charm

charming
like an apple
-twinkling apple-
it's charming
so unlike
smell-of-a-skunk
-you're charming, reader-


shy!
like charming under covers
less like an apple
more like a pear
to charm
to think of others:
treasure!

fAvorites

A HILL
      FRANK O'HARA


Yes, it's disgusting
when you lose
control, but my
wilderness is love


of a kind, no?
And the purity
of my confusion is
there, it's poetry


in love with you
along with me,
both of us love you
in the same "My!"


Yes, but don't be
scared; poetry
is intangible and
there's no purity


in me
outside of love,
which you can easily wreck
and I can lose.


Clouds pass in
my notorious eye
but you, through
all, I see.




POEM
      FRANK O'HARA


When your left arm twitches
it's like sunlight on sugar
to me and my tongue seeks
the sea of your skin, its oily
calm of green light on the floor
of the ocean
                     as in parting,
there's a flutter between us
while I haul down a flag and
you look absently out of
my heart so you won't see
what light one fears in the
sea that I don't want you
to know is of you in me

Now and Forever

by A. Ginsberg, 1992


I'll settle for Immortality-
Not thru the body
    Not thru the eyes
        Star-spangled high mountains
            waning moon over Aspen peaks
But thru words, thru the breath
        of long sentences
loves I have, heart beating
        still,
inspiration continuous, exhalation of
        cadenced affection
These immortal survive America,
            survive the fall of States
        Departure of my body,
            mouth dumb dust
This verse broadcasts desire,
            accomplishment of Desire
Now and forever boys can read
            girls dream, old men cry
Old women sigh
            youth still come.

stars

stars in your circulation
perfect
hm
passion
allusions of life
around you
aberration


still - 
love
and want enough to need
wont to live


"too kind" pity
my sourceless veins


bitter-free-impropriety


design butchering decisions
false skins unhinged
die with me




hm
wont to live
yet death seems promising
death with shoes, at least
life is love and absence death?


(when one realizes he is mostly meaningless yet still somehow loved
nothing changes)


still - 
love or life
why can't it be neither?
they both always interfere
interfering interjections
like the words
"die with me"
and "finish"


stars again
feelings aside
my feelings inside
are stars for stars
enough, yes
hope and agree.

green, grass eyes

your green - grass eyes
healthy, watered, but
dry and bright - reflecting
the sunlight, smiling

Passion for the Sky

by Joseph Ceravolo


You are near me. The night
is rectilinear and light
in the new lipstick
on your mouth and on the colored
flowers. The irises are blue.
As far as I look we are across. A
boat crosses by. There is no monkey in me
left: sleep. There is something
sold, lemons. Corn is whizzing from the
ground. You are sleeping
and day starts its lipstick.
Where do we go from here?
Blue irises.

honey

honey

-sweet, delicious, and delightful-

I

leg bruises from

night knees

sentimental items

sleepy eyes

who can believe in

choice, with no voice

who's is that?

that hair

honey, you're a catch

honey, you know what

I don't think I've ever

seen you before and

I might as well

love you.

Whether you want me

to or not.

honey do you know

what dreams are

dreams are the

green eyes, hazel eyes,

brown, brown, brown eyes

your brown, honey eyes

(yum!)  (?)

I don't see

why I shouldn't

love you.

Well, from someone

else's perspective I do

but not from mine.

honey we've got time

II

honey, remember

that part about dreams

I was out of my mind

and it's a sin to waste time

well, as far as dreams,

as far as I can tell,

there's a reality too

and I can't tell you

much about either

or certainly

which one we're in

and for that

I'm to blame

but

if it's all the same

I like it that way

III

oh man

I said it's a sin to waste time

and that's true, but

I was out of my mind

and honey, I don't mean that

at all about you

this is about time, and space

and feeling out of place of both

like pain that doesn't hurt but

you know it should and you

want to feel it and feel where

its coming from and feel where

its hitting and feel where

it slams you into place

and time

I want that pain

honey, you know?

The Breather

by Paul Muldoon ("Moy Sand and Gravel")


Think of this gravestone
as a long, low chair
strategically placed
at a turn in the stair.

