It has been several weeks since my last contribution--I send my apologies to the scores of disappointed readers. I have not written much lately, but am currently working on a different frontier of mythology. Those of you who know: you know. That particular piece, however, is not at this time suitable for public consumption. Thus I submit to you, dear readers, a small composition for your select digestion.



THE PROBLEM ALL THE TIME

It had been years
since I shimmied up
a tree, so
I did,
and upon descending
observed
winter light
and the luscious hair
of the fields.

LONELY MEN NEGLECT THEIR WOMEN

I am not that
hungry silhouette
moiling the moon-silence
of the long steppe.
I have not the thin eyes,
nor the wolf-belly;

You have known me.
My spurs
do not pit
other porches in the dark—
My eyes haven’t got
the low black hush
of moths that clutter
the gutters
of lonely men. No,

I have loved you richly.
What more needs man
than the slim revolver
of your tongue and
your six-chamber hips?

A revised edition, more true to the author's original intent.



LAUNCELOT AND THE BOAR

In all ways pursuit turned out to be
shorter
than I would have thought.
I lie
on my back feeling
the hair of the earth
brittle against me
and hearing the
steam spilling from you
into our
cold chapel of air.

Now lying in the gaunt wood
this man will not think of you.
He will grit his teeth,
whisper
I am not maimed,
I am not maimed.

You must be
a wet haunch hung
in a dark pantry,
not a gale of hot breath,
not a crispness
against my lips,
not a red blot
on my pale leg.

Thoughts on growing older.


AMBITION

For when I yammer
of Araby silks, beneath
my tongue simmer
visions of
the motes fluttering
in your morning tea,
and my plough rusticating
under our
tall sweet mulberry.

A working draft of:

LAUNCELOT AND THE BOAR


Mad have I been
licking the wet loam
for you in the gaunt wood,
cocked for your dark blur
amid the brambles.

In all ways pursuit turned out to be
shorter
than I would have thought.
I lie
on my back feeling
the hair of the earth
brittle against me
and hearing the
steam spilling from you
into our
cold chapel of air.

For a moment my
nostrils swoon amid
a hot gale of your breath
and your crisp flesh
against my lips—but now you are
a wet haunch hung
in a dark pantry. For all
that your heart brast
to splinters upon my chest,

I have gained
only
your flaky blood tangled
in my beard.

TRAFFIC

don’t live in a port.
when you look
toward the quay and run
your eyes along your ship’s taut lines
you can’t help but
think of thieves
sticking their knives
in your business.

BERTH

You are a harbor of great girth—
I have laid my murmurous timbers
beside you; the warm
warped oak of the quay
is the sure flesh astride
my hull.

I have bucked
in bitter waters these long months
and sucked of foreign spice—
but the hot smell of your meats
yet stalks the mess.

The sirocco funnels me
toward you—I am implacable.
I have but
to charge across
this churlish air.

RIPE

You have striven
to lay me bare; bathed
your teeth in my rarest juice;

But I have placed my soul
in the pit—no matter how
deep you eat, it is a thing
you’ll never be able to swallow.

THE CHANGING FACE OF CONFLICT

It's been
such a hell of a long time
since I last surrendered.
You know
how lonely it gets.

She loved
my eyes
and what a nice guy
I was.
But I have got
good trenchments,
and howitzers
could not gut out
the deep fleshes
she hankered to worry.

When I saw her bodybag eyes, I laughed loud
and said wasn't this a pretty thing,
is this how you send a man away.
It didn't last and never does.

An experimental piece, though I shan't fault you if you can't spot the experimentation.

CARNASSIAL


Raw shriek—
the owl
next door. He wakes
me every night, the
sound of his billowed chest
and the swollen smell
of his claws.

I don’t listen much, not
to his husky eye
rubbing hard against
the moon—she answers,
her white belly
trembles like eggshells
and she succumbs.

It doesn’t concern me so
I don’t listen much, instead
I devour the book in my lap, ignoring
his bully romp
in her soft craters,
the page unread.

