Sunday, September 30, 2012



fall 'n symbols
    
(a recalcitrant response to Longfellow’s Harvest Moon)














                                             

withered roses in the smitten cold
a way of nimbly nipping at the bud
thorns that bloom in vain within the folds
of gorgeous sentient clips that smite the edges
lining organs intended to be pumps
that simply fill our beating veins with blood
but all this pompous verbiage beheld
has rendered vital parts obscene
among the pages of our pithy sighs
depending on the us of this and that
we’d better fill our days with trimming hats
with full blown maids arranging plastic flowers
culled from curtained stalls of ancient showers
alas this synonymic woe and gracious me
redundant triplets cowering in the storm
giving life and love tendentious form
















if there are song birds 
listening to these words
gobble up and graze among the stanzas
your empty nest withholds a new apartment
for gold winged brides in groomed saffron organza




Thursday, September 27, 2012

humbled by the background


humbled by backgrounds
smiles framing demure pouts
revealing nothing...


a new poem


                          regrets from h to a


holding no regrets for lies he’s told
he does bemoan a certain lack of loyalty
his lies have shown him

given time and all the loss he’s ever known
great strides in conscience grace his girlish gait
gaily walking swiftly toward mayhem

fearing men who can’t outrun their trousers*
feeling he has left his pants exhausted at the door
fled becomes the only strategy he leaves behind 

every little heartbeat letter sound may bore him
evacuating cavities of if and next
each time he tries to flee his bowels deform him

despite goodwill he runs from every little score
decrying any love that tries to sing him
denigrating the use of inlet when his taste for foreign lingo favors fjord

could the narrow breadth of vast unopened heartache
castrate the way he waddles into wrath
cavorting with the this and that - what have you

beneath the folds of one crass outlandish gown
belying the unflappable tags of dignity
besieged by definitions that have him prancing out of town

absolution from untruths he knew would haunt him
await him at those blanched  and toothy gates
aware that all the things that fight to love him


are all the things he doesn’t really hate…



*  “a man can’t out run his trousers” - from Alistair MacLeod’s play No Great Mischief

Friday, September 21, 2012

two stories


two stories
Ice                                                  
after Anne Beatty's 'Snow'

I remember the cold night you crapped yourself walking home from your Nana’s house, how I always belittled you for calling her Nana instead of Granny, Grandma, or just plain Grandmother. “What’s that smell?” I said, as you rushed in the front door and went straight to the bathroom without taking your winter boots off. The odor went through the dining room, into the kitchen, across the living room, and stopped at the fireplace, as though it had made this trip before. This would be difficult for anyone to believe, except perhaps someone already familiar with the depth, substance, and navigational skills of your in-exquisite flatulence.

Our first month together was spent sharing recipes, cooking each other’s favorite meals; like Chili con carne or spaghetti and meatballs. Late at night, in the kitchen, you would stay up for hours, preparing for our next gourmet breakfast, while I slept soundly with an increasing waistline and a contented heartbeat.

When you made Eggs Benedict for me for the first time, I suggested a spinach salad on the side, with real bacon bits, like the brunches I remembered going to in the village before we moved in together. The day of our first big dinner party, when you had to prepare for seven guests and couldn’t find your recipe for stuffed mushroom caps and asked me if I had a good one – you, wide-eyed and frantic in your mother’s apron, like an insane chef in some televised cooking competition.
Our friends loved coming to our dinners, prepared especially for them in our little converted carriage house. So many friends visited, and the fireplace made them all want to stay very late and drink in excess and tell stories about their most recent romantic escapades: the accountant who met an ex-astronaut who he took to the Mars cafĂ© for lunch; the beautician who kept ending relationships with really nice guys whenever she noticed a nose hair dangling from their nostrils; the transsexual flight attendant who was afraid the pilot she was flirting with would discover her ‘secret’ and have her fired; the bellhop who was screwing an enormously wealthy government official from an Arab Emirate and wondered if their relationship would ever amount to anything.

Did our friends think we were interested in their stories because we fed them and listened intently as they slurred their words and spilled red wine on the carpet, costing us our damage deposit when we moved out? Now I think they probably knew we would never last. We were as hopeless as we had been as children, two boys playing in the same schoolyard, peering at each other through glazed innocent expressions, wondering what we would be allowed to feel for one another next.
Remember that night at your Nana’s, the ice was so treacherous and you said we’d have such fun holding each other up the whole way there, but I refused to go. It was like we were totally devoid of metaphor and were literally sliding away from each other, but you insisted it would all be okay. Later that night I tried to drive over to her place to get you but the wheels of my car just spun in the glassy driveway. I fell twice on my way from the car to the back door.

