Abstractism My poetry reifies my “it should be”s or tries to or maybe it pushes them further down into the kind of obscurantism that could be used as metaphor for black hole, rather than the other way around. I do not know, I never read my poetry with another’s eyes with your eyes. My poetry creates worlds real and if no inter-worldly diplomatic relations exist yet it is because no one yet went there to return, no one yet went there, period. Maybe because communication is bound to fail, every untried communication is bound to fail with lizards with spiders with dandelions with my poetry. Easier to fly to the moon, I know. More expensive too which makes it more marketable. “Hey, let’s attach a Nike shoe to the rocket” is a better proposition than “Hey, let’s attach a Nike shoe to this in pectore poet.” Or opscurus. Or tenebrarius. Or inlaudatus inperceptus incelebratus. Not that the Nike executives know Latin, but they know Dollar. Like all executives. Unlike you, you know also Poetry. You went to my world but you are no diplomat. You are poet, like me. We both speak to lizards, also to us. Maybe this should be enough? My poetry fills your pillow, pads your chair uplifts your breasts cushions your stumble offers a firefly’s light for your next step. Do you speak also to fireflies? Teach me? Do you see my “it should be”s? I sit at my desk, write this blather with nerve ends tingling for your tinkle jingle chime and hope that your next return from my world you tell me you found more of me. More of the meaning. More of the wishes. More of the “it should be”s burnt into your flesh as you, proudly, show me the scars.

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Sculpture sculpt your nakedness in the block of air between my eyes and the wall facing me, dislodge the molecules one by one, slowly, emerge like a magnificent David from under the hands of a Mickey slightly faster, slightly quieter, slightly cleaner, let me regard the nascent outline still coarsely hidden under layers of decorum as the displaced molecules of air crackle, frizzle, sparkle into a deformed corona, chisel away with delicate tips of fingers the rough chunks of evolutionary propriety clinging to the emerging masterpiece and masquerading as a rabble of cotton, leather, silk, buttons, clasps, rubber, freeze! the way of Edgar’s Dancer of Auguste’s Kiss of Thutmose’s Nefertiti you, the first and last self-sculpture in my life born in that block of air between my eyes and the wall facing me so soft, so enticing, so far away...

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Circle Remember, all these old people you laugh at today were once young were once strong, beautiful, proud, needed, had beating hearts, had sparkling eyes, made love like hyenas and sang like nightingales. Remember it, when you get old one day and others laugh at you forgetting that you were once strong, beautiful, proud, needed, had beating hearts, had sparkling eyes, made love like hyenas and sang like nightingales. Circle.

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Vignettes, one ...and suddenly I’ll flare that rage that comes with age then sit and rhyme my worth of dime a poem sweet thus obsolete a winter’s gray in search for May with flakes of white and tufts of night and when you’ll read the words I knead with sparkling eye and riving sigh with wishes laced through dreams unchaste I’ll learn your heart bleeds round my dart I’ll know my breath has vanquished death.

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Vignettes, two I feared the river’s mighty flow Until you dipped your little toe When all its might and all its plight Turned into murmurs of delight, The river braces, gently slows Defying gravitation’s laws And for a moment eons long It bathes your toe with love and song The moment’s dead, the moment’s gone The river dons its primal brawn To roar its mounting rage anew The toe returns to warmth of shoe Yet both, forever, now will miss The magic of that moment’s bliss.

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Love Movie I saw a love movie, yesterday, of the kind where love returns eyesight to the blind heroine where love extinguishes a forest fire where love prevents a war between two neighboring countries, of the kind where love is responsible for all humans born though I call this act copulation and I see it as the one transcending humanity and common to all known and unknown species including and not exclusive to fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, insects and... plants. Hey, I guess it included dinosaurs as well, though it sounds a bit complicated. And yet, I sat down and watched. Maybe because I once loved fairytales? Maybe because I still love fairytales? Maybe because I... write fairytales? Wherein I grudgingly admit to paint things pink and dress things flowers and surround things butterflies and copulations is re-baptized love... at least for a few moments before I give in to that irrepressibly irrepressible impulse of realism which drives fairytale out of the window and forces my hand to grind and grate and gravel my words into the paper until it shreds into complete illegibility. And only I know what I have written. And then I forget.

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Winter. Scene. The crows, in relentless competition with the magpies and swallows attack the crumbs of food I keep throwing in my garden then fly away, hiding from the evil eye while they munch whatever they scooped. Or swallow. Or whatever crows do with food. I just called them again, hoping the neighbors won’t call the police or maybe the medical services responsible for cases such as mine, oh, such a failure at learning foreign languages, mainly crowish not so much the lexicon as the accent. I guess even the crows have a problem understanding me this being the reason they wait for five minutes before falling upon the prey. Followed by said magpies, letting the crows take first risk. Followed by said swallows, letting the crows and magpies take first and second risk. Today there was also a cat. Black. A newcomer. Though I guess it was more interested in the flying food then in the lying food. Leaving hastily soon after, after all one does not play games with a murder of murderous crows. Plus magpies. Plus swallows. Even frogs but there were no frogs in my garden too coldy, too whitey, too snowy. I lie down in a lounge chair on the balcony, a thick blanket over me a thick hat to my head thick socks and wait for birds to come to sing, they don’t. Probably don’t know how. Or too scared to. I wait for you to lie in the lounge chair next to mine, you don’t. Probably don’t know how. Or too scared to. Or maybe because of the thick blanket and thick hat and thick socks and dark sunglasses that I forgot to mention you don’t recognize me. It’s irrelevant, the result is the same. Crows come for my food crumbs. Also magpies. Also swallows. You don’t come for my word crumbs. Even when I do not hide under blankets and hats and socks and dark sunglasses I forgot to mention.

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Like a dream I sit on the window sill, balancing myself delicately so I do not drop the two floors down on the pavement and strumming just do-re, sometimes re-do then back to do-re which are the only accords I learned to play on this second hand guitar bought just for the occasion to impress you. Not expecting to impress you. You sit on the window sill across the street, balancing yourself delicately so you do not drop the two floors down on the pavement and listening to my do-re and sometimes re-do cacophony knowing I am just trying to impress you. Not getting impressed. Or maybe getting impressed, not sure still. A breeze flips your skirt higher up on the thigh you don’t pull it back down. A breeze blows your blouse slightly away from your chest you don’t pat it back down. A breeze tousles your hair. You allow it. Do you have a secret plan? This night I will write you a poem telling about the white horses I will tame to carry us away about the white hacienda I will buy to lead you to about the white bed I will gently lay you on to rob your innocence from about the white butterflies I will summon to dance a crown around your head and then cover our nakedness against night’s chill. Like a shield. Like a song. Like a dream. Tomorrow I will not send you a poem telling about the white carriage that will carry you away about the white house that you will be led to about the white sheets that will rob your innocence from by another’s hand. The butterflies dead. Never born. Like a dream.

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Live, here, now Live, here, now, Pit your glimmers of light against your glimmers of darkness and take sides in a battle that is not won until you decide elsewise, Prefer ugliness of beauty and foolishness of wisdom over the beauty of ugliness and the wisdom of foolishness when mind joins heart in decision, Regard me, through that temporary hoop created by thumb and forefinger joining in the perfection of a peeping hole, Try to follow your regard with your body the way of a banshee following her keening a swath following its scythe the bliss of quiescence following the bliss of commotion underneath sheets, Forget the paradox of physicality, forget the impossibilities of reality and make place for the wonders of poetical circumlocution pouring over your forms alongside your cottons and your linens and your silks dressing following undressing following dressing finally leaving you bare of covers and words, Read me with a mind allowing words sculpt the gyri and sulci of the brain it will inhabit ingest me with the mind of a newborn full of hungry emptiness understand me with a mind one hundred years old in a body one hundred years younger then you’ll love me.

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Complexities of Love I remember a girl my age, at the age when age didn’t matter I was madly in love with her she was madly in love with someone else someone else was madly in love with someone else else... complexities of love devastating, devastatingly innocent. I remember a woman twice my age, at the age when age started mattering I was madly in love with her she was madly not in love with anyone anyone else was madly either in love or not in love with anyone else else... complexities of love devastating, devastatingly beautiful. I remember a girl half my age, at the age when age mattered infinitely I was madly in love with her she was madly in love with someone else someone else was madly in love with someone else else... complexities of love devastating, devastatingly demeaning. I remember girls, women above under around my age, age mattered, always I was madly in love with them all they were madly in love with various others various others were invariably madly in love with other various others... complexities of love devastating, devastatingly devastating.

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Love Glove Above Poetry ...yeah, back to my favorite subject, ranting i.e. perorating or sermonizing or haranguing or so on about poetry and its endless hanging-on minions if on the doing side or on the undoing side constantly shooting morbific mordacious morbid diatribes aimlessly thoughtlessly deadly. Just because they own a soap box. Just because they own a license. Just because they own a written mouth. They call erotica porn, no one called Francisco’s La Maja Desnuda porn They call romance schmaltz, no one called William’s Romeo and Juliet schmaltz They call nakedness filth no one called Auguste’s Andromede or Anguish and Ecstasy or Danaide filth I guess it’s because everyone has access to a pen and a piece of paper yet not many have access to a brush or a stage or a chisel thus everyone is a poet yet none is a painter or a playwright or a sculptor thus everyone is allowed to open their mouth in depreciation of poetry yet none dares open their mouth in depreciation of painting or playwrighting or sculpting. They think they know. Analphabets. Strange world. Modern world. Diseased world. Thank you, illustrious predecessors for paving a way round humanity’s mephitic tar potholes. I will keep poetrying, If need be then love-glove-aboveing. If need be eroticaing romanceing nakednessing the way of those others I appreciate and adore and admire and applaud and venerate. After all, I also do not know a brush from a stage from a chisel. But I do know my way around a pen and a piece of paper, oh, by God, I do know my way around them and those flames you see rising hungrily from around my desk are my pen rending the piece of paper with thoughts of erotica and romance and nakedness.

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On the subject of LUCA There is a bit of LUCA in your cat. There is a bit of LUCA also in your amaryllis in your gold fish the pigeons family you saved from annihilation last winter the gecko the corals crocodile’s deceased ancestors in the president. In you. One ancestor to us all. Way beyond Octogenarian more likely Hadean more likely brainless sensesless genderless. But... oh, what a legacy oh, what genealogy... *LUCA – Last Universal Common Ancestor

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almost rhyme of almost life and almost death and vice versa and when in the evening the sun dies anew and melts in the dew that will birth it with morning and when in the forest a doe births a fawn and wakes in the dawn mid of wild andromedas and when summer’s fountains are filling the valley aware the finale is summertime’s drought and when pebbles trundle like miscasted diamonds and mixing with almonds are steamroller fodder and when snow dispenses temptations suavely and innocence bravely defies it or dies and when rusty trumpets deliver a dirge yet flowers will surge from within travertine and when lovers argue and senses are torn the memories mourn their children unborn.

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Parallax View Nobody’s fault. Uncalibrated expectations. Mine Uncalibrated wishes. Yours. Like incompatible bucket lists from various periods in a life – the plastic of old, the silver of young, the real of never. Parallax view. Daydreaming. Flight of fancy. Psychology could define a new sub-science and call it Antinomis Oxymoronis to provide it with the necessary Latin justification and academic rationalization to be taught the world over. Also in my classes of once. I thought we’d have a Cleo and Julius relationship, though not so historic. I thought we’d have a Liz and Richard relationship, though not so tumultuous a Marilyn and John, though not so tragic a Lady and Tramp, and maybe so yes and they lived together forever unchanging irrelevant the number of times I screen it oh, the eternality of cartoon beauty. I measure relationships in poetry units. This is one dimension. Of course there are many other dimensions and seven volumes of it do not necessarily mean better than one poem of it but, still, it is one measure. I’ve had relationships with hundreds, I’ve had relationships with a single I’ve had relationships with zero. And if I do not define ‘relationship’ any measure is of course meaningless yet I persist, with no specific reason... well, maybe with creativity as reason. And this one was rich, deep large fervent fomenting but, now I know, not Cleo and Julius. Not Liz and Richard not Marilyn and John not Lady and Tramp. Parallax view. Antinomis Oxymoronis. So sorry. Such pity.

