Cake

Pythagorean hymns out-crazy my old god,

The one I think about beyond all thought.

Her filthy feet have plod, have plod, have plod

Through bowls of cinnamon and angel snot.

I raise this monument against authority.

A piece of pilfered placenta in my jeans

To aliment the wrath of my minority

Until the trumpets wake the zombie teens.

I know the promises I break for you,

What chaos and resentment will ensue:

My angry opposite, your swollen eyes.

The mirror stills with breathing like a lake

Although the desert will not fill with sighs.

I built this mystery when I baked your cake.

Prelude to Consciousness

I am myself a fragment sifting dust

The end of nothing come to this

Eternal standing wave of purity,

A consciousness of vowels and sibilants.

It will soon be time to forget me

Although some early ideas stay aloft.

The special identity no longer applies

Beyond the expressway, where the houses

Return to the state of cabbages

And disappear, bathing, in ozone fields,

Your address when you are not here.

The bitter sunshine promises to cool

When oligarchs pack up their toys

And head for the exit.  In the interval

Small packages of joy await your mouth

If only you would call to say hello.

Is there no one to care about the thing

Whether it needed strength or alchemy

To breathe itself into a form of life?

The tribe today is a silent mass of tweets.

Give me your talking blue-green surfaces

Beveled by wind.  Am I still here?

Looking outside the boxes of the mind

Pure indifference returns

Pincered by the hands of the clock.

The sterility of night touches my mind.

I want only a fragment of your love

That I might live inside you (where else?)

Like a raindrop.  But my designs on you

Only postpone the time of our embrace,

In satin indolence, a paradise

On the embellished margins of your soul

If I can squeeze my spirit in this fruit.

Blocks

1

If I could write the radiance of birds

Or name the births of all the continents,

Would I be closer to your secret mind?

Others have touched the penetralia

Of your obscure recess, so why can’t I?

When will the azure of your voice proclaim

The feasts of patience come?  Never?

So I lose you among the guests and ghosts.

2

Let’s dip into the monologue of someone else.

Wow.  It is noisy in here.  Like windows

Thrown open on the loudest city ever built.

Things are always different from what they might be.

Time is moving away from itself

Like a train whose cars are getting farther apart.

Some things will never grow old.

Mysterious things we have no use for.

3

The languages of flowers will revolt the mind

Seeing into the long dark passages that never add

Up into constructions, like the gusts of horses

That galloped away before these hills rode in.

The obstacles are supposed to have some use,

Like an opportunity.  Optimism fizzles like a drink

While unknowable rendezvous arrange

The flowing substances, the dark necessities.

4

Walking around naked on the moon,

I stop only to consider the coffee stain

In the glass of the soul.

The house is defenestrated with griffin claws

And a leopard is laughing at emptiness.

Some people are never

Satisfied they didn’t discover the Pacific.

Not even I can wish you away.

5

I suppose I ought to love the sea.

But I hate it.  That’s why

I don’t return to America.  I love the land.

The great thing is to love something.

If you wait for things to change, you’ll never do anything.

I don’t know whether you know.

The masses are seething beyond the portico.

If only we would bother to perceive them.

The River of Silver

The turning seasons add, almost imperceptibly,
Another layer of grime and mold
To the houses of the aristocratic necropole
Where the patriarchs fume as they decay.

The houses of the populace, less grand,
Caked with plants, wires, the slogans of yesterday,
Streaked as with mascara by the rain,
Accumulate like cereal-box facades.

The bel apartments are layer cakes
Or ocean-liners basking in the sun.
A toothless horse pulls a wooden cart
Loaded with scrap collected by a boy.

A foreigner looks up from his guidebook.
An idled crane drifts like a huge weathervane
As the clouds take the shape of animals:
Tiger, dragon, seahorse, rhinoceros.

While the more dangerous passions are alive
In the faces of the loved and the spurned
That one encounters on the shady streets;
Like destinies, they must remain unknown.