You have such different memories. You recall how beautiful the bridge was as you crossed it alone, like a small girl wearing a red hood in a fairy tale on his way to grandmother’s house, looking for icicles as you peered between the openings in the cement railing, hoping to find a magical one to put in the ice box for her to save for her Christmas tree - and how our love was frozen in time like some eternal chunk of winter glass.

By our fireside our friends would tell such silly stories about love and romance. One night, giving me instructions on how to love, you told me, “A love will die if you don’t treat it like God treats snowflakes, like a fine chef treats every entree.”

I went back to the village not long ago, after moving to a basement apartment not far form the carriage house that we shared. It was the end of June, and so many of our old friends were there, all dolled up and enjoying the annual festivities. Geoffrey, the one who always brought a dreadful homemade dessert to all our dinners, had just passed away that week. Despite all the stories and the drunken mishaps, Geoffrey had always been there, smiling and ready to help out with those nasty red stains on the pale gold broadloom, hoping, I believe, to stay late enough so I would fall asleep and he could have his way with you, when all he had to do was ask. I sat with Geoffrey’s widower, looking across the street at the thousands of revelers, and there were three of our old friends, sitting under the beer tent, laughing and sipping wine from huge plastic glasses, slopping cheap red dollops on wooden picnic tables like they did by the fireplace in our rented home. It started to rain heavily, and he put up his umbrella and locked arms with me, pulling me closer and out of the sudden downpour. When I left him, once the rain had stopped, I walked through the square and glanced at all the names. Three or four stood out – collections of engraved letters identifying some of the people who had passed through our lives. I felt sad. Even if they had been with us that day, we had no place for them to come to dinner.

This is not the way love should unfold. As you told me, love, like food and snowflakes, should be carefully prepared. We only had the beginning, the rest melted away, like fine cheese in the bottom of a fondue pot or snowflakes on mittens. It’s pointless to speculate upon what might have happened. Who expects things to last anymore – did anyone ever? But people do remember our dinners. They amount to something in the minds and memories of a chosen few; the ones we selected from our respective address books, and cordially invited to our home to share one of the many kindnesses we bestowed upon each other.

What I remember most is the night you came home with your trousers filled and frozen. The ice. Still, just saying, “the ice,” I laugh and my lips kiss yours like magic cylinders stuck to something that attracts them and yet becomes so painful once separated.
No further mention will be made of your ‘accident’, the way you said “Oops” when you came down the stairs after showering, dangling a laundry bag filled with all your clothing, and how we laughed by the fire, spilled wine, ate homemade pretzels, and made love as you recounted a tale of frozen feces, and how, that night, when you were  on your own, they accompanied you all the way home from grandmother’s house.




I don’t know how to love him
Should I speak of love / let my feelings out / I never thought I’d come to this /what’s it all about?
Tim Rice

It’s an old story and not a very interesting one. A man of a certain age suddenly comes to the realization that he has had so much casual sex with acquaintances and strangers, and so little with people he has gotten to know, that he has developed no real talent for conversation with long-term lovers. So he starts to make a conscious attempt to talk to the people he is sleeping with. The list is considerable. He is still attractive and has no difficulty finding other ‘like-minded’ individuals. And except for one ill chosen remark about hair color during sexual intercourse, in the eyes of the seventeen odd people he is currently seeing, there is no noticeable change in his interpersonal skills. His sexual cohorts have never noticed him lacking in the art of social dialogue before. But therein lies the problem. To him it seems like dialogue – on the page. He is reciting it like a well-trained film actor. Not too loud, not too emotive, the camera will do some of the wok for you. When the time is right an outpouring of emotion will be extracted carefully and subtly. This isn’t the stage. You don’t have to project, or reach the heart and soul of the shop girl in the back row of the balcony with the windows to your soul. She – the filmgoer of your dreams - will desire you wholeheartedly if you simply follow the foolproof maxim - less is more.

But he doesn’t feel them deep inside – the things he says – and can’t figure out why. He’s had so many women before, and although in very many ways each new encounter is just one more, he has always prided himself on his special love for all of the women he has slept with. So now, at the moment in his life when he has decided to make a conscious attempt to develop new social skills around intimacy, why does it all seem so hollow and unfelt? Because he has already done it by rote so many times in a world that privileges the concept of one and only? And by considering the emotional trappings of the so-called ‘normal’ world of courtship and romance so late in life has he inadvertently rendered himself a mere shell of a man filled with nothing but the memories of extreme sexual fulfillment with a variety of beautiful and exciting women?

