My Lucky Day

Luxurious caution, jays and robins,
this is life among the trees. Fear
breezes by, smears me with feces,
blindfolds me, pushes me down, ah!

Rude intrusive thoughts drop in:
Your mother died alone glued
to a glass eye. They found her
propped on the couch. Oh, oh, ouch.

There’s more: You charlatan,
you fake, you harlot gambler,
you high stakes whore. You slept
through life and oh, you snore.

Think it up again, dig deeper,
scream into your fist, you sleeper,
you lucky-to-exist, you cheat. You lie,
you steal, you smoke, you drink.

Stop. All stop. Forgiveness,
like a feather, tickles your ass,
kisses your booboo, wants
to fuck you, fills your glass.

Raconteur

I prefer Irish whiskey with scotch, washed
Down with a martini, dry. It puts the kibosh

On small talk. On all talk. My breath stinks
Of excuses. I am falling like a dew of ink,

Quoting turtles, misquoting the news,
Shooting the breeze while aiming for you.

I’m never quite as old as I say, or young.
Kiss me now, you thing you, give me tongue.

De Sade’s Online Profile

Bring me all
your kittens I want
to eat Them.
Wear torn clothing,
I don’t want
To work too hard.
Bring enough lipstick
For the both of us.
Also: a saddle a quirt.
A saddle a quirt.
You won’t love it
If it doesn’t hurt.

Cryptography

It’s simple geology we understand slightly if
At all. That timeline stretched out looks
Mighty small. Maybe I would come if you would call.

I can fit ten thousand dreams in a suitcase
And have room for you. I know a child has at
Least one recipe for ice cream stew. Do you?

It’s hard believing in things that refuse to exist.
I wonder what it’s like to never have been kissed.
Welcome to Cheeseland! Now get Swissed.

Have you left your husband yet? Let me know
When you do. Here’s herb o’ grace and there’s
Rue. Kiss the face in the mirror: that’s the love that’s true.

Cheese and Roses

What ho, this cheese doth stink.
I say what I think.
I do what I please.
I think I’ll eat this cheese.

I’ll eat it with some ale.
And thereby lies the tale.
The cheese stinks like a skunk,
But less when one is drunk.

Say, drunk on pow’r, fame.
Protecting one’s good name
Is such a boring chore.
This cheese reeks to the core.

You cut me to the quick.
The rose that has no prick
More often has no smell.
And everyone can tell.

I do what I please.
I say what I think.
With roses or with cheese,
Adieu, adieu. Wink, wink.

Catch Me If You Can

The making of poetry is trivial.
I doubt you think so.
One has to be careful what one says.

A poet is not an idealist.
She does not miss what he does not see.
A poet is something else.

We dwell on what we have.
We gloat. Dwell, dwell, dwell.
We will all be killed for it.

If you can make money, make it.
If you can write, write.
Just don’t wake me in the middle

of the night.

At A Remove

My my, how words fly, fly
around, around, stuck to
sound. Sounds try to make words
work, but sound shallows written
down. You say buzz, but that’s
not what buzz does. It does one
good to remember how removed
everything is from everything,
how the act of observation
is in the way, in chit in chat
in simple things you say.

Boom. Or Boom! The effect
on the page is as chock full
of crap as the liner in a bird
cage. A slap in cyberspace,
a middle finger through the glass,
a finger up the cyber ass
to counter middle age. You are
removed to tears. That will
pass. You lovely, lovely lad,
you lovely lass. I love
your lonely body mass.

Busy Man

The sun rises dressed
to kill. If the economy don’t get
you, the ennui will. The birds
come (yum!) to my windowsill.

I am traveling in a Lear Jet of
large size to Belize thinking of
her thighs. Puh-leeze don’t wake
me as it’s difficult to rise.

I am working on my cocktail
hour, humping the hostess in
a bed of flowers. I don’t
know my name. I shower.

Ok, so things are tight. They’re
mighty tight. The birds will
have to work all night. Work
until they get it right. Right.

Brother Two

Hole in heart, never lived.
Never knew him. Well.
That was that and this is this,
And we are what we give.

Still, born and still blue,
Dead before a breath,
What he gave was nothing
And nothing still is due.

Baseball Season

A New York Times is the day rolled
under an arm as it begins to rain.
The player catches a baseball to win
the game, celebrates a death.
It's all over. She loves you for who
you are. You don't know it yet
but you are loved by everyone
for dying. There's no other reason.

The story of your life is above the fold.
Column four, next to a coffee stain.
The baseball rises,rises, into the thin
air. Everyone holds, holds, their breath.
It begins. You and her are through.
You take a slow pull on a cigarette
and stare for hours at the sun,
denying. It's baseball season.

