The Light

The Light

Your Blues

you brought me your blues
like joseph’s coat
like colors you see in my eyes
like shadows of shades drawn
and your old rhythms
over against my truths
and sirius doubts
that claim superiority
over a lazy smiling lingering
though you still sit
in this jungle of metal
where your blues
are offered beyond my condolences
my half gestures toward nudity
where your blues, musical,
are still located in my flat heart
after so much depression and frustration
swam over me i could barely slither away
with one of my empty laughing apologies
even if you do scatter
my flatness, my tuneless deadly songs
my way of dreading anything simple or sweet
like your rhythms or your blues
and turn them into showers of meaning
i live here where my motley clanging
is the emptiness foretold by your prophesies
and my tonelessness is a debt i collect
over against my own dead dread
while you continue to sing
twitter twitter

Sandpaper Heart

i bleed
like an aorta
gone wild
with your scraping
against my mind
rough as eddies
in a hopeful pond
your feelings
have a texture
that reminds me
of love

Chimera

blue juice lightning
somewhere
hitting a tree
in my mind
in my arms
held there
like a planet
currents sent
between mornings
with the energy
of a cat
screaming
as she jumps
in front
of the moon
pathetic words
are worse than tears
at ineffability
and yet my mind
keeps forming them
to bring you
on the yellowed pages
of yesterday

Eros

a little rose cake
budding into oblivion
tasting like rum
forever enervate
like no one’s heart
felt like an absence
whose sweetness
is crisp
as a Sunday suit
it is your departures
that get me stirring

In the Aftermath

Blown like spittle across my regrets,
Your speeches come at me
And my chagrin tells me of nothing
But vague, generalized weltschmerz
And rather universal negligences.
Woe unto him
Who deceives angels or whores,
Components of crimes too vast
For your machinery.
Slick like regret, your slithering
Oils my passions. Encounters come
As they might, always piece by piece,
And never beneath ratiocination.
Inevitably, I choose words and forms,
Sculpted before dawn and even more beautiful
Than your winsome countenances. To me, that is.
I felt I knew you once.
And yet I find myself wondering.
For blown apart is the winnowing,
Blown hither is the chaff;
We eat rice and beans for dinner,
Refusing your call to suicide over and over,
And remaining silvery to this day.
So the man I thought I knew
Has gone spelunking
In the cavities of my past,
Where he sits enthroned
In homemade jewelry and bric-a-brac.
And there, there, there—
Of course he finds compunction, remorse, and guilt.
I am over fifty.
He pretended to enjoy
My childlike willingness to befriend him,
And yet wasn’t that merely the sum
Of my nervous breakdowns, recapitulated,
Transformed by the strength
Of his own merciless probing?
What did he expect to find there?

The Day After

Intoxications of a green boudoir
Where push me pull you
Became a shade over my eyes
Continue to haunt me
The day after.
But your trenchant flirtations
Weakened by the day’s passing
Only provide moderate heat
For the proclamations of my mind,
Seeking murderous, substitute satisfactions,
Like tweedy eponymous infidelities.
Still, darling, your love lingers
And washes away today’s
Tawdry filaments of time.
Still there are sweet, sweet occasions
For me to fantasize about
As I did as a girl
Reading about love
Between uncle and niece.
Still you manage to open me up
And make believe I can sing
Like the blues ladies
Who don’t compare with me
In other ways, or so you said.
I crave their music
Like an addict in her first recovery,
And yet let’s face it,
It’s obviously your caresses
And piquant compliments
I have a lingering hunger for.
The day after: maybe
There will be more of these.
Maybe you are here to stay.
And maybe, just maybe,
I’ll forgo the dusty volumes this once,
Preferring a newer bedroom
In Mexico this time,
Where women still wear stockings.

The Light

Another boy, a hyena of magnificence
Walked politely past me this morning
And I—I looked down.
I was engaged. I had escaped.
I was not committed.
However it happened, I was free again.
Yesterday.
Concentration beckoned you
Like those leopards in Africa
Called to one whose heart
Had been imprisoned
Like a diamond in shaggy concrete.
Those builders were strong it’s true
But they weren’t built like you--
My new, my one, my one, my one,
Oh my, my new black boy.
The one—I want the one
With those shoulders
And lovely long legs,
Firm, firmly situated
Above work boots—
And he noticed when I continued
Engaged, engaged in conversation
With a white man, wearing spectacles,
Whose cock I’ve thought of sucking.
He was a gentleman, just like you.
Just like you, he noticed my ass.
Just like you,
There was a song in his mind,
And though I couldn’t hear it just yet—
I didn’t know for sure
How it came to him,
Or whether its echoes
Were of Christ or Satan—
I felt it there, zingy;
And maybe he would know
About what hearing
Miles Davis is like—
Bitches Brew, yes, Bitches Brew—
When the light gets in.

A Furtive Illumination

Lucidity is preferable, isn’t it?
To desires of the flesh
And all its musty peregrinations,
The absurd carousel of grace
Breaking through again and again,
Almost cruel in its eternities,
Ever opening my eyes
To your gleaming knifelike certainties,
That steely Puritanism of my past
That draws me like flies to sugar,
That recalls me to the sober life
And all its radiant attractions.
He is nothing I assure you
Compared to the lusciousness
I derive from your mystic deprivations,
The lonely stony repetitive whip
That promoted the gristle of my vocation,
Which was after all for so long my obsession.
My suspicions about your buried desires
Are not so obscure to you.
You see them in my eyes.
I’ll tell you right now:
Her attractions for you
Are transparent as the splendor
Of an equine ice sculpture
I saw in your eyes this morning
When I took off my cotton pajamas.
But ecstatically I tell you, darling,
Our furtive, nuptial gropings,
Their glories and subjections,
Free me in their clumsy way
From the oppressions of my instinctive narcissism.
They drop me into a cold, cold well:
Down, down, down,
Where there are some permanent satisfactions.
After all they made me a glamour queen
Even in the basinet
Or later, a few years later,
When God Himself appeared to me
Like a statue made of exquisite alabaster flesh—
Luminous like yours—
In my mind’s eye it was just like
Those chestnut gleams in your viola--

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