A Cool Blue Breath the True Color They See

Ever since that dip-shit affliction

My sullen slow-burn eyes

Behave like two jaded men of letters

A couple knuckleheads without belief

End of a long day

They harmonize a pair of sighs

And sit on the bed puffing a cigarette 
Pilfered from my lover's purse

All night they follow meandering paths

Left dry by my receding dreams

Come morning my eyes 

Pick fights with my nose 

They speak

When I have nothing left to say

It should come as no surprise they weep
Piss-water apotheosis

I swear as soon as chance permits

They’ll start a shit-stupid war

On the wrinkles of my desert face


 

Your Constellations in an Ocean

Bid farewell to an idea

Abandoned on a deserted beach

Cold wind now and rain for once

Too late

The frigid earth-borne brilliance

Spontaneous 

Fire of your intellect

Your exquisite desire 

Too infinite for such a tiny universe 

For Our Two Selves Beyond the Seven Clouds of Truth

You're here again 

You and your delightfully perverse 
Wickedly tender wit 

Here you are as always 
Disinclined to offer facile disquisitions

Merely as a pleasant means to look away 

A suicide for instance

Feels utterly saintly 
Everywhere tonight

Feels difficult to be 

Let’s just be here 

Calling things and events by their true names 

For once beyond bitterness and fatigue 

O how this honesty becomes us opening outward 

To reveal persons 
Other than ourselves 

Such absolute values 

So vaguely obsolete 

So happily prone to be misread 

These few words 
Tender only the flimsiest aid to being 

Here at the climax 

The more naked we get 

The more clearly we'll be seen

To be ourselves 

Why should we be ashamed? 

The French aren’t ashamed of being French

Author Reading

Or Again at Something that Comes After

Do you still feel disinterred sun-burns?

That was the cock-eyed July 

I foreswore double-vision and quit cold two

Dozen dependencies and you

Were so impatient with the hum-colored sun

You were only rather

Irritated at my having been born at all

First is the sweet fetid dust of these

Quiet goddamn poems beautifully

Wilting on a bedside table

Now is when you say

Summon the sun's guitars for us

Regardless of the ashes

Where did we put my cigarettes?

Now’s our chance for a little cry

Small dry sobs we bend and warp

Joyously into pinwheels and whirligigs

Hot dog!

Dreamily pernicious where you come from sure

But twice as mean the dirt

That taught me to chew

Second is the eagerness of silence

A desire waiting for the moment

It will learn how to speak

I suppose we have

Very little to say

I don’t know yet

But we will

We Go by as Water to the Sea

Implacable clouds pour into the seam of the horizon

Casting a vast libretto death-mask O vicious opera

Unrivaled and ever more exact whale song O furious

Knowledge of love whelms and whelms our black

Wings drowning in this nocturnal ocean where we 

Hum the Lord Chancellor's tune a seafloor serenade

What frivolous lyrics pile all upon appalling dreams!

What violence in the atmosphere of such creations

These unraveled but extremely serious commitments

What can survive must have some quality but what

Must be done under such pressure and circumstance

We are the sunken masters of deep-water harmony

We are the vivacious nosebleeds of aquatic nightmares

We’re insouciant singers in this absurd expanse of bliss