YOGURT CONNECTEDNESS
YOUR MOODS SHADE MY LIFE _______________________44
MADAKET SUNSET ____________________________________45
PAGAN FURY ON THE DANCE FLOOR ___________________46
NOW IS FOREVER _____________________________________ 47
YOU BOTHER MY BALLS ________________________________ 48
CROSS COUNTRY CRUISING _____________________________49
OKAY _______________________________________________ 50
MAYBE YOU WON’T MISS ME __________________________51
THE MORNING FOR LOVE _____________________________52
MALAISE ___________________________________________ 53
USUALLY ___________________________________________55
YOGURT CONNECTEDNESS I _________________________56
YOGURT CONNECTEDNESS II ___________________________57
YOGURT CONNECTEDNESS III __________________________ 58
Yogurt Connectedness
Your Moods Shade My Life
How could you allow me
To make you feel so ashamed?
My reign ends at your touch
And we barely rule ourselves.
———————————————————————————-
Madaket Sunset
It’s so very hard to know
That everything is just the way
It always had to be.
Our barefoot froth walk disturbs the flow
Of waves that will not stay;
The wind must die or flee.
Like the plans we lovingly laid,
In rolling tide, the stranded shells
Adorn the oily beach.
I can’t explain why we were made
So captured by sights and sounds and smells
And love beyond our reach.
—————————————————————————–
Pagan Fury on the Dance Floor
With little resistance, I bend my head
to the side.
I say, “Excuse me.” They snarl,
I snarl
And on my merry way I go.
I become a monster to please;
Wish to suffer and not be guilty.
Luxury is sin when man dies hungry
And I’m starving for me;
Don’t you see?
It’s a kind of revenge,
But when I smile to myself
It’s because I know
All about good jobs and lousy lives.
So, with a little resistance,
I sigh
And slam into passersby.
——————————————————————————————————
Now Is Forever
It’s hard for me to understand
Why a woman needs a man.
You need a man that you can hold?
Confusion and uncertainty get so old,
So fast? But nothing lasts.
The established way doesn’t work today;
We exist and fumble about.
The cities fall down; smell the decay;
Everyone’s moving out.
Moving out to where? Do we dare ask? Go north? Go south?
All I travel on is word of mouth;
I can’t afford to move around.
So if all words fail me from this time forward,
If my speech just babbles from sound to sound
And no meaning be ever known,
Whose fault would it be: whose fault if not my own?
It all has been already said and done
I can not be your only one
And though I seem as calm as can be
I don’t believe what you’re asking of me.
You need to make love to something more
And take it further than you’ve been before?
You need to find a love that can grow
In a lover you can always know?
We’re stranded here; This sad situation
Leaves us lost with no relation
To anything at all. Were so, so small.
Sibling systems fight battles of atoms, ions and light
And we just die. So, I can’t begin to fathom why
A woman like you claims she needs this man.
I have no strength left to understand.
——————————————————————————————————————————-
you bother my balls
make honey make haste
complain and connive, say
“i don’t love you, i love you so much,
why don’t you work for IBM?”
well, i be a man not M for money
and if i sold out it was to you
because i loved you
and if this is poetry, i’m sorry
because i think it’s ugly
to hurt so much for love.
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
cross-country Cruising (Does it Matter That it Was in a Plymouth Fury?)
Let me dye your wagging tongue
So that we might be equal.
I’ll dye it purple;
In purple there is unity.
White and black converge upon it
But it purifies the standard.
Metaphysical mirrors of what I am,
Soggy molds of some perfect image,
Hold no art– just a facade,
Like some bodiless extremity.
Your sorrow is a many faceted creation
And your eyes hold the truth in separation.
So, don’t give me watered down versions
Of what you think I should hear.
I picked you up on the side of the road
And give you a ride toward your destiny.
Can’t you share your journey with me?
The night’s too long for imitation,
For words repeated. I could talk to myself
If my own sorrow was enough to make the miles
Move. The tormenting shadows, bathed in
The morning mist, disappear. You sleep.
Yes, the pleasures of the darkened road
Exemplify the nakedness of reality.
A fly dies on my windshield,
But the sunrise is still beautiful.
——————————————————————————————————————————-
Okay,
I’ll tell you the truth.
What really hurts me
Is how far away
You drift when
The world doesn’t do
What you think it should.
You seem to think
That nothing touches me
The way the pain touches you
And that just puts me, me, me, me (like echo)
Farther from you when passion
Suffers its most trying test,
When love has to be at its strongest
Because it is least felt.
———————————————————————————————————————–
MAYBE YOU WON’T MISS ME
I’m Dying.