TRIANGLE

My civil suit I have shed, and
this evening I would be clothed in you;
The long hallway’s throb envelops me,

I am enervate with anticipation darling: I spring
from behind the cherrywood jamb—but here is someone else-
he is red, engirthed, breath-flogged. And you,

to think that you could find such
succour under barbarian flames, you
who have sheltered in the lee of my flesh.

ETTARD

The sun ripens
like a peach toward night;
wet-fleshed and red
its warm juice squelches
between my knuckles—
I had anticipated rapture
as my teeth clave
to the bony pit but I think
I’d rather have watched
its bright sickle
covey to the red breast
of dusk—
now its savaged strips
of rag-flesh nuzzle red
against my palm like
the lingering press of fingers
on your hip—
I never open a package
the way it’s meant.

SHED

the moon is a corn snake
in the grass.

she worms through
the gaps in my slats—
I am in need of repair.

her dry belly dusts
the dry dust in my parlor,
and chairs upon which
she has not sat—in a month—
maybe more.


she has not seemed so full, nor so
new-skinned nor immaculate,
now that she is distant—
never so
rapturous.

THE IGNORANT GARDENER


I know when to plant,
but not when to water, nor when to shore up the soil,
and so my green blooms die.

THE MOVEMENT OF MOUNTAINS

I.
It is a wonder to me,
the brute precision in the chambers of an engine,
and it is a wonder to me
that they churn with such strength.

I know the feel of distances—I breathe
the dust of the Cascades, and the greenery,
and think of the hills of home, and I know them
to be the same;

The hairy bulk of the tor—
Thick mobs of trees, straight-backed, unruled.
My eyes cannot pierce
the voluminous shadows beneath.


II.
I creep along the hairy stomach of the earth
and marvel at its deep flesh.
I touch the immaculate purple,
the velvet-knuckled foxglove.

And on the westerlies gloat
black-hulled men o’ war, their umbrous knolls
rammed full of thunder.


III.
And if the earth by rubbing its fecund fleshes together
heaves up such crags,
what do my fingers do to you?

REYNARD

Eventide
I have heard you, but you
have not sought me,
so have not caught me—
how your fingers have howled
in low tones
in the red cold
eventide.

Each night the trumpets
moan—you have brought home
the white stag; the bristled
boar’s throat still
cakes your teeth. Yet you
have not pursued

this hump
of disconsolate fleshes—
the shudder
that has reft the shade
between your thighs;
the bright pelt

shivering in a winter barrow
yearning to be the
spike of flame
in your dim brambled holt.

I am writhing in impotent frustration--ceaseless fits of melancholy interspersed with violent bursts of euphoria, crowded by testy taciturnitude and ill, snappish humours. My chest seems constantly on the brink of implosion; my ribs flex inward on my heart, breath waxes taut and raspish.

I am leaving. But that isn't all of it.

I need violence and exertion, distraction: a victim for the crouched rage twisting bleak talons in my gut.

I cannot be mythological all the time--every so often, poets must get sappy.


CULINARY EXTEMPORE

the train has no direct route
away from the apricot sliver
of your shoulder.

the thames is brown. the bright
belly of france is a far haunt,
her breath pendulous,
her sinews slim peaches of
light through
cheap kitchen glass.

what remains to pluck
across the cold channel; the metro
clucks off into the tunnel
like a lingering tongue

and the white wine of your bones
shimmers into the dark gullet.
now there is no
dim kitchen jazz,
the tart has limped off
your pomegranate lips.

how can I heat your oven
and get you cooking
when I cannot even find
your scent in a slick clutter of rain.

PUNTO REVERSO

The iris on the sill
thirsts—

your breath
flays the green flesh,

the purple cusp
(parted and flushed)
quivers against the raw
light.
You slip

to the kitchen, shuffle back
with coffee and
fumble with the Times.

THAT MOVIE

I like the one
with the knight, who under
the helm is soppy and
grim, a pouty hard-luck
bastard.

You liked the cold guy
with firm jaw and
bold chest. The crisp boy
who looked charming
in 3 a.m. boxers.

I think that "Rusalka" is at last ready. I have edited the piece to a point of satisfaction, if not contentment.



