1)
Outside Longing Inn:
a lithograph
The pool is full of dead leaves
lying in sun, wrinkling
words hemorrhage faintly
till dawn
Temporary currents take turns
taking off
each other’s
modern bruised and muddled costumes
dumb luck-
fingers
Brought them face to
mouth with nature:
raw inebriate
gesticulate
gritty grey
facts
unprinted,
the water dyes
by ink swirl
2)
saṃsāra bed
perpetually waking to dream
of bed, tossing, to move
great waves of white and shadow
I feel my gravity in lines of linen
unbroken
parting, returning to die
constant
drugged, adulterous
there must be some steady pulse
or backbone
to rise again at early light
3)
Skin
Skin is the present
canvas
us ourselves, cannapaceus
stretch
Renaissance buried in clay
we muses paint red moods’
ceramic copy
into each new day with powder
in picker-pinched lards we
trundle off to bake
to show or not to show is
not the only mode
we joke
and in the laughing, veiled details
disclose this brush
or line all
fleshed in imitation
there is in this accentuated
absence, caked and caramelized
the hidden green or bluish terms:
outrageous shadow
of our landlocked voices seeping through
4)
Winter
Surrender yourself, she sighs
to the long evening doze of
puddles fossilizing cigarettes
and time impertinently frozen
in soundless steaming bedspreads
petting shut your urban eyes
I will show you all the places
Where your shadows softly lope
Your cheap green velvets purged-
lie between my porcelain breasts-
and sing the song of setting time
sing the song of time dissolving
into silent unlined margins
While your blood beats raw against me
like a river wrestling ice
I will win you over slowly
I will show you what you are
sing the song of time congealing
sing the song of time undoing
with your heartless adult breath
Sing until your stomach freezes
Sing until conclusions clot
I will seal you up and take you
As the spider takes the fly
I will slowly crystallize you
I will suck you waterless
I will seize your blue-veined logic
expunge your dreary premises
dry didactic fool-fleeced reasons
Till you plead and shriek for mercy
Till your buds blush tendered back
to the bone-dry essences
all-but lost to Summer slack
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