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

The Lava Life

I slept through the resurrection

I drank too much Irish whiskey and had to sleep it off

It was raining fire while I slept

I woke up for the war but then went back to sleep

When I asked you to marry me I was asleep

I slept through chemistry, philosophy, and law school

The kidnapping, the hostage crisis, and the release were a good long nap

I never woke up for my divorce

The alarm sounded but I was sleeping

I couldn’t keep my eyes open for the French Revolution

I was asleep when I lost my virginity

Wake me up before you come

I slept through Great Expectations, Little Dorrit, and Oliver Twist

I was late for my own funeral I overslept

While America was working I was enjoying a siesta

I slept through the Olympics

Remembrance of Things Past was written for insomniacs

I was dreaming I slept with you

I was dreaming when I heard you say “I love you”

They had to wake me up

I slept through ancient Greece

The sunlight was so bright and warm I fell asleep

The universe rotated on its axis while I slept

I had to take a nap to wake up

I slept through Paris, Barcelona, and Moscow

When they walked on the moon I was out like a light it was glorious

I was sleepwalking when I performed a triple by-pass
The Berlin Wall came down and there I was asleep

I hibernated in summer too

I’m sorry Your Holiness what were you saying I must’ve dozed off

The Ushers of the Exact Limes

At home in the caves of the sun

A perfect chest of drawers.

Ringed fingers.  The plausible ins-dead

Standing, soap flake galoshes

Essentially gardens, mythologies

Where the other animals read

After the lights go out, after

The war.  We shine up the lily,

The touch of feet silver the linens

And method.  The story of us

Tangerines every sympathy

Pursuance of limits

When parted.  To logic, a fig, flames.

Clouds and letters, blown.

If I could go where no one lives

And stare into oblivion,

It would be exactly as here and in this life.

In the Bird and Flower Business

Although the fraying at the edges

Occasionally flips the game pieces,

Scattering the pattern like tv snow

Through the mosaic of being,

Everyone has an unappointed task.

The bits we gather go back into the fold

Issuing between the visible and the light

On those occasions when the tide

Of darkness ebbs.  The flashlight

Makes them sparkle in unforeseeable

Ways, the flashlight of the mind,

Asleep for so long, then one day lit

Like a torch one is now carrying,

In private splendor, for the new creatures

Suspended in the walls of a raindrop.

The power is not yours to do with

As you wish, any more than sleep,

A pure good, is something to have,

But it will come to you, like love,

And then you will be swimming

Beautifully, the equal of the angels.

Let’s dive in the oxygen till the stillness

Reaches its apogee and we are pure time.

Our twin souls will be folded and intricate,

Braided like sisters of darkness and light.

A Very Small Exit

The junkies in the system sleep somehow

Through the revolution leaking from the edges,

One of many small exits.

And spirit is

I have a key to the earth

I water seeds in you, a secret algorithm of love

I am filling up a notebook

A spirit composed of clouds and verbs.

I am in a bad mood.

The horizon is holding by a thread.

I have lost track of the days and the nights

Sleeping overtime, clasping still the straws of hope

To be free, freely entangled in the junk

Nobody seems to mind I put

In this column of integers.  Why,

Should they?  I understand many things

And this is not one of them.

You must have rocks in your head.

Everything is tainted till the forgetting comes

Another set of integers

Then nature leaps out at you.