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Nihilism for the Modern Homemaker

I am pretty much nihilistic;
tea never stays hot once poured,
and its steam causes the ceiling to mold.
The maintenance of metaphors is tiresome;
why do laundry when clothes only get dirty again?
The same could be said of myself I think.
What point is there to bathing a boy who runs away
for the purpose of getting filthy again?
I live for others to exact labor on me;
the dishes pile up in the sink, the husband has affairs,
baking soda and vinegar never get another woman out
of the laundry that runs away to a sordid motel room,
and no detergent cuts the grease, the smoke, the smell of my boy
coming home late; sometimes bile and blood never wash out.
The labor they exact on me is hard; my hands are scabbed and dry;
but why do I work anyway?
I can sweep, but the dust will fall in the same pattern, halos and wings
making rings where I lay as a child.
I can mop, but the mud and caked dirt and broken dishes will come back the next day.
I can bandage my finger, but next meal will cut me apart again,
tear me up into little bitty pieces and throw me down the drain.
But the labor I exact on myself is worse: it is the hard work of dreaming
and it drives me mad.

You say there was this bad time, during the war.

“During the war.” Am I expected to know what that means?

To me the war was a time where I had plastic toys,

danced them in sardine tins,

and then cried at night on the carpet, not because I was sad,

and not because I chose the carpet to cry on,

but only because I was a baby, and we cry a lot, wherever we can.

The war looks like those silly signs you make at me through the window.

Except, from what I know about war,

the window would be smeared in blood and you would make toothless signs

with a blown out shell of a head.

Everything I know about war comes from sardine tins,

and war bond advertising on Saturday morning cartoons.

Gosh I hate sardines, but they’re good for me,

and you make me eat them.

You say when Dad went away,

that was during the war,

that was a bad time,

and all those are empty to me. Sort of like the ugly socks grandmother bought me, and I never ever wear.

I’m a boy and I don’t like elephants or pink things.

And I don’t like sardines.

But you said Dad was a no-good rascal,

and that the house smiles so wide it creaks now that he’s gone,

which I guess explains why everything is falling apart,

why you never make sandwiches any more,

why the roof leaks and rats are everywhere,

and why,

when you think I’m not listening,

you complain to the insurance agent that things have gone to Hell in a handbasket.

That still doesn’t explain why the Devil does groceries dressed like a girl.

Apostrophe at 1 a.m.

Night,

fuck you!

You’re a slimy whore, fuck you!
You are never a good night.

You never come and make me want sleep. I have never seen the sun go down and thought rest. Always has the sun set, and I’ve thought of roadsides, no traffic, and raccoons. So leave off, Night, and stay your coming, at least until morning.

So fuck you,

promiscuous!

The filtered light, the sleight, the brush you have at th’hour of disaster, so fuck off.

If you’re so hungry, feed yourself!

You feed yourself; you grow wanton things in smarmy fields, at night. It’s sick how you grow teeth to lie through. Grow, reap, bake. I’m your wheat taken my seed taken grown in moon taken from feeding streams taken, scythed, taken,

crushed

rolled

kneaded my palms, taken off,

baked off,

fuck off you refuse to.

A culinary whore, a mind of stars, purpleeyedwhereslothbityour right check and drew no blood.

Hey, Night,

you’re a bastard child and loveless to boot.

Fuck, Night, you make me want you.

Yellow roadsides with no traffic and a deer someone hit and dragged over to the grass

I am not chained Night, I don’t have to itch my eyes at night. Tonight like all nights, I’ve gone to you, Night.

Why make me do it?

Why give me a rusted saw to fix my own escape?

Drift me down to the people who dance in you,

Make me alone! I want to dance with them,

FUCK NIGHT. SLUTTISH TIME,

And I want your rosy cousin;

your pallor makes me apprehensive;

your sounds are reticent, so you are a chamber

where my sounds echo, my joys louder, woes rebounding.

Night, go soft away, please!

Silver lights tattooing my fleshly cosmos, away!

Bring the sun, bring her shy graffiti through the curtain,

let her play.

I try tapping in cut-time, and then cauterizing it,

like tossing a bus off a bridge full of people at 9 a.m.

making a little splash in the bay, and

some rusty buoy rocks out the tale a few miles off. 

tossed at 9, precipitated downwards,

at 9 a.m.

that’s such a nice and wholesome hour

9 a.m.

