Life Choices

From My Window

Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar,
complex scent arrives
from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in
the end of the wretched winter.
The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way are
budded — I hadn't noticed —
and the thick spikes of the unlikely urban crocuses have already broken
the gritty soil.

Finding the Space in the Heart

I first saw it in the sixties,
driving a Volkswagen camper
with a fierce gay poet and a
lovely but dangerous girl with a husky voice,

we came down from Canada
on the dry east side of the ranges. Grand Coulee, Blue
Mountains, lava flow caves,
the Alvord desert — pronghorn ranges —
and the glittering obsidian-paved
dirt track toward Vya,
seldom-seen roads late September and
thick frost at dawn; then
follow a canyon and suddenly open to
silvery flats that curved over the edge

Somewhere Thuban Is Fading

We enrolled at barbizon
Knowing full well
We’ d never look like
What was promised
Cue carol of the bells
Cue a demo on the casio
And the security of two-way
Escalators setting the speed
Those early mornings
In our mall school
The store’ s silver grills
Some mannequins left
Half-clothed
We’ d taunt them
With our imagined summers
In london paris rome
We weren’ t please and thank you
Walking with books on our heads
No we were going to devastate
Greek shipping heirs

from d e l e t e, Part 12

Welcome to your day of sanity! Come in and close the door it will likely lock behind you and you will be home alone waste disposal will take care of your needs : at long last undisturbed phenomena without the heavy metal background of the street will be yours for observation and response : do you have visions? do you think? Your mouth do you open it for more than medication?

The Last Son of China

.......................    hello hello hello   ...    Weiwei   ...    where have you been?   ...    I see you in dreams   ...    bleeding   ...    in the darkness of the sun   ...    81 spots in the flame   ...    each a nightmare one cannot wake up from   ...    Weiwei   ...    the last son   ...    you told me as we said goodbye   ...    your last night on the Lower East Side   ...    未未   ...    the last child of your Mother and Father   ...    born in the labor camp   ...    exiled from Beijing to the far desert   ...    watching your Father clean public latrines for singing the truth  

Make a Law So That the Spine Remembers Wings

So that the truant boy may go steady with the State,
So that in his spine a memory of wings
Will make his shoulders tense & bend
Like a thing already flown
When the bracelets of another school of love
Are fastened to his wrists,
Make a law that doesn’ t have to wait
Long until someone comes along to break it.

Medusa on Sansome and Pine

The woman is daft.
Invented her own sect.
Has upside-down sex.
With alternate species.

You see her on the street.
Corner of   Sansome and Pine:
Morning rev up of sf financial types.
Instead, there she is, beneath a gigantic hat.

Hair wild, in coils, like a rattle-
Snake. Smiles like she’ s got the shakes.
Every cell in her seems to vibrate.
Psst! Could you turn that to low?

“Lucretius grabbed my arm and led me”

Lucretius grabbed my arm and led me
to the spot where he went nuts. I watered little
drums right away and entangled the Sava River
with knitting needles. I putrefied a small soup,
dismembered seven towels. There, He — The
Terrible — burnt on the stake, squatted, too.
My god, I beat him up his ass. Puff, puff, but
no one had heard a thing. Now here, I’ m flooded
with flowers by cumin. Even Tarkovsky appears.
Now I will suck you with my thumbs, mold
you like clay with my horns, till he’ d vaporize and

Apology

Lately, too much disturbed, you stay trailing in me
and I believe you. How could I not feel
you were misspent, there by books stacked clean on glass,
or outside the snow arriving as I am still arriving.
If the explanations amount to something, I will tell you.
It is enough, you say, that surfaces grow so distant.
Maybe you darken, already too much changed,
maybe in your house you would be content where
no incident emerges, but for smoke or glass or air,
such things held simply to be voiceless.

O Me! O Life!

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’ d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’ d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring — What good amid these, O me, O life?

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