DON’T INTERRUPT

My tongue is trying mightily

to memorize your mouth.

Ny tongue is training hard

for your prestigious,

and demanding,

texts to come,

MY I

Moleculed into existence by hope’s heredity,

any I is a sum of its actions and its beliefs.

At first these were fostered by practice and authority,

and then in the youth they were constellationed by passion,

and then in a careful age constitutioned by reason.

This nowI lies striated by habit and destiny.

CHANGING HABITAT

That which is between us–

:is it a floor or a corridor?

:is a wall or an interval?

:is it concrete or a ghost?

The cityscape altered,

our promenades became barricades.

Every touch feels more like a cut.

Marathons may falter.

A dozen christenings, one thousand crypts.

All the tears we wept, the saints invoked, the promises broke.

The ends of beginnings.

FIRST NIGHT IN THAILAND

Giraffic

I lever through the sweat the noise the dirt the traffic

(knowing she smiles somewhere, all brown and gentle hills),

gnu-like

legs unsplay, crookback unscrews like new.

Under her softink waterfall her eyes a-beckon

somewhere, here, in Bangkok.

LEY LINE

Lids closed, fingers open:

With mind and palm along your body map

I’ll trace the truth of you,

Enlightenment needs no light,

This (any!) erotic journey

starts at the muscular center of fizzog expression:

I read your phrenology Braille,

the honest simplicity of your long high forehead.

My explorers find your wisdom,

mind’s eye between world’s myopia,

pause softly between your brows,

before plunging

down—

Forefinger sacrilegiously slaloms the Mimizuki,

j-curves under the septal cartilage,

lingers awhile (for your aromatic delight)

and balances across your fairy-tale philtrum

(the corridor chipped from your upper lip

by Night, the Angel of Conception,

that one, who offered a semen drop to god,

who chose a soul from Eden

to cradle in your mother’s womb,

–who’ll guide you to heaven when you’re done—

a nice bedtime story trades the nevers for the nows.

My whorls rest at Cupid’s Bow.

I nock my arrow for awhile

where tongues trade moistures, exchange heat for heat,

rituals of encouragement for the holy trek to come.

….

Refreshed, the phalangic pilgrimage resumes.

Tips skirt the lover’s chin well to keep from falling in,

then hook under the jaw’s overhang in freefall

hardly braked at all by the void deck

of Adam’s not-quite-absent apple

(the unswallowed remnant of your first man’s forbidden fruit?)

and advance down and down,

hesitating at the mammary gate

(moist by now with the seer’s perspiration)

but able to resist the curious alpining temptation

in the knowledge that the end is near,

the mountains can wait —

sometimes the summit is not the sum.

Down and down, quickly now,

no urge to contemplate the navel

if consecrating the bishopric is the goal.

The pope pops in to Cathedral’s portal,

enters stiff-necked, humbly exits.

The Tree of Life shakes from the roots.

….

All existence starts twice,

once with Mind, once with Life.

Landmarks come and landmarks go

but the path is marked by one straight line–

any perceptive fool can blindly find the way….

And yet the silk hegira road goes on

even farther, beyond the oasis spring

for those who wish to follow —

around the archaic curvature of Mother Earth,

that halves the buttocks’ apple

and turns the heart upside down,

and then up 33 stations of the spine,

–spine–the measure of stiffness in an arrow shaft,

–spine–the furniture that clasps the book together,

–spine–the hard stairway to the base of brain.

…