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10 x 10, eleven I wish the days of love forever gone Would turn to waste into La Parca’s womb And as my nights the lure of passion don You be my bride, and I your mortal groom. When morning lures the gullible young sun To choose a death in wait at end of sky You’ll sing me life until my days count none And never answer my beseeching why. I join the womb, beneath La Parca’s scythe You join the sun, and other hearts ignite.

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10 x 10, twelve While Jupiter was busy hunting skirts I hunted words to build your beauty’s reign And scribbled rhymes to paint into refrain Upon the cuffs of my discarded shirts. While Jupiter was busy waging wars I waged a spree of interlacing runes Dripping the trills of larks into my tunes Into my garbs upon your naked floors. While Jupiter was busy chasing oaths You dropped your eyes, you dropped your pride and clothes.

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10 x 10, thirteen I thought I would compete with Bill today And challenge gold with some inspired clay But then I found myself trapped in morass His gold stays gold, my clay turns kind of crass. And yet I know, this ten times ten old art Will forge the key to your desiring heart So here I trudge with a renewed élan And braid my words into insane rattan. I’ll never win, he’ll always stay ahead But I’m alive, and... sorry Bill, you’re dead.

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10 x 10, fourteen The blades, awake in your smoldering sighs, The grass, ablaze in your flickering eyes, The skin and the fingers aglow with crave Your breasts my subject of poetry rave, I came to you days and I parted nights Obsessed with the shimmer of raw delights You came to me nights and ravished my days My body at war with mutinous haze, We cleaved parting reason with lips and nails And watched, bereaved, as the love season sails.

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Octopuses Innocent bystanders, we, lovers, watching impotently as morning forces night into submission before murdering it with color and sound and movement our fingers clutching at each other’s flesh like tentacles of warring octopuses loving octopuses doomed octopuses. Let me dress you, I begged. You let me. Let me dress you, you begged. I let you. We dressed undressed dressed five more times in the following hour until time decided we used up our entire time credit. One more time, time? But time refused. A jarring buzz at the door told us the taxi had arrived. The taxi had arrived, I said, unnecessarily. Let me undress you, you begged. I had no idea how I got to the airport, on the plane, off the plane. And afternoon killed morning and evening killed afternoon and night killed evening and I lay in my bed waiting for morning to kill night anew, alone my fingers curled into a fist, like a dead octopus. And all that sea water streaming down my face drowning me.

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Almost Legend We were drifting into the sun entering you, a goddess therefore alive I, an adoring disciple therefore alive in your embrace we, lovers, running away from prejudices of humans and gods much deadlier than the sun. We knew it. Do you love me because I am goddess? you asked. I love you because you are human, I answered. Do you love me because I am human? I asked. I love you because you see me human, you answered. The sun embraced us willingly, protecting us from world’s jaundice, partiality, misogyny, bigotry, xenophobia and rest of beautiful names to horrible evils infesting humans and gods alike. Do you think it can do it forever? I asked, eyeing the sun with wondrous fear. For as long as we wish. And does it ask anything in return? This time you eyed me, with the same wondrous fear I eyed the sun earlier on. Nothing. As long as we wish together. I see. Forever. I finally dared take my eyes off your big brother and look into the eyes of my sweet lover. I was melting, much faster than I would have melted alone in the sun. Would he mind if we make love? He would be terribly upset if we don’t. The solar flare rested unexplained for eons to come. Not until jaundice, partiality, misogyny, bigotry, xenophobia and rest of beautiful names to horrible evils were expunged from humans and gods. Then they found my poetry book and you inside of it. And they understood.

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transmutation you lie on the snow on your back naked there where I laid you down your feet joined not in shame but in defiant waywardness your arms stretched both sides of your chest not like a Raphael transfigurating Jesus but like a Rodin uncurling Danaide your breasts flattened by gravity you nipples hardened by desire rivulets of color excommunicated from your skin’s flowers slowly flowing both sides of your inert forms and dripping in reds and blues and greens spreading growing gnarled roots into the snow like an amassed forest of veins dissipating into the invisibility of needle thin fingers, ends, nothingness... don’t! you sing, your voice barely audible when I kneel next to you ready to pick you up don’t! you repeat as my motion continues don’t! wait! and I don’t and I wait until the snow soaks in the hues turning to the frozen palette of spring’s flowers to come and day’s deaths to evanesce into sunsets and tree’s greens to err on their dissonant ways to turning buds and you turn pale, aquarelle, beautiful do! I am cold! you murmur, your colors finally ready to explode into the world and I scoop you into my arms into my skin into my life like you were a leaf like you were a feather like you were a rune... I carry you home I cover you seven layers of colors I cover you seven layers of covers I cover you seven layers of compassion please, cover me one layer of love! you whisper and I cover you seven layers of love.

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Domains We have just scratched the surface of the single-X domain. When insufficient time had passed. The one comparable to elementary school relationships when we hold hands push each other on swings chase each other here and there scratch, bite, cry, make up peek curiously at the different way the other pees with no real understanding kiss on the cheek then hide then rush to kiss again then hide again almost innocent almost comparable. I guess we will not reach the double-X domain. I guess insufficient time is left. The one comparable to adolescent relationships when holding hands is not sufficient anymore and brazenly we try to brush breasts, to brush cheeks, to brush lips with thighs squeezing under tables unseen and from time to time chests pushing against each other boldly and hips clashing shortly and fingers venturing where none had ventured before at least so we think some pictures daringly revealing a bare shoulder some sentences daringly using L words maybe even some poems borrowed from some recognized masters but dedicated to each other an open mouthed kiss a touch of tongue followed by disgust followed by restive push and pull and fire not innocent anymore beyond comparable already. I know we will not reach the triple-X domain. I know insufficient time is left. The one incomparable to any other relationship when all limits dissolve and all clothes rip away the hesitating hands of yesterday become the clawing hands of today with the teeth of yesterday becoming the fangs of today bodies rolling and reeling and roiling while the mattress screeches its terror as fire envelopes it its straw entrails bursting into the consummating flames consuming the trinity of man woman bed and incinerating it into the apotheosis of a relationship that only an act of God can terminate and an act of God terminates when they rest panting and sweating and smoldering in each other’s embrace innocence dead and buried incomparable to life or death.

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Statistically You are not virgin anymore The sun rises in the east always Eyes are green sometimes We will make love the way you are virgin still and the sun rises in the east sometimes and eyes are green always never. My only refuge is statistics, it allowing the probability of a lone 1 trailing several trillions 0s after the decimal point that any or all above inconceivabilities may turn conceivable. Including the never. This is a different kind of lottery than the one I never won and therefore it leaves me... optimistic. Irrelevant the trillions.

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Strange Seasons Spring, probably. Mine or yours? I guess it matters, but not really birth and death mixed, the primal scream starting a rolling stone down from the top of the mountain gathering speed, momentum jumping skipping crashing all on its way oblivious to miles and years and tears lining its path loves heartbreaks joys and the inevitable end awaiting at mountain’s foot be it a soft landing in a swamp’s mud or a hard knock out against a waiting lump of iron, crocodiles and stars optional. I, playing with wooden swords and terrible monsters about to eat me many years before you, you, playing with silver dust and pink clothed fairies many years after me, as out of sync as hiccups to heartbeats and yet we knew that letters gather in storm to words and words gather in storm to sync and one day we would gather in storm to us. Did we? Summer, probably. Mine, when? Yours, when? Your music yours my music mine my dances not yours your dances not mine experimenting with life and body parts and cracks grew in the mountain and flowers grew in the cracks and bees visited the flowers eyes of various colors and shapes abundant finger touches of various demand insistence and permission need abundant and I kept losing my virginity so rarely and you kept finding your virginity so determinedly and we tried to identify why the hell is humanity so obsessed with virginity generally and with hymen particularly when elephants and pigeons and mosquitoes aren’t (with the obvious conclusion it’s another means of menfolk subjugating womenfolk) both of us experimenting with our own versions of sometimes virginity occasional virginity as per need virginity statistical virginity and an olla podrida of various virginity levels as demanded by the situation at hand and by words passing temporarily through our minds at that specific moment coupled with invading dreams, wishes, expectations. Never supposed to meet. We. The gigantic gaping mouth of uncle Chronos carving an abysm the size of Grand Canyon between us with no mules hanging-bridges helicopters hot-air-balloons to help the crossing. Not even stopping my watch and advancing yours helped. And yet, it was coming. Poor uncle Chronos. Autumn, probably. Mine passing. Yours looming. And yet the mixing of the smells of crushed fruits and crushing leaves and crushing drops of rain and crushing dry grains of wheat with cranes hesitating between going and coming and the sun undecided as to its zenith location and me finding you before you losing me and us finding us before the world ends whatever was left and whatever will ever be left masked underneath heavy layers of blue mascara dripping on pale pages shaped as letters and syllables and almost poems and never poems I inhaled an entire ocean just to sense your provoking femininity and you exhaled an entire lungful and bodyful just to ensure my senses are overloaded those seven seas and thousand years away waiting for me to choke and come begging for more and I came begging for more asking for your heel to step over my chest and your grip to clench around my wrist and your breast to smother the leftovers of humanity and sanity once given to me and now prey to your womanly whim and delicate charm and maddening perfume pulling clouds down over my head to my shoulders and grass up over my shoulders to my head and cocooned I inside that impenetrable fortress waiting for your body to liberate me from the tyranny of metaphors into the republic of reality where lips are lips and teeth are teeth and hips are hips and grunts are divinity allocated to humans by any number of gods that there might be or might want to share or might want to smile, grudgingly and enviously upon us humans. Is it all real? Winter, imminently. Mine. Past looming. Past knocking on the door. Past friendly nosey neighbor. Wrapping seven tons of bricks around my ankles, each, and little does it matter that the bricks are made of years they could have been made of gold for all I care. Yours. So uncle Chronos does own a debatable sense of humor turning your looming autumn into budding summer with garlands of butterflies dressing your skin and braided in your hair and hanging five inches long from your ears in a fluttering frenzy of living earrings. Break off a piece of your summer, love. Send it to me. So that I can carry your warmth underneath that marble comforter soon to dress my bed while I join the sociopathic and poetry despising society of worms to their various forms and languages and habits and habitats. Hey, do you think that various voracious sounds nice as part of a poem? Do you think that macabrity should make it to whatever academy list of to be created? Do you think that I making love to you would be like you making love to me? Do you think you could love me?

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May Pretty maiden, pretty say what you’ll dream about today? I will dream of itching hay and of you between my cherries crushing grapes and rotten berries telling me I’ve born you May. Pretty maiden, are you happy when we play mammy and pappy? Mainly when you get all yappy as you chase me in the pillows under May’s enchanted willows with your words so sweet and sappy. Pretty maiden, what’s your rush when I touch your bristling plush? I just heard a trilling thrush singing May into my morning and this gripping lust aborning when my blush turns into flush. Pretty maiden, will your fire be my most deserving pyre? As my passing Mays respire and your hands seed me with flowers while the yours and mine turn ours time your words beget my choir.

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Metaphorical Layers All this shit that I write is I metaphorically kneeling in front of you and proposing which can happen, unfortunately, only metaphorically. And does happen. All these metaphors inside the metaphor is I making love to you in that undefined no-man’s-land between consent and rape trespassing borders between undecidedly and unwillingly and their counterparts and hoping for the clemency of a jury composed of a single member you. The metaphors inside the metaphors inside the metaphor is you disregarding any metaphors and accepting my proposing and my love making and taking it all one step further into the Tierra del Fuego of your craving, no metaphor intended, that undefined personal no-man’s-land where you demolish whichever borders or limits or conventions may exist and drag the metaphor ensemble into its reality borders or limits or conventions may they go to hell. Reality the innermost layer of metaphors.