Havoc send softness

remind authorities: strength through weakness

remind authorities: submission

remind authorities: bliss through havoc

send softness

do no be lonely - do not be hated

send softness, remember

there is nothing like a mother

women - be mothers

men - love mothers

let your skin be sunned

let your heart be watered

rest /// your restless soul

inside your heart

uncomfortable pain and blind desire

inside your heart

radiant universe and flesh and blood

inside your heart

communal, holy, burning fire

neverending endless

beginnings never

release the

newness of being

Blush

What is this advertisement maze!
    advertising everlasting hours
advertising various, culturally meaningless
    ways - even in a meaningless culture -
I need a life lasting days


Smoking cancerous violently gentle women
    feelings - ah, yass - for a while
Love! you child! I'm the woeful wisest
    juvenile - even in an uncultivatable culture
I need your -guts- to help me smile


Outside is meaningless mass
    its insides - all of us - always ALWAYS
I've seen my insides - "Fast!"
    fight! I'm meaninglessly abashed
I need need (need) more Light


My heart is greeeeeen and lush
    and veiny and attached - yes
always attached - "just" "like" "a leaf"
    my leaf's a blush, hushing /// the world
blushing for life and light and - ah -

broken

broken -
like the heart
of a fingernail
this world
grows back
but never
the same
Will you Love me today?
or worsen my pain.

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on Nature

on Nature
who knows Nature
who knows Creation?


I am detached
I can't romanticize Nature


I love the vibrancy!
exposed by Sun
after heavy Rain
releases upon itself


strength, chaos
it's a love I know
vulnerability, peace
a love of convenience


where is Stopping Love?


I Imagine Nature is like Poetry
or Nature is Poetry
but I don't know
because of the disconnect


the Trees - all wearing
tight
ivy dresses
naked arms
out
mingling -
except one


outside my window
I see dense, populated
Nature, surrounding
a wooden, wired
pole, existing
together - untouching -
with no
connection, except
Air and Dirt
and
Unknown Tension


does Nature miss me, or
am I a walking, wooden,
wired pole?
      If I knew Her,
would She clothe me?

To the States

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist
      much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city, of this earth, ever after-
ward resumes its liberty.

Walt Whitman
1860/1881

the blossoming figure
of my bloodied spit stain
is a pulseless heart, silent!
in the snow
straining for existence
immortilized by winter

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love comes again
love, with the wind
love, never thick-skinned


not that heinous kind
that hideous, hateful kind
not manufactured love
like frozen, steely
winters, like iron
and smells and feels
like iron, and 
never once steals your
stomach, or heart
or feels like blisters, open
and splintered.


not that kind
love, hopefully 
unlike time!

Ode to Heaven

P. B. Shelley

(1819)

Chorus Of Spirits

First Spirit

Palace-roof of cloudless nights?
Paradise of golden lights!
Deep, immeasurable, vast,
Which art now, and which wert then!
Of the Present and the Past,
Of the eternal Where and When,
Presence-chamber, temple, home,
Ever-canopying dome,
Of acts and ages yet to come!

Glorious shapes have life in thee,
Earth, and all earth's company;
Living globes which ever throng
Thy deep chasms and wildernesses;
And green worlds that glide along;
And swift stars with flashing tresses;
And icy moons most cold and bright,
And mighty suns beyond the night,
Atoms of intensest light.

Even thy name is as a god,
Heaven! for thou art the abode
Of that Power which is the glass
Wherein man his nature sees.
Generations as they pass
Worship thee with bended knees.
Their unremaining gods and they
Like a river roll away:
Thou remainest such -- alway! --

Second Spirit

Thou art but the mind's first chamber,
Round which its young fancies clamber,
Like weak insects in a cave,
Lighted up by stalactites;
But the portal of the grave,
Where a world of new delights
Will make thy best glories seem
But a dim and noonday gleam
From the shadow of a dream!

Third Spirit

Peace! the abyss is wreathed with scorn
At your presumption, atom-born!
What is Heaven? and what are ye
Who its brief expanse inherit?
What are suns and spheres which flee
With the instinct of that Spirit
Of which ye are but a part?
Drops which Nature's mighty heart
Drives through thinnest veins! Depart!

What is Heaven? a globe of dew,
Filling in the morning new
Some eyed flower whose young leaves waken
On an unimagined world:
Constellated suns unshaken,
Orbits measureless, are furled
In that frail and fading sphere,
With ten millions gathered there,
To tremble, gleam, and disappear.

Two by Paul Muldoon

Beijing

I could still hear the musicians

cajoling those thousands of clay

horses and horsemen through the squeeze

when I woke beside Carlotta.