Rwanda Recovers

The sound of a machete curls
into a sunbeam and licks itself,
cat content, in cochlear savannahs.

A blood bowl howls empty.
There’s no mouth to surround it.
The mouths are underground.

In my comfortable chair
Rwanda recovers. I can lean far
back and snooze when the news

gets grim. Rape and pillage.
Genocidaires are assimilated
back into the village.

In gacaca, murderers are forgiven.
Names are never mentioned.
Nobody is happy. It is something

to build on. In my comfortable
chair, Kagame sits. I say, “So far,
so good.” I am not there.

I have sent the massacre away.
I curl into a cat coma, lick
myself. I have a good day.

The Work Ahead

Barack Obama woke up with a mandate
A cranky country as a playmate
In winter. Hey mister, my car broke
Down. Can’t see for all the smoke.
Make me whole, save my soul,
My tongue is stuck to a cold flagpole.

Barack Obama woke up with a war
Or two, a cracked economy, a sore
Spot or three, angels binge drunk
In Jack Daniels creek, a hunka hunk
O burnin’ love, serious as death.
America, turning blue, takes a breath.

Bailout Logic

I have ice cream.
It is melting.
Give me yours.

Don’t tell mama.
You better not.
I’ll kill you.

When I get yours,
I’ll hold it over
Your head.

You can suck
Whatever drips out
For a quarter.

Now that we
Got that settled,
Get used to it

I’m always gonna
Be bigger
Than you.

A Work Ethic

I spit the taste of poetry
out of my mouth. Bah.

University, street, the way
to do it, the way to not

do it. Bah. The wine drunk
rant of the pedant, cold

calculation of the cucumber.
Bah! Bah! Shudder.

Stay in the gutter, or don’t,
ascend Olympus, keep it

in the work. Listen: I
love poetry. Poets not so

much. Every now and again,
it is good to plow under

topsoil, let it rot.
A fallow field, a shallow

man. Left alone, both
may grow again.

Memory

Memory drives the car into a wall,
from the wreckage my father crawls
wearing my mother’s clean underwear.
Memory has a heart attack in a rocking chair.

My heels are tarred. My ancestral home
is farther and far. My, my, how I’ve grown.
No wish to put a grieving penis inside
an object of mad, sad desire and ride.

We can see further than infinity,
jump higher than local gravity.
Memory is a deaf mute bidding at a fire sale.
A small man falls headfirst into a tall tale.

Boo Who

The ghosts cry
out to me, “Horror,
devastation,
pestilence in flowers.”
Nonsense, say I,
I refuse you sweetly,

take my weather plain,
in my brain.
You mistake my eyes
for hors d'œuvres,
sip my tears
through cocktail straws.

The big blue sky
is continued in
the next life.
Be dumb. The drunker
you get the cuter
your ghosts become.

An Emphasis Falls on Reality

Light rain wet moon scales
Lipstick cigarette smoke
Walk, look, walk, look afraid
Afraid, afraid, music, run.

Run, look, music, smoke trails,
Think of an old joke
Sailor and young maid
Sudden flash, drop gun.

Weep, talk, word fails
Fix not what not broke
Do good. Get paid.
Walk off. We done?

Amusements

Sex gravity pulls us down to the center
of the earth where, oddly enough, it
is hot, hot, hot. My core's the unknown
metal, boiling point infinity.

You can power the major metropolitan
cities with orgasms gathered
on Singaporean Saturday nights. The lies
alone make stray dogs turn in their sleep.

I want to be buried in a vagina renamed
woman and understand why in reverse
bursting from the earth with a cry of goodbye,
a leaf turning red to green to disappear.

I've had my share of hair down there,
emptied me all sticky smelling
on stomachs, thighs and backs, armies
in a thimble, nimble fingers glistening.

The bee sting swells, it pulses where
you have been stung, o lady. Underneath
the hangman's stage, the grappling pair
hear the trap, the fall, the snap, and do

not care.

The Saint

I don’t remember old lovers, don’t
remember cigarettes I’ve smoked,
don’t remember the clever lines
that hover between hatred and a joke.

And I lie between my teeth, I lie
before breakfast, lunch, snacks,
I lie down on the tracks, summon
trains, spill salt, step on cracks.

I hear the beautiful world talk dirty,
potty mouth pearls, see girls lift
their skirts, flirt with money, success.
I’ve run out of things to bless.

You Haul

I moved into a new poem
because the old
one stunk of you. I couldn’t sleep
in the metaphor,
it sagged. It was tiny,
like looking through
the large end of a telescope
towards great
things. It was like eating
kittens and getting
caught. The shame. Like
the pure shame of bed
wetting. God, I’m sick
of what you want.
Ill at ease must
please the bon vivant.