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Waffles We bought one waffle, one, for both of us, one bite you one bite I yet once the waffle ended, the munching did not and we continued with tips of fingers then with roots of fingers then with other parts of one or other anatomical significance for demonstrable reasons of selfless contribution to a wasteless sustainable ecology on a locally global scale. Care to be more specific? Culinaristically or corporealistically? Cannibalistically. I bought another waffle. Still one for two. Then I paused each step explaining (hastily) demonstrating (eagerly) breathing deeply (out of necessity at a certain stage and beyond). If I didn’t know better, and probably I don’t know better, I would say you are horny, you said, using the H word abhorred by any medieval or classical or modern poet and thus banishing any chance for a Pulitzer or similar out of the equation, I mean you could have used Halberd or Heuristically Programmed ALgorithmic Computer, aka HAL 9000 in short, or Hallelujah but you chose horny, leaving me with no choice but investigate further the matter hoping, now that any hope for Pulitzer & co. turned to smithereens, that you minded the Pulitzer even less than I did. Are you? I asked, keeping nevertheless the H indecency out of my question. I kept buying waffles, having incidentally discovered that I had an unknown-of interest in anatomy and had lots and lots to learn about it and the waffles supplied me with the necessary energy and rationalization and (most importantly) excuse to visit your various end-of-waffle areas of interest your own enthusiasm little by little evolving as well in symmetrical opposites. The end of three days found us with unexplainable stupid grins carved upon our cheeks verily more knowledgeable in several non-disclosable matters and emaciated to the point of hardly leaving a shadow in our wobbling wake irrelevant the number of waffles we wolfed down.

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When 45 was king When 45 was king and I its devoted slave and servant and helot shuffling and sorting and flipping through my hundred odd deck faster than a seasoned cards player through his 52 pieces of painted cardboard having the time to sleeve-out and place-on and start-push and cheat-select before the one momentarily in my arms had the time to gather her wits and rebuke my insistence and powder her nose... powder can wait, Paul Anka cannot... and then to the next one both the 45 and the one momentarily some allowing the squeeze some resisting the squeeze some squeezing till my spine was about to break and my chest about to cave in at the onslaught of hands and thighs and breasts and then someone else would shuffle the 45s and another one momentarily would hang on to me, or I to her and I would curse or bless according to who was free and who was taken while the rock or rumba or cha-cha or twist or whatever was forcing us to unglue letting us chase the devils in our souls and those in our pants and those underneath our one momentarily’s skirts and thankfully another slow Elvis or Adamo or some unpronounceable name’s 45 would send us all screaming to look for the light switch off position with the war of the sexes taking place anew under the protecting blanket of small blinking neon eyes (...hey! somebody cover those neons!) with a preferred one or an unpreferred one that was “giving” or an unchoiced one who was the leftover selection on the chairs the rest being captured if you crawled instead of rushed some even married the preferred or unpreferred or unchoiced one momentarilies later. The end of every battle always finding me greedily collecting my 45 kings, and queens, and jesters, and pawns caressing the dust off them apologizing for the rough treatment inflicted sliding them to a well-deserved sleep into their inner sleeves and outer sleeves and external protecting nylon sleeves and kissing them to good rest until next battle. Until the last battle. I don’t remember the last battle. I slide a 45 carefully out from its multiple protection layers (I don’t remember you acting so carefully with our babies, says my wife) handle it with the reverence due to a king place it with surgical precision on the turntable let it start rotating let the needle drop... hey, do I really cry? I ask myself as Elvis follows Paul Anka and Adamo follows Elvis and unpronounceable name follows Adamo and I feel sorry for my kids and their kids and their kids’ kids and so on hearing myself saying the way each generation before me said – they will never know what we knew they will never have what we had they will never feel the way we felt. Only that, in my case, I believe I am right.

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or so I believe I don’t have much time left so I’ll climb up the mountain to drink from the fountain that nurses new youth to all creatures uncouth or so I believe. I feel the end nearing so I’ll roam my first ocean purloin its commotion since swagger and sway keep tomorrows at bay or so I believe. Practically I’m done here so I’ll join masses mining some swearing some whining for nuggets of time hidden deep in my rhyme or so I believe. You’re a dimwit oh these humdrum and boring excuses for snoring my breasts playing tease will get time playing freeze you better believe.

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The reasons, though no reasons are necessary I want to make love to you          because you exist. I want to make love to you          because I exist. I want to make love to you          because we exist. Now, let’s define exist. One may say breathe. Ha! One may say eat sleep move. Ha! One may say think feel love. Ha! One may say whatever one may say and it will still be Ha! You and I and we fall outside the definition, any definition. I want to make love to you because dinosaurs once roamed the Earth. I want to make love to you because Pi is an irrational number I want to make love to you because there was once a guy called Michelangelo because man walked on the moon because dogs love humans because earth is round and sun is hell and in a few billion years the solar system dies. I want to make love to you because we are one single point node event on this infinitely thin single points nodes events randomly tangled skein which is existence leading from minus infinity to plus infinity mathematically said or previous big-bang to next big-bang astrophysically said or ever before to ever after poetically said and if this single point node event which we are fails to occur the entire skein falls apart losing its continuity and reaching from minus infinity to the miserability of no infinity from previous big-bang to the miserability of no-bang from ever before to the miserability of never after and this can never happen. The laws of mathematics. Immutable. The laws of physics. Immutable. The laws of life and its subset, poetry. Immutable. I want to make love to you because we are so fucking unique. Singularity. It happened already we just don’t know it yet. you better believe.

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Dvořák I woke up to sounds of Dvořák’s “Songs my mother taught me” wafting from your phone like perfume from a lilac freshly blossoming, too tired to tell you to turn it off you, probably as tired as I was, disregarding it entirely. It was only after the jingle reached the end of its natural life that I felt your hand crawling out from under the covers and fumbling with the phone’s functionalities... a few seconds later Dvořák was blessing us again with his mother’s stuff. Aha, she likes it, I thought. Aha, you like it, I mumbled. Uh-huh, you mumbled back your consent, you talk too much, you mumbled back your discontent turning on your side and pushing your bare ass into my no less bare hip wedging me into sphinxlike immobility and almost panic. Almost, mind you. I found one hand free, it was mine and decided to turn the embarrassing moment into an instructive one by letting it wander freely somewhere trying to find whatever items of interest there or elsewhere I found items of interest everywhere. I had to focus and at the end of a couple minutes’ focus I started scaring watching the fire-alarm overhead, afraid any moment now it would go off and within seconds get us inundated by shapely muscular bare-chested firemen... aha, this was probably your plan all along, wasn’t it?... Huh-uh, you denied, unconvincingly. Found anything of interest? your mumbled mumble followed your denial mumble and following impenetrable feminine logic you rotated round your longitudinal axis one hundred and eighty degrees now wedging me for real. I had suddenly one of those momentarily momentary moments of human weakness and I opened my mind in respectful yet blasphemous reproach to God contending the fact that he created humans with so few hands and so few mouths when the job at hand was so momentous, I bet, God, you were out of clay though, with due respect, you did not seem to be out of clay when you created the octopus not that I envy the octopus, mind you (I did envy the octopus)... You mumble too much, you mumbled again and soon it became irrelevant the number of hands and mouths and whatever else was of interest for the job at hand so glad that I had whatever was of interest for the job at hand. I wondered if you asked God the same question at the phase that you could still ask questions. I lay over you like a deflated tire. You lay underneath me like under a deflated tire, eyeing the fire-alarm plastic box critically and fumbling again with the phone’s controls, making sure I did not slide down. Dvořák blessed us again, good boy Dvořák, did you ever dream to become a phone jingle for a dream creature? We decided to change hotel. We did not want to risk a regular fire surprising us because of a defective alarm system irrelevant your repressed firemen mentals. It was clearly defective, if to judge by the smoke ascending slowly to the ceiling.

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Volunteering ditty (ditty, not duty) I volunteer to love you. OK. I volunteer to adore you, worship you, cherish, treasure, adulate, idolize... ok, ok, ok, ok, ok, ok... sing you, praise you, serenade you... ok, ok, ok... cuddle, caress, hug, embrace, deflower, devour, empower, prize... ok, ok, ok, ok, too late, ok, ok, ok... I volunteer to undress your overwear and innerwear and underwear... careful with buttons, careful with zippers, careful with clips and clasps and chinches... to be there every moment of your life, enjoy everything you cook, hear everything you say... no need to exaggerate, doubt it, ok but I prefer listen... make love like a man possessed... try like Brad Pitt, maybe a wig would help... dream of you every night... can you really control it? can you really prove it?... dress your underwear and innerwear and overwear... you mean like a drag queen?... no, I mean dress you your etc... oh, so again careful with clips and clasps and chinches, careful with zippers, careful with buttons, reverse order, see?... I volunteer to stop volunteering to anything but your cause. I don’t have a cause. Then we’ll create a cause. Which kind of cause? One that will be dear to your heart’s cause. I believe you’re a lost cause. Because? Because pause clause applause... Menopause? Also this but way in future’s jaws. You killed the ause. But kept to rhyming laws. Our romance ended (see above) we went our separate ways, I stayed in the past (not too much future for me to look forward to) she moved in the future (not too much past for her to hang on to). I did, though, keep my volunteering oath see this ditty, I wonder if she’ll ever know I loved her so (used past tense, just in case she reads it too late).

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Strange art Strange art, poetry, the odd child, the only personal art in the kingdom of arts truly and fully and absolutely so in essence rather than style which easily explains its zero mercantile value for whatever masses one may think of as personal as someone’s eating ways of their asparagus and cucumber and tomato and tell me who would pay for seeing someone’s eating ways of their inner asparagus and cucumber and tomato? Not to mention the additional effort involved in reading rather than seeing. Strange art, poetry, effortlessly finding its sister art in that odd place called infants drawing pictures those raw humans still lacking the much needed words to express torments and joys and wants. One picture tells a thousand words, yeah, says the professor, proudly regarding an auditorium full of the right bovine nodding ignorami. One word tells a thousand pictures, yeah, says the poet, dispiritedly regarding an auditorium empty of the wrong bovine nodding ignorami, oh, if they but were full of the wrong bovine nodding ignorami those with the right set of eyes to see. Or read, mind you. One thousand words then tell one thousand thousands pictures, yeah. Strange art, poetry. See, conversely yet, it takes the full seven volumes of a poet’s collected word-art to paint one single picture though, it is the one picture science was never nor will ever be able to draw, all sciences confounded. The picture of a human’s soul. Or, in this case, a poet’s. Strange art, poetry. Stranger still, those strange people who dare grapple with its scribbled bricks. The poets, I mean.

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Let Melody Let your shoes, with soles and laces dragging memories of paces liberate those wriggling toes rollicking in freedom’s throes, Let that horrible invention born in spinsterly dimension pantyhose its dreaded name let it rip and burn the shame, Let the shirt with pearl button hiding treasures for this glutton tear along the hidden seams carrying unspoken dreams, Let the skirt with all its trimming as my mind approaches dimming fly away into wind feeling utterly chagrined, Let your bra, so thin and lacey driving me befogged and spacey disappear into the naught left beyond my dwindling thought, Let, oh let your grinning scanties knickers? or culottes? or panties melt under the leering sun waiting there since time begun, Now, let me, your heart’s pretender wallowing in all this splendor I, coveter of your skin let me habit you with... sin.

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Lethe-al ponderings I have made it to the river In my old and battered flivver Once a mighty fearsome body Time’s grim minions turned it shoddy I lived twenty thousand sunsets in the arms of love and glory Watching wrinkles, pains and sorrows sink their claws into my story Now the reaper calls my number Slinging white into my umber, At the gates of naught and nether I will drop my resting tether One-way pilgrims fill the ferry To forever’s sanctuary Lost upon the banks of Lethe I’ll play ferryman’s affection Offering no coins but records, poems, or my stamps collection Guess I’ll play it kind of chancy If it’s cash his only fancy, Say he doesn’t stop to ponder And I make it over, yonder Will there be elated heaven Or just boredom all days seven Will I curse from morn to evening that which none escapes its halter And the noisome tropes encasing a divinity’s sad altar Or I’ll smile... I touched you... once, It was worth now turning dunce.