Life-size, also. Also terra-cotta.

The sky was still a terra-cotta frieze

over which her grandfather still held sway

with the set square, fretsaw, stencil,

plumb line, and carpenter's pencil

his grandfather brought from Roma.

Proud-fleshed Carlotta. Hypersarcoma.

For now our highest ambition

was simply to bear the light of the day

we had once been planning to seize.

Bob Dylan at Princeton, November 2000

We cluster at one end, one end of Dillon Gym.

"You know what, honey? We call that a homonym."

We cluster at one end, one end of Dillon Gym.

"If it's fruit you're after, you go out on a limb."

The last time in Princeton, that ornery degree,

those seventeen-year locusts hanging off the trees.

That last time in Princeton, that ornery degree,

his absolute refusal to bend the knee.

His last time in Princeton, he wouldn't wear a hood.

Now he's dressed up as some sort of cowboy dude.

That last time in Princeton, he wouldn't wear a hood.

"You know what, honey? We call that disquietude.

It's that self-same impulse that has him rearrange

both 'The Times They Are A-Changin'' and 'Things Have Changed'

so that everything seems to fall within his range

as the locusts lock in on grain silo and grange."

blackberry smush-art

the blackberry smush-art
like rorschach sweet tarts
was stored in museums
and never given its freedom!


(SPACE)


the sweet
blackberry smush-art
from feet
like rorschach sweet tarts
upbeat
an upscale upstart
discreet
handmade counterpart
defeat!
by berry smush-art

I'm sorry I didn't wake you earlier this week
the sun was there, against the sheets
but I knew you needed some sleep
and the bed was wrestled and weak


I ate the bread for breakfast
and planned to buy more at the bread store
the eggs were still in the chickens
and the milk was old


I roamed, waiting for you to wake
cheerfully, I found your copy of Dickens
suddenly stricken, my proud individualism
was long missing, yet never missed


I closed the curtains and planted a kiss
knowing is would likely be missed
life's grasp is much tighter than we said
we would ever let it be.

black crows

on

black pianos

dancing

singing songs

that

strangely sound

like

music and

get

me dancing

I don't know what I see
And I don't see much
I leave the first page blank
Because I know it won't dissapoint
(Okay, so. Okay, right. I know
I know. Okay)
I wasn't born yesterday
But I might as well have been, everyday
Its not at all like oranges
Because they don't grow backwards everyday
Wildlife, if not caged,
Has the uncanny ability to completely ignore us
If we could ignore ourselves as such,
We would be more worthy to cage wildlife
Space travel is off
We're getting more primitive, but with technology
This time!
Why am I so negative? I'm not.
I didn't eat dinner. By choice (echo).
This will go to the Black Hole
The wierdos congregate at the Black Hole
This will join them.

Perfume

Don't put your perfume on my ice cream

you know what I mean, your perfume

is a dream, unlike my ice cold

reality, unlike your perfume

well, ice cream may be too optimistic, but I'm

not pessimistic, I just don't need your perfume

dream. We just breath - hic -

we change quick. We - ahhh - perfume

Dream.  Our thoughts stick your thoughts

my ice cream is suddenly slick. Your perfume

air-thick. don't. put. your. thoughts. on. Me. Just

just just. Smile. And breath breath the perfume steam.

And when it ends you'll be thankful for

the more painful road not taken.

4.22.11

In Tennessee - all parts, I believe - love is a funny thing

Its the only state I've ever lived in

It doesn't at all make me want to sing

but it sometimes makes me wish I could

And it truly is funny, not at all like peculiar funny, though it certainly is,

I believe, but like funny, truly

Don't think I've never been out of Tennessee

It's funny for whatever reason you want it to be

And that will be the difference (it won't)

Between you and me.  But in Tennessee

There are so many different kinds - but they can be so similar

In both feeling and thought, yet so terribly different,

In both feeling and thought, but probably more in feeling than thought.

Everyone knows this, children through and through,

but they don't find it funny as we do, and we do. If you go to Tennessee

"Looking for Love," I'm sure you'll find it, whether you know it or not.

If you don't, then it probably doesn't matter anymore. You

Should remember childhood, if not even yours,

and you should try, just once more.

Its not Tennessee, its not you and me,

its nothing between us three. Its not even about love, Tennessee

But thats probably what makes it funny.