Nine people shoved in a corner. It’s 1 a.m. down the alley and very yellow on the bricks. Finches lark out of the shadows, rats, cats, submariney sounds in the plumbing. Scrabbles, boinks,

drip

drip

I’m speaking and you can’t hear me.

Wildly I have flung blessings at the night and the trees in stands there; and blindly did I dispose of the blessings received of warm people in favor with wet teeth drooling of the blessings that never did come out of the unthoughtful night.

they also serve

I stood in the room with only a telephone,
and I have never been more expectant in my life.
I didn't want it to ring, really,
but never have I expected something more:
never crouched in the woods, expecting the police,
never went sailing and expected fair weather,
never expected the Yankees would lose;
never expected to be called in to work,
and never expected a raise (God, never);
never trudged home expecting a good dinner,
never expected Mother's stern disapproval;
never sat by a deathbed and expected a goodbye,
never expected blood to feel so hot;
never forgot what I expected I would remember,
but never did I expect to remember anything in the first place,
like how I never expected to remember my school days,
or expect a "please,"
or expect that one day behind the old rusty fence where the road changed to grass,
and never have I expected that surly L-word after a really long kiss;
but let's be honest, I never expected that kiss to happen,
and never expected that word to be said through gritted teeth;
and I never expected those stains would actually come out,
and I never expected I'd miss them;
I never expected the sun not to rise,
never expected lokcjwa,
and I never expected to live for quite a long time;
but it's funny

mild yokes, 1?

Milton, if you were not Milton, bless you,
you'd be as beastly as any brainless ox,
hitched to any old ricket of a plow,
and joyless would you heave it down
long and lonely cabbage rows;
or turn, and thickly plod with heavy hoof
through the ruddy beetroots, and pass invisibly
by them; if by chance working them up
from the dirt, and seeing their frowning beards,
you'd have to trod bullish on, and leave them lay.
I say, a toady for the farmhand you'd be,
and on your sluggier days you'd get a good licking!
Enough to set some speed on you,
trudging down those cabbage rows.

wrung my hair, stamped them feet

I painted a portrait, and named it Dejection;
My aims were to mirror on canvas the river
That drained assorted tales from a section
Of forest. On broad boats of leaves
Fallen in its current it speeded down
The whispers of trees once green, sent them down
To dusky, dying, soundless seas.

It fell that in the middle of the river I composed this picture.

Things weren't as I imagined them.
Yea, the woods were not gorgeous,
And the stream's bends were imperfect,
And the trailing leaves uncrisp, and rotted, and stale.
I wandered more, and noted that scores on scores
Of brown skulls of spring clogged the scene,
Where aged ribs of flowers stuck fast, collected,
Then slowly congealed the ebb and swirl,
Coercing the current into pools, where, coagulate,
Sorrowful made the fair waters stagnate,
Froze their motion, decayed the river's resolve,
Its impeccable keening for grander shores forgot,
Destroyed in slow measure the life, the hope,
The pure liquid pulsate of its soul.

More evil the wood, then, that imprisoned the river there,
and in chains of Autumn fallen forbid it drain!
How earth sullied that clear crystalline stream,
Until languorous and weepy, overgrown with algae
So sickly green the stopped-up river seemed
That I, absorbed in morose rapture,
thinking this spot a grazen pasture,
Stepped; I sunk, and in the mud was bound.

And I had my brush, but had no pigment;
So drawing from the wounds of the river
In muddy pustule I painted my picture.

we painted, or took pictures,

When once that Fall, which was a while ago, it rained,

All the airs whispering and cool on our faces,

And the colors falling hotly, and our sky drowning;

And the empty climate of the wood around our house

Would remind you and I we had only cornbread to eat, and each other;

Where we lived I would go, and

Pluck flowers out of coffins,

And bring them back to you. They sat,

And drank up their black spines from pewter vases

the water drawn from pools

on the train tracks behind our house where our children trod, safe and secure

that never a train would run, that these places always freightless were.

There was a time which, if you measured it on a wristwatch,
was the emptiness of a yawning mouth.

You see, seized up in cotton is a tough place to be,
or whatever paper is made of nowadays,
Materials of all varieties: mostly wood pulp,
sometimes fishing lines, or even more rarely
big gray bridges, open bays, hay lofts,
autumntime bales and wide indistinct fields.