RUSALKA

my eyes
lap at
the sluggish white shroud
of water
(at white lips, at
your white comb of teeth).

Is the water’s murmurous wisp

the sough
of your limpid throat—
or the stark vespers
of the firs?—Oh—
past the cloistral trees
the wind gnaws
at the steppe,
at the green heart,
and cold things sob
among the stones—

The black water is your palace gate,
the white froth your crystal arch.
Am I not your Kiev prince, the shanty against your wall,
the courtier in your hall,
the hart upon your fire?

ODYSSEUS ALONE


I have clanked
through the sulfur-breath
and shut my ears
to the dead; I
confronted the baggy buttresses
of your face, mother.
How do you think that sat with me?

I crouched in the wood guts
and watched a babe
amid the trojan revel.
How do you think it sat, that sticky reek
between the fingers, that furious joy,
that small soft head
on the stones?

I am a man.
How do you think it sits with me,
that I know no gods
but those who fling blood in my face.

A new edit of the most recent post, modified during my odyssey in Los Angeles. This is, I feel, a less distracting condensation of my theme. Also, a note: the real title is the one above THIS version. Sometimes, having a "G" next to the "H" on the keyboard can be such a bother. I almost wish it were the former title--better consonance--but we would, alas, lose the allusion and lapse into confusion.


GRANDPA HERLEWS

I smell the barbaric clay
and flay the soil but
when I rub my eyes the dirt
makes me cry—goddammit
when I toil in your hoary garden (once-mannered, once-young, goddammit)
I churn up the rusty taste
of your cuirass; of
the sweet scarf you kept folded
in your back pocket;

scraps of your chest—
spackled in mold (bright black flecks
on your lungs),
impaled on the spear invisible.
goddammit.

my lips and nose crush
into the gravel—I shall
eat the earth bellied over you; I shall
chew to your dark wet womb and
gnaw away the strap of decay. I shall, goddammit,
lift you up slick and new-skinned.
every callus renewed.

but of these thick stone glades,
which stone is yours? in the hot mist
you are obscured, and I hear the distant
thump of hooves.
I cannot find the broken lance, nor
the one who thrust it in.
So
I cannot pluck it out.

I understand that it has been a long time. Truth be told, I have not written much lately. But here it is: raw and unedited (yet). Gerlews refers to a knight from "Le Morte D'Artur" who was slain by an invisible knight. Balin, a knight of the Round Table, swore to avenge the death, and guarded Gerlews' damosel until this was achieved.



GRANDPA GERLEWS

you know I smell the barbaric clay
and flay the soil but
when I rub my eyes the dirt
makes me cry—goddammit
when I till your hoary garden (once-mannered, once-young (goddammit))
I churn up the rusty taste
of your cuirass; of
the sweet scarf you kept folded
in your back pocket;

scraps of your recliner—
your throat simpers, your lungs
juggle (impaled (the spear invisible) goddammit)
and the snakeskin victrola
of your chest hisses out
rusty songs.
susannah’s a funny old man,
man,
man.

my lips and nose crush
into the gravel—I shall
eat the earth bellied over you; I shall
chew to your dark wet womb and
gnaw away the strap of decay. I shall—goddammit
lift you up slick and new-skinned.
each callus renewed.

but of these thick stone glades,
which stone is yours? in the hot mist
you are obscured, and I hear the distant
thump of hooves.
I cannot find the broken lance, nor
the one who thrust it in.
I cannot pluck it out.

A GREEK BURIAL

I have buried
you in the hot field;
the furious choir
of flies is seeding your eyes.

The unguent sap
on the pine-brakes
beads like blood—it is
the smell of folly.
I do not
I do not I do not
recall you. I do not
remember
the freckle on your earlobe.

My legs stump
up the mountains’ trojan heights.
We were
the stifled whisper in the horse’s gut—now
I am the sack—and you
are the splayed blush
of the fort thrown open.
I am the Spartan, you
the palace and the plunder.

And if I cross this ridge,
I will no longer recall
no longer regret
the balloon-chested flesh I left
in your moat.

I saw you, I mustered,
and now my banners
stipple your clammy shore.
But my ships are gone.

