hulk

your sweet absolution is not my drug of choice baby

nor do I desire the sugary sopor of release in quite the same description,

I find no solace in those tweaks and tricks of light -

the steady progression of your every enamored list sits nearly askew

on a teetering inadequacy of my divine comedy,

the errors I reel off accept my useless virtues -

render me infertile in this barren scribbled land,

I can not write in sand and nor on water shall I remembered be

for this is my decaying life and the husk you love is me.

1988 (Intermezzo)

grasping at the rough spillage of my tongue,

formative distinctions ache out their tense judicial instruction.

thought-pre-thought crushes out the loose bonds of steep association

and carves funeral niches for free descriptions and an allusion to soul -

so this and other inadequacies gain heat and fire,

as steaming deep conversations flitter away into the rambling street

to soak and re-remember Harlem days when nights caught fires unaware

and old dead Lorca grappled with his love and my iniquity

jungle orderlies

distant communications with steep

desire, I move orderlies to bring about

a quiet revolution, not that the

wheel’s shifted per se but at least

some subtle malfeasance crept into

our sad September hold-alls.

I engendered then at least two

passages in which settling nicely meant

giving up the core of all you

wished you’d fought for many long

Æneids ago. That brought freshly

forward sought nonchalance like bilious

deeper notions and I, in my tower,

glaring at the obfuscations and their

kin laughing in the dying jungle

know too much salary is part of

all the malady lain bare like ripe

plums pregnantly sombre in their

bursting skins, baring all the sun and sin.

brevity

reflections on a dimming past
loosely sown teetering histories
a sweet brevity eludes us.

deliveries

knapsack deliveries in an Appalachian

dream, far older than any continent

you know.

given that respectability and hedge-rows

are seeded hand-in-hand,

my short-tempered corroborees no

more ratify a fledgling hate than

cast my dice so hastily in betrayal.

deeper consultations reveal the stars

appear innumerable to the man with

no fingers.

why then should the brevity of kissing

lead my deeper passions past their

squalid remorse and into seething warmth?

what dream-walking takes in effort is

redoubled in dark tellings of unseen

sleeping paths

when I need a code of conduct I’ll be

sure to yell