My father has been irresolvable,
very had to figure. I used to think he did not emit,
but he emits well, only in a curious fashion, like to
a nitpicking butterfly, or a giraffe.
I did not think my father emits, until in an old cardboard box
he showed me his emissions, like confessions, under
a professor who could only have been incredibly fat;
I shrank in the chair and beheld lists of things.

Fallow acres
upon acres
upon acres fallow.

Fern Hill

Maintenant comme j'etais jeune et libre sous les branches des pommes
pres de la maison penchee et content comme les herbes etaient verts,
et le soir au-dessus le grenier etait etoile,
les Temps m'ont permis...

fuck.

The muse, the tongue, the pen,
love diffused, sullen and silent, stiff
is the glance, the jazz-band, the marching, the hands
that play and graft ribbon, skin, dreams on the bent wood,
sleep the contortion forests yellow and red as a circus tent.

dissolved.

blasphemous or empty

Ring out the bells, make the air heavy with them!
Send out fog of myrrh, heady spice! Earthly delight!
Choke on that, the fervor, you may sing your battle cry;
you may,
you may,
you may lift it to the raven wind,
you may,
or tune your voice to smaller hymns you may,
to thank the hearth, next the bread, last the LORD;
that is your song.

You may sing the trees, make them greener in note and phrase
than ever they were in golden summer light;
sing that light,
sing the Song! Use your voice,
warble like a thrush,
a hen at creaking day, a creek--
sing the creek! Sing it colder and faster,
sing it down to sea-green shores, misted wharves,
sing it past the lonesome tottering hermit--
sing the sands, sing their distraction.

Sing the large hymns, not the small.
Sing first the LORD;
that is to sing the world.

can't wrinkle a webpage

so much fuck the world; so much.

rocks and literal rocks,
What is it that is not children playing?
When the radio-dial in grimmest tones informs me of the funeral I have missed,
because of oversleeping again? Second time this week.
Loaded barges gray with age who lug impossible cargo
'gainst the current sage and surge--time surges too, with haphazard sickle and scythe--
while the unthinking green children make sweet indentation in the hilly grass,
watch them barges wheels about in the sky and seem OH GREAT TUNEFUL WORK,
Huck and berrybush all fused in such delight in swarming Mississippi jungle.

Where is the creeks that go? Where is the creeks that run to, parched, phantom?
My address to you is simile; is like them pyramid cloister, cloister dry rot,
cloistered sandstorm brown, like them sandstone slavehands, penhand rather.
Writ, tossed with the afterbirth in the bin; binned, rubbish, that's writ a shade,
a stream a shade to a-c-compose.
Rotted faithless and a hull pitiless for none, to who none spread when eyed.
Whores eyed. great great humdrum, great turning unending space association
too cold for wolves , dipping , boughs drip , or smell of olive , baking ,
too cold and deep for mothers and any love at all.

The night is the worst sort of neighbor, forever perturbed
and ill at ease with his own sightless company,
insists on pressing between my curtains until slipped inside
I have to share with him his nighttime woes.

When singing low on the night I encountered the brightness of a metal lamp
whose leverage gripped on my mind, so uncomfortably lifted, the longer I stared,
it grew, pressed up; then with a sudden violent leap, it uphove! unhinged
my thought, with such snapping dislocation that myself snapped, thundered back, foundered and failed,
my surroundings reduced to plain senseless arithmetic of black street,
black lamp,
black pole,
ones and ones
and colorless bleak things;
until on my back lying I saw me, stricken gazing still into the light that shone out,
round and radiant-- and that light transformed:
the night gone, that light racing itself across a hundred thousand multitudes,
that bent and waved as the field of clouds piled in bright sky
over which I flew, beaming, and saw the bands of light as avenues indefinite, clear,
yet as water, then warm air, trumpeting fresh and fair as daybreak, gold,
and crisper, more light and easy and lucid and free, harmonious,
remaining constant above those clouds to their very ends which were beyond me sent into the forever blue,
making cleanly visible each and every corner of dusk and gloom beneath, and them instantly removed
-- thus by light only transformed.

