Semi-colons

That savagely indifferent nap – as void of caring what was going on

beyond you as a Jersey dairy cow would be to earthquakes in Nepal;

the sexual shenanigans you planned

and only partly carried out;

the range of soft involuntary sound you found

while talking to a friend in pain;

the gain of drawing, framing, labeling, enabling your “art”

you barely managed to sustain – snarling at it like a rabid dog;

that yet-another-piece-of-pepperoni-sausage-pizza

you just slaughtered like a hog;

how you watered thought with terror and hilarity all day – killing,

marrying, ignoring and imploring all the lovely awful static in the way;

the semi-colons linking almost everything.

You’re damned if you won’t sing.









.

Party Talk

You try to make the points

you’ve stored in stories

you can tell at parties

while a pet is on your lap:

logic is reflexive and insidious –

intention seeps into your smallest

talk – desperately deductive –

underneath a tone you

try to make seductive.

Your social apparatus pleads

and begs. The pet voluptuously

drapes across your legs.









 .

Body Parts

Body parts

are oddities in art.

Art does not require them,

but oh, how we desire them.

.

Wishful Thinking

Every thought is wishful. Every word’s a dishful

of the slinking and the slippery: no spoon can spoon it up:

but oh, its swoon – its glistening effects! Somehow,

in listening, we catch – detect -- a spill of overtone,

an iridescent whisper of relief: engendering the wild belief

that this time, this time – it will come. Blinking, we grab

fistfuls of its dare, and maybe aren’t anywhere – but there –

the wishful thinking simmers, hangs suspended --

teasing spirit! -- glimmers, not so distant, in our earthly air.

.

Besotted

Ah, to be beside yourself –

bestride the glories of a brimming

love, too fresh, too unencumbered,

too ridiculously succulent

to keep your lips from licking it –

or wanting to – the shunting  

to and fro of your besotted heart

between its secret stories

and the rash audacities of flesh,

its flush, its cadences, its blooming

heat, sweet radiance of private

sweat you almost smell –

oh no, oh yes, the sweat you smell,

the tongue you’d put to it – the spell –

the unimaginable possibility of hell. 









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