Of Me Without You In

When I win the National Book Award for poetry

Ten years after I’m dead I am the luckiest stiff

In this forgotten cemetery and yes I put on airs

Plunder choices and find my source right here

O why did I leave that vain clause in my Will

To have a mirror affixed to the ceiling of my coffin?

Dirt pushes in my veins my heart is near to Mother

Earth shall I grow a night flower now some fierce
Intelligence with smooth peaches-and-cream

Skin O I feel it beating underneath so warm

Pulsing hot blood all throughout your body

O why did I leave that silly proviso in my Will

To wear over-the-ear Skullcandy headphones

Perpetually playing the Cranberries’ “Zombie”?

Your Discography Has Become Unmanageable

You’d be wispy in a short story maybe just

A character glimpsed in a rain-shower

A beautiful woman wearing pensive glasses

Holding a New York Times above her hair

But smiling as the heavy newspaper sags

The ink spreading multifarious innuendoes!

O but you’d be raunchy sauntering sexily down

A pine board staircase in a spaghetti western

Turning the head of every squint-eyed lip-

Syncing Italian cowboy in a chiaroscuro saloon

Where is Ennio Morricone in Times New Roman

Twenty-four point font? Only it’s not Morricone

It’s John Zorn utterly Zorn composing the score

Of your film or possibly hey Frank Zappa!

You Were Sweeter Than the Blossoms on the Trees

Tonight Betty Carter’s on my mind her lips like skull-

Candy between my eyes her voice thrusting far

Horizons even touching stratospheric audibilities

Nevertheless her song achieves it achieves not

It achieves it achieves not it achieves it achieves not

Her voice has a brittle delicate crystal neck veering

Downward to soil to the earth to the base of sweating

Concrete and rust-happy steel girders these architectures

Nevertheless invent sublimities of hope on a shoestring

Foul play may come our way foul play it’s time we learned

We got burned by foul play is what she sings O she sings!

Someday foul play may come our way then maybe

We’ll learn and so on we know is what she sings tonight

What’s new? We stop in front of a flower stall what’s new?

O the Fickle Dialects of the World!

See here where the bones of Joan of Arc

Molder under the oak? Where is she is

Not a question we should be asking all we

Know is here a blossoming soul in the grass!

O we want to listen to Al Green and dance!

We just want to dance around these quiet

Flowers here beneath these forgotten trees

The lily and your lips thunder more softly

Than these Mississippi clouds tonight and more

Ominously O we want to listen to Al Green

Don’t we? What hymn murmurs its seditions

Beneath these oaks tonight humming

Discomfiting secrets in the blood of every leaf?

The rain is making puddles to wash our faces

Where Is the Exquisite Country of Your Song?

For instance the time you apologized for the stars

You were always saying things like I’m so damned

Empty I think I may scamper off before morning

And there was America following you like a thumb

Sucking little brother with pants around his ankles

You said I’ve had it with the moon for being always

So damned obvious and the deceptively majestic

Inchworm makes me very wistful I could cry

Tonight you said I’m as alone as the ocean’s lips

But my song is just as off-color and off-key Ha!

Your slightly nude words ride an invisible horse

Your words no matter where you send your words

They never stop galloping beyond a movie sunset

Like a forever an endless excitement on the horizon