I was approached by an extinct thing. Appearing in my wintry yard, and ambling forward with a gait that was jealous to its left, in its eyes I recognized an envious zeal, the same common to all things dispossessed of the life we love to hate. When me it finally reached, its shoulders slouched, and in meek obscenity slowly its mouth it unfurled. It spoke to me in grating tones:
1 "I was born beneath a huge, black rock, that heedless intruded on the air that swam around it. My den was cold, damp, and dripped with the echo like to the sea floor. When it rained, the black rock wept. Despondency fell in cords off its face."
2 "I was born of a woman and have been consumed as one."
3 "I moved to a cottage by the seaside, where I kept warm by my iron hearth and wrote copiously. I drank tea, and enjoyed watching the sun set on France far over the whitecapped waves. In the winter I would cork my walls and wrap myself in heaps of blankets, the patchworked quilts of my grandmothers, and odd flannels. My nose I would stick in a glove."
4 "I once wanted to buy an ermine coat, but when I felt it jockey for position around my neck, I screamed. It fell to the floor, where it wriggled, and I fled."
5 "Your religion is untrue."
6 "Where the dunes wash into the sky is where I buried my mother after she died. The tint of red red rubies was in the sand and the sky was pink. Descending I looked up to where the dune crested its wave, and where I had marked the grave. The wind, catching the sand, flung it off in wisps into the evening sky, and as I turned at last to go, I saw the geese, flying in skeletal bands, stretched out, heading far, far north."

Your head is definitely a warm hill,

full of spaghetti and no sauce.

     How tuneful it is to tap on tin cups;

     supper tonight is a warm string and a

     thin

     tapering

     wick.

What the well behaved vein disdains to pump
I will spill; my hands washed in the pulse with which I plan to wash you.

Popping mints, one, two, three in my mouth
(so that I avoid building more insidious habits)
but no savor, crunch, no chew; look across the room at you,
sentimental-faced clutching a blanket you're swaddled up in,
tucked in that wicker rocking chair pretending the rainy pane
can catch your interest while you run rivets in the rug
ignoring me seeing you.

You assume I've always got my nose to the ground
and eyes on a rose, hand around a pen, and it's for this I think your eyes
shine black and wet like a villa in a valley touched by winter rain.

black and gray and yellow

It started at a bad time; it started late, when I stuck a piece of gum into my mouth and I headed out the already open door.

Hoping that there’d be by now a fire in my belly, which I have by now quite filled with

thick peasant bread

in preparation for starry nights that are always colder in their clarity, and more beautiful, and so much meaner to ungloved hands, my hands, that guide me down a page foolish blind; that page I cannot see. Numbed hands, bumbling touch, touch numbed by the rising air off the glacier melted where I stand.

Crossing the street to get to this night place, belly girdled with plain, dark peasant bread

(that is so good, too good soaked in cheap stew)

a dog rustled behind a fence, and I heard him, rustling, and I heard in my mind, “it is a dog rustling and he will come out”

but this did not stop the shock of his ghost white face looming at me, and did not muffle his machine bark.

BUT NONSENSE! My ears have been numbed and plugged with cold, and I cannot hear anything.

Nothing—like when I imagine the trees that rattle in the wind and shaking the clear cold comes running down them like rain—walked into the woods, and now can’t see. The moon is hid by the showering cold and the leaves. I drip with a shiver. Wanted to, would have told all about the water, and the city lights on it, the oil spills, and how so vivid they were I expected ducks to crawl out coated in light and sticky golden threads. But they were clean and all very sleepy.

the light from the fires never reaches me, rubbery and stopping at land and never reaching my feet

BUT the tide got up and left and trailed out like a slug, while all around my bench the mud flats rose thickly with a thousand trapped and dying things and smelling of sulfur. If I enjoyed disgusting scenes, I would enjoy these.

We are all soluble little bits draining into Donne’s oceans.

1,000 miles away a car aims its headlights at me from the summit of a mountain across the muddy gorge.

there’s a pirate plank pushed out into the flats, but all across them echo the hoots of gulls and the sights of black forest walls like fence posts with dogs behind them.

a landscape too medieval, washed in gray dyes. Gray browns?

My eyes are numbed and cannot see. Like I am, and into the woods again.

Where did I go?

i hardly remember

i remember city lights telling me where the earth spun,

so i followed them meekly, less courageous than the dog behind any of those black rising fences.

i moved, and thought of where i was, and began to think; and the more i thought, the more i missed and regretted the gum in my mouth and the door that was open

And I became sullen and moody.

Traveling and roaming I am silly and slight in this life, running to jump, but never leap;

Success in Circuit does NOT lie.

succes in Circuit does NOT lie.

succe in Circuit does NOT lie.

succ in Circuit does NOT lie.

