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.
