marriage poem #1

When the purpleblack night grows soft,

blends its own sweet Billie Holliday tune

with the dark morning I shed my shirt,

my pants, slide in naked next to you

and feel the sweet soft ache

in my shoulders, in my legs, my chest.

I touch your tickling hand,

fingers sprawled open on the bed,

limp with sleep yet opening, closing,

the bitten nails tiny,

your breaths regular with a quiet cat-snore.

When I wake in the later morning

you will be on my chest there, there

in the place you love to set your head,

and perhaps, because we are married now,

the air will collapse or be in a state of collapse

under the weight of my many night-time farts,

and things won't get too terribly sappy.

But you will still love me, even then.

With morose laughter, at times, and moaning

at my morning murmurs and the awful

smell. Pulling the sheets up once more,

twice more, I may say, will say,

Welcome to marriage love. Welcome.

sunday school fragment

The sundayschool felt-board

lives within us:

adam and eve naked

close to each other

but rather androgynous.

Oh aint they got fun.

question

Are poems that don't make sense in and of themselves making any sense of the world? My intuition is yes - maybe. What do you think? Is there a possibility for confusion to result in non-confusion? Or at least some comfort in it?

exfoliation

Out of spiced spiked cider and

spliced veins

we got chagrin, we got

coriander,

we got worn out

brown couch
and 18 rainbow-covered pandas

for slept there and slept there,

slept there.

Faith's public swimming pool exfoliates

with the skin

of flacid emigrants--

at least it's closed on weekends.

Lay your sleepy head dear

here and here and here. 

mashed potato clouds

Clouds are piling up in the west,

huge mashed-potato trainwreck pileups,

piling up and greying faster than my father.

Thunderheading east

over Olympics tall, cold and wet,

mucking up all our sunshine

raining grey gravy from the sky.

Measure out thy worst, O great potato peeler!

I fear ye not.

not-sonnet of jimminy cockroach

Crawling in my walls the cockroaches go

hithering thither, discussing the weather

as we all do: hello Jimminy Cockroach,

eaten the poison, or simply just shallow

in all your hopes: I will not touch the stuff

in the trap, mr mouse: am I, nothing yellow

for me, not for me. Mr. Roach, God is, how does 

he doing? Does he stimulate your marrow?

Tomorrow I will arise and fry eggs.

Throw strips of bacon at the corner where meets my

pillow walls. You may fight the open mouths of ants

and other cut creatures with mandibles,

with Mr Roach, for the chewable death,

Mr Roach, always, with his ever open mouth.

english professorisms

A rolling pillar of half-tone smoke

half-tone grey in the tonnage

of the heavy effacing self,

heavy in the legs and shoulders,

I came crawling out of the fetor of a weasel:

I, I roared a sickness inside

and out: thunderheads piled

like poisonous sky-stone within me,

poised above my white-hot heat-death:

boiling oil, all I am is boiling oil,

heavy in the porkbelly and coinage,

potted basil plants with placid bookish

rage, thrown red clay and feathers

out into the yard, all the potshards

and lefty goatsherds to gather there

a third world mine own, a sandpainting

for my cross, a mother for my Christ,

a holy but whorish version of Mary Godmother
for you the students, 

the Christ-child born half-Jew and half-Roman

in the alphabet stew; 

no matter: we are in this soup together

now drinking the susurrant milk

of our manicultured fathermothereraser