How many times do I have to tell y'all before you believe me? Do I have to bust out my "Handwoven in Ghana" again?

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THE GAG

I turn to speak—but
where your ear should be
is only
the crystal swath
of hair.

the single body alone in the universe—

I pass out
the glass doors into
the deep dawn
and you follow
and I turn
and you turn and I seek
if not solitude then your ear
and you offer your lips—
again—scarce bleached
of our nocturnal yaw.

and not the truth—

Of these I have
had my glut:
lips gypped of word
by the tangle of lips,

Of hurling out my cry—
and then only
my spit clutched
in your throat.

I

have

been

accepted

into

the School

of Film

and Television

at UCLA.

RIDE

Making
love.

We strove through summer stalks,
we peeled our hearts like lemons
and ravaged
with quick hooves.
The sun
fell into sour halves;
We slid downhill
toward the fresh ruin of our lives.

BURIAL FOR A KING

Bear me home,
You Spartan mothers.

I will die
With cold banners
Of distant tribes
On my shores,
Their ships loaded with virgins and gold.

This place is a dull pool; a lonely mir with my name scratched on the dry stones, splendorous as a blood clot. Here might I recline, chapped by old songs and quiet in desolation; solitary as hell. I have only this dim mechanic ear with which to exchange sorrows.

Here's to you, my electric familiar.

You! hypocrite lecteur!--mon sembable,--mon frere!

Goddamn.


LOVE SONGS

I often wonder what it means
when they play a song over and over
and expect you to love it just as much every time.
Doesn’t it lose some flair and flavor
the more you suck from it
with a voice that’s never as good
as those firstly uttered syllables?

SILVER SYLVIA

Had we met
In some darkish club
We could have danced mightily,
Between musky gins,

Our eyes
plying.

Your breath is on the carlights
when I trickle through the streets on urchin heels—
The smoke flapping to one careless side,
umbrage:
a door.

Had youth teemed in my chest I would have asked
And we would have lingered
In the damp footprint of the spin light.

But then—
these other two
in the other room,
and the furious gas—
and I recall these things too
that I have felt.

POPE

when the pope died,
he looked small
after they dressed him up
and powdered his
wrinkles.

dead: he looked baggy
and stern,
and I felt bad for the pope,
though I’m not catholic;
he seemed like a right
old guy.

so I opened a tin
of mackerel,
was it friday?
I think it was friday.

when they buried
that old guy—

—he nosed across
the ‘hold like a dreadnaught,
bristling with papal turrets,
crimson wake.

I didn’t cross myself or anything—
I’m not catholic—still,
he seemed
like a right old guy.

Who recalls my Black History Month poem from senior year?
Here is what is left of it.



BLACK NIGHT

Pa dead—a bullet in his head—
in the garden.
White bodies press
against the doorjamb.
Ma scream—
the house burn down.

No one told me that my poetry is horrendous--has been, for a dreadfully long time. Why else would I have to overhaul it so much? Actually, I don't mind. It teaches me that the first draft is simply that--a first draft. The final draft comes of dredging and chopping, sweating and fretting.

So here, again, one from relatively recent memory, edited.

But surely not final.


PASSAGE

I hung back in the brume
and watched thunderbirds with broken headlights
huddle off into flat cities of mist.
Ritchie's dead but I hear from his charred throat
that we belong together. I don't blame him,
what the hell does a dead man know. Can't fault
a stiff for being wrong.

there are streaks in the air,
leaves to the brittle grass,
fire colors
for dead guys who love to pluck—
We belong together.
The hell we do.

I am heir to an autumn empire,
stiff against the
hot mouth of winter;
My needle's gone bad, so Ritchie
died in a fumble of static.
I slumped in a plastic chair staring,

thinking why in hell
did my last good record
shimmy off and die.

P.S. Bonnie: Congratulations, mon lecteur!

I doubt if anyone saw the original for this poem; it was written during senior year. Regardless, here is the heavily revised vision, which, despite being one-third of the original's length, I believe to be far more effective.

BALLAD OF THE MELANCHOLY KNIGHT



The fading leaves of Avalon,
The autumn leaves of Avalon.
Lancelot, Lancelot,
Such crowns are broken.