He doesn’t believe any of that crap. He looks around at his men friends and sees their long-term relationships and they are not all train wrecks. But they are also not entirely fulfilling. There is nothing wrong with them. They just don’t strike him as something he longs for. So he decides to carry on with the business of learning how to consciously speak tenderly and meaningfully to people he knows – the people he is already sleeping with and the people he may one day sleep with after learning, through heartfelt conversation, all kinds of wonderful things about them. This does not stop him from continuing to sleep with near strangers. With time they may become the people he knows. He is simply making a mid-life adjustment, akin to buying a new belt when you feel your old ones are all just a little too tight. They feel fine, but they could expand a bit. He is aware of the objectifying nature of his metaphors but does not feel that they present a problem in his daily life. He knows that a woman is not a belt.

So now, when he walks into rooms with a paramour that none of his men friends have ever seen before, and he notices their smirky smiles, with a trace of envy marking their tone of voice when he greets them, he always remembers to introduce his date by clearly stating her full name and her profession. It may seem a small step to many, but in his world it is a giant foot forward as he comfortably and confidently makes his way toward the end of a life that he has absolutely no intention of ever making any apologies for. 



Saturday, September 15, 2012

4 poems



as luck would have it…

having fallen again, call it denial, call it a river of love, rushing by…

love may conquer all
but pathologies always win
over-riding romance
with one bold stroke
of bloodthirsty genius

all those devastatingly handsome vampires
refusing to suck your blood
he-bitches craving God’s mistaken race
half in love with fairies

as luck would have it
he met him so close to a full moon
but not close enough
just a sliver, a French tip of desire

and if there is a man up there
he is dying slowly of a joking heart
having come to terms with the last lunar eclipse
that left him in the dark


*

two defensive strokes / one haiku

hand guns called his name
slipping into simile
like razors into veins

this was not a suicide note
just a jagged love poem
longing for another waltz

lyrical weapons
designed by moths to shade them
from the jaded light

*


Oranges & Roses (five pretentious stanzas)

one

the pretentious sentimentality of the clouds
hovering over us
rain, sleet, snow, obstructing horizons
causing thunderstorms to cower

two

the pretentious sympathy of the very poor
rationale behind the strategies some rich people
employ when they describe their personal ideology
on charitable behaviour

three

the pretentious packaging of oranges and roses
in the snow - like Queen Anne and her naked slave boys
dying dark against the frigid whiteness
as they dance for ghosts

four

the pretentious way of suggesting
Queens had any real power
over the colonization of birthing bodies
and inviting Pocahontas for tea

five

the pretentious desire to take a road trip to Virginia
just to see whether they sell snow globes  
of a famed ‘Indian Princess' and her mis-taken Cowboys
the beloved, savage, civilization of global tourism

oranges & roses eaten among            
                                                            clouds
                                                                        wealth
                                                                                    snow
                                                                                                tea
                                                                                                            travel…



*

gun control   (three cozy palindromes)

snuguns
snugguns
snug guns




*

Saturday, September 8, 2012

the virus is making its magic tonight





the virus is making its magic tonight...



the virus is making its magic tonight
huddled in this strained embrace
we try to love each other against all odds
resisting metaphors to war
attacking fear with love
rather than anger - not anger
entire patterns of kaleidoscopic organisms
composed by two strands of RNA
fifteen types of viral proteins
from the last host cell infected

entering immune system cells
building viral copies
each molecule playing
harmonic roles in this process
from the first steps of attachment
to the final process of budding

we have found a way to bloom
in these final diagnoses
the pain we feel is neither
sweet nor sour but both
the pain is lasting
and we find ways to endure
to create nostalgia for so many futures lost

there are no soldiers here
no weapons
just a body and its own private virus
un-camouflaged distinct
in some everlasting clutch
grabbed from a world
filled with worrisome warriors
wanting so desperately to name it out of timeworn kinship
into realms of scapegoating
and histrionic imperialism

begun as a massive strategy for the destruction of an identity
the dubious normalization of queer
that had been so hard won we cried in streets
rosy triangulations vigilant on thoroughfares
only to be harshly chaperoned by false scientific jargon - chat
herded along grid-like routes to the ridiculously sublime missteps of time

the absence of the truth
of tenderness and touch

and now we have it here
in a plethora of bodies
abundance with but one choice to love it and ourselves in and out of loss
to toss our sense of me and I in the end
without regretting middles and beginnings