Succor in Circuit does NOT lie.

I don’t see people, I can’t see faces. A familiar girl taps me on the shoulder and I push past her. Dreams and filth. I cannot see, cannot see

the world is a stranger

I am draining to a place—I am seeing one, a long watery line broken in ripples—from here to home.

Home finally?

What is home? But I am not there wrapped in linens.

if home were Burma I would be wrapped in linens. or Siberia. Lenin’s linens; but I am not THERE. A street up a hill and a sign and a street still declining is not home and that I why I went there, so why obsess over what I fled? Why even after I have run out?

I cannot press Home out of my eyes and ears and numbed fingers.

I reach into my pocket too cold to feel my pen leaking

A bus driver

has seen me two, three, four times.

I can’t care. Shameless.

A bus driver

has seen me three, four, five times.

I’m so disgusting.

Is this it? I fled to a jaundiced world! Jaundiced night world, full of repulsive night men, night women, unclean and NONE of them in LINEN SOFT. Night men night women did I flee to YOU?

really? a boy who is not home is on the bus seat in front of me and is sick. he is sick, he is he.

Stop coughing! stop coughing! stop coughing! stop!

Black and gray and yellow, i am walking in these.

distortion beats are bringing the branches alive, every leaf a bent note, about every tree; and me, rolling up a hill where each step brings me closer to heaven, while I sink down to hell.

things blocking light are changing yellow streets into some kaleidoscope fantasy. transparent wonders that could be shadows.

It’s not real. These must be the scenes people write about.

such as, roadside lettuces at midnight.

such as, another dog, a pearl in the night, his legs trotting cartoon slideshows.

flick, whip, forward midnight motion.

Rounding the corner home has never felt so sane, and so stupid.

The family is back. I do not read, no think, no do the things I should do. I head for the linens; I get to bed, get to bed, get to bed.

the gentle and the rough;

a den of lions, fiends, and the summer coated doe,

swaying between golden birch trees.

i will take you to see the summer coated doe

swaying gently between golden birch trees,

watching her fawn playing on summer's old leaves

that cover the forest floor

the summer coated doe watching with big brown eyes

her fawn rolling all between the golden birch trees

the summer coated doe is easily found when she wanders around

through the snow stretching out and alone beneath the old gold birch trees.

A dog opened against the night
like the tender mouth of a clam,  white.

Right now I am
really fucking
soup

Trying To Say

I would much prefer to scream like the ocean,
Who though stillborn loves to charge and crack
Fullfaced onto the cliffs, them through its spray sobbingly roaring

To the howling gulls above, laughing with glee
And careening still cheering loud

Straight in the peaking egg white waves,

While all around their sailboat bodies lightning explodes
And troubles the black churn.

But a submarine is always

Quiet glassy and calm.

I dreamed we were a charcoal sketch,
us smeared where our black lips met.

A hundred million pearls of words;
riddled seashells on threshing room floors.

which day?

Take you up that dusty mountain
beneath the PVC rainbow.
It never rains, you feel thirsty,
so away I go, down to yonder brook
with holey pail to fetch, and leave you
alone on summit high or most indescribable
when the dust runs up the trees and rises
on a tornado,
and God comes out from behind a black baked sun,
you've been staring too long,
and makes it rain quick, fast, so
by the time I am back you are
among the verdant green and
wispy grasses, minnows and
streams, trees and things,
and catch you
singing on
a blossoming branch.

wild surmise at sunrise

Distill away night's frost,
sip it from a tin glass.

Inside the rising sun who has yet
to warm the dew, or morning air,
a sparrow nestles soft with a redbird
in the bare and blustered branches of a tree,
and tucks his head into a downy groove,
fuzzy as a peach, while his breast moves
slow and sweet like the heave in a harbor,
or waves washing on a beach;
but then lifted in singing ardor,
a dazzling tune; tsunami.

Satan approaches Eve from the bush,
looking like a preschool squiggle.

Hell's hunting hound surprised me in the dry grass
(and that instant I knew I should flee).
It waved with those heinous-lipped smiles
and those drooling, fool-wide eyes
and trotted up on friendship feet,
flapping, silly beast,
wagging and snorting and sneezing all the while.
I whiffed salmon and old dung;
its black coat happily half-threaded,
seamed up along twice-torn bite marks
and rivets driven deep,
ran all across with a child's stitching.

