Impotence

I have no words for you.
Chalk eyes
censor your face

Your witch hair
Your Jew nose

Robin -
we have licked the salt
of our wounds with
tequila hate and
crumbled in adjoining
stalls

but you ask too much

I cannot reach up your legs
and pull out the death in you
and I cannot
hug it away.

Venture Capitalist (Cut-up)

Dulce de Leche hyperion satyrs oozing torrents of liquid Armani seep from tarmac chasms, steep leviathan Dow Jones chattel box. Tick tock, tick tock, CLANG! Commodities commodified in soulless exhumations of mortgaged evanescences and bonfired immolations of mattress-stuffed altars of dream. Sopping up every bead of rosary sweat encrusted outer borough scrimpers and lottery-filleted assistants to the assistant to the assis… . Incisors sink deep into sweetmeat fantasticalities of obliterated housewifery and ‘for my boy’ portfolio pathétiques. Numerical legerdemain dazzles prostate Sweeneys, in blue collar villanelles of polished impoverished dreams. CRASH!
O! Such impoverished dr… (whirls of ‘ Chevy(ies) from the levy but the whisky was dry’).

“A level of financial exotica ensued, wherefore: ‘irrational exuberance’?”


Maybe this will be the day that you die.

Isfahan

Long ago
Long ago
In the days before phantoms and phantasms
In the eons before endless nigrescent vistas
In my innocent fertility
fearless to the importunate siren
You beckoned, I came.

Istanbul had left its mark
And though I appeared unmoved
by skin song delectables of obscene plumage
Such decadent deliverance!

You had me, Kanuni,
Ah, Tokapi, your diadem spires
so impaled my Occidental contempt
I felt the imperial ghost forms
The Mighty, the Munificent, the Majestic
all
splayed prostrate
on lucullian kilims.

Oh, I had heard the tales
of an Eastern mosaic conflagration
of the gilded Safavid conurbation
where geometric and mathematical zillij tiles in
blinding cosmological landscapes
made you look the gilded buffoon.
And I had to laugh at the arrogant impossibility:
“Esfahan is half of the world”

(…and there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree…)

For though Shah, Abbas
you were first the Shi’ite potentate
and I knew your family tree.
Death to all who did
not sanctify the meaning of Muharram
or beseech the Hidden Imam
by scourging backs to blood meat supplication.
Such impeccable Western revulsion:
Where could Beauty possibly fit
in such sanguinary marinade?

(A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!)

But ever the ravenous pilgrim
There came a time
Although it now seems
long ago
long ago
When I had to behold you
When I had to know
If beauty could
congeal in blood.

At the foot of Hasht Behesht
The Palace of Eight Heavens
Blinded
Ravished
Spellbound
Breathless
vibrato
tremors
O’er stucco kufic supplications
To Allah and His Prophet
And all the Blessed that followed.

Oh, how
Your tiled Peacocks and Your Angels
Devoured me
There in
the brilliance
of sun-shattering portals
pendiment miracles
achingly etched archings

Drenched by
your blood-soaked beauties
that would ne’er
set me free.

Now time’s passage
caresses my numbered days
and soft! Lone the moonless vista
mocks my buried heart.

But there is breath
of mystic verdancy
and on holy dread
of nights of fire
I dream, Oh I dream…

(Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

…And on her dulcimer
she played…)

Oh my carnivore lover
Such insatiable splendor
….I return
I return…
to impress infinities
of such succulent ecstasies

Come
Take
One
We
Embrace me
Consume me
Isfahan.

Tuesday Morning

Mist on silver glass
The anonymity
Of ritual
Ablution.

Much as
Automatic aftermath
Of soon forgotten lover.

Dark and brimming
China cup
Censer
Swirls
Prayered palm psalm
In promise steam
As sun streams
Through aspen leaves
Filling black coffee
With stars.

In full gallop, joyously akimbo
I gather incrementals
Of doing and being
Feeling
Everyone
Emerge
From the cisterns
Of themselves.

Automotive interrogations
Re-commence.
Scribbling
In their notebooks
Of raindrops
To be avoided
At all cost
Much as rumors
Of cathedral
Pine.

The Muse
for Duane Locke

The animus of your pen, visage beheld, rivulet images, sepia, effluence of strophes, claret. Metaphysic lily pads impulse siren-straddling prosodic canals within your silted genius. Melisande to your Pelleas by curve of cheek, the importunate finger, frisson of tonsorial disarray, in 8X11 disturbance of ethers. The mighty bard asea in glossed montage gives way to Calliope, Thalia, Erato, Melpomene opening the door shrine wide to whatever comes, whatever comes…

Est est est, held fast, a balm for civilization of monstrosities, diaphanous saffron prorogue. Here is my body so contrary to au courant opinion in my terrestrial mysticism, stripping the parlor of its veneer of lies, dissembling your shadowed linguistic constitutivisms and contortisms, capturing leaf in the bosom of my web.
Words ARE passion flowers.

morning near Cape May


There is a Hopper print
in a rental house
near Cape May.

Strangely
it replicates
the very place
in which it resides.

Soft sun
on a sun-blanched
deck of non-description.
Neither invite, nor rebuff
just there.

And so I walk through tidal pools at five AM.
The vast expanse of the Atlantic does not
assail, then.
And no ships appear on the horizon
With promise of rich spice adventure
and other illusions.

Sandpipers skittle dance to quivers of froth.
Droplet parapets of yore are pregnably dissolved.
And communities of hours are a knee-bend away.

sand crabs prowl most fruitfully
grand minnow ballabile
mermaid slippers immodestly saunter
an urchin begs for solitude

my moveable molluscan feast…
ah Dave, there’s your starfish!

Everything bears this imprint of impermanence.
Each footfall carried away in murmur of foam.

And like every child I scour
the shore for the special ones ~

mother-of-pearl teasing
the perfect black fan
a tangerine surprise.

When the brine is washed off
You will lose your patina.
But now you are perfect.
Full ripened dead seashells
Not a shard in the lot.

It is time for black coffee
and the chattings of morning.

I walk past the Hopper
cupping my wealth
a breeze kiss on bare leg
it will be warmer today.

Charleston, WV

Who could resist you?
Oh, how you tantalized

Your threadbare imprecations
your hemp heavy knots
The verdant cilice
of homespun pathos…

…Cloaking every resolution
to leave you.

My cankerous courtesan
Charlot/vagabunt

My mutant genius
staving every metaphor
of ‘wild ‘n wonderful’ filth.
Until today.

Treasures stacked in
carnivorous remembrance
filling
rented yellow truck, and

…it all spills out…


Yes,
more flea than tabby
runt of the litter.
You memorized my ankles
with such fantastic contortions
how could I move without hurting you?
Purring such sweet rumbled nothings
small wonder
I never felt claws.

Your vermin besotted hillsides
of fallow promise
and such lush lies
are behind me now
says my rearview mirror

And ancient homespun
like dead kittens
and leprodic tramps
will ball into dust,
and
someday, one day
will
blow away.