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Gates When I got to the Gates of Heaven (that’s how “they” prefer to call it, not Heaven’s Gates or something else) someone there at reception said I was not on their list so I should try my luck with their unsavory neighbor they called Gates of Hell but their neighbor, once I got there, insisted on Hell’s Gates... sounds sexier, they winked yet didn’t let me in, nevertheless, even when I called it their way. You’re not on our list, they claimed, checking also with the head office. So where do I go? I asked, pissed off at this time wasting bureaucracy, not that time mattered anymore. What about back on Earth, until we all sort our shit out? suggested the sexless guardian almost cutting my nose off as it (haha) speedily closed the gate. I did not see any complaints box around nor any ramming rod to ram any of the neighborhood gates down so I decided to follow its advice and floated back to Earth. No one was waiting for me, no one knew anyway that I left so I got down from bed donned my slippers scratched my head ate a piece of stale Belgian waffle, still tasty (all this wandering up and down and sideways got me hungry) and sat down to write this missive to my lovely. Will count as transitory Chapter X in my biography. Lovely, I tried to get you rid of me but it didn’t work out. Better luck next time. All this yo-yo up and down is kind of deprecating (to them, not to me) so I believe next time will be the good one. BTW, all is in black & white “there” so when you follow me, many years henceforth, no need to bring lipstick just bring your body, please. I’ll sneak it in, even though it is against regulations (I read their brochure). PS. Any hesitation you may have had heretofore... forget it! Let’s just fornicate the way God intended, OK? With variations, OK?

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Pithecanthrope before the wheel, before the knife and the metal and the fire, pithecanthrope I would have combed your hair with thistles and washed your skin with snow and laid your lair with dried grass and crumbled bark and lost feathers. and food? squashed overripe pears into your mouth and stolen honey between your lips and goat milk in my cupped hand for you to slurp, and loved you into toothlessness. after the wheel, after the knife and the metal and the fire, pithecanthrope once again I will comb your hair with phosphorescent fingers and wash your skin with heavy water and lay your lair with radioactive ash. and food? sweep exploded pears into your mouth and volatilized honey molecules between your lips and my breast’s milk for you to slurp, and love you into eternal radiance.

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Flesh Give me your flesh, Let it wrap itself around me with the tenacity of a hunger driven piranha carrying in its belly a one hundred days stretch of fasting with the knowledge of one hundred days of fasting to follow, Let me wallow inside its annihilating embrace admixing the human wonders of goo and goop and gunk with the inhuman wonders of groan and grate and growl until gates that could only be appertained to heaven close behind the artistry of our convoluted bodies, Give me your flesh, And I will re-apportion the bones lining it inside and throughout until you will get as shapeless as a splash of mercury sloshing mindlessly around a wobbling fistful of gravel ever looking and never finding the form it would contentedly settle into for the rest of its unnatural life, I will paint into it colors of spring upon blandness of winter followed by summer robbing spring of its achievement to burn ripeness into color twig exploding into bud, bud exploding into flower, flower exploding into fruit autumn pending and before re-conquering winter drags me away you melt the way of the very first and very lonesome flake of snow fallen on the blushing cheek of a maiden touched first kissed first loved first, Give me your flesh, the essence of beauty the essence of love the essence of life.

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Dying Leaves I walk the narrow, empty street The leaves are dying round my feet As autumn dawns into my wake And whiffs of rot my nostrils rake. My loves collapse from drooping eaves Awaiting death among the leaves My poems sing the inching curse And gild in black the waiting hearse. Some leaves remember better days And rustle whispers in the haze Some leaves beseech my crushing shoes To plead against divine abuse, And yet, some seep into my heart And beg to join my dying art Alongside loves and souvenirs And cheers, and fears, and years, and tears. The autumn catches with my stride And all that dies, and all that died My heart, my mind, the leaves gone rust Will turn to ever, lasting dust.

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Good Bye? How does one say Good Bye even before saying Hello? How do I say Good Bye before taking a sip from your glass of wine before impatiently biting into a piece of food you impaled on your fork before drinking a bowl of soup with one single spoon with you one spoon you one spoon I one spoon you one spoon I...? How do I say Good Bye before knowing which side of bed you sleep on which is your preferred toothpaste which TV program you’d rather kill than miss? Before washing your hair drying your hair dyeing your hair combing your hair? Before finding which song on the car radio makes you scream and gesticulate almost hitting every other lamp post on the road without ever hitting every other lamp post on the road? Before smelling and tasting and hearing your perfume your contortions and contractions and convolutions once the preliminaries are over and the soup finished and the side of the bed defined as irrelevant by trailing events and actions themselves followed by that period of absolute contentment and contemplation and congeniality? Yours. With me carrying the onus of admiration and adoration. How do I say Good Bye before even saying Hello? How does one skip Hello right into Hell with the tiny o, that would otherwise mask the ripping sounds of a heart, missing?

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Slides Inside. Slide between the linens and me dislocating the bond between flesh and matter and replacing it with the bond between flesh and flesh and when vacuum cements the vibrating borders and seals them into inexistence make certain your intentions are as dishonorable as mine or else you will never understand why the smile on your face for the rest of your life. Outside. Slide between the cottons and me disregard objects objecting to your advance in a most non-objective way and rather than retreating embrace the challenge and find grounds of mutual interest before losing interest altogether together in that giddiness sinking its roots between dying elysium and resurrecting reality. Anyside. Let me slide between your flesh and you leaving no leftovers of forgiveness in your mind no explorables unexplored in your body no doubt as to what a valley scorched by crawling lava feels like in your souvenirs and once your poetry ends being written ask me to write it again.

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Pretending on matters of high importance You close your eyes and I touch your breast and then you open your eyes and we pretend that nothing happened. You read the menu and I kiss your ear and then we order and pretend that nothing happened. You give me the key and I unlock the door and then you lock the door and pretend that nothing happened. Which side of the door are you when I lock it? You decide. So I decide if something happened rather? Correct. You say good bye and I say good bye and we pretend that nothing happened. Like we pretend that spring follows winter? Like we pretend that the earth rotates around the sun? Like we pretend that we pretend? Sadly. Yes. I wish we pretended. So do I. We parted. Pretending eternal friendship. Pretending that spring follows winter? Or pretending that winter follows spring? You decide. You decided.

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Love Cycle Love like any living entity gets born. It screams its first days into the unknown then it stumbles its first steps until it finds its footing it learns it grows it believes it becomes big love. Love like any living entity atrophies. It falls into habit losing the spark and the sparkle and the glitter and the glint and gaining the wrinkle and the crinkle and the crease and the crimp decrepit withered it becomes old love. Love like any living entity dies. It needs to be fed it needs to be groomed it needs to be healed and unlike any living entity it can bloom for the ever of a life, of two, or, like any living entity unfed ungroomed unhealed it dies it rots it putrefies it becomes dead love.

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Strange Philosophy I know how I should be read by others. The point is I am not read the way I should be read by others. Why does it matter I don’t know. I keep saying that I do not care so I probably lie when saying so. I wonder if Michelangelo cared. I wonder if Tennyson cared. I wonder if Mozart, Rodin, Chaplin cared. Of course they cared vanity stalking the most noble of souls. They were also paid, but this was secondary. Of course I care. Of course I see myself aligned with them artists, else, why do I write? Of course I know why it matters, noble soul that I am not. Others includes you and if I am not read by you the way I should be read then why do I write? Probably in the hope that above ‘if’ is dysfunctionally embedded in this text and that I will one day learn of it. Doubtful but... we all know we die, hope is what keeps us alive until that moment. Strange philosophy. I was never a good philosopher.

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Strange this, life. I leave no emptiness behind me. I wasn’t there, anyway, so how could I leave anything – smell, pheromones, emptiness? Certainly no thunderclap the way the sudden removal of a car a tennis ball a needle would have created, left, the way the sudden removal of a kiss would have created, left. Kiss?! What kiss? Some idiot screams on the radio. A crow picks some leftovers from the asphalt, was it once a burger? A guy... no, a gal throws a smoking stub from a car window. One may call it life. I call it random events based on some universal law of functionality no one formulated yet. It will be formulated in a million years, once everybody would have forgotten me and the emptiness I didn’t leave behind. Strange thing, life. Strange thing, butterfly effect. Strange thing, entropy. In the end nothing means as much as the moment any moment this moment when I write to you when I miss you when I wish I was kissing you, instead.

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Erotycon Leave on the lights. I want to watch you. I want to watch your every detail be it cloth disposed of impatiently or fingernail broken in anger or indecent position unintended yet assumed with pride and vengeance after you throw me on the bed extracting me miraculously from all habits in one single move and then parade in front of me with female-cock pride peeling slowly away pieces of that bane humans call attire pausing at the delicate parts of it and pulling them away from the skin and treacherously cutting in it another tiny vent and another tiny vent slowly revealing another gorgeous piece of flesh and then another gorgeous piece of flesh my torture incomplete my humiliation beyond complete as I lie there on the cold bed awaiting the penknife the sickle the scythe to strike until with no intervening hiatus you rip all leftovers away from your body and descend upon me like a vulture my purpose in life suddenly clear since Adam bit that apple to be your rag your mattress you sit down on me slowwwwwwwwwly you sit up from me slowwwwwwwwwly and breeze turns wind and wind turns hurricane and emerging cataclysm gulps world gulps solar system gulps universe... are you alive? you ask worried I hope not, I answer feebly asking forgiveness from the enveloping womb of darkness I pull away from as two soft arms gather me protectively to a soft bosom and there between breasts and breastbone and sleeping nipples I suckle my way back to the horrors of life outdoors and the beauty of you indoors. Colors glide from the tapestry sewn into your skin and ebb into wave after wave of rainbow enchantment around us upon a bedsheet that witnessed the birth and death and resurrection of me.

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Erotycon, two We lay on our backs, panting like horses that just finished a two miles race foaming, frothing, neighing... well, everything except neighing but not far from it what’s that on your body? she asked, looking down at it. I followed her gaze to the Dalí’an landscape of reds and blues and greens and blacks slowly rolling away from the crests of my body into the crevasses of my body and bed and floor... your tattoos, they boiled away with the sweat, I exclaimed awed. Impossible, she giggled, uncertain, embarrassed, what was the temperature... there, you think? I have an idea, I smiled back, mischievously and rushed as horizontally as I could to prevent losing more ink to the floor pulled out a drawer pulled out an old pen, fitted to it an old nib, pulled a piece of paper and rushed back to the bed, still as horizontally as I could... What are you doing? she asked, puzzled, beautiful. I sat down scooped with the nib as much of the crawling ink as possible and started writing. You are writing what? A poem? You are a poem. I write memories. You mean you have to write what just happened to remember what just happened? I want to make it unforgettable. You mean you have to write what just happened to make it unforgettable? It was the wrong hour of the day, the wrong moment, the wrong position to answer stupid questions so I kept scooping and writing and scooping and writing pulling additional scraps of paper as necessary and scooping and writing and scooping and writing until there was no more to scoop and the last scooping movement was trailed by a thin, bleeding cut. Here, read it! She took it, slightly curious, slightly frightened... It is... just one word?! Over and over again. Over and over again... In all possible sizes and orientations and languages, at least those known to me. In all possible sizes and orientations and languages, at least those known to you... In all possible colors, no, scratch that, in all your colors. In all my colors... One color missing. I took the nib, scratched her skin until I drew blood and pushed my finger against the wound then fingerprinted my paper scraps, all of them. Now it is complete, all your colors. She wasn’t persuaded, I saw it in those gigantic green eyes she raised towards me. Then she scratched my tiny cut until she got it bleeding again dipped the end of a finger in it and fingerprinted all my scraps of paper as well. This is ours. Now it is complete. Now it is complete, I concurred. The word, was of course love. Two miles later we lay there panting and foaming and frothing, and neighing, yes, and neighing, why not, life is worth living, life is beautiful. You are beautiful. HNÆGAN!!!