Hell's hound cracked its jaw
peered northward meekly
like to inhale the moss grown at that side of trees
and aimed a purr at my face,
and grinned.

Bastard beast! Foolish fiend!
Full wide I saw its gums caught up tight
like cotton all picked and packed
a hundred hundred thousand downy white feathers
clustered up tight around its ghouly snags
crammed thick in each crevice and dripping,
simply dripping fat with drool.
Gross and inestimable slave!
Braggart of your fancy feast,
soaked in it, stupid and slow!

I heaved myself away
but not ten yards forward West I saw in a cradle
set in a den among the blind rustles of wheat
the killed dove,
sad among the dying grass.

Shot midway out of the gloaming air,
I'd hope to assume.

I stopped to rest on a stone
and faced the empty skyline.
A wind bristle sought my cheek and itched me where I wanted, tousled my hair and ran like water into the crooks of my sitting knees.  Everywhere was rainless, autumn and earless, and very very still.

From the West then,
full blown the orchestra banged.
Black and sick it sneaked past!
thick lips agape and brutal head turned to me,
it shrugged in a careless, pleas'ed way,
then dumb as ever slumped away,
following the scarlet tympani
off to tangerine sunset.

I walk with a cane,
an old oak thing.

On it I lean,
the windhover talon
gripping the soil under me.

It cracks on the pavement
sinks into sand
I am guided by an eagle eye
clutched in my hand.

Squat on his quartered hind (his torture price for significant glances), a significant glance he cast at the objects in the room.

His desk was nice, made of oak, covered in a cloth and decorated with a vase full of ashen-faced hydrangea blossoms begging the rubbish heap, but he held on to them. Papers were everywhere, the most of them crumpled, uncrumpled, recrumpled, till they lost all their form and became soft like silks. On them were written in awful red ink what he hoped for, loved to hate, and his fears. They looked like used bandages from an ER ward; he shoved them to the corner of the desk. The pen he wrote with was in fact the only pen he ever used, a red one, such that people accustomed to schooling must think his grocery lists looks like term marks. But he didn't know any people, not really. Only a portrait at his right hand admitted the existence of other humans.

Inside the little metal frame, his father looked stern as usual. He was wearing his uniform, studded with badges and regrets, mustache trimmed and combed. His eyes squinted like watermelon seeds and looked uncomfortable in their own sockets. He was terribly hung over, and hated, hated the photographer, hated every flash that hurt, hurt so god damn much. What the fuck was this little Asian man getting at, blinding him, scalding him? His retinas were branded like so many fucking cattle. Was he bovine, did he stomp and snort? Oh, yes, come suck at his tit, and he'll give you his best milk. Yes, fuck you, and you. Do you wash, do you bathe your cows? Do you feed them corn, the constipated bastards? Castrate them, hot knife, kill, cut, bake, chew, savor, swallow, transform into your flesh their deaths, make it good. Oh you sweaty fucking gook. Would steak sauce improve the dish?

Such a man was his father.

His significant glance shifted, fell on the King James Bible in front of him, spread open.

Psalm 34:8. O taste and see that the LORD is good.

I lay my head beside the willow tree

Common of a sunny day

Me reclining in the light-gilt

living room saw my Mother

approach and say,

"See this peach."

(holding it out for me)

"It's fuzzy and sweet,

but inside it sleeps a bitter seed,

a stone to make a tree.

Think," she said to me,

"Of the wonder of a tree,

that from wood and leaves

a peach should be!"

She shuffled away, and I sat

stricken and reeling on the couch.

For the sun in my eye,

I could not see, and thus

was left to my own device.

What a marvel was a tree,

said she,

and I tended to agree.

Thinking further, I came to see

how we all did come from trees.

How from that tree plucked us

our general progenitors,

with choosy hands,

passing down that bitter seed,

and for a while to me it seemed,

hardly could a soul from trees be gleaned;

but in all the hewn wood,

life,

threshing words,

spilling sap, tremulous

and overgrown,

house to ivy, ringlets and ladder,

moss graves, finches, sparrows,

bright bulbs, berries, snow-fallen,

morning's anchor and worms' parasol,

bench on which the fawn would lay,

dancing through the dappled day;

Through that I see a tree,

and in it,

I see we.

i have been told it is very rude to yell but

YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE

MY ONLY SUNSHINE

YOU MAKE ME HAPPY

WHEN SKIES ARE GRAY

My smiles could never be enough to tell you

how much it means you don't take

that sunshiiiine

away-ayyy, ayyy.

