8.21.2014

POEM

                     for Rikki Osborne


Each day I confront Reality
    as if I were a bee
                            with biceps
in a roundabout commerce of excess
amassed inside of the achy abdomen
        of American caskets,
            obscured by fogged glass—
                                               the heartbeat of it.            
        What does one say in a poem
    after a Midnight rain, after
what one expects to eventually come to an end?

Whoever invented Finality
            should fall into a mysterious Abyss—
                                catch a skyline
                                    in the fleshy fruit of some
                  silent lightning . . .

        picking up The World
    by the blankness
of its meaning,
         perception like bookshelves
without books.
                                                      
                      Scottish accents
                 are the complete opposite of
        German accents (the phlegm in the
larynx is less heart-melting & amusing?)
           
Scottish accents
               cloistering you
                                to become
                    St. Smitten—
             words held in your gaze like a kitten?

True feelings disarm the reader? 

                        The hips of this poem
             are moving
                                            the way that your
                     favorite baseball
      player’s hips
                     rotate when in his
                                       batting stance.

                                             As you think
                                 of some picturesque Mankind,
realize that I’m displaced by a HOWL
                                 (ears to hear, tears to spill),

                           so remember that all that I feel 
stares out like oil-painted minds.
                        Pure

anonymity.    
            I’m after penultimates.

                         The statue blinks in the garden. 

                    Apiphobia
                destroyed
        sometime in my teens.

Snippets of life:
       you drove around
with friends around ’94, listening to Nirvana
perhaps in a state of nirvana

& do you dream in color?
          I meant to ask you that
                               before the summery-flames
of our collaboration
                                paused at the semi-colon

            of our synaesthetic
        stare-outs (your scar
as my scarf—
    your possible stigmata as my
            possible rhythmic hypnosis).
Paris, 1921. Remember? I’m there.
        You pose, with demure,
            to exemplify the appearance
as if we were there. You’re there.
                   
                    Imagine

            if the male gaze
    were destroyed
by a mind
                 that is no longer solo.
                                                        Imagine

                                 the Folie à deux.
          We’re bloodier
than the geniuses of the world,
                                  half-mental,
                                          half of the world
                                                in a summer-zone

     with 8½-celluloided bodies, red as beef—
           those Mastroianni flames of stiff upper
     -lippers
        where tonight, tonight I HOWL
to a dance in the background,
                    yanked around

                    by the shoulder
                                        to cast an eye
on the foreground of my yesterday.

                      Still, yet,
                         the universe melts around us;
                the stars are soft like warm wax.
               The stars
                                  glisten
                                     to be heard? I feel

                  the wind
                     in songs of trees
                         which are like bees
                                in the middle of seas.

Where do we go when there is
                               nowhere to land?

                  Clarity is a bird
                      of red pleasure right through
                 to the face,

flamboyant, buoy I float,
easy to be labeled as a full-blooded American
            & true,
                    but my ancestors were vikings
                                           & noble Englishmen
                                    in unsterile lands
               where the earth still groans
from spilled blood,
breathless assaults, out of branches

the albatross stands in the air . . .

                          my sails await a wind or a window—
                   a tongue growing in the soil of my silence.


In August the days always seem like 3 o’clock.
In August, the garden houses spit-up blossoms
dotting an air                              that becomes
nightmoon                                     chalk.  Our
seasons,                                            more my
-sterious                                        than sea
-bottoms.                                 Maybe we are
already  beekeepers in              Gardens of The
Future surrounded by
labyrinths                                  & breathing statues
that stare
                                holes
       Abramović-like through             our bodies
like honeycomb,                        chiseled away
day-by-day, keeping hope             alive, or frightened
                                                    like liquor spilling
            over pampered flesh—
                    jaded, jolted, dark,
                              a thickening voice
trembling to make me tremble to treble
the gushing forth.
                                                    Is this what you meant
                                        by asphyxiation
                when your headspace
needs room to breathe?                         Life
                                                                 sways
                                               like a broken lampshade

but Ideas as Objects of our consciousness
                                                                 listens to us,
like the iridescent insects that we spoke of
that                                                           listen to you,

that have                                                   recurring dreams
like you,                                                    that show you
what is truly                                                inside of you:

                           Think of galaxies     
                                    like bruises on legs
                                                  or like your leg   
                                                             that was bleeding     

                                                             torn by the thorn
                                                  or the thorn out        
                                        of my side          
                            like Adam’s rib?
                                                                                     
                                                                   (


                           Yes, the sky breaks open, but for you
                           The sky becomes like the shallow-end
                           of a pool breaking open to swallow up
                           anyone that detests or harms you.


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