1
She pressed her ear against the shell:
she wanted to hear everything
he never told her.
2
A single inch
separates their two bodies
facing one another
in the picture:
a framed smile
buried beneath the rubble.
3
Whenever you throw stones
into the sea
it sends ripples through me.
4
My heart’ s quite small:
that’ s why it fills so quickly.
5
Water needs no wars
to mix with water
and fill up spaces.
6
1
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
Raised on a cozy diet of conditional love,
I learned to emoji from teevee.
Now I’ m hounded by gripes before my time.
Twisted in my genome is this thorn,
and all I see are feuds,
even swans got boxing gloves for heads.
— Ah Ketty-San, why so mori? Maybe you need upgrade
of person?
History shat on every household.
Cop cruisers wand their infrared along bludgeoned homes,
demanding boys to spread your cheeks,
lift your sac —
Now, here’ s an alcopop to dull that throb,
hide your ugly feelings.
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
Over the rim of the glass
Containing a good martini with a twist
I eye her bosom and consider a pass,
Certain we’ d not be missed
In the general hubbub.
Her lips, which I forgot to say, are superb,
Never stop babbling once (Aye, there’ s the rub)
But who would want to curb
O Grammar rules, O now your virtues show;
So children still read you with awful eyes,
As my young Dove may in your precepts wise
Her grant to me, by her own virtue know.
For late with heart most high, with eyes most low,
I crav’ d the thing which ever she denies:
She lightning Love, displaying Venus’ skies,
Least once should not be heard, twice said, No, No.
From Daddy sprung my inborn ribaldry.
His crudeness destined me to be the same.
A seedlet, flowered from a shitty heap,
I came, the crowning glory of his aim.
From Mother I inherited ennui,
The leg irons of the queendom I once rattled.
But I won’ t let such chains imprison me.
And there is just no telling what this brat’ ll...!
This marriage thing? We snub our nose at it.
What’ s pearl turns piss, what’ s classy breeds what’ s smutty.
But like it? Lump it? Neither’ s exigent.
And I’ m the end result of all that fucking.
You dweller in the dark cabin,
To whom the watermelon is always purple,
Whose garden is wind and moon,
Of the two dreams, night and day,
What lover, what dreamer, would choose
The one obscured by sleep?
Here is the plantain by your door
And the best cock of red feather
That crew before the clocks.
Siwashing it out once in Siuslaw Forest