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Beach? Cloud? Cave?... decide, woman!!! TAKE 1: Ready for the beach event? Waves tickle the soles of your feet. Or maybe these are the tiny crabs I saw congregating deciding your fate between the various toes of your various feet... yes, I am aware that various does not apply to two but I kind of lose my bearings while watching you in that bikini... wait, is it a monokini? wait, is it a nokini? wait, is it a biped or a monoped or a noped writing these lines (same counting method applicable to this bi/mono/noped’s brain) while tickling the soles of your feet with the tip of my tongue and picking single grains of sand incrusted there. Sorry, apologies to the multi crabs nation for such infamous blame as previously inferred sorry, apologies to the one female nation for such fake news as previously proffered sorry, for not really being sorry. Please don’t forgive me and punish me with being the shadow between you and fire of sun with being the towel between you and drops of sea with being the silks between you and layers of cotton following, later on, above the silks. And I will count the grains of sand your heels displace while walking the shore and I will brush your hair while the wind willfully undoes my work and I will carry you on my arms waiting for your fingers to clasp the nape of my neck and whisper in my ears all the words I ever wrote you reminding me of love. And you. TAKE 2: Ready for the cloud event? Thunder is not the barking of the electricity in the clouds but the barking of that uncontrollable muscle in my chest as we are half way up to the first cloud about three thousand ladder steps beneath us about three thousand above us to go and you parading your paradables there, above me as you insisted to climb first your skirt beating every which way my eyes fixed one way and one way only up, straight up, I guess you knew what you were doing when you proposed this vacation. Effort involved?... nothing, meaningless, mental control involved?... thunder, told you. Love, I’m a bit tired, you meowed voice girlish smile impertinentish regard devilish. Yeah, tired my ass, I muttered to myself, or rather tired your ass, I muttered to myself delighted as I closed the few steps upwards one hand clutching the ladder one hand pushing afore mentioned paradables upwards softness so welcoming perfumes so welcoming sighs (mine) so welcoming the way to the bottom of the first cloud so blissfully remote. Until you suddenly rushed upwards leaving me there cursing my ungainly shape and my forgotten binoculars down there, on Earth. Ready for the next cloud? you bit my lip drawing blood guided my fingers a heavenly nanosecond long under your skirt and then shooted upwards the ladder again. I knew what awaits me, us, me, once we hit that promised seventh cloud that thunder in my chest turning God’s trumpet as I rushed after you, pausing from time to time to inhale heaven from my fingertips. TAKE 3: Ready for the cave event? Stalactites grazing my head and stalagmites drilling holes in the soles of my bare feet as I rushed about that hidden from sight cave making soft bed for my woman to lie on piling sweet fruits for my woman to chew carrying carcasses found outside for my woman to feather herself in fur herself in hide herself in, invite me in. I would never force myself in. I was quite advanced for a primitive he-hominid she was quite feisty and capricious for a primitive she-hominid with bones woven in her hair and white chalk images artistically scrawled upon her body and black charcoal stains drawn around her eyes and tiny drying red lines of blood leftovers smeared on her mouth. What will they call these things in a two hands’ count millennia? Lips? Lipstick? (Please forgive me for using words I was not supposed to know, ok? Inclusive ok.) I was born to hunt and love her. War and love her. Protect and love her. She was born to hunt and war and protect me and love me. Told you, quite advanced for a pair of not-so-far-from-monkeys. Lover (or whatever combination of grunts meant ‘lover’), make love to me (or whatever combination of grunts meant ‘make love to me’). I did not let her repeat herself, last time I did it I lost her for a full moon to another full moon. Never mind stalactites, never mind stalagmites, never mind quartz as sharp as tiger’s tooth I rushed her way all bleeding and all panting and all relieved of my habits and she welcomed me inside her feathers and furs and hides and black fingernails cut ruts all across my spine and black teeth cut pieces off my face and green... green? where did I learn this word from?... eyes shone like wet leaves in a storm lighted by burning trunks fallen prey to sky’s anger as we rolled beneath above among stalactites and stalagmites and quartz and I ripped her open and she crushed me broken and I guess it was the first time ever a hominid woman whispered inside a bitten ear I love you. Also the first time ever a hominid man wrote a poem to his mate. It was short, just three words, three stanzas, but what a symphony of feelings was sung through these words. You Are Beautiful. You understood. I knew you understood when you bit off another piece of my ear and crushed me broken once again. Ah, the beginnings of modern romance...

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Weaker sex? Ha! Re-live your ancestry. Re-live your yesterday. Re-live your yesterdays when you cut the hair of the mightiest had the empire’s emperor hold on to your hem launched a thousand ships turned a holy king into a murderer were assassinated to prevent a revolution wouldn’t give up your seat in a bus flew to no return provided a face for chicanos and feminists prophesized in poetry nursed the wounded under fire warred for the rights of beasts at the price of your life and etc. and etc. Don’t you kind of... idolize women a tad too much? No. Not at all. I know also all the bitches, I can count also all the bitches. That’s why I started with a ‘your’ indicator, first line. And second. And third. When my mind pulls you to the forefront these are the ones that rise above all the rest. Whatever the reason.

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The Artist Time decided to take on the art of sculpture not as a profession mind you, but as a hobby. Of all the arts it could have chosen from, it is sculpture it chose. It could have chosen poetry, pottery, clowning, cinema ballet opera knitting writing ghost stories and competing with the Rowling dame (this is where the billions are) ...no, the stupid critter decided to compete with Michelangelo and compete with Mickey’s David. Idiot! And who of all of Earth’s population did Time take as its block of marble, so to say, to chisel on? Guess! The one other critter that never won any of the state lotteries with their ridiculously high odds of a few poor billions to one having tried them all all his life (double all is not a mistake), and yet he won Time lottery’s first draw with its impossible trillion trillions to one odds the prize being acting as Time’s block of marble, so to say. Me. Is this the right way to say it or would I be a better choice? As if it matters. So one day I wake up to find Time chiseling away layers off my muscles. Then chiseling on additional layers to my fat. (How does one chisel on? Trust Time to find a way.) Then chiseling some artistic holes in my teeth, some artistic ruts to my eyes and at second thought also to my mouth, some stains to my skin some hair off my head some fine strands on to my ears (that I have to keep shaving off daily) some hair extensions on to my nose (that I have to keep snipping off daily) some ingrown nails some hanging skin some less erections it chiseled away my spagat and it chiseled away my forehead to knees and it chiseled away my 100 meters in 10 seconds (I never had it but feels good saying it) and then Time took some time (haha) off and it wasn’t even the seventh day and decided to try some improvements, with David all the time on its mind, in the internal layers of its block of marble, so to say, gory details of which I will save you from since I do not want to have you puking your breakfast/lunch/dinner/snack/etc. over this poem/blog/story/essay/etc. in whatever form you may be reading it paper/screen/microfiche/roentgen/etc. Great job you did with this block of marble, so to say, Time. All of this effort did not get you any closer to above mentioned David but it did get you farther away from above mentioned original Me. And now I bet you planted your undefinable ass (apologies, all the under 18) in some bar or bodega or night club sipping your cold Belgian beer and thinking of additional ways to improve on your creation, after your beer of course. Well, let me be clear on this one, Time. Fuck you (apologies, all the under 18)! Next time I will allow you next to me will be when all you’ll be able to do is chisel my flesh away from my bones in atomic size particles, no more sculpting allowed. Mickey beat you! David beat you! I beat you! One million years from now, in the future, a then-hominid ten times farther away from the today-hominid than we are from our ancestor-hominid with head the size of three watermelons and eyes the size of single watermelons and feet the size of watermelon seeds and balls and tits the size of no watermelon (by that time hominids would have all become hermaphrodites, oh, poor devils) will gently lay on a table the recently excavated bonily leftovers of Me will caress them with thin long watermelon tendril fingers and will mutter to itself (hermaphrodite, remember?)... shit, what a magnificent specimen! It will not know what shit means, of course, therefore it will not apologize to any under 18, but it will use it anyway the way we don’t know what ok means but we use it. MAGNIFICENT! Hear it, Time? THIS will be my revenge, you Time scum, you sculptorial failure for all eternity (eternity being longer than you, I presume, hahaha). Fuck you, Time (apologies all the under 18, recidivating, this time triple exclamation-marked)!!! ooIoo ooIoo (this being my typographical attempt at a double middle finger) Time!!!

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For a dime A poem’s lines rhyme Like a caroling chime, The do’s and the la’s Wedding silver to brass           every time... The poem’s lines rhyme Like a caroling chime, The do’s and the la’s Wedding silver to brass           every time... My poem’s lines rhyme Like a caroling chime, The do’s and the la’s Wedding silver to brass           every time... This poem’s lines rhyme Like a caroling chime, The do’s and the la’s Wedding silver to brass           every time... A poem’s last breath The obdurate death My verse for all time This song for a dime.

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Absurd Analogies You mean AA? No, your AA has nothing to do with my AA, yours has to do with me being the brain and you being the alcohol masquerading as blood flooding me into a state of pure delightful inebriation. No, I mean other analogies. Like You the mouth and I the bee gathering all that sugary existence from your lips... Bee? Are you going to sting me? Do you prefer me butterfly? No, stay, bee, I like the feeling of danger menace vulnerability you deliver to my lips... You will not sting me, will you? You the scabbard I the sword. Oh, do I hear some sexual inflections? You hear wrong. No, wrong, you hear right but you’re wrong in your interpretation. Intimate. Not sexual. We are virgin to each other never knew each other never will know each other until that moment that I slide into you to cuddle there safe from the wraths of the world rust and dents and atomic bombs... ...to wrap myself around you safe in my knowledge of your sudden penetrating slash and soft, feathery protection... virgins to each other... virgins to each other... (Moment’s hesitation. Yours.) Say, and if I was the sword and you the scabbard in this analogy? (Moment’s hesitation. Mine.) Oh! (Here I roll my eyes CW.) Oh! (here I roll my eyes CCW.) Oh! (Cross-eyed.) This opens up unimaginable possibilities, and since they are unimaginable I cannot imagine them. Oh! You the sea I the swordfish. You used already sword. This is different, this is swordfish. Oh! You used already Oh. (Here you smacked me the way Muhammad Ali smacked whoever was in the ring.) Different. You. Unfathomably deep, unfathomably startling, unfathomably mysterious beguiling warm. You. Unfathomably talented unfathomably creative unfathomably imaginative. You... I get it, what about you? I. Unfathomably lost in all this depth mystery creativity and stabbing every which direction trying to hit your thought hit your soul hit your body failing again and again, sea, so vast. I.E. trying to hit on me. I.E. yes, shamelessly, humbly, violently, gently. And other xly’s. I like your xly’s. I want you to love my xly’s. Thus I keep swimming times blindly other times blindly as well, after all you are woman, I am man. You are sea. I am swordfish. You Jane I Jackass. And this leads?... No idea, skip. You volcano. I soda pop. And this leads?... No idea, skip. You my end of time. I the one who called you my end of time. This starts interesting. Not even a hint of sexuality, though, knowing you... Let’s see, go on. I found you somewhere at my many percent from start time mark and my few percent from end time mark and you but a lass where percents are meaningless and nights are long but not long enough and days are long but not long enough and the sum of it all is threaded with the sparkle of silver and the flicker of gold and opals and amethysts and jades Hey! I shouted your way, almost falling from my top tree branch where I was feeding birds Hey! you waved back starting to climb my way carelessly letting your stockings tear away and your skirts tear away (I knew it would arrive, eventually) and by the time you reached my branch there was not much left to cover your nakedness and I just wished it was even less I brought you flowers. And me. I fed the birds. I love your flowers. I love you. And somehow your flowers and my birds and you and I we all started mixing up ending with just you and me mixed up with so many beautiful flowers flying around us and so many beautiful birds blossoming around us I don’t really mind Jackass. I don’t really mind soda pop. I don’t really mind Jane. I don’t really mind volcano. I do. I do. The end of virginity, not as the world knew it. As we knew it. You Penelope. You Odysseus? You Eurydice. You Orpheus? You Desdemona. You Othello? Hm, let’s try some that don’t necessarily belong to the O family. Iseult. Tristan? Guinevere. Lancelot? Beatrice. Dante? Juliet. Romeo? Delilah. Samson?... (And on and on we went through the night, through many nights, my head in your lap, just beneath the youth of your breasts, your fingers at the corners of my eyes, counting the age of my eyelashes). I wonder at the absurdity of all these analogies. And stories surrounding them. I guess there are more. I wonder at the absurdity of absurdity. In all these analogies. Yes, there are more. There are countless more.

