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,
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.
5 am. One-quarter past.
Distant chimes inform me this.
A bell peal knells the mist.
And sunlight’ s
not yet bludgeoning.
But some light gets blood going.
Last night it was snowing
and now
every path’ s a pall.
Though mine the only footfalls
at this hour of awe. Above
hangs a canopy of needle leaf.
Below, the season’ s
mean deceit —
that everything stays
white and clean.
It doesn’ t, of course,
but I wish it. My prayers
is my season
of defeat.
Though all
is green
and death
is done,
I feel alone.
As if the stone
rolled off
from the head
of the tomb
is lodged
in the doorframe
of my room,
and everyone
I’ ve ever loved
lives happily
just past
my able reach.
And each time
Jesus rises
I’ m reminded
of this marble
fact:
they are not
coming back.
Up late watching slug porn, you confess
you had a boyfriend who could spin you
like that, slug grace and slug ballet — we don’ t
touch the topic of slime — and those eyes
dangling from tentacle tips must be a
kind of love or lust, sighting farther and
nearer all at once. (But are those eyes?)
Slug sublimity suggests love’ s a drag,
touch that lingers and leaves a wet trail of
memory and... What did we do before
YouTube? Boob tube. Boobs we have none; slugs,
of course, don’ t care, can’ t tell girl from boy,
is an opening, is all
we can see
of the long
strands that make
the pathways for
rays, bisecting
annular rings,
the most
vulnerable door
of what makes
the holiest of
things.
The belt kicks on with a whir & the whir
licks the end grain of the offcut with a hint
of hesitation. A small wind of ochre dust
sweeps off the belt before the belt comes back
to where it was. The whole room swells
with the scent of cinnamon & desire.
How imprecise the smell of desire.
The wood takes on a sheen, a gloss
the grain can live behind without worry
of being forgotten. A single knot blinks
out of the small block and becomes
The sill plays a cruel joke — thrones me. Frames me
lording over lawn mower stripes — myself
in a shallow trench. In grass blades. Myself
persisting, despite a dickhead sun — me
in chlorophyll. Early, I find myself
swaying — me! in the black chokeberry, me!
in the rabbit’ s throat. Me, the rabbit. Me
dancing out pellets. Out-dancing myself —
my father’ s pellet gun, the hawk. The joke
is a bright belly full of dark hopping
along my father’ s garden & the joke
small, between wrapped talons, is the hawking
Two spiky-haired Russian cats hit kick flips
on a vert ramp. The camera pans to another
pocket of the room where six kids rocking holey
T-shirts etch aerosol lines on warehouse walls
in words I cannot comprehend. All of this
happening in a time no older than your last
heartbeat. I’ ve been told the internet is
an unholy place — an endless intangible
stumbling ground of false deities
dogma and loneliness, sad as a pile of shit
in a world without flies. My loneliness exists
in every afterthought. Yesterday, I watched
What a thing it would be, if we all could fly.
But to rise on air does not make you a bird.
I’ m sick of the hiss of champagne bubbles.
It’ s spring, and everyone’ s got something to puke.
The things we puke: flights of stairs,
a skyscraper soaring from the gut,
the bills blow by on the April breeze
followed by flurries of razor blades in May.
It’ s true, a free life is made of words.
You can crumple it, toss it in the trash,
or fold it between the bodies of angels, attaining
a permanent address in the sky.
