O Mouths of Blossoming, Mouths of Transfiguration

And to have all these words as they think

Nothing of grief asking only for calm or lust

Useless in this village of impotent swagger

This town washed by the smooth waves

Of a filthy river this burg that fears night’s dark

Breath here where I am nothing more than

A faint noise rustling deep in a mirror-well

Into which you might look from a distant

Window in a city of quartz where yellow cats

Follow one another down otherwise empty

Sidewalks where from eucalyptus trees birds

Are charmed by your voice where there is

Fine-weather rain that brings joy and where

I could find what I write in what I love

Sometimes Broken Precisely Because

I miss you always now the snow is here to stay

I think of you when the color blue nearly 

Always opens up and looks out any more to see

How nimbly the future passes happy turbines

And Swan Lake is there too with the lumbering

Ballerinas and all the silly back aches after all

The elderly girls prayed enormously sweetly

For the resuscitation of stillborn indiscretions

Or was it the resurrection of Vienna sausages

Well dear who’s dying of thirst now tell me who

Needs a drink already we never did do one

Effortless thing did we but it pains us nonetheless

It pains us to admit O paradise! you wear my

Vague outpourings very well tonight my dear

O Ever Importunate Wisteria Naked in Winter

In this grey weather the nearest shadows throw

Back confused heads fast against a wall their

Tangled lines moving vaguely into a dim landscape

A love without an object a love without direction

The way winter opens a book maybe a treatise

On Modernist architecture with a photograph

Julius Shulman took one California afternoon he

Climbed some iron gate without caring where

He went but hearing the first sharp note of a bell

He turned his head and saw the structure’s heart

There where all the lines converged where the light

Of God shown on an outside wall and on an inside

Wall he made the light with his camera with his

Rhetoric against the shrillness of deafened words

Story Told by the Back-Broke Bricklayer

Death came to town to pick up a pizza

And an old-man-soul on the street where

Lovely young Rita lived and when she saw

Him she said O Death please promise me

You won’t come unannounced for me

Please holler before you come for me

Death said sure thing lovely young Rita

And Rita danced and Rita sang and she

Ignored the days' fall into months she

Ignored the months' fall into years

And when Death finally knocked on her door

Rita said O Death you never warned me!

Death said yes I did Rita but you didn’t listen

To your aching bones and your cracked voice

Alterable Noons of Loitering

O chanteuse you croon now what we desire

Is distance you sing we need a village

That waits off on a horizon a slate-roofed town

That won’t come any closer and I say look!

These perilous flagstones lead to a gate

That you call a cornea but I call my Muse  

(You do not always know what I am feeling)

You hum O baby don’t be that way don’t

Feel fluish and woozy (floozy?) baby you need

Some Jewish medicine—chicken soup and long

Boring stories about the struggle of your ancestors!

I say my people forgot almost everything alas

But that’s okay because I listen to Nouvelle

Vague and make up my own dammed tales!

Well Isn’t That Precious

Yet to exist with great repose

Like a new carpet you buy sight-

Unseen from a JC Penney catalog

To have done to dawn what the dark rose

Does to night and to do it as quickly as a cat

Breaks cover O to be the way one dreams

A joy to rejoice in this bitter caprice of leaves

This cold evening when your words

Sink once again their adulterous vowels

Into my dopey sorrow my melancholy 
That blubbers like internal organs