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Days Today like every day preceding this day and for all the days that days remember me as your charm trickles and lingers I tie ribbons to your fingers tiny diamonds to your lashes round your nipples moon-rock ashes silver bangles to your feet... oh, my mind with you replete           swoons and crashes. Every day preceding this day and for all the days that days remember me when the sun deserts its nisus with its sunset to surprise us I inhale the blissful glory of that damning purgatory that cherubic burning lea neath your dress’s canopy           hell’s furore. This day and for all the days that days remember me you have danced on nail and nettle proud of heart and brave of mettle now I’ll swathe your lacerations those invading sweet temptations turning want to feral chase with my wild and muscled mace           palpitations. For all the days that days remember me I’ve roamed kingdoms populated minds aberrant, underrated, until life’s depleted ocean in a last, defying motion stranded me upon this shore swan and siren songs galore           lover’s potion. Days remember me they may call me misbegotten yet remember the white cotton guarding the forbidden borders that my hands, your nipple hoarders ripped away from flesh and skin then bedizened you with sin           fuck life’s warders.

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Should’ve’s You should have been born somewhere in the wilderness in a farm, with cows and horses and chickens and wheat fields and vegetable beds and dogs, of course dogs, next to my farm. I should have been born somewhere in the wilderness in a farm, with cows and horses and chickens and wheat fields and vegetable beds and dogs, of course dogs, next to your farm. And as kids I would have pulled your pigtails and you would have scratched my eyes and we would have loved each other, oh, how much we would have loved each other. And as guys and gals I would have taken you to dances and touched your breasts and you would have let me take you to dances and blush when I touched your breasts and we would have loved each other, oh, how much we would have loved each other. And as young adults I would have married you and given you five children and you would have married me and given me five children and we would have loved each other, oh, how much we would have loved each other. And as old adults you would have sat in my lap with fifteen grandkids on the porch and I would have sat in your lap with fifteen grandkids on the porch and we would have loved each other, oh, how much we would have loved each other. And as old people I would still sneak upon you in the meadow and steal your delicate offering and you would still allow me to sneak upon you in the meadow and steal your delicate offering and we would have loved each other, oh, how much we would have loved each other. You were not born somewhere in the wilderness. I was not born somewhere in the wilderness. And we love each other, oh, how much we love each other.

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definitely NO! sex I’ve taken you to the beach. I’ve taken you to the clouds. I’ve taken you to the cave. I’ve taken you past present and future. I’ve taken you nowhere and somewhere and everywhere and each and every place and time I’ve remodeled you tatters I’ve revealed you naked I’ve crawled every square inch of your outer and inner flesh and left prints etched down to muscle down to bone down to mind. You won’t remember, you were not there when I was there... or maybe you do remember? I’ve not taken you yet to my balcony, though. Among flowers. And butterflies and bees and parrots and no crawling fingers. I’ve taken you to my balcony. No crawling fingers. I laid you down upon a bed of mixed petals asked gently butterflies to fan you cool asked gently bees to drip your lips honey asked gently parrots to offer you nuts of all sizes and colors and while you lazed under the transparent canopy separating life from dream I started reading you poetry. Some of it mine. Well, honestly, most of it mine I did not know of any other that would do justice to the moment to the woman to the woman’s senses. And you listened, and you napped, and you woke up to the birds, and you napped, and you turned over peeking from under eyelashes making sure no sex and I there making sure against all biting instincts no sex and you asking meekly no sex? and I answering hoarsely no sex and you listened, and you napped, and you woke up to the birds, and you napped and I kept reading until there was nothing to be read anymore that wasn’t read already and starting anew from chapter one, poem one, word one. Feeling every bit like an antiquity god building a heaven for a goddess. And no sex? And no sex. You wake up... did I fall asleep? Then you feel the flutter of butterflies and taste the honey of bees and munch the nut of parrots and... hey... is this your voice, still reciting poetry? I believe it is. I believe I could go on like this forever. Can you please define forever? Undefinable. My voice. Then my writes. Then memories of me. Forever, the human way.

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Do you dream of my body? Do you dream of my body? she asked her voice intonation as factual as someone asking the time of the day as someone reading a rental contract’s endless clauses as someone reciting a grocery list for the twentieth time. Do I dream of your body? I echoed my intonation so different that it might as well have been a different dimension, the rhetorical quality to have made a Cicero proud the musicality of sound to have been accepted as a neologism the underlying temperature to put global warming to shame without the inherent risks and yet with all the doom quality of a tumble into the sun. Do I dream of your body? I reiterated harmonizing a different amalgam of intonations yet keeping the same set of abusive statements that the first set placed on her ears drilling mercilessly through the labyrinths of her ethereal mind and the convolutions of her physical brain. Please re-think, not the words but rather the music. She re-thought, not the words but rather the music. Do you dream of my body? she asked. And this time the sun tumbled into me. I wonder how I keep writing, makes one believe in ghosts.

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Studded Wedding rings, studded with tiny emeralds. Grinding discs, studded with diamond dust. My poetry, studded with morsels of heart, mine, size of weasel bites size of searing sparks size of stiletto punctures with atom sized knock-outs. Soft, even with the thorns and the broken glass and the razor-wire fragments it is still velvet, try it, drag it softly along your cheek downwards, sideways, in circles, drag it softly upon the back of your hand downwards, sideways, in circles, drag it softly underneath your breasts, between your breasts, around your nipples and as the inflammation between your thighs threatens your life let it soothe, placate, tame that harras harassing your insatiable gluttony for fire for smiles for peace underneath the poplars with my hand braiding roses in your hair and your sighs mingling with the buzz of bees and the flutter of butterflies and the rustle of leaves slowly covering your nakedness with autumn. Don’t shy away from telling me of occasional thorns and glass and razor-wire piercing your skin unintentionally, if mine, maybe intentionally, if not mine. I will gather you in my words lull you all the way into the worlds of ataraxia and as white lace ties to your ankles green consonance ties to your eyelashes.

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Cup's I cup your flesh. Which part? Choose. Knee? If you so wish... And while your shoulder finds the right nook against my shoulder I will tell you the untold, unabridged and true story of Ulysses and Penelope’s first night together after his return from his unfortunate pilgrimage. Is it an... erotic story? It certainly is. Mmm... I cup your flesh. Another part? If you wish. Ahm... elbow? If you insist... And while your foot finds the right positional angle between my feet I will tell you the untold, unabridged and true story Of Othello and Desdemona’s first night together after the pomp of marriage and guests left them in the bliss of lone togetherness. Is it an... erotic story? You bet. Mmm... I cup your flesh. May I choose? Didn’t you until now? Ahm... let me think... breast? (there I stuttered, coughed and choked, in this order, for a few moments) And while your hand cups my flesh... May I choose? You may. (you chose and I stuttered, coughed and choked, in this order, for a few moments) ...I will tell you the untold, unabridged and true story of Romeo and Juliet and their only night together after and before mayhem and death. Is it an... erotic story? There isn’t any more so. Mmm... I finished telling you the stories. Those are stories. Do you have also a story about... us? My cupping firm. Your cupping fearsome. Erotic? Erotic. I hope so. I hope so. I will tell it when... You will tell it when... I will tell it. When. If. Yes, definitely when. Definitely if. Definitely. Waiting. Waiting. Like waiting to be born. More.

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Ampersands I look at them, admiringly, lovingly. Some timidly designed, yet gorgeous some so intricately designed that gorgeous would be insulting and the correct word to detail them was not invented yet, can never be invented. Splendrous? Magnificent? All but pale synonyms to gorgeous and none encompassing the totality of the thrill those indescribable ampersands entail. I couldn’t imagine a Romeo & Juliet without such a one. I couldn’t imagine a Ulysses & Penelope, an Othello & Desdemona without such a one. Lover, you seem to be stuck on your pairings, always R & J, U & P, O & D... Oh, but I have others as well... I have... She blocked any following words with a pair of lips that would be the envy of any ampersand design. What about... You & I? she smirked. Which ampersand design would you use here? She got me there. By the balls, if I be allowed a bit of pardonable yet germane pertness here. Never thought of us in terms of ampersand design, and now that she said it... Oh my God, was all I could say as she converted the inherent meaning of above pert expression from figuratively to literally and literary ampersands became just blurs upon the endless canvas of those ampersand eyes and the rest of ampersand she.

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That moment of glory That moment of glory when I undressed you naked in the rain and streamlets and runlets and rivulets of purified water cascaded from ends of hair and ends of fingers exploding in tiny rainbows around your feet human you disappeared and aery you birthed the way of a water lily the way of a diamond grain the way of a nova thankfully billions of light years away thankfully falling into my arms. That moment of glory when you blossomed all around dying me in the rain with streamlets and runlets and rivulets undergoing a process of contamination by salt erupting from skins and blood particles blessing the birth of another sun human us disappeared with the rest of us hewing a way out of bodily knots and bacchanalian collusion and howling wings stretching our lungs into the ten-line staff notation so typical of our flesh’s plainchants. The moment of glory passed. The moment of glory stayed hiding in the interstices of watertightly woven fingers.

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Statements I’m virgin, she stated and I spattered and splattered and stuttered my way back to sanity four days running. Yeah, and I’m 4th of July, I tried a flat and thin joke and flat and thin it stayed. Like single layer toilet paper, like peel off an overboiled potato like a drop of nail varnish diluted in a glass of acetone. C’mon, you’re usually more articulate than that, she teased, goading me into proving that she was lying. I couldn’t prove it was 3 o’clock (it was 3 o’clock at the moment) so certainly not that she was lying (she was lying... I thought... I think...). My memories of that defining moment in my life are blurred, still. I remember walking fluffy pink clouds covered imbricated petals I remember riding hummingbirds’ beaks deep into hearts of flowers I remember many other nonsensical offerings to my senses. I do not remember proving the debatable matter. I remember lying on my back (I think) on a sandy beach (I think) the red gate of hell receding from my gate of food (I think... no, I am sure) and emanating sounds that translated the cacophony in the world to a simple... So? So what? I retorted, the temporal blur I related higher up starting at that very moment to never let go again. She made it considerably harder laying her head on my chest her hair conquering even the most elementary of my senses, those I did not know humans possess until she uncovered the secret to me. Add to it the horrifying (to my sanity) combination of fingertips and nipples... I don’t know if you are... were virgin, I stated in return. You are certainly not human, I finished my statement hurrying to return to those hairs and those nipples and that... creature. I think she accepted the answer as articulate and converted any further mental tease she had in mind to a bodily one. She succeeded.

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Autumn Colors The autumn colors are preparing for the big invasion, that much is obvious even to civilians like me. For now it is just a few patrols here and there a few skirmishes there and here the sharp edge of polar-cold bistouries cutting erratically through the air killing a few leaves frightening a few mice deep down burrows... nothing serious yet, the onslaught is yet to come unstoppable indomitable imperious. It comes. It finds us with all the abruptness of a snapping dry twig underfoot unleashed hysteria suddenly channeling our primal senses through narrow gaps cracking beneath splinters of flint stone and tree trunks and dry bones yellowing with age as we roll and rave and rage among wooden benches underneath wooden benches between the planks of wooden benches sometimes making love sometimes plain fucking a torrent of leaves burying us three feet underneath the never ceasing deluge where our humanity shed of its cloth and inhibition gives in to the most tender of bestial ferocity and beauty. We pause, among the wooden benches underneath the wooden benches between the planks of the wooden benches, cupfuls of the other’s flesh still broiling inside clenched fists and as we shyly try to cover each other’s glowing skin with our own we feed each other crumbling leaves and whisper them down the settling landscape of lungs with mouths regaining momentarily the sanity of encroaching color decomposing inside the rapidly fading lull of in-between rampaging sallies.

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The childhood of man, the finding of woman So we sit at the table, you drink your hot cocoa I drink your hot cocoa too, from your mouth. So we sit on the bed, you invited me to sit on the bed, yours, I hoped to be invited to sit on the bed, yours, I don’t know if to hope for more though I do. You hug. I kiss. We don’t undress, we rip rave rage all of a sudden all together all the two of us and as all that we just began just ends and as we grab the ending just a little bit longer by fingertips to fingertips to rest of us you offer me your cocoa again and it burns to blisters my lips my tongue my palate my heart. How does cocoa get to heart? The mysteries of life never cease to astound me. Of love too. I walked life’s deserts, hiked its mountains, crawled at the bottoms of its seas, I married your body without marrying your finger married your mind without your consent lined my mattress with words you wished to say but didn’t and sank into the chaos at the end of my time and the beginning of yours carrying with me ounces of happiness, trillions of them.

