Dominoes

ivory soap in a sudsy bath
a white gull skiving through wide white wisps
sweet tasting snow on white mittens
a white muff and hat with pompoms
white plastic braces on white teeth
your beard a charcoal etching framing your coffee face
dilating pupils in those eyes, glittering at me
the penumbra of frankincense on your onyx skin
dad gave me pearls I wear with a black t shirt
shall i paint my fingernails black?
i was four when my panda bear drawing won on uncle al     
101 dalmations
stinky skunks at the cabin in Wisconsin
white studs in a mahogany frame sailboat
vanilla ice cream with hershey’s chocolate syrup
ice cream cake roll
kahlua and cream
starry ice in root beer
the foamy head of your guiness
a universe of white stars in an ebony heaven
your black legs stretched out on my white cotton bedspread


My Secret Life: A Continuation

Deluges betray my innocence, I know—
These effulgent deluges, when my tears
Are heavy as wet cardboard on my mind.
Darling, only you push those fulminations out
And beyond mere eyes, mere tears.
My marriage was a funnel for our secrets,
But they are no longer ours.
It is now true that it has all been my fuming,
That pernicious, gnawing, bones in the trash—
Was that chicken or duck?—
Kind of thing I used to feel
When I used to pursue inebriation
As an accountable pastime.
Of course that ended a few days
Before you came into my life,
Charioteer of rubbish.
If only you would abscond with my research
Or that invigoration I associate with you
And all loss.
This gives me that sense of a bear
Invading the camp, stirring up coffee grounds.
Now how do we deal with the attritional rubbish,
The chaos that is an insult to no moon,
Assured of its dignity, like a cat.
If you must know I relish the bracing certainty
That you have finished with me,
Because I relish the awakening
That devolves from that emptiness,
Throwing Buddha toward laughter,
Never claiming it,
Never saying Jesus is mine.
Because that is what you take from me—
A sense of God—
And that is what I can’t get back.
I can’t remember anything about religion
Or what the Dalai Lama might say
After he had finished a lecture on emptiness—
Or what he might tell me privately in a whisper.
You see, when I feel your presence
It’s like I’m seeing God.
My awe supersedes all tension,
All misprision, and induces no vapors.
No drowsiness plows me under.
But I forget what God really looks like,
Preferring the nanosecond before those orgasms
I had while we necked.
I know what you’re thinking. 
Let me consider.
Are my assertions merely questions?
Am I merely trying to get you to talk again?
No, simply put.
I’d rather you didn’t go back
And change your mind.
I like that nanosecond of emptiness,
The bone china cup freshly washed and dried
In the moment before I drop it.


Fading Out

Gone from me:
You are gone from me.
You will pretend to attend to me,
I know, for some time,
But I can see you fading out.
I can see the royal blue denim
Turning paler, then purplish,
Then outright gray, bleached out and useless.
I notice that you shave only on work days now.
The keys no longer jingle happily
When you fish for them at the door.
You forget to ask about my father.
You don’t care when my nail polish chips.
You don’t notice.
You’ve given up sleuthing.
You don’t even ask who is the man
On the message machine.
You look away, indifferently,
When I gaze at the ice cream.
What makes matters worse,
You keep up your pretences.
When you stoop to kiss me,
I no longer check to see
Where your eyes go.
And I heard you humming
Before work this morning.


Your Seraphic Eyes

Your eyes sparkle like a city full of lights.
I feel your eyes upon me—
Eyes, watching eyes, glistening, brazen, watching eyes.
I am sure these eyes are upon me,
As God is my witness.  As God is my witness
I cry out, I cry unto you,
O leaders, O watchers,
All you who dare to look upon me:
Do look, do look:
But I cry out to you.
For you know who you are;
And you know you are the watching ones,
Watchful as stars
Looking upon the moon;
Bright as the sun
Looking upon other suns, stars, planets.
And dear, dear moon,
One so lonely in the sky, one so lonely,
I too know what it is
To feel eyes upon one,
To feel energy and reflected energy.
And I cry unto those
Who are like these light centers.
You threaten to threaten me
But I assure you, you do not--
For I can cry out.
I can declare who I have become
Despite all your arrant nonsense
That for years has been my meager sustenance,
Which I have pretended to thrive on,
Out of empathetic pride.
For I know you, watchers;
Yes, I know you.
For I feel the rays
Of your eyes as I wake.
I feel the rays of your eyes
As I wake, as I say, as I wake,
And as I walk, and as I wander
The ways of the city
And even as I whore.
But when I unleash
My bodily energies in love—
My own lone bodily energies—
I am certain then
They are only one man’s human eyes.
For God has spoken to me of your eyes,
And he has warned me
Of the gods that hide there,
Warned me that to betray myself
In that deification is my only nemesis.
There your opportunities lie waiting
And mine, exhausted, lie asleep
Like cattle in clover in the evening.
The gods that hide in your eyes
Are legions of seduction, and my longings
As I unburden myself in the evenings
Are danger incarnate, so God has warned me.
But your redolent attractions undo me;
The sparkles in your eyes threaten me.
I hear in them sighs
Like seraphic cymbals enclosed in silk—

