What Would I Say?
I’ve been on the porch. She was putting smoke in the water. Naked ladies stand in puddles in front of the box wood. The days get short. The light concentrates in a glass of water. In this part of the world summer hangs on until October. The summer’s almost over. Expect a sudden sixty degree drop. What would I say to you if you were here? Guess it would be ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye,’ since you were always either coming or going. I’m drinking this nasty water.
I didn’t tell you how much I enjoyed watching you sleep that afternoon. It seemed holy as Sunday even though it wasn’t. I could never tell you how much I wanted to touch that blue vein prominent down the inside the white of your perfect recumbent arm. Something I did say. Then again, I expect I feel too delicate, too vulnerable, to be truly sincere. I just think about how the future is always in place of some forgotten past. I’m too fascinated to be depressed. I am so eager for change that I can’t even stay the same size. I’ll allow myself to be touchable for a change. I will become that solid. And I will get emotional. But then how can I say it. Like a bird on a wire, just about everything you do makes me flinch. I sense that you can be that defensive. I will be touchable and touched, open and abundant. I watch as a mosquito bites me. I am always surprised by how much poetry one has to write to equal the price of a bowl of thin soup. It takes a whole ode to buy a boiled egg. A good sized epic won’t get you more than a loaf of bread. It isn’t that sad. It is the business we’re in. And I can’t tell.
30.
True Revolutionaries
Carry A Burning Rag
June wore a freedom ring
and a zinc zodiac around her neck.
We know from the note she left
that she has moved north and east.
She took the cat.
Seems she thought it was too quite.
"I can hear water evaporate," she wrote.
I keep thinking that I’ve written down
everything that needs to be said
in a little leather-bound book.
I keep looking for it but I can’t find it.
I may be imagining things.
June has this affect on me,
leaves me disorganized and confused.
I spend whole days looking for air.
At night I kick myself till I bleed.
I’ve learned that I can’t write with my feet.
I can’t fight in this heat.
I can’t afford to take care of my teeth.
I don’t know which two ends should meet.
I can’t believe in the dead.
I’m not just saying this for some contest.
I know young verbal artist who can memorize fifty lines of rhyme in a couple of passes and have it down so pat that they can throw back some hundred proof, light a match, spit fire and recite four syllables a second.
June (does she ever use her old name)
can’t take the tedium. It makes her raw, thought she retains something sublime.
She leaves us for invention and simile.
She leaves it up to those so inclined.
Every word should be understood
as part of this one big thought.
My Bitter Poem
Life’s an old letter
where it’s always later,
and night like a thought’s
a glass of stale water.
Once a friend came to see
if we’d fit together,
but that’s been so long
it’s lost to the shadows.
"All we need is," you said
"love". You said as
if nothing else matters,
as butter sans bread is.
All we need is space,
I think, and time to fill it.
Your hands have plans.
You feel like really it’s . . .
Lips, cheeks and lobes –
your face makes a puzzle.
"All we need. . ." you say
and you look troubled.
"Guard you heart well
or you’ll drown like a coin."
Wish I had sung that.
Wish this weren’t my poem.