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There are absolutes: I will die forever, I know. I will never step on the moon, I know. We will make love only on the silent white between my stanzas there, where reproaches just about to be born retreat into nothingness, I know. There are also inabsolutes, a word that doesn’t exist but should: If government ministers would be logical they would not be ministers, I think. If our ears would have had a band-stop to filter out the ‘mi’ the music scene would have been completely different, I think. If someone would have stepped on a butterfly somewhere mid of Eocene we would have been born same time, same continent, same street, I think.

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Eiffel We got there, finally. Took us the better part of a life but we got there at the feet of the Eiffel tower and holding hands we looked up... wow! another part of life, maybe not as better as the first, to get to the top of it. I squeezed your hand... to encourage you or to encourage myself? Are you ready? I asked. You squeezed my hand back, didn’t know it was possible to squeeze further and for a moment I feared for the sake of my knuckles, and thumb, and middle finger - its uses so ingeniously varied. This is where you wanted to be, right? I continued a note of uncertainty creeping in my voice. You kept looking up, your neck the neck of a swan your eyes the eyes of a birthing universe. And there we make love? you asked. And there we make love. You on top? If you wish. I on top? If you wish. You talk too much. We burst forward the tidal wave of humanity’s only two humans alive at that moment in time crashing through the frozen immobility of guards and gates and gawkers and climbing the forest of beams and bars and bolts the size of watermelons upwards onwards topwards first half of the way I helping you second half of the way you helping me third half... ...third half, what’s this, poetic math?... third half, I continued unperturbed, we holding onto each other like vines like burrs like thistles reaching the needle top clothes exploding off our skin metal around us turning incandescent blob leaving the following endless generations of city engineers wondering until Earth fell into Sun. As we made love madly, wildly, insanely... Who on top of whom? We on top of we. And around? and underneath? and inside? and everywhere? and?... You talk too much. I spread my wings gathered naked you to naked me and started floating above a glittering Paris... ...see, this is la Notre-Dame and we made love... ...see, this is le Louvre and we made love... ...see, this is la Sacré-Coeur and we made love... ...see,... seventy four times we made love caring not for frightened screams of passers by or challenges of gendarmes or the endless bickering of doves assailing us... ...oh, this is la Notre-Dame and we made love... ...oh, this is le Louvre and we made love... ...oh, this is la Sacré-Coeur and we made love... ...oh,... this was the second time around, you still clutching at my chest I still clutching at everything that was skin and flesh and bone of you. Drinking you in, inhaling you, absorbing you. Now? I cooed. Now, you chirped. And we swooped down on people in the cool breeze drifts feeling the freedom we couldn’t enjoy as wretched humans and we glided upon the mirror of the water watching the twin sky slide underneath us and we invaded the pavement eating yummy crumbs fallen from luxurious cookies and finally perched atop the highest and prettiest building watching the sparkliest and prettiest lights. May I now wake us up? I cooed. No, you chirped. And we remained hugging for minutes, for hours, for centuries. This doesn’t look like our gargoyles, kept saying the following endless generations of city engineers wondering until Earth fell into Sun.

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idyll, one we walk hand in hand, mostly your hand in mine, at times mine in yours, head on shoulder yours on mine, thigh brushing against thigh as if by chance certainly by chance, sometimes, mostly intentionally by me sometimes intentionally by you, I hope, we find a bench we sit my arm wraps your back protectively and a left fingertip pushes against the round softness of a left breast’s side unintentionally, at begin, intentionally the entire rest of time, we stand we walk again the dogs running berserk around us chasing first imaginary then real squirrels chasing first real then imaginary skunks chasing each other’s tail while we kick the life out of mounds of dry leaves so that we can cough so that we can choke so that we can clean each other’s mouth with each other’s lips and tongues and breath. the sun falls asleep at the mid of the day its warmth beating softly neath smoldering hay I’m itching, you murmur delightful distress beseeching me kindly your need to address I open your button and open your clasp relieving your skin from the menacing grasp indebted, your gratitude voices its chime and offers your nipple till end of all time the dogs lie asleep round the knots of raw flesh that moments before seized the meaning of thresh, my hand on your belly, your head on my chest I start weaving dreams... at your gentle behest.

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idyll, two the pines shiver lightly foretokening wonders about to bedizen the mighty expanse the bridal immaculate garment which sunders a world’s innocence into anguish and dance. the maiden steps slowly, engraving with garlands the glittering snow crunching under her feet a murder of crows cawing gaily engarlands the colorful figure they’re eager to greet. a black-and-white storm barks its way with a flurry a white-and-black storm follows thick on its trail the somnolent white turns rampageous slurry as wild shrieks of laughter yield hiccup for gale. the pines fall asleep, while the moon graves a crescent disparting the white from the hovering black, the maid falls asleep, flushing cheeks iridescent with trickles of dreams and a doggy’s wet smack. the morning erupts with a crows’ mighty bugle three creatures emerge from the crumbling white silk and life starts anew like a landscape by Brueghel infused with the warmth of a mother’s fresh milk.

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I Wish I wish I could sink my body inside your body the frailty of stiff flesh burrowing roads and inhuming despair until, once reaching those unfathomable depths of woman and beast, it displodes like an army of glass bottles chasing the side of a building to the solid pavement below and once there the cur coils and curls and nestles for as long as the word eternity carries meaning. You lullaby me with daggers and squashed rose petals.

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Love. Positive, gushing, cute, romantic, poetic love. It’s something I think I need right now, she said. Love. Positive, gushing, cute, romantic, poetic love. Like this? I asked pointing to the starling murmuration that followed the wand of my index finger first shaping a pulsating side-lying heart then shaping the fluttering tail of a galloping stallion then thinning out to one single horizontal line, horizon to horizon before disappearing. Her eyes sparkled, tears exploding into a scintillating mist that enveloped us, hiding us from the world, from ourselves. Hey, did you really do it all with the tip of your finger? she wondered loudly taking the tip of my finger and letting it run all the way from the tip of her nose to the depression of her navel. Letting it rest there. Sorry, no murmuration there I’m afraid, I said. Are you sure? she asked, and suddenly I wasn’t. Or maybe like this? I asked further releasing my finger from the tirany of her hold and starting to draw shapes in the sand. Yes, suddenly we were swimming in a sea of sand, or rather walking atop it like that famous biblical character... Jesus? If you wish. My shapes took form, then took life, then took their own lives... Butterflies! she clapped hands delightedly and with every clap another color added to the fluttering rainbow until my finger slashed the middle of it all... Fishies! she danced and pirouetted and fell on her behind only to bounce back to the tips of her toes and chase a school of sardines then be chased by a mean looking shark then leap with a glide of flying fish and then my finger stabbed the heart of the vision... Puppies! Kitties! Lambs! There were more kinds but she just lay on her back and let the biting scratching battering multitude of miniature life inflict upon her body as much unimaginable damage and pleasure as imaginable in her mind. My finger struck out. Oh, no! her sides of mouth pouted in repressed sobs until I offered her the same finger to suckle, bite, torture, assuage. This? I don’t remember asking, probably I did. She looked around. I see nothing, she said. This? I do remember asking this second one guiding each of my right hand’s single fingers in between each of her left hand’s two fingers my thumb outside, her pinky outside, palm to palm wrist to wrist hip rubbing against hip as we started touring the world and its wonders. Also the Eiffel? Why not? Also the pyramids, the Norwegian fjords, mount Fujimori...? she kept enumerating and I kept us jumping until her head fell with a sigh on my shoulder... all this with the tip of your finger?... She was whispering, tired. And the warmth of your heart, I added, covering her with layers of warm night interspersed with layers of white snowflake interspersed with layers of broken flint stone sparking with every movement of her body. You know, this is the first time we fall in love where there is no sex involved, she giggled into my cheek. You know, this is the first time I offer you positive, gushing, cute, romantic, poetic love. Still love, no? No. Not ‘still love’. Simply... love. She yawned, content, and fell asleep. When she woke up I wasn’t there anymore.

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Night, Follows Day Your heart entrances tips of mighty trees And leads them through the glare of morning’s sun To feed them life, until the day is done When it pulls back to sleep across your knees. Your fingers touch the earlobes’ gentle pink And gently ask the butterflies astride To part and fly, with morning’s ebbing tide And paint the night with stardust’s playful clink. Your breasts engulf my mouth into the fold I sing with words as meaningless as time The rapture in the bodies joined in crime I beg with night, my soul and life to hold. My day has ended with your breeze of mouth My night has started, and my cranes fly south.

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Dust The letter lay neglected, the pungent smell of mildew Pervading hollow innards of vowels huddling close, The bloated ink recalling within its tufts of shrill hue A fire once consuming love poems in their throes. All yesterdays forgotten, she dusts around the corners A tune escaping softly the prison of her lips Grim days of old forsaken along with clinging mourners Her mopping hand rejoicing in dust’s apocalypse. A flutter... What in blazes?... A yellow apparition Floats from beneath a drawer and lands against her shoe One corner bends... it offers conditionless rendition As scribbled lines sink slowly in the surrounding goo. She freezes, thinly choking, the sheet between her fingers Vibrates like frightened kittens afore impending doom, A sudden, long gone throbbing between her temples lingers, An eerie silence gathers and sails across the room. My dear... convulsing fingers gash wounds inside the paper My dear... convulsing rivers gash wounds inside the brain My dear... she drops the broomstick, the mop, the brush, the scraper, The world begins to wobble, her eyes begin to rain. An hour, two, an ever has seen her crouching, hollow, As she re-reads the stories, the lives, the matching rhyme, As she re-lives the moments in which she used to wallow Believing into stardust until the end of time. Enough. She stands. She wobbles. She steels her melting muscle Her fist crumples the letter reminiscing the lust, The awe, the crave, the fire... all gone with yester’s rustle, The brittle paper crumbles, and dust returns to dust.

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Futuristic Nostalgia One hundred years from now and three hours, or so my grandkids would’ve had grandkids cars would’ve gone droneway food would’ve been 3D printed and my books would’ve rotten crumbled into dust become just another polluting factor. Where is he buried? no one would’ve thought necessary to ask relegated as irrelevant or not relegated at all a life lost becoming just a life forgotten a love lost becoming just a what the hell was once upon a time this thing called love about? And then philosophically I would’ve asked a question asked millions of times before what is the purpose of life for the living what was the purpose of my life into my death and why am I writing such gloomy lines at an unholy 3am on this unholy Sunday night when all I want to say is yet again I love you?

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Older Suddenly I feel old, not because I feel old but because others feel older. Sleepless nights keep me awake, as strange a statement as any older than itself keep me younger than older others my brain de-fusing itself from my body and dancing to tunes even older that those older mentioned a gush of youth hormones just engendered by my various systems at 3am doing its best to make me forget poles melting and sinews melting. Loves lost are loves never tried my hidden older self keeps goading itself into existence and finding philosophical reasons for a revivalists festival. This is a second gloomy body-refuse rejected by a brain this chilly morning while I console that hidden older self with ludicrous lustful thoughts of you.

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Dowdy A poet can turn beauty into gloom, as dowdy a philosophical expletive as any, A poet can turn gloom into beauty as dowdy a philosophical expletive as any, in addition to the one above expelled, A poet can heal a broken bell A poet can grow a rose in hell, maybe dowdy in its own way, but honest, I wish I was a poet, my hundred thousand lines entwined with thorns and flowers, with bitter sighs and chimes, my words a swarm of locusts that drowns a helpless dawn and you my match of glory... a spark... and then I’m gone!... actually I am quite happy with it, I do not think it dowdy at all, personal parallax of course.

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Moments I dream of moments at your breast When I assail the nipple’s crest And while the rapture storms sublime While critics bowdlerize my rhyme To feel your nail cleaving my flesh then fall asleep inside my chest, I crave the moments in the rain When begging lips cannot abstain From licking drops gliding upon The stretching neck till birthday’s dawn The brackish flood failing to cool the bubbling roar of fire’s reign, I crawl through moments in my mind No man or poet to their kind Has ever fathomed could exist Where tongues encroach and limbs entwist The only justice I can yield is blessing them with words maligned, I dress the moments with my ink Beneath a sky that fears to blink Afraid to lose those sighs divine When mouths get drunk on pouring brine The sleeping wolves growling to life before they leap and white fangs sink, The moments that you own, unique, The laws of obsolete physique Re-written with a master’s hand Besprinkled with your perfume’s brand I lie prostrate against your feet to drown in flakes of your mystique. The moments gone. The moment’s gone. Oh, wrap your wing around me, swan.

