A Swaddle Of Poetry

I have a small but earnest contingent of fans of my poetry, and this roving biographical shotgun blast called my "web log" seems like as good a place as any to post the only poems I’ve written in the last three years.

I was thinking about saving them for publications and competitions, but most of the time I shudder at the wretchedness of the published and heralded poems that are chosen in those places where I have a somewhat reasonable chance of distinguishing myself.

Here, these poems can just be themselves—a lyrical bouquet, a swaddle of poetry—rather than some loser’s discarded pieces of shit.

Enjoy!

One Of My Aspirations Is To Be A Solar Body

Several deep character flaws
that I can’t seem to amputate
or metamorphose
have frogmarched me into a life where,
at least sometimes,
which is to say, most of the time,
I have no greater or clearer aspiration,
no more specific purpose for being,
other than a decades-old, divinely inspired motivation to
write something so singularly beautiful
that its only earthly comparison would be the
emotional-intellectual brain-feeling of
sunlight on bare skin.

#####

A Wailing Ambitious Ex-Catholic Author Cannot Briefly Answer Your Chit-Chat Questions


Two years? Gone!
In elsewhere time,
and nothing written,
not a line,
not a rhyme,
but a heaping of beatings—
a blacksmith,
page after page,
beating and beaten,
choking with rage!

Must in the air,
not obligation but moss.
Coughing now, wheezing—
but my own boss!

That’s the spirit!
And that’s the body, too.
Both of us, both!—
what can the two of us do?

Alas,
no daily rendering
of our poor Earth could be complete
without the existential march
of mischievous little feet
hurrying whatever wild weather
they bring to the cellar door
(where once the storm knocks
it knocks forty more).

And flying down low
into the safety below—
all my family, real friends, weird feelings in tow—
I’ll have myself time
and nearly all I might need:
to write,
to read,
and plead,
and plead,
and plead!

#####

There’s A C-Word Below

A child is unaware of its own fragility,
and me a beast-man I’m all too aware
that the grains of sand are always getting smaller.
The child dashes and leaps chin-first into the vast ocean
and slaps five with everyone at sea or ashore
while the beast-man’s bottom pockets fill with sand
and he slaps his hand to his sore throat,
where at the top his fragility threatens to reveal itself in its magnitude
and leave nothing but a shell, a husk, molted—
the outline of a man.

I used to be afraid.
There used to be a process for dying,
and I used to be afraid of its grim chapters.
But in a mood like this, my culture has exhausted the ancient process,
refined it to an unintentional perfection,
and I just want the relief
of no-thing.

Is it still called depression when you don’t even want out of it anymore?
The sun eventually hits both of the poles—
nowhere on Earth goes more than six months without sunlight—
but here?
It is a sin to compare God’s favorite marble to a jagged gray
pebble jammed into the tread of a shoe
lost somewhere very dark.

Am I robust? Not in the cradle where these words lie
nor in the cunt where they received their unholy conception.
Tomorrow I may be temporarily robust or increasingly fragile.
I’ll know which,
but it won’t matter.
One can only look so deeply into a mirror—
"This is not a pipe."

#####

Sudden Personal Revelations In A Sober Malaise

I used to have to ingest weird chemicals
to channel the muse of Poetry;
now it is sobriety that pumps me with weird chemicals,
and the words just flow
like smoke,
but out this time.

I wasn’t even happy when I was three years old.
Now, at thirty-one?
Cover me with dirt and trample the grave.
Leave no tombstone.
Forget it.
I have lived and that’s enough.

#####

Mayakovsky’s Lament

Fools! You spend your time like it’s gold,
but you can’t possibly be wise like me,
and spend your time like it’s enough.

Women are constantly beating down the doors
of all the temples I’ve never been to.

What are they after,
those hordes of the so-called fairer sex
(fair in beauty, unfair to my covetous lusts),
other than what I was after myself
when I was visiting the other temples?

So if we are so oppositely similar, then,
maybe you should stop looking at me like that.