 

A Lover’s Complaint

Desertion is a crime
Against the poor in heart.
Only those who have no memory
Of love’s harsher forms
Can configure to their mind’s content,
Can encounter truth
In mercies that no longer happen,
Can search for reality
In whenever he comes back
Or whenever he chooses to run
Fantastic errands of grace on the street
Where he’s been seen with his secretary
Or her cousin’s daughter.
Have you ever relapsed into love this way before?
Have you ever tried to call someone back,
To draw them out again, seeking outward experiences
That you keep hoping will match
Those heartless inner experiences
Which your love cannot master ever
Try as it might?
Have you ever heard tell of such another heartbreaker?
For I tell you I have not.
At age 52 love is new for me.
I have never met with resistance like this before.
Always lovers came back in time,
Or bought me flowers, or finally remembered anniversaries
And other momentous occasions,
Predictably plagiarizing matudinal regrets,
Preferring to pretend ignorance to remonstrations,
Demonstrating visibilities and invisibilities
That recreated and placated lonelinesses,
Only to countermand desire,
Only to lapse into lesser desires,
So that I never really was defeated this way before.
This time adandonments are real;
And desires are beyond the flesh, unconscionable;
Fluid, whimsical, and eternal.


The Winged Horses

curses thrive upon the winged horses of poesy—
woe unto those unrequited lovers
who attempt to ride winged horses of escape
over elysium dreams or valleys—
for i am among them
and only i can speak for them—
unreturned love is unreturned danger,
tantamount to oblivion—
unkissed, we long for realms untold,
unloved, we yearn for the heights of recompense—
but only ghosts of tomorrow
wait upon my dreams;
and longings only are my daily sustenance—
longings for reason and discipline
and other extremes of behavior
foreign to this plagiarist’s heart—
disguised as a poet,
i copy the lovers:
watchful, i moan like them,
i dream like them,
i sigh like them—
but lone scholar, lone plagiarist that i am,
no lover dotes upon my etchings, my scribblings—
lonely as a cloud in may,
a february darkness lurks in my heart
and the impulses there
are like black flowers
on gray davenports
beneath loathsome springtime moons—
invasions of deception riddle my perceptions
about what love is or isn’t—
but i know it can’t be less than this:
solitude on a rocky planet—


The Morning Meeting

Count the birds in the palmetto
By the window,
Their stained glass brilliance
Speaking of mornings
Devoted to love: one, two, three.
Your lingulate insinuations
Tear my brain apart,
Pis allers succeeding for a moment
But only on the level of fantasy.
For God and His angels sing to me,
Changing your lavalike words
To harmless silver jewelry
I wear as a mask that securely hides
My desire for you from myself.
The cunning dreams in your bottles
May deplore my mysticism,
But over and over again,
My resistance is sweet to me
As a pink grapefruit
For a February breakfast.

 

A Phone Call

Precious oligopsony of your influence:
Perpetrator of venerable generosities
Under your control:
Such is the good fortune of my soul.
Always your ambition conspires to help me,
Ever and anon scrutinizing
My underhanded relapses into sheer laziness;
Ever miraculizing my lowly impulses;
Shining your light in my cavernous darknesses,
Yes, shining your light,
Parading reflections,
Magnifying my demented philosophies
And strategies of self-destruction
Until I see the error of my ways.
Then they protrude like a caterpillar
Making its way out of its bloody capsule.
They are obvious as a bagworm escaping its bag.
They unfurl, a roly-poly bug uncurling in its mud.
It is your dynamism
That puts my blatant suicidal inclinations
To shame, their grandiosities shown
To be mild mannered, barely noticeable gestures.
Until you, I just did not know
The truly grand required so much effort—
The kind you put out—
Actually required a strong statement.
You remind me I know nothing about acting.
Not only have I never bothered
To go to drama school, like you did.
I have never bothered to take any actions
On the stage of my life.
I’ve just let it all happen to me,
Citing receptivities that were accidents
Of fate and the impact of other people
As if they were my own virtues,
Portents of poetic powers.
As if God granted such gifts
According to deserts
Based on laws of earning.
I’ve only been sitting in the sun.
Your noble alternative presents me now
With an option: I could call you today.
Or will I just let you slip away?