Witchgrass

Something
comes into the world unwelcome
calling disorder, disorder---

If you hate me so much
don't bother to give me
a name: do you need
one more slur
in your language, another
way to blame
one tribe for everything---

as we both know,
if you worship
one god, you only need
one enemy---

I'm not the enemy.
Only a ruse to ignore
what you see happening
right here in this bed,
is a little paradigm
of failure. One of your precious flowers
dies here almost everyday
and you can't rest until
you attack the cause, meaning

whatever is left, whatever
happens to be sturdier
than your personal passion---

It was not meant
to last forever in the real world.
But why admit that, when you can go on
doing what you always do,
mourning and laying blame,
always the two together.

I don't need your praise
to survive. I was here first,
before you were here, before
you ever planted a garden.
And I'll be here when only the sun and moon
are left, and the sea, and the wide field.

I will constitute the field.


---- Louise Gluck

Gerry Murphy

"Under the Dog Star"

Imminent synchronicity wakes me.
I open my eyes as the digital clock
displays 3.33.33. a.m
Beyond the windo
a gleaming curve holds up
the dark weight of the moon.
Further out fierce starlight
glitters through from 1347,
Even the dogs are silent -
shot, knifed, and bludgeoned into silence.
Thinking of you,
I begin to imagine you
slipping out of the satin hush
of your underwear
into the chafing din of my arms.
Trouble is, you are probably awake also,
busy in the sealed-off archives of memory
shredding this fiction.

Finally I admit to myself
that you will not call
and apart from burning offerings
next to the silent telephone,
apart from racking the postman
until he snaps and coughs up
all those letters you insist you sent,
I can do nothing.
So, I sit in the gloom
unravelling steadily,
the gleam of a demented smile
growing brighter and brighter
as I disassemble the rose-
shelovedmeshelovedmenotshelovedmeshelovedmenotshelovedmeshe-
reassemble the machine-pistol.

This is where I peel your name
from that much battered, much travelled suitcase-
the heart.
Where I dissolve whole reels of memories
which played and played
in that obsessive, all-hours cinema-
the head.
This is where
I switch off the individually-lit photographs
and burn down the dreary warehouse of regret.
Where I walk out
into the sweet empty air
into the desert of myself.

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis


-- ee cummings

Small Murders

When Cleopatra received Antony on her cedarwood ship,
she made sure he would smell her in advance across the sea:
perfumed sails, nets sagging with rosehips and crocus
draped over her bed, her feet and hands rubbed in almond oil,
cinnamon, and henna. I knew I had you when you told me

you could not live without my scent, bought pink bottles of it,
creamy lotions, a tiny vial of parfume—one drop lasted all day.
They say Napoleon told Josephine not to bathe for two weeks
so he could savor her raw scent, but hardly any mention is ever
made of their love of violets. Her signature fragrance: a special blend

of these crushed purple blooms for wrist, cleavage, earlobe.
Some expected to discover a valuable painting inside
the locket around Napoleon’s neck when he died, but found
a powder of violet petals from his wife’s grave instead. And just
yesterday, a new boy leaned in close to whisper that he loved

the smell of my perfume, the one you handpicked years ago.
I could tell he wanted to kiss me, his breath heavy and slow
against my neck. My face lit blue from the movie screen—
I said nothing, only sat up and stared straight ahead. But
by evening’s end, I let him have it: twenty-seven kisses

on my neck, twenty-seven small murders of you. And the count
is correct, I know—each sweet press one less number to weigh
heavy in the next boy’s cupped hands. Your mark on me washed
away with each kiss. The last one so cold, so filled with mist
and tiny daggers, I already smelled blood on my hands.

by Aimee Nezukhamatahalil

may i feel said he

may i feel said he
(i'll squeal said she
just once said he)
it's fun said she


(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she


(let's go said he
not too far said she
what's too far said he
where you are said she)


may i stay said he
(which way said she
like this said he
if you kiss said she


may i move said he
is it love said she)
if you're willing said he
(but you're killing said she


but it's life said he
but your wife said she
now said he)
ow said she


(tiptop said he
don't stop said she
oh no said he)
go slow said she


(cccome?said he
ummm said she)
you're divine!said he
(you are Mine said she)

- ee cummings

i like my body when it is with your

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like,, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big Love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you quite so new

- ee cummings

A Song for April

by Sean Lewis



This is the story of your longest journey

and how it came to meet your fate

and how the reasons, time, and people tangled

and how your answers lie in wait.



And how it whispered, "O, adhere to me

for we are bound by destiny.

And whatever doubts that fill your mind,

follow me, you will be fine."

This is the story of your longest journey.



This is the story of your past lifetime

and how it's with you even here.

Your little loves, your books, your dreams, your freedom:

there were the things that you held dear.



