The Unpunished Vice

Poetry moves me as nothing else does.

“Moves” is the wrong word.

Only paintings do it too.

And ballet and jazz and wine and sex

Everything does it.  The piercing blue eyes

Of Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia

Never did it.  I am the wrong person

To ask.  Anyway no one is asking.

I must remember to read, to read more.

It is strange what it does to the soul.

Time evaporates.  Journey to the Moon

Is a philosophical novel by Cyrano de Bergerac,

A facetious and irreverent man

With a big nose.  It was there

He exercised true freedom of imagination.

God was hard to kill, like a hydra.

I don’t give a damn what Byron says.

About anything.  Byron used to have it.

Victor Hugo used to have it.  Keats didn’t

Have it.  Now they don’t and he does.

Emily Dickinson didn’t use to have it.

Milton had it, then didn’t, now has it again.

Shakespeare has always had it.

Homer too.  Ashbery, Stevens, Borges

Kenneth Koch, Whitman, Neruda, Rimbaud,

Michaux, Lamartine, Schuyler

Baudelaire, Stein, Bukowski, Donne,

Apollinaire.  On the subway I saw

A spectacled man reading a book,

A thick book, with a title in Chinese.

Totally intent, he had a faraway look,

His total being gathered in that gaze,

In that book.  “Pleasure” is the wrong word.

These intransitive declarations I make

To the night.  I have a key to the earth.

I Want You to Drink My Lips

Is not being born, not yet being born,

The same as being dead after having lived?

Why were the children

Gift wrapped and dripping with slime?

How should I know?

The more the wind scours the sapphire sky

The smaller and smaller we get.

A pinkish light falling on everything

Is sounding the shallows of fear

Where nothing grows.

We are walking around a secret intention

That starts out as a general feeling

With fuzzy poles, before a mercurial

Haphazard line can be combed out of it,

A series of curved planks to take you

To the country of half rooms,

Trout seduced by the prelude to night

As they descend from the trees.

An occasionalist keeps it all humming along.

You!  Surprise.  Subjects, objects

They all reinsert themselves at some point

But they always give way again too.

Like donkeys, like asphodels, like hands

Brickyard 2-11-13

The rabble are blitzed on the krieg of nations
wearing the world violator on the back.
There are some very bad ideas, he thinks,
Is this one of them? Whoever handed it
to him, shrinking into the dark, had to be loaded.
Blankety blank blank. Can I borrow your rose-tinted glasses?

We decided to change the song in our head.
Will the grooves still turn in the same direction?
In any case, the girl with the red farmer's boots
will not accept the flowers. Thank you, anyways,
for letting me borrow that dream - can you repair it?
I am not awake during business hours.

The couples in the Afghan restaurant remain docile
although he is sitting on two RPGs
and her hands are drones in the salad.

Tulip

We float around like clouds

And the wind lightly touches our hair.

I have a beautiful feeling

When the façades release their birds into space.

The light bends to get a drink

At the stream, puzzled by its own shadow.

The colors of evening have arrived.

I love you more than gray and pink and pale blue.

I wish we were curled up in a flower.

That would be lovely maybe a tulip.

Before the sun comes down

And the words collect like droplets

Of water, I will miss you where you are

And the night will be as the day.

We Are Lucky

To be born on the edge of the same galaxy

And to have collided in the great particle accelerator

To have all our fingers and toes

To have our curves correspond like the sinuous bodies of ocean and earth

To pleasure one another with our five mouths

To be naked in our clothing

To walk hand in hand in the river of humanity

To spit rainbows

To have our teeth fall out so musically

Not to have lost all our feathers

To fuck also in spirit

To join two labyrinths with a single kiss

To eat one another for breakfast

The choices get harder, finer,

This thick into the maze.

The music we make when we come inside

Colors our sighs in the darkness.

We love one another in a big basket.

The white cotton towels have been engineered

To keep us floating in each other’s arms.

Trying Not to Think of You

How can I embrace what has no body?

You have a body and I embrace you

Wrap me in your soul

Consisting of arms, legs, shoulders, and lips

Your torso is smooth as the softest Greek marble

This poem embraces you like a cat with hazel eyes

Its long sultry glances at you signify the eternity of love

The universe is a void for verbs and adjectives

All nouns are illusions

It’s like a foreign movie with subtitles in a foreign tongue

As we walk around and put our mouths where they fit

The sphinx-like bridge in the light of late September

Queens almost looks romantic from this vantage point

Nestled here between steel and stone

Only you and I exist and maybe not even I

Only curves in space like rivers of sex

And while the tattoos flower up your back the dawn comes

So this is what it is to love and be loved by you

Forty is the New Thirty

The same old abandoned walks

Despair would be too dramatic, would call for action

Instead I am shading my eyes from the sun

The dark side of the sun spooling out its disenchantment

I am not the only drunk on the temple steps

The swirls of light around people and special objects

All forms of knowing and perceiving

This road has been hallowed by travelers

The children throw rocks at the embassy

I can write whatever I want

The clock, the wave, the bird, the star

Some very nice things have happened

And some not so very nice things