The cloy of sin,
The keens of silken women
Wrecked on the wind,
Oh Lancelot.

The hall scattered in shadows—
Where are the fires,
Where are the golden lords
With all their words?

Gone, with a smattering of hoofbeats,
a rustling
of wolfskins.
Such now is the joy of Camelot—

The throne draped in age,
the sighs within.

I have returned.

Events look promising.

I am this
dead scarf of land.

Nothing.

Nothing again nothing.

Hit me again.


THAT DISTANT TONGUE

the smoke
like a cigarette fulminating,
the mute wall
of your teeth and the snow—
dim
within a dry womb—
Shall I, Love,
rake down
the windows and purge
us of warmth,
Shall I interpret you
through lace
of grease and
exhaust?

you have wondered
why I forget.

Whatever faithful few of you still read here, I am curious as to your respective reactions toward the seeming ubiquity of sensual themes in my writing. Tell me.

Truly, I expect only one reply. The rest will be pleasant surprises.


OBDURATE

The frightened splay
of muscles—
a glitter of eye—
I thunder within
the armor of my blood.

but baby
I have murdered for less.
I have split
the carapace of the moon
for the taste.

I am rich
with this hoar-hot hush,
the silence of my knuckles—
the thrush
of my mute thighs.

Heretic:
the cloister of your spine,
vespers in the dark,
dulcet.

We don't want to see them anymore. We don't want their snow in our ears.

Ah, me.



BEACHHEAD
The gritty white
beach, unfilled:
a pasty skull.

The nostrilous
caverns, the salty
lips gnawing.

The raggy stones
flog with moldy
fingernails.

The way that I
have known you;
ungentle.

Bonnie, your reminder could not have been better timed; I have not needed it more than in the last few days. Thus, dear readers, something wicked this way comes: another poem to flare upon the ramparts of your senses and perish, impaled, without having penetrated to the keep.

INELUCTABLE

I roll down windows
in rain
while the heater presses;
I want
the hot and the cold
like blood.

I hate
the skirts in dusty
kitchens, loving
cakes instead of me.

Regretting the sting
of your heavy breast,
chthonic—I know
you were not
that thing I loved—
But—

The music and the air
vie—I have
sore fingertips,
I have lain with
the baker’s wife.

Someone insisted--indeed, threatened bodily harm if I did not comply.

To help you better understand the power of editing, compare the previous entry with this one. I believe that this third or fourth revision more accurately reflects the emotion I was attempting to capture.


HELOT

Oh but
the hot city
and memory.
you wouldn’t lie to me
but I
would lie.

age
is chalk
in the mouth of bravery.
the young hoplites crashed
by out the window,
‘cross the asphalt,
and my plume
withered;
and I
was filled
with heavy things:

our trees
by the church,
pink blossoms like
a fresh
bone of want—

HELOT

Oh but
the hot city
and memory.
you wouldn’t lie to me
but I
would lie.

the mirror was a hard tunnel
buried fat so near
my old face.
the young hoplites crashed
by out the window,
‘cross the asphalt,
and my plume
withered;
and I
was filled
with heavy things.

our trees
by the church,
pink blossoms like
a fresh
bone of want.
but I
would lie.

Some things are not enough. And we are too tired to pursue.

I can’t confess

to being Catholic, but they’re onto something

with those alabastine figures of theirs, enthralled

within saintly washes of light,

staggering through the muted stainglass and oh--

each reverend hair on their molten faces

splayed out in sunlit fiery points, red-gold

candelabra combed out in gilt braids back from

their virginal mistresses’ faces,

softshadow cheekbones and

that dead ancient ashen pulsing terra cotta feeling

--you know it too--

aching out from lips and eyes swollen

with some ascendant pride,

their supple throats poised

at godly angles,

and the taste of white water in my mouth

for want of that holiness

--you know it too--

The crucifix embraced in lover shadows--

these churches stony and warm,

like careless sheets rumpled humbly,

still warm just after those young bodies have

crept away into robes, lightheaded with the

scent of coffee and someone else’s

breath lingering between their glistening teeth

that flush pale shoulders from behind

lips still red from violence.