Rock outro.

Guard this dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon

THE REAL McCOY WAS A BEATNICK DO-NOTHING

or

THE HEAD OF CONGRESS

Four-thirty in the a.m. and I find myself once again standing at the 401 stop, corner of Rochester and Davie, waiting for the night bus to take me home.

WHY ARE YOU STARING

at me, who's staring at the ground, who's innocuous.

I AM A MOLE

but I can't burrow into concrete. I try and dodge my shadow, more like a sullen dwarf sulking under me, small, round, quite exact and fat. Straight underneath a streetlight is a nice place to be

SOMETIMES COMFORT ME, BUT ONLY JUST

No one touches this little pool of me and my waiting.

Sleep is a gentle thing, beloved from pole to pole--

Sleep, that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care--

There is no malice in our slumber,

no evil in us sleeping.

She closes her eyes,

removes her sight from my world

and returns to that sun-fogged sea,

rides,

as if she were herself a buoy,

on the gentle sloping shores

of wave next wave next wave.

Warm, flecked, dappled sea;

Up, down, cradling herself

with prayer-hands on her cheek.

Out of port,

Forever severed 'til she wakes.

There is a grayness is our sleep

which makes uncertain age or year,

cuts out the heart of passion and of care;

yes, takes the very heart out of things

so we pump breath, life, the slow heave

and rhythm of tenderness--

but bloodless,

Calm, misted.

If she cries or rages I cannot ken.

She is Artemis, Adonis,

Venus and David.

Closed and close, forever far.

She is marble, immovable,

the marvel of serenity,

occupying that dark liquid space

where all figures remain fondly

inscrutable.

What goes there?

What wind, motion, stir or sigh,

love, hate,

release?

Yes, release indeed,

from all of these,

Thus I think this childhood is not to be irretrievably lost.

I'm certain that his blood was

in the painting,

on the painting,

dashing through and out the painting;

I know when his ear came off

the blood was on the brush

he smushed into the canvas.

My father used to drive for one hundred and forty miles on the oceanic freeway in order to pick up fresh avocados from this dusty Mexican flea market, ten minutes outside the bronzed town of Ovoya. He spent an hour and a half driving there, sweating, and another hour and a half driving back; he'd drive there with the sun in his eyes, rising on the horizon, then return when the sun was just sinking low enough into the night so as to blind him on his way home. Feeling miserable both ways, Dad would stink and melt into the leather car seat in his little silver bullet until he climbed out at the flea market, embarassingly stained beneath the armpits, soaked through in the back, and a ring around the protrusion of his belly where the stuff pooled as he sat. He spent the next half hour wandering around in that desert of tents and ancient pickup trucks, looking for the stand that would sell him the best avocados. The stand was always moving, the owner a particularly swarthy hispanic who spoke better English than I did at the time.

Dad would buy the avocados and bring the home expressly to please my mum. But each time, in the trunk of the car, without fail, five-o-clock in the afternoon, coming home on the oceanic freeway, those avocados would roast and turn brown and shrivel up like figs. So mom never did get to taste them.

i keep your teenage poetry

chaque matin//d'habitude

I take my mornings scalded, like the milk I toss into boiled coffee, boiled tea, mine and yours, whose steam I'm scraping off the mirror so I can see well enough to shave, making sure that when the sunrise chill comes to bite, I can feel it.

Then, I'm waiting for the rainy bus, feeling my scalded fuzzy tongue, and through the fog your hot shower left on my eyes, I try and find your hand.

Pot of Cabbage

The shapes words make inside,

Shovin and shakin off the fog

(rubbing down their rough sides)

Works me in a way to feel so warm

And muddled, mushed in a haze,

Closed in the lap of a lass.

A pot of cabbage steaming on the stove watching me mingling,

Making faces with the fire and musing of close cloistered rugs,

Frothy mugs slapped down that masquerade as

Something less potent than the honeyed glue

That turns me into tipsy me, fuzzes and fools

My ears, my eyes, my mouth,

Is fazing me, lazing me

Into a static, sparkling quilt;

I’m glad I’m not wearing a kilt

because I’m unelegantly sprawled.