Three Thoughts

Sometimes when I am not yet drunk enough

(and Ovid and Virgil are left on their shelves),

I intentionally get in emphatic arguments

regarding facets of life,

and I take a wrong side

purposefully,

to enjoy how people find aggravation

in finally proving themselves correct.

I have sometimes seen people

doing enough cocaine to dust the local mountains

and they speak loudly because they have important things to say,

as if their voices (thicker than straw and quick to burn)

can make their ideas into wordless towers.

I once read a lot of Bukowski

but I stopped because

I kept being tempted

to write poems like this one.

Meditations 10.29

I was thinking of the way she kisses

When the moon has died, when night is very dark,

And then about a serious question.

Yes is the answer, Marcus Aurelius,

Wisest of all men who wore the purple-

Though I would amend that simplicity,

And note that you would have become poet

And not philosopher if she had shared your bed.

Razors

There was a soft glow from another room

Lighting the hair on her calves like cobwebs

Or the fresh delicate silk of spiders,

And I think them mad, the other women,

(Modern as the make-up on their bathroom floors)

For drawing steel upon their wintry legs

As if exposure made them beautiful-

Trees without bark holding succulent fruit,

Fish cold like ghosts swimming bare of their scales.

Some times, my love does imitate those girls.

She shaves, she scrapes, her flesh is a mirror.

Upon that sheen I see the face of death,

But she sharply grins when my eyes are upon her.

Revenir

A year past, I carved you from dark tree trunks

And a goddess warned me you could come alive.

This tension between love’s reality

And words that are trembling in soft whispers-

It creeps through windows, lays upon us like the dawn.

The shades split bright rays before they reach you,

I know the light will grind your dreams like grain.

In vain I attempt to anticipate

The moment that arrives as you awake-

If you will stretch your arms behind your head,

Or if a waltzing sentence will emerge

(A request for songs, perhaps cold water).

It matters not what is done when exile ends.

My tears flood the Nile’s banks. I will hold you again.

Carmen 31

If I started to write you something sweet

I fear that I would poison the sugar,

So mostly I begin with war’s drumbeats

And hope by the end there is less blood.

Plants thirst for water, they are not maligned.

So too, they fill their mouths with the sun’s rays,

And still their blossoms are such lovely things.

As I prepare to play thief to your light

I notice our bodies- husks on the ground.

Do I drink so eagerly of the flames

That I shame those that can live without you?

When parasites are carried long enough

We call them children, or give them pet names.

Carmen 30

When people declare that nothing is free,

They are often confused by my laughter-

Knowing not that they have conjured Troy’s gift

Or the seeds inside young Persephone.

It is something in the first dying leaves

Or buying drinks for dulcet girls in heels

That I identify with Jormungand-

He wraps around the vast earth we crawl on,

But to him it is the only normal size.

At Ragnarok he finds us pitiful

And yet he learns that monsters can be slain.

Rapine artifices in camouflage,

Eternal return hammered with lightning;

The ancients teach no wisdom, save that none

Can know the endings of their own short lives.

Even mistletoe has bloody vengeance.

Which triviality will I ignore?

Regina

There was a vagueness about her that provided a more permanent impression than the color of her skin, like a halo shaped of pure radium, or the flicker in the eye of a bear (dancing with a pale rose balanced delicately upon its nose) when clapping hands evoke the rushing of a river and the tempting scent of berries and fish is almost as real as the lash.

Unexplainable echoes follow in her path, reproductions of things lost:

-A South American agent of torture who tilts his head to the left and burns into a soul and seems sorry, whispering through a scream, “You will die well, the innocent all do” but then the pain again, and more.

-Warehouses filled to rafters while on a far road a boy’s family abandons him while yet alive because he cannot stand after fainting. His mother mourns him with two younger children on her back (all bellies and curled ribs like the bands that hold together empty barrels) who weep because they hunger but also from the dust. Her sobs diminish. The gunmen will be on the road when the sun sets.

-The sound of two syllables, separated by five seconds in time, taken from one extinct play of an Athenian tragedian, building on each other like coins dropped into wells that had been dry long before man first built altars to those gods who most adore the rhinoceros clash of bronze.

Certain tales that shrug their own shoulders are told of wolves, specifically of those half-familiar and half-lupine. They are loyal but often confused by sheep and their eyes are blue like freezing rain and some live all their days with their masters, but time may lay any man abed and ailing, his companion his comfort. Then suddenly, bared teeth that menaced steppes for millennia are in a snarl, and the language they had always heard but never understood commands them: “Kill. Devour.” In a blink, a shredded throat that silences any final words; they become as kings with new crowns in that moment, the weight of gold less than the shiver of forbidden accomplishment. Would the first minute seem as years after a life without freedom?.. and then it occurs. The usurper looks about the room and like thunder sees that no window is in view and, crimson-mouthed in glory, she realizes that she cannot open doors. Oh! But the taste of it! The warmth of blood on a tongue! Starve, Regina, but savor your triumph!