And the little glimpses that you get

are the memories you can't forget.

And the feelings that you can't deny

Now you know the reason why.

This is the story of your past lifetime.



This is the story of the boy who loves you,

who loved you then and loves you still.

And how he stole this song to try to please you,

and now he's waiting on your will.



And if you return to me

I'll make sure that it's meant to be.

If you let me into your heart

I'll rend your ventricles apart:

This is the story of the boy who loves you.



This is the story of your longest journey.

Selections from Gerry Murphy's "End of Part One"

'Reductionist Love Poem'

Never again
your lovely face in mine
as I wake blah, blah, bah.
Never again
my arms around you
as I sleep etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Never again
those long involved conversations
after midnight
but then, never before.

'Water Myth'

"Whatever inspires,"
you call from the shower
the water stunned into droplets
on your suddenly delicious skin
"Well," I reply,
from the airport
twenty-seven years later
"even with arms,
in your presence
the Venus de Milo
would be queuing
to be kissed."

'Further Out'

I can't tell you
where this is happening
I know it's a dream
becuse the left bank of the Siene
has just appeared directly opposite
the right bank of the Lee.
I know it's daylight
that silver-grey, residual glow
from some imploding star
shining in your glossy black hair.
I know it's you
because there is not one
even remotely as beautiful
on the stony inner planets
as I know you have been kissing me
for over a minute
because I have just woken up
gasping for breath.

In Praise of My Sister

My sister doesn't write poems,
and it's unlikely that she'll suddenly start writing poems.
She takes after her mother, who didn't write poems,
and also her father, who likewise didn't write poems.
I feel safe beneath my sister's roof:
my sister's husband would rather die than write poems.
And, even though this is starting to sound as repetitive as Peter Piper,
the truth is, none of my relatives write poems.

My sister's desk drawers don't hold old poems,
and her handbag doesn't hold new ones.
When my sister asks me over for lunch,
I know she doesn't want to read me her poems.
Her soups are delicious without ulterior motives.
Her coffee doesn't spill on manuscripts.

There are many families in which nobody writes poems,
but once it starts up it's hard to quarantine.
Sometimes poetry cascades down through the generations,
creating fatal whirlpools where family love may founder.

My sister has tackled oral prose with some success,
but her entire written opus consists of postcards from vacations
whose text is only the same promise every year:
when she gets back, she'll have
so much
much
much to tell.

Rumi - Like This

If anyone asks you
how the perfect satisfaction
of all our sexual wanting
will look, lift your face
and say,
Like this.


When someone mentions the gracefulness
of the nightsky, climb up on the roof
and dance and say,
Like this.


If anyone wants to know what "spirit" is,
or what "God’s fragrance" means,
lean your head toward him or her.
Keep your face there close.
Like this.


When someone quotes the old poetic image
about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,
slowly loosen knot by knot the strings
of your robe.
Like this.


If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,
don’t try to explain the miracle.
Kiss me on the lips.
Like this. Like this.


When someone asks what it means
to "die for love," point
here.


If someone asks how tall I am, frown
and measure with your fingers the space
between the creases on your forehead.
This tall.

The soul sometimes leaves the body, the returns.
When someone doesn’t believe that,
walk back into my house.
Like this.


When lovers moan,
they’re telling our story.
Like this.


I am a sky where spirits live.
Stare into this deepening blue,
while the breeze says a secret.
Like this.


When someone asks what there is to do,
light the candle in his hand.
Like this.


How did Joseph’s scent come to Jacob?
Huuuuu.

How did Jacob’s sight return?
Huuuu.

A little wind cleans the eyes.
Like this.

When Shams comes back from Tabriz,
he’ll put just his head around the edge
of the door to surprise us
Like this.

Delicious.

The Basque Nose

I may as well be invisible
when Curtis says to Idoia his wife
That Basque nose
Let me touch that nose
and she lets him
and I’m surprised I don’t
repeat him: Let me touch that nose
even though I’ve thought more often
of her chin— what I would abandon
to touch the line along
the muscle of her neck
to the small ridge below her ear —
a place which has no simple word
even in the half dozen languages
we choose not to speak in that room

Curtis—one of the most benign
men I know except for one
New Year’s when he got drunk and vaulted
his six-foot-four Iowa-farmboy frame
over the dinner table to stomp
the gum out of some brute
pushing up on Idoia
But do you blame him?
The brute I mean
for blabbing anything
the liquor—he mistook
for muse—inspired him to say
just to hear Idoia speak—her vowels
thin cool and round as céntimos
dropped in a beggar’s hand

I smoke on their front patio
Idoia stops in the kitchen
And I hold my cigarette
to the window between us—how (for a moment)
she purses
her mouth near the glass
a mock gesture too much
like a kiss for me to ignore


After dinner Curtis Idoia and I drink
wine which gives me courage
to practice my Spanish I think about
the difference between saber and conocer
conjugating each verb beginning
in first person New Jersey familiar
So when Curtis gets drunk
and kisses his wife’s shoulders
they both close their eyes and I’m still
muttering I know... You know... He knows...
Patrick Rosal

found it!

