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February 2000

I wonder if you’ll ever know who loved you

So Dazzling, Boy
Your weapon concealed in your pocket,
A bright smile, giving

just a sip,
just one sweet line only
(a love letter, 1958)
Tattered tableau,
loving tablecloths,
desperately mended

I lunged
We danced rolling over and over and sweet deliberate breathing lunging,
easy

you entered me a question mark

as I was giving birth to you, You pillaged, poisoned me.

I know myself to be a fertile sonata.
But to you I am a one-liner; I exist only as a statistic.
I ended up a flattened butterfly on your easy-turning, youthful pages
You climbed onto me like a step-ladder into your plea,
into the next morning
by which time your mission was complete,
Your periscope now on a different land mass.

The fruits of your sowing, I won them. A heavy breath.
You,
not sullied, finally, in spite of all of our breathing lunging,
by ANY kindness, nor by any feeling
Watchful now, eyes darkened,
I bother you now. You discard me.

I see endless lives.. They slip back, I
lose the shore
Pirates,
Wandering into this, my village, abstractly,
leaving a few wrappers rolling in the dust in
the town they came supposedly to worship now littered with the detritus of
their brutal, their fevered compaigns.

Taking asylum long enough to cast your vote,
you cast aside my village and all of its inhabitants,
Stay not long enough even for goodbye,
Just quick pleasure and the problem redressed
rotting problem

Burning village in me, A long wait behind the damp huts while the smoke
drifts into distant fields.
You roll away having conquered this green pleasant hill with your
patent disinterest, vague, blue-eyed: Mean, its wonder and other
worldliness all at once

A child all of a sudden, you look at me as though I mean to harm you, you
pummel me with your menacing look,
A pilgrim in a country you can’t quite see yourself inhabiting,
You typed in your question deftly, using your loins so so easily,
The answer comes back to you in code,
While I hunker on the bleak deck, floating out on an ember in a cold ocean

Pursued, raped and sold, soiled
By the sweet dance of a child,
All dewey-eyed, sweet-eyed innocence, bright as a star

You, horrified now, push me away,
Me, a
Broken-eyed, bent tree after a wounding, fitful hurricane. (You heaved in
your sleep, I slept on the floor.)

Did it really happen, or was it just on tv?

Pretty spin doctor, you cast your unseen ballot,
narrate events on the screen with the ultimate aplomb.
I imagine that bombs are dropping behind your lovely smile...

Playing games on the freeway, I lost

I watched my neck lengthen, my head fall, murdered by a pleasant child
In the mirror, now, a pleasant ache
My head rolls off onto the shimmering, dusty ground.

December, 2000

1.) A whiff of you---someone is wearing the perfume you left on me last
night
I kept it on as purposefully as you rushed home to shower it off
looking into a dark lense   your eyes maybe
Ball of light floats alone, incorruptible
No one there to comfort you when you reach home
You crave   something like home, something akin to family
Briefly shorebird, you landed on me
Wings flapping, elegiacal

Neglect
where your cold light shines brightest
and you can stab me in the chest
or between my eyes
yours are looking both ways

danger beats its wings tidily, so fashionable
on Brompton road
it perches, flapping (the new year approaches)
I go searching for it in every beat of your heart..
or was that your feet
clicking purposefully, delicately
so very elegant, a black crow pecking
away on smooth-stoned pavement at night

2.) words came out of my mouth as from your mouth last night
your lilting, rolling
not a put-on, but your sounds coming out of my mouth.. here on the second
plane of the day, I make that sound of yours, that tongue-tasting one
animals make, or old people
you’re a very old person in a young man’s body,
third sagittarrean tiger

3.) moon man
you hold the torch of the moon
waxing, waning,
expanding and contracting unpredictably, predictably--
when it suits you, of course
pulled by unseen exigencies
invisibly behind a screen of your heart
so closed for business, so ruthless, so cool
your pressed suit
your cupid’s bow mouth
you’re always looking at your foot bottoms and sniffing yourself like some
strange animal
dandyesque,
grotesque
to some perhaps but to me a womb-like man,
moonish

September, 2001

I provide a square for you, Boy

in my web I seek to secure you

but
you bound around

battering lamb, a ball of mercury
of pure fire

your face a blur
you, spider, neither humble nor free

in my nest you lay

you were restless
at times so very alive
but only while oblivious to me,
mirror facing in

your windshield wiper mouth   takes no prisoners
makes no promises awakes
no place

in which I could grow or thrive
and yet I insist to admire you
through this window--
this perfect square, delicate

I take my time, complete the nervous circle,
Built my camp a Bedouin,
a refugee

you lay in my tent, weaving, dreaming,
gazing out the top,
watching out the window busy hands

you propose to me no more projects

you only lay with me for a short while
my body your pillow in the rubble
your face my promise, my encampment

my family, I thought,
bleeding,

gazing into a crystal ball,
family, blowing away now like smoke,
like mirrors