And those haloes slung white as orchids behind devout hands--

those Catholics are onto something.

DOUBT.

I said to the wrinkled ashen boy
sprawled against the rock, hey Have I got
any prayer?
But Prometheus was dry as a cicada,
dead with a black tongue.

Rain plunged down like cathedral bells
and slandered itself against my skin
and steamed off his hot dead arms--his chain
sung against the stucco cliff
of my house which slacked its brows into
the mud and lathered there like a barren mare.

The oleanders shuddered fecund and smelling
white, rustling like dark colors against
the breathy gapes of rain and wind.
They purred against his glistening gray toes.

I creaked with thought
within the eyelid of the porch and
blundered into evening while
the footprints about his crumbling body
stippled away and I fumbled my way inside,
thewless, leaving
the oleander leaves jutting from his mouth.

melancholia - n. a form of insanity characterized by great depression of spirits.

A depression of spirits--a swooping of lucid, transcendant ghosts teeming downwards in celestial bombardments, a sweet white flood of light stumbling and crying up out of your lungs like moonwater: a chalky insanity so suffused with life that your pale wet heart sutures up against the bellowing skin of willows and elephant grass, old skins of beating things still fiery, like dusty swans flailing in dry rice stubble, bleating out their last hoarse chords. Brass saxes whimpering in the night, smelling of crickets and coolness. Herons plowing the glassy ditches, their hooked claws silent as ecstasy, feathers bristling like the scent of street lamps limpid within the dark. Melancholy crazy, sure as the day I was born.

Mom's spooling the night out in the black; don't know where the hell she gone, out somewhere between the wet winter lights. What the hell you want? When she gonna stop crying, when she gonna goddamn goddamn goddamn I turn about in melodic splinters, I know where the tongue of God rests against the moon and bleeds cut up with metal in his great moist cold eye, his coal teeth throbbing murder murder blood like a shawl on my cheeks remember remember goddamn I don't know who that you what I am whisper whisper devil man give me the crazy.

Cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut slack muscle slumped out in long fleshy arcs
no no I don't no know know goddamn goddamn tell me
who died who left who still here oooooooooooooooooooooooh.




sob.

I feel fiery and clean, stirring.

I am working on a long poem, a multi-tiered project entitled "The Epic of Bouncer Sam." It won't be "The Iliad" or "Paradise Lost," but it will be the longest poetic piece I have attempted in a long time. It also represents a nascent experimentation in form and style. Tonight, it clambered past the three page mark.

I think I'll take a walk tomorrow morning, watch my breath. 7:00 sounds bass-like and cold. I'll do't. Anyone care to join me?

I finished filming my short film today.

Since you won't, I will. This is only for my sake, mind you. Give it no purchase. This is not an invective. You know me: a meddler in melancholy who feels more than is good, who charges the shadows of windmills and shakes his own hand in congratulation.

PASSAGE

I felt the grains of evening

and knew your ink to be tangled

in someone else’s hair:

seasonal fools and summer stretchings

sucking in the glints of yellow light

of these cold gaps beneath

the shallow mulberries,

me waiting

while radios spill out humid songs, wretched songs,

songs I don’t really listen to.

Evening flashed and I knew

your wind

gambled in someone else’s gutters,

clattering around

with silken chains

and violins

like crickets rubbing against

the roots of your spines,

loving.

A virgin’s robes are first.

Evening rattled like

white dice, the bony stars

tapping like fingers against teeth and I knew

your skin to be

in someone else’s wires,

a crackling mesh of

black want, the black

of your flicking inner eye

shuttering clicking gasping—

portraits of boldness with eager velvet frames—

who wants to wait no one wants to wait you

can’t help it.

When evening strained, fanned out

in pale strokes of blue light I knew—I knew—

your eyes were other eyes:

hot and keen

marbled green with

the humid refractions of summer,

blinking through rosy pallid

loving.

First to go.

School has begun full-swing.