Twenty Billion Light Years of Lonliness

Mankind on a little globe
Sleeps, awakes, and works
Wishing at times to be friends with Mars.

Martians on a little globe
Are probably doing something; I don't know what
(Maybe sleep-sleeping, wear-wearing, or fret-fretting)
While wishing at times to be friends with Earth
This is a fact I'm sure of.

This thing called universal gravitation
Is the power of loneliness pulling together.

This univerise is distorted
So all join in desire.

The universe goes on expanding
So all feel uneasy.

At the lonliness of twenty billion light years
Without thinking, I sneeze.


Shuntaro Tanikawa

So. Good.

"Uncommon Denominators"

I add up the times I’ve fantasized about
women I’ve seen but never spoken to
and divide that by the hoursI drive past cemeteries and add again
the weight of breath in your mouth
measured in the ancient Tagalog word for yes
— but the number always comes out the same

So I subtract the moonand the smell of incense on Good Friday
trying to connect Planck’s Constant
to the quantum moment between a candlelit flick and the back of your neck
setting aside my 7 dreams of having sex once
with Tyra Banks who tells me God
You Filipino guys know
how to make love to a woman and even if I tally the 10,069
channels launched by satelliteswhich have an asymptotic relationship
to the count of stones cast
from a sinner’s fist raised
to the power of eight million punch-clockstiffs heading home late
still the number comes out the same
and when a beggar pirouettes along an expressway’s center lane
swearing this won’t be his last
cigarette (smoke rising fromthe rust in his moustache ) I suddenly know
the acceleration of a falling body
has little to do with slippinga mother into the ground or
a whole greater than the sum of its parts

And if you ask what I’m doing
with 7 loaves and 4 fish multiplied
by the root of a dried tamarind tree
or the coefficient of friction
of a bullet on the brink of a rib
or the number of clips emptied
into an unarmed Guinean man
on a dark Bronx stoop I’ll tell you
I’m looking for the exact
coordinates of falling in love plus or minus
the width of a single finger
lost along the axis of your lips

Patrick Rosal

Just because I finally found it (it's fun to read aloud)

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,

Leaves around me falling,

Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,

And the woman calling.

Thomas Hardy

More Pablo for my mood.

"I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You"

I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.

Pablo Neruda

Sums up my mood.

"Tonight I can write the saddest lines"

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example,'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her void. Her bright body. Her inifinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.


Pablo Neruda

T.S. Eliot is the feckin' man

his 'Preludes'

I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.


II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.


III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters,
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge,
whereYou curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.


IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

Jay Mobley

Eggs

the Man with two Colors of christmas
drudgery particularly when he smokes
alternately his Starbucks and Marlboro
as I enter the steamy upwards:
A lispy man concealing his sanctuary

a Capillary (solipsism) runs across the glittering surface
of my heart - screams:
No!
but I - Man with two Sides of crispness -
like it anyways. Wedges at least,
the little Orange and sloppy;
with their once-acute eyes now peeeeled open
and smashed into the conglomerate like
a "small Business"
...Entrepreneurial spirit, my ass.

i ought to have complained
about the running whites
but should i wait?
for someone who is paid
to wait - rather than making for a fast break
and a short (5 foot 2, perhaps) order chef
who makes her orders tall?
Eggs - eggs and the bacon i asked for is sausage
eggs and the bacon I asked for is sausage.

Not Mine, but Tom McGovern's "Untitled"

Franny took in her breath slightly but continued to hold the phone to her ear. A dial tone, of course, followed the formal break in the connection. She appeared to find it extraordinarily beautiful to listen to, rather as if it were the best possible substitute for the primordial silence itself. But she seemed to know, too, when to stop listening to it, as if all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly hers. When she had replaced the phone, she seemed to know just what to do next, too. She cleared away the smoking things, then drew back the cotton bedspread from the bed she had been sitting on, took off her slippers, and got into the bed. For some minutes, before she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, she just lay quiet, smiling at the ceiling.

ee cummings "i have found what you are like"

i have found what you are like
the rain,

(Who feathers frightened fields
with the superior dust-of-sleep. wields

easily the pale club of the wind
and swirled justly souls of flower strike

the air in utterable coolness

deeds of green thrilling light
with thinned

newfragile yellows

lurch and.press

-in the woods
which
stutter
and

sing

And the coolness of your smile is
stirringofbirds between my arms;but
i should rather than anything
have(almost when hugeness will shut
quietly)almost,
your kiss