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Interlude I wish I had time to read War and Peace again, I won’t. Oh, such pity. I wish I had time to read Don Quixote again, I won’t. Oh, such pity. I wish I had time to read again, so many, to listen again to so many to watch again so many to meet again so many many of which are not there anymore to be met or I don’t know if they are there to be met... My world ends and these and others like these and many others like these poison my thoughts my days my nights and then you send my way Spiegel im Spiegel and I hesitate between howling and smiling knowing none of my wishes will have the time to come true and yet the dagger smoothly gliding inside my heart somehow misses the target and exits the other side turning rainbow. You hang your hat on the colorful arc remembering to remove your head from inside it and tell me that a world capable of creating such mesmerizing pain is a world worthy of the veneration of words nailed to it like icons, and I manage to decide on smiling and I thank you for alienating the poison, be it for just the interlude of first note to last note. There is magic in this world. You are only part of it. But you proved to me there is magic in this world.

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Blasphemy I can’t help but ponder why do people associate strength with iron with steel with concrete? Primitive people, I understand. But modern homo-sapiens? Iron rusts. Steel, even stainless, eventually rusts. Concrete crumbles. Eventually. Too. I understand why not wood, wood rots. Or stones. Give stones a couple hundred years of wind and they reshape. Eventually. Too. Diamonds are too rare to count and glass too brittle to even consider. But why not plastic? Plastic is abundant. Plastic is eternal. It will outlive iron, it will outlive us, if there were dinosaurs alive it would surely have outlived any of the species. So why not associate strength with the eternity of plastic? Could it be because it does not sound poetic? Or could it be because it is so close to a human plague easily beating any of God’s plagues that we are simply afraid of blasphemy.

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1/4 Give me a quarter of an hour of life, yours. There was a lot of life before, mine, there is a bit of life after, mine, there is the before the before and the after the after various lengths various knowns and unknowns various varieties of variations and I don’t necessarily mean to sound poetic, give me a quarter of an hour, yours, and we’ll make it last longer than the entire before and after and quarter including the undershoot and the overshoot and whatever other shoot there is and forget the quarter and live the infinity and fulminate. Not like a star. Like a party balloon like a soap bubble like a light bulb dropping to the pavement... plop! and while our eardrums implode I will guide your eyes through the interstices of a hydrogen atom to watch the wonders I will travel with you upon the convolutions of a canine brain to see the love I will hold your hand while you shop around for sun flares tiny hair-ends singeing... ouch! while we make love while we make love while we make love until we don’t make love anymore quarter of an hour later. Infinity of an hour later. See?... I kept my promise, watch your wristwatch the molten blob of plastic embedded in your wrist is all that is left proof of all that was. The sacrificed quarter of hour embedded in time’s wrist like Venus de Milo’s nipple upon her right breast like red inside a poppy’s petal like a newborn’s cry of victory over the impossible odds of life.

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The moments gone The moments gone, the moments gone to no return lost in chiffon lying injured among the fern lost with your smell with perfumes warm of women young inside the knell and all those poems left unsung the moments gone the moments gone, forever lost, the final dawn. The memory grating my blood inflated veins like emery the games it plays inside my brains the gentle song losing its voice within the din within the twang of life decayed to whisper thin remembering while years assail my flesh and bones dismembering. Upon a time forgotten with its blooming moons upon a rhyme awake within forbidden runes your head asleep between my shoulder and my neck the sorrow deep pieces of heart staining the trek I leave behind covered with loves that once I loved with heartbreaks twined. The moments gone, the fire burning sweating skin, now sorrows spawn with acolytes and next of kin the beauty wilts the eyes regard and try to see and reason silts between the was and tries to be the moments gone, regrets a thousand swarm my mind while mornings wan. ...grasping the tune and the rhythm and the spirit of Léo Ferré’s Avec le Temps.

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I love your, she said I love your poetry, she said, I love the way you turn around phrases and metamorphose words and break rules of grammar and literature and English and dare go strange ways and strange metaphors maybe tried before yet never seen before, by me. I love your poetry, she said, smiling. I love your attention, she said, you always pull me aside away from the rest and the many and the few and you make sure I feel wanted and loved and appreciated for whatever I do and whoever I am and whatever I don’t never forgotten though you could easily have forgotten. I love your attention, she said, smiling. I love your persistence, and insistence, and consistence, she said, I may be there I may not be there you may not know if I am or will be there and you write as if I am the only one in this world and as if I exist beyond doubt waiting beyond doubt enjoying beyond doubt which maybe I do maybe I don’t doubting not for a moment us. I love your persistence, she said, smiling. I do not love you, she said. I do not love you, she said, smiling.

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Idyll, three The smell of freshly cut grass sends delicate tendrils to inspect my nostrils and then, finding them sufficiently safe curls there for the one-two hours sleep of its ephemeral existence. I allow it, I would allow even for longer than that but it politely refuses... this is my life, it yawns, I will live it to its full, you should the same. Yes, I should the same, if not for being human. I count three crows, chatting noisily about the most efficient way to dissect a worm so busy with the arguments that the worm slithers away to safety long before the argument is over. Then they start blaming each other and fly each to its way, I do not worry they will make up, they always make up and visit me again. Loyal crows. Like the loyal stray cat that keeps stealing the food of the other loyal stray cat, I have lots of loyal stray cats. Loyal to me to the neighbors to the other neighbors to the entire neighborhood, they could have made great watch dogs but they are cats. I pour some more dry food in the bowl, enjoy! And leave the stupid pigeons alone, please. And the mice. And even the rats, after all they are not to blame for being born rats, it was not by choice, it was by statistics, by fate, by design, by... you choose it, whatever you choose fine with me. I yawn. That smell left its lazy heart with me. I yawn again. Where are you, right now? What are you thinking right now? What are you doing right now? I start enumerating the possibilities, attaching odds to each and knowing that I am as far from reality as reality is far from my dreams, let’s see: cooking walking writing scratching your left side shopping for shampoo just finishing your john duties just finishing your love making duties just finishing your painting your fingernails an toenails and lips duties laughing, inside or outside, climbing steps, upwards or downwards, imagining me, dressed or naked. Painting. Singing. Swinging. I take a walk under the cherry blossom trees, soon the lilac will blossom soon the dandelion will blossom soon all the billions of seeds floating through the air will die some will not some will wait for a better world, a better summer, a better human to replace me. I will wait for you or maybe not or maybe you’ll come or maybe the maybe’s will metamorphose into certainly’s and all those petals shedding like dandruff from an afflicted treetop will join us in the agony of discovering us of uncovering us of recovering us of departing from each other us. In the beauty of the agony. With the crows with the surviving worms with the stars exploding first in your eyes then in mine then in our joining joined bodies with the stars dying before the death of the universe with the stars dripping upon your hardening nipples and roasting them the red of fire of lava of hell. The cat meows. It’s a new one. Probably heard the rumor. I throw some food its way get up from the reclining chair and enter the house. Close the door. The emptiness so... empty. I sit down, write my thoughts before they forget me, ready to click “send” before clicking “off”. Send. Off.

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Idyll, four I’d like to tell you of those dreams I dreamt before the scythe of dawn Had culled the crown from blades of glass and spread its glitter down the lawn And in between your ooh’s and aah’s at my absurd narrating skills To find asylum in your lap, forgetting all assailing ills. While swallowtails invade my realm, the beauty’s flutter in their wake Besprinkling life’s egressing sprouts with promises of crystal flake, I’d like to smear upon your lips the taste of ripe and rotten fruit Then whistle in between your teeth quixotic figments of my flute. A broken wing reclaims its flight, a broken claw reclaims its might, A broken soul reclaims its hell and begs to set the world alight, I like to say “I’d like to” stuff while gazing through the eye of life The roaring trail of passing years ablaze with whipping tails of strife. I’d like to claim your body’s day and through the night to fill its bed With “might have been”s and “should have dared”s and raw kaleidoscopic red The power of tomorrow’s brawn to quell with ever’s lofty spark And as I saddle my last trek, to pour my light into your dark. I’d like to say “I told you so” after your desperate embrace Breaks bone and heart, unpens my rage and locks me in your boundless grace And when I go to never be and you remember my fierce hold I’d like to think I taught you love that burns your heart in ways untold.

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Painter You’re a painter, paint me your sorrows. Take out buckets, numerous, from the sea of sadness and sort them out by color by viscosity by rage take out some more buckets the sea will not diminish in size, no worry (I know, you don’t worry, you hope) and after you line them by color by viscosity by rage choose your brushes and dip them in the goo and start painting the lumpy hills of my body and the serpentine troughs of my brain wide brushes for my back, shoulders, narrow brushes for my wrinkles, creases, long and soft and lithe brushes for my intimacies... you don’t know them? Discover them. Paint them. Vanquish them, subdue them to your will wait for them to beg mercy allow them to boil away the leftovers of sorrows into the naught of incorporeality prefer tattoos? dip needles and drill my skin prefer graffiti? fill cans and spray my skin prefer comics? stretch my skin between thumb and index and draw a stiff middle finger directed every which way sorrow engulfs you. Then laugh. Laugh! You know, the rictus applying to your mentalis, risorius, buccinator and some thirty odd additional facial muscles and as the tinkle deserts your vocal chords it turns the sea of sadness into clumps of ice that first break and then escape gravitation and then flow to fly around Earth like the suddenly remembered small brothers of the rings of Saturn. Your sea of sadness now a sea of beauty, just because you painted me sad.

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Birth then, when the first light pierced my eye I burst into that primal cry that spawned my years of joy and pain, I swore aloud: never again! eagerly waiting that last breath to spawn my death.

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magic and abyss at the end of magic there is an abyss when magic ends one falls into the abyss I have lived both. magic did not quite end, yet, I did not quite fall into the abyss, yet, looking forward to the second once the first ends.

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Maiden Harken, maiden sweet of lashes, To my mind’s benighted ashes, From an inkwell’s liquid quarry I have dug words wrapped in glory Verses famished with desire For a love encased in fire Tales of yesters laden sorrows Craving sun’s exultant morrows Then... oh gods of bliss cascading Just as life is set to fading You arise within the verses The encroaching mist disperses Tales and words enslaved by beauty Pledge to seal my tour of duty While a hymn to you unfetters In my adytum of letters. * There’s a maiden, there, worlds yonder Time to time she stops to ponder Turns one page, and then another Moments few of utter pother Was it sooth or was it vision Heart to heart on rapt collision?... Then the moment gently fizzles Amidst laundry, pots and swizzles.

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Good Bye, the rhymed Before we say good-byes fifteen And blue invades your tumbling green Ascend into your passions cart To rummage for your misplaced heart           and let it preen Then watch it offer me your hand And lock my hopes into remand When after curtsying abashed To rhymes untold and pledges slashed           it drowns in sand. The bell is cracked now fifteen score The weight of tempest’s clawing lore Has left it with a gaping gash The tinkle with remorse awash           for evermore The ever after’s sole good bye Is crushing stars inside your eye And in the face of trothal death You glean those crumbs of passing breath           that you descry. I guess it’s time to break my flute Arrest my drum disjoint my lute My line of reason to exscind My stanza reave my spark rescind           my verse imbrute All you’ll remember is the gist Conjuring morning’s waking mist While in a corner of your mind Inside an ogre guarded shrine           rots yester’s tryst.

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Good Bye, the rhymeless Do you hear it? The thousand-head strong horse herd thundering its brutish way across the valley... or is it a cattle herd?... or a moose herd?... or a brontosaurus herd plummeting down the mountainside toward me ravaging everything on their passage before they blast through me the way of hot iron through a snowflakes blanket leaving not even splinters of my future writes not even dust not even a stain. The history of writing can be cut with a knife even mid of a sentence mid of a word mid of a punctuation symbol. My history of writing can be cut with a sound zero decibels would suffice. Did suffice.

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Good Bye, the nothing Nothing good about it. Nothing bad either. Nothing.

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