Prizing Those Days Most Dolefully

All your flowers bloom like passion

But they die with monotonous regularity

Their faces falling apart like tepid applause

Ah! why do I think of Finland when I see

Your blue eyes after all you’ve never even

Been to Sweden yes your lips are indeed

A lovely misadventure O delirious laugher

Are you like myself amiable as a horse?

Don’t you see it’s not that I want you

To be so knowing as all that but you are

Delicious and I don’t mind letting you know!

Why do you ask if roses can be charming?

Everywhere we look we see ashes

Eager for a guided tour of the future

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When Suddenly Spring Sprang to Mind

Exactly at the prick of dusk your folded arms

Broach the middle of the room and laughingly

You say it’s a terrible thing to feel love blistered

And peeling on a wall you say once we were

Still happy-go-lucky ukuleles more treacherously

Intimate than the wind’s hurry through an empty

House the whole sky’s rush toward night you say

Tonight the moon is a clenched fist O what I say

What have I ever won by the blurry courage

Of my bloodshot penis? what have I gained

By pitying all the yawners who never once

Squeezed mystery from a succulent moment?

Love’s a disease that will never be cured of us

When the Last Light Becomes Nocturnal Wind

And so however ridiculous Highway 20

Melts amazed by homeward  traffic

Lisping across the Mississippi bridge

The milk-brown river flowing deceptively

Sluggish beneath a flaccid skin that hides

Tangled muscles of current punching

Earth shouldering acres of soil past

Vicksburg whose windows cough

And spit geometric pools of bruised light

O Vicksburg! you offer the unquiet gift

Of a smile when you let the world go

With your head thrown back among

Raucous dogs your ravenous throat 

Slugging the day’s last colors 

The Event of Our Freedom

Whole days waste their fuzzy unfocused lives

At the doorstep of your breezy nonchalance

Whole days languish in a sort of linear nostalgia

Tonight the shadow-shot air whispers snowily

Where shall I stand so as not to catch a chill

Tonight stars terrify me so do naked light bulbs

Listen! I can feel you flickering in my skull

A disqualified emotion neither a something

Nor a nothing you are a glacial fire dying out

I am talking about the invisible of the visible

About your moist lips parting for a word

Not about the desolation of ardor or the future

Of privation but about seeing your white teeth

Become blindingly indifferent when you smile

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