yes, we huddle in this strained embrace
composing entire brilliant patterns of kaleidoscopic chaos
disseminating ordered mayhem we may one day conquer
free to make this choice on loving death
and the abject fear of isolating ourselves from our detractors
bending viral loads into symbolic signs swaddled and beheld - for bodies to enfold

yes, huddled herds - virions of valiant sympathy and hard won grace…


Saturday, September 1, 2012

FOUR LONG 'ISH POEMS




self-portrait of the artist as a middle-aged malcontent 
(a triptych)

           one
i sat on top of a mountain
            rejected manuscripts
            stuck up my ass
waiting to be included
            in a ‘best poems’  anthology
            i am still waiting
cold, wan, rash
            rolled, soiled pages
            weighing heavily
upon my urethra

two
            i committed myself
            to making a new piece of art
            every day
ended up with sore arms
and a very crowded apartment

         three
           through the threat of cataracts
     detached retinas, missed eye appointments 
           and intermittent dental care
i see every word as precious
            hanging on each syllabic turn
            white mice in peanut galleries
swinging softly by their tails
            in deluded fog           



‘the privileged poor’

my kitchen is the size of a large closet
my bathroom is the size of an impossible storage unit
my bedroom is an equity banned dressing room
I am subsidized to the tits
and have no more space for judgment
but I have enough room
for the hard won oxymoronic
identificatory praxis of the privileged poor
for what the supreme global dwelling place for colonizers call
their democratic right to shop and to be shopped for

so don’t cry for me Central America
let no country
that has been fucked by  North American complicity
shed a tear
for the tremulous fault line of rampant capitalism
as it fucks me
treats me like a well fed pig

apple in my mouth
skewer in spit
i spin and sizzle
awaiting, stinking, smug, impatient
for the well cooked
insatiable excremental excitement
of your gorgeous hard won
wrath





strolling shot/shouldering love

sitting in the front row alone
driving into film with a backseat lightly grazed by random cinephiles
he stretches one arm in a pink fleshy triangle over his head
fingertips resting lightly on the top of his right shoulder
soft tips sink nimbly into puffy skin
this faintly discernible intrusion into self
close to the bone

he gobbles devours endures celluloid moments
where he is safe outside the scene
someone onscreen  starts to cry
someone else onscreen puts their hand on the crying someone’s shoulder
then the crying someone turns to the consoling someone
resting his head so gently on their shoulder
as the tips of the spectators fingers sink further into the flesh of his own heart
skeletal blades and connecting tissue become crevasses of desire
his arm stretches toward some unattainable limb - some bodily matter
he is penetrated so tenderly
his hand is having sex with his shoulder

this unbeatable trust between limb and body - body and limb

in middle age these seconds minutes hours matter
providing erotic detached filmic comfort
still reeling in his mind
all those distant lovers mourning a lack of sexual forgiveness
making love to their lost selves
fingertips on their shoulder blades
ready for their close-ups

mourning memories of tenderness clawing deep
absolving hollows from self-embargoed love


five reasons why I really hate my poetry today

one
I really hate my poetry today
I hate its lyric sadness and the way
it wanders with such pomp through come what may
declaring courage in the face of doom
detaching from humanity by describing all the stuff that fills a living room

two
I really hate the way I have with words
they tumble out in microscopic herds
rattling my teeth and sending shivers through my underwear
I really hate the way they seem to care
about what’s right and wrong and what seems so damned unfair
and how they always end up with some citation to some stranger’s pubic lair

three
but most of all I hate the rhyming couplets
thanking gods for a lack of exuberance over poetry in quintuplets
so I write in fives just to piss my sad self off
so I can look in mirrors and smirk then scowl then scoff
then covet some pricks hat I’d like to doff

or doff some prick who likes to covet dicks
but that was five and this is one past six

four
chairs and lamps and tables interest me
I should have been a carpenter like that stud from Galilee
I would have filled the world with furniture
Instead of furnishing the world with love
I would have tipped my cap to our Lord Jesus 
with one agnostic leather glove
I would have craved some godly wisdom when push came down to shove

five
but instead I’m here and hating my poetry so god damn much
just lifting my fingertips to the keypad is like poison to the touch
but yes, such pretty poison I can’t seem to get enough of
as one bard said, these are what make our lives
the stuff that dreams make muck of

p.s.
so let’s raise a toast to words and all they say

like shit! goddamn!

and

“kind sir, have you ever considered becoming, just long enough to kiss me, GAY !!! ? ”


photos, top to bottom; Madame X, Madame Recamier, Eleonora Duse, Martin Sheen, Rupert Brooke