Hell Mouth

he flounced about in crazy
like a two-dollar whore at the local holiday inn
on prom night
collecting change for Super Crack Wednesday

He gave a f**k
about paydays or bank accounts,
investments or futures
he gave a f**k
only so far as it fed the demons

and he was none the worse for it
turning gnarled and disfigured
riddled
by the gapping
oozing
wounds
that were the stigmata of his disease

it was all
just a surface decoration
merely a prelude
for those that would be damned

the destiny of desire

a thinner blue
and pale bones
dust and a broken nephilim heart
maps the incidental flight path
against this leaf’s course

Silver strings and Franklin’s ghost …

E is for Emma
cut loose
and pushing us onward
to the destiny of desire

trees

Trees
Thick and weighted
Down by crystals
Dressed for a wedding
We pass
under

You are
Long and beautiful
Strong against the fear
And the night
And the cold

Forbidden
out of reach
gone
baby gone

will you
through this dark
salvage my abandon?

Can I

Find you

seder

I write you

you smile
you say wise things
and guide the orphans we’ve become

thin dry tendrils become fertile laughter
and rings like bells
now more than dogs
greet us at the door
there is plenty
more than enough

and we are not a burden

a ghost story

an Esoteric ache
for
voices
over wine

laughing
heads thrown back

twisting
the spines of ancient gods

hidden
in the essence of the real
indecent
and exposed

with eyes closed
and faces pressed tight
into breathtaking instinct

oak, leather and smoke
cotton warm and cool
lavender and amber

I ever was
In love with you

blue-grass

driving down back roads
following under the arms of yearning pines
I did not know
I would leave you

turning you laughed
calling out her name
so much we were alike now

you said it was just as well
with our blood beneath these stones
that roads still led here

and despite of all my longing
now I’ve had to leave you
even though
using music and rare magic
you once took me home

Contemptuous youth

Contemptuous youth gives way
and childlike ardor
Is Replaced by cool reality

our imagined defects
consumed by creeping frailty

persistent distant memory
Small but potent
Resists every effort
To scrub clean the past and
Make now the present

Within these cathedral walls
A phalanx of shades pass through
Ever murmuring
Witnesses to my poverty
Elusive and hollow
Just out of reach
Leaving me ever unfilled
And longing

pen prick

I am desperate to pin prick this skin
That holds us back
To let glimmer through
Like diamonds
This great wonder-full

wireless

Forgive me my intrusions
My excursions into your better life
My failures to satisfy
Your dreams
Your desires

Forgive me
My lacking
My brutal being
And barbarian ways

I am the dog that you lie down with
The sins you rise up with
Sins
You cannot wash clean

You want
But cannot bear me

All those strings attached
That tie you to an-other
Make sure that you
Cannot own me
That you Cannot hold me

while I glide wireless
on a slipstream

blue

A smell
a taste like blood
the blue
aching blue in my bones

Spoons, knives, and forks
all in the proper order
so important
not any more

Her voice
draining into my ear
throbbing into my jaw
without sleep
with lead-lined walls
and spikes that impale
the hearts of doves-
to make a fortress
to keep you safe
and my illness in

awakened

Within infinity those monkeys have
awakened me

and no doubt, will deconstruct me



As if under anesthesia, I will go to sleep
knowing nothing but the next moment. And,
as it is with Shakespeare’s Lear, in that
infinity, is it not inevitable that I will again
awake?

in exile

rational secrets are kept phallic and nude
lacking in language
objectification conveys a pornographic
image history
its characters abandon individuality and come
to share themselves in an expression of longing that can resemble prayer


allow us to inhabit it, those of us in exile
prisoners of displacement
take the time
outside the single self
to incarnate a brilliant lexicon
an iconography of glorious strangeness

Love Poems for Persons [yet] Unknown

Tell me of your loss
Tell me of your fear
There are many deaths
How many will you choose?

I propose
A living while we can

Let me breathe your skin
And show you what I mean

Let me
Speak
Let me
love
Let me
Trouble you no more
Let me
Pass by
Let me
Know –
Let me
no
Let me
Alone

Words fail me

This liminal state
a Romantic Other life
So not interested
but
Traveling
in circles
Re-
Envisioning
Re-
Entering
Re-
Moving
Re-
Doing

RE-IMAGINING


Secret
travels
brown
not green
shifting fantasies
rain

does she
greet you
with
enthusiasm?

Perpetually
Playing
Plying
Dancing

Reminding

like
A Razor
cutting
It leaves a scar
Every surgery
a death

A ghost in the heart
Waiting to be made flesh

Laughter is the only medicine

And if I tell you
How can we move
Forward
Into
A future
Or a past
If I tell you really
Everything
Then there are no
Secrets
and
I am not
The Other

Beloved

I am -- I am
How can you not know me?
Beloved
I am – all that I am
How can you not know me?
Fair forms beget fair forms
And the tongue of love
Still speaks those names which cannot be spoken
Beloved
Beloved
Beloved
I will not long be with you

Be with me while I linger

girl on a train

soft and dark
looking through
flashing by
some point she cannot grasp
pretending,
that she does not know
all she has swept together
in dis-guise
and hoping to be mis-taken

so much more in hard pink

she overflows
beyond containment
lost in a dream
of flying without wings

slipstream

driving through the night
a sea of ink and rhinestones
cresting, unfurled and speeding

the elected taken flight

into unknown rapture
and thin moments
of the divine

Drawing Breath

graphite on paper
ink on vellum
marginalia, marginalia, the
marginalia of my life
(god – I’m such a narcissist)

the coffee ring on a napkin
the black wire against the white wall
snow and everything dark against it
the calligraphic mark

the shadow cast
the flickering celluloid
(Humphrey Bogart in silver
tones – where are you that
we need you now?)

the typewriter – the typewriter
how could they abandon the typewriter?

smoke and beautiful faces
braced against the cold…


---


the tongue
thick and straining
against
you
them
me
and my charred bones
ground to dust and ivory black

still hoping to find
what I lost at 33



---


with carbon stained lips
I came and found you there
or rather
everything that had been you

touching your face

and in that touch
a drawing made of my desire
on white cotton sheets

the work of reason

there is a limit to these words
over-used
and under-spent
without the power to navigate
this most potent life

shadows to the flesh of feeling
now a corpse of deepest yearning
they desert me here
standing in this hall
sanctified polite
with only frayed and misfired readings
to pierce a work of reason