Today, I took up a poem I thought I had finished several days ago. I did not alter a word of the original piece, but I was unsatisfied with the incompleteness that it left me with. The poem eventually more than doubled in size, and has become the longest poem I have written in some time. I also consider it to be one of the best. But for its length, I would post it here; however, I doubt that anyone would read it. Poems are too common a sighting here for anyone to take them seriously. Crying wolf.

In other news, I am currently taking 19 units' worth of classes, and it looks to be a challenging but fascinating semester. My Poetry class will probably end up being the favorite. My Poetry teacher also instructs my English 101C class, and I enjoy his style very much. He is weathered, with drooping, empathetic eyes--a bloodhound--, a soft voice and a deliberate manner. He is, however, far from sedentary, since he is constantly hiking or biking. Both English classes are a joy, seeing as I am finally getting the opportunity to deconstruct again.

Otherwise, I am taking:
*Black and White Photography
*Introduction to Oceanography
*The World's Nations
*Student Repertory Theatre -- I am directing Sam Shepard's Back Bog Beast Bait, which you will all have to see once we open. It will be in the second bill, which will not perform until May. Callbacks are tomorrow, and then the respective directors will wrestle and wrangle to get the cast they want.

That's likely the most concrete entry you're going to get for quite some time. Savor it; return every so often to read it again and cherish it for its rarity. In the meantime, stay off the smack and start having more babies.

For years, I have been unable to answer the question, "What is your favorite movie?"

I never knew. Nothing fit my tastes completely, never fulfilled every part of me.

I have an answer to that question, now.

When the credits rolled in on Jim Sheridan's "In America," I sat amid the rubble of my tears, watery and loose, sunken into myself in the darkness that had settled on the shoulders of the couch, that crowded in the corners of the room's dusty eyes. I didn't cry, but I wanted to. I wanted to laugh out loud. I wanted to hold someone, kiss someone. I wanted to sit and stare out at a dying afternoon and watch the sunlight stir through the lace.

I can't tell you why it affected me so. I share no common struggles with those people I saw before me; I had no moments where I gasped and felt "Me, too." And yet, when the last image faded into the clouded reflection blooming on my winter windows, I shuddered with release. I felt so damned good. I can't tell you what it was in that film, only what it made me feel.

I don't think that any of you will agree. I think that you would watch and say, "Yeah, it was good. It was really good," and nothing more. That's the nature of difference and taste. I don't expect you to share it, or feel what I felt. A part of me is sad at that, that we cannot feel that together. I understand, though.

"Hey, what's you favorite movie?"

"'In America.'"

Got one for you, straight from me. Fragile, filled with irony. I hope that you sincerely enjoy it, but recall gently that I revel in bitterness. My bitterness has so calmed over the years, until it has refined itself into a tender, molted thing, cradled and whispered, something nearly unlike bitterness. It has moved: it is no longer a thing of anger, of waspish hatred. It is a thing of quiet desperation, of slender doubts nursed beneath dark ceilings. This bitterness holds no blame or malice, only hesitant questions gliding toward a warm, answerless black. Human questions, not eternal questions. We all change.

The formatting will be, of course, all wrong. Blogger doesn't seem to know what the "Tab" key is for.

Eucalyptus finch,

tripping about in scalded air, the summer

crawling, the summer bawling turbid, rabid

with misty morning sweat, your black hair curled

against your forehead, tasting me.

The pasture’s tanked with the shades of slaughtered steers,

missing, skinned and burned

already fermenting in the hot steel belly of summer,

the tractors clambering bug-eyed over the

flesh of the fields, my fingers strung out

like pale naked bodies hung in your hair,

my mortal crown.

Your legs churned like origami wings

against the summer wind

rilling through the red canvas curtains

like rippling snakes—

pardon, that’s not what I want what

I came for, and I remain pale:

slumped in evening against

eucalyptus sad with hard, stirring summer

pungence,

rubbing dirty hands against my eyes.

The mares, slack-ribbed and used up,

too rutted for riding, whipping ratty tails,

your blonde hair straying behind brown ears,

the shore of your throat and the cathedral of your lips,

I cry like a paper samurai,

humid grasses teeming against my legs,

the eucalyptus sallying forth

for their shadow war

with bare fireflies, my lights in you.

