophylactics and prosthetics and redeem the work of their harbinger barbersurgeons, barbarous locks smiths, who balded us while tonsured ones whittled our natures away.
Teachers
reach our minds
by opening blinds
to show us our signs
bright enough to darken our sight, reveal our oceans’ icebergs, use their mistakes instincts and stimuli to instruct our eternal youth eager only to grow old.
Scholars
caulk the cracks
in the walls of fact
caused by careless lack
of application as their brains’ gray boredom yearns to learn about all the abouts to catalog and diagram and quest to close the gap between the sag of our intellect and the stretch of actuality, but our tired libraries strive for arson because we know when nothing is left all will be understood.
Rulers
view their role
as plugging the holes
in their fated goals
and they deploy their troops their laws their clubs their crusades their mobs and their parades to advance their cause of making the patch of our earth a carpet for their comfortable feet and leave us as shirazless as Shiraz. We say we need rulers to draw our lines straight but the rules rulers impose are intended for us ruled ones only.
Soldiers
know: to kill
they must always drill
and harden their wills
to deform enemy stones into tombs and they expect command and stratagem to stand up their haughty uniforms against opponent motley and bayonet resistant pacifists.
Judges
budge the law
from hammer to saw,
from justice to fraud,
they are the chaste prostitutes who should always be on trial for verdicts that sentence abstinence with masturbation and we must prepare to wear our loudest scarf to their dockets their gallows and their guillotines.
Prophets live in confusion, poets in fantasy, healers in contagion, teachers in ignorance, scholars in mystery, teachers in ignorance, rulers in entitlement, soldiers in destruction, and judges in wickedness.
WHERE DO THESE, OUR CASTRATI, GO?
On the march–
the rag, the drum, the bugle’s linger.
In the church–
the wine, the crumb, the seedless singer.
By the curb–
the road, the thumb, sundrunk and cindered.
Remnants of sacrificial souls.
…