Hard Rock / was / “known not to take no shit
From nobody,” and he had the scars to prove it:
Split purple lips, lumbed ears, welts above
His yellow eyes, and one long scar that cut
Across his temple and plowed through a thick
Canopy of kinky hair.
simplicity
say sleep
or
shall we
shower
have an apple
you are
as I need
water
shall I move?
do you dream?
shallow snow
flesh
melt this
you gave me a white rose
put the lamp on the stove
it caught fire
the I Ching said
thunder above the lake
lightning in Baker Street
switched on the cooker
and blew a fuse
blue flash
you see
the whole experience
is electric
I
Eastward the city with scarcely even a murmur
turns in the soft dusk,
the lights of it blur,
the delicate spires are unequal
as though the emollient dusk had begun to dissolve them...
And the soft air-breathers,
their soft bosoms rising and falling as ferns under water
responding to some impalpably soft pressure,
turn with the city, too.
Ginsberg, Ginsberg, burning bright,
Taunter of the ultra right,
What blink of the Buddha’ s eye
Chose the day for you to die?
Queer pied piper, howling wild,
Mantra-minded flower child,
Queen of Maytime, misrule’ s lord
Bawling, Drop out! All aboard!
Finger-cymbaled, chanting Om,
Foe of fascist, bane of bomb,
Proper poets’ thorn-in-side,
Turner of a whole time’ s tide,
It appears that we’ re living (which isn’ t always the case), depending
on how one defines such things, in a “now you see it /
now you see it” kind of way. We can say we’ re working on our age,
as well, listening to Bob Dylan songs where people can age
in whatever direction supports the theme. “Too bad life doesn’ t
get themes,” Robin says, and yes, that’ s right, and then we can all go
do whatever it was we were going to do anyway. “It’ s either that,
or pay off the kidnapper,” as Neil Young had it, back in the mid-70s.
In my heart the old love
Struggled with the new,
It was ghostly waking
All night through.
Dear things, kind things
That my old love said,
Ranged themselves reproachfully
Round my bed.
In a culvert by the airport
under crumbling slag
wine colored water seeps
to this pool the two does
drink from: each sipping as
the other keeps look out.
The skyline is a blur
of barcode and microchip.
Even at home we hold
the narrowest purchase.
No arcs of tracer fire.
No caravans of fleeing
families. Only this
suspicion ripples
through our circles of lamp glow
(as you sweep the faint sweat
from your forehead and flip
another page in your novel)
they move in swift on the Swift
Plants in six states & sift
through the faces to separate
the dark from the light
like meat & seat them in
the back of vans packed tight
like the product they pack
& who's to pick up the slack
the black & white can't cut it
so the beef stacks sell single
to feed the pack the flock
who block passages & clog
Things are not
unmoving (or else what
is ing there for?)
The things once-living
fall on the never-living
all the more movingly for the eye
that passes over them.
The wind wells up
to spill a trail
of onces off the nevers,
take opaque from eye
to mind, or near it —
every rocking takes some leaving
to a stonish spirit.