Your radio begs for a single reprise,

the memory of a bruised Impala

shaking cans up your gravel to rest tinfully, tunefully,

with bleeding, whispering seats

before your ice-tea kitchen, your red canvas curtains

and your red hair stooped like cranes over the sink,

grins across the driveway, white through glass.

See, I remember.

I must wonder how many of you have stopped looking, have stopped wondering. So many of my posts are windy poems, vague and uninformative.

What do you come searching for?

You know me far too well by now to believe I would give you anything simple and straightforward. The post just below this one will give you few clues as to my status. The setting is fictitious, the representation of the dance is entirely subjective, the language abstruse and--no doubt, by this time--annoying. Hell, the crimson coat doesn't even belong to the person represented as wearing it.

Have you come, time after time, only to be rebuffed by rhetorically coated ciphers? What do you do? It must have come to the point where you flash by a couple times a month or so, just to check. Upon seeing the most recent poem ("Another one?"), you skip away, without allowing the page to load fully.

I am certain that my diction is tiring after a while, my themes redundant, my style familiar enough to seem flat as hardtack.

Well, hell. Too bad.

The fenders of old Fords glitter

in songs of frost, winter stones,

the green curves of your eyes sharp

against the snow, the purple

of an iron twilight silhouette, the red of your fire

flayed out, your silent hair

like prayers leaping

from electric fingers over tombs.

babe, you so tense, sshhh—

don’t speak while

winter’s throwing her pale stars,

stirring like translucent freckles peering upward,

whispering beneath milky brows

and tiring of the band inside won’t they just

sshhh—I hear your collar rasping against your skin,

the blood in your lips pressing

in fragile vacillations, susurrant battalions

teeming for

Me I clamor to say.

The rigid burn of the lights behind sullies up

and hurries up and stammers against the windows

with moist fingertips, the guitar

and the bass juggling each against other—ssssshhh what

are they saying meaning longing.

The fenders of old Fords gleam

like the precise shudders of cold hawks

cocked on sick white birches,

shifting and exhaling,

their coiled breaths gnarling away into

twilight. Time well bandied.

Speak why do you never

speak

they gander into a song I think I know,

strong and slow.

The young girls sigh out the wintered windows

and draw spirals in the fogged glass.

Twilight ails, founders in the drifts and banks

bundled on the hills, smooth as women’s bellies.

Speak I’ll never speak, not to auger

this low immutable air.

You in a crimson coat like a tulip dead in snow.

The drummer downs his chaser and

those cymbals spray against the sills, grabbing for evening

like rouged eyelids, cupping instead the shoulders of young girls

and drawing their heels to the floor.

Your twilight’s gone glassy with moon,

suddenly glistening in a lucid luminous charge

across the stalky land, pallid as silvered opals

flinging the scent of cold sap

against me, standing

like a battered cellist, empty,

a voiceless warden.

Will you never Speak

speak?

the singer, blanched, lilts

across the acres of thinly clothed flesh,

leans the girls back against frigid walls.

The fenders of old Fords harden and grow white,

burgeoning in cracked mutters of old metal.

My heart turns in a sallow faded land,

and I gather myself under that piano-painted moon,

because I cannot gather you.

I heard Manhattan's metal
stinging in my blood,
a slithering of wild.
Another place I've never been,
another greened copper bulwark
mossing about in the gashes of decay
between years, sloshing between memory and desire, eh?

I feel the harlot,
having bunked under bridges
unraveled like silver bones of smoke,
unable to see, peeling the warmth
of my breath off between surges
of Hudson snow.
Having not seen.

Manhattan rain's the slickest,
cold as tin gutters on cardboard cafés,
cotton-tongued lovers crying
between newspaper sheets, I and my
blue harlot eyes,
stirring to a dim Sinatra
scratched out among the window bars,
dented radios with frost on the dials.

The streets have quiet tongues
numb with Hudson snow, oily
as pistols, firing dull clamorous cabs
full up with sleeping cartridges
mutely toward death.
Your hair draped
against my ear, the warm vibratto
of your voice nested
in the cusp of my throat.

Manhattan's a mockingbird.