My mother, strong and sweet,
Is dying.
My father, quietly tense,
Is dying.
My grandmother, with arthritic smile,
Is dying.
My grandfather, enlarged liver and all,
Is dying.
My other grandmother, tall like poplar,
Is dying.
My sister, who just fell in love,
Is dying.
My Grandfather, who I never knew
Is dead.
I’ll bet someone you know
Is dying
Too.
Maybe someone you didn’t know
Is dead
Also.
I miss them all, completely, already, but…
I’m dying.
—————————————————————————————————————–
THE MORNING FOR LOVE
I open my eyes to your questioning gaze
And lay in the light of a fiery blaze
That looks down upon me and my love
With warmth from even so far above.
What sweet surprise the morning holds!
Emotions warm as the day unfolds
But now is the time for me to know you,
For love to awaken and for me to show you
Truth without deceit.
Surprise!
My receipt
Is a yawn,
In the mourning for love.
——————————————————————————————————————–
MALAISE
Like mayonnaise is transparent
When it sits out a while
And something tasty turns rancid,
Hideous, see us
Making a mountain out of tuna fish.
What’s wrong with that?
You want me to bear the guilt of deceiving you
So that you can be a new sort of
Delicacy, your anger
A calling into the priesthood
Of the human heart?
I hear your prayers,
The sizzling circuitry,
The cries for beauty;
Too much, too little,
It’s all too something.
All right,
I’ll admit it’s too nice
To tie up the world
In a Christmas colored package
With a pretty brown bow,
Hey!
Maybe we can stuff an elephant
Into a bread box and blend
That grey with a wrinkled sky
But those infinite ties,
The language of sound,
The mold and melancholia
Make hasty reverence
To the obvious,
One facet in the diamond
Life of verbal philosophy.
An Appia image in veiled nakedness,
The stolen forest of gossamer
Symbolism can hint at immortality
(And solitary moments
Become traffic jams)
But men still stick their noses
Where they don’t belong
And women pedal along
On their menstrual cycles
And all those Cambodian children
Grow up or die
And poets tie up poems
Into little Christmas packages
And offer their naked bodies
To a science of analysis
Or hide the hemp scarred wrists
Of realization that nothing
Is ever quite enough because….
It’s all all right.
I could say I hate it:
Such a torch,
The anger, the discontent, the scumbled emotion.
In this world of hard core immediacy,
Futureless fantasy,
It’s all all right,
All tied,
All messy and beautiful,
Elephants and dappled sky alike
And sounds of mold growing
On the milk bones the dogs are eating
Because we like white teeth and sweet breath.
——————————————————————————————————————————
What I usually do
Is spend a little time,
Talk and mingle and mess about
Before I slap your face
With the look of my life.
Can you blame me for being frightened?
When you move the air you touch me.
————————————————————————————————————————-
Yogurt Connectedness
What you do is
You take your yogurt
and its brother,
Another batch from the same culture,
Same yogurt culture.
Enclose them both in lead:
Lead boxes or something.
Separate them
As much as you can.
Separate them.
Hook your EEG machines to them both
And feed one of them some milk.
The needle jumps on both batches
Both batches yogurt brothers that they are–
The needle jumps on both batches,
Like they’re both being fed.
——————————————————————————————————————
Yogurt Connectedness II
There’s this stuff in my mouth that hurts me
When I don’t feed it sugar. It lives there
Because I was lazy enough to let it grow wild.
It would have grown wild anyway but not on me,
In me; and now it is a part
Of what I am, which is caught.
I always was but didn’t know it. There’s this stuff
That I am for some short time that keeps me human
And aware of my place, my connected nature.
All my vast deviations, all my play, all my toil
Is stippled with pores of worldly existence and so
Much more than I will ever be able to know or feel.
I always loved milk. I’d drink gallons every week
But never was yogurt because of what I thought I was,
Because of what I wished to be. Yes, I’m connected to me,
also
But that’s not to say
That I’m only connected to me.
I’m a construct from contradictions,
A made thing in a world of made connections.
——————————————————————————————————————-
Yogurt Connectedness III
I don’t dare touch my lovers–
Let the air between us carry
My thoughts alone;
Make my move westward
To keep them from touching me
When I’m not looking.
There’s still so much between us
And still no way to melt skin
Into one human blob.
What’s a single soul,
Like me, doing
So connected–
When freedom’s ideal
Is a wealth of solitude
In this a poverty of aloneness?
Feed my lover and you
Feed me.
Touch my lover and you
Touch me.
Feed my lover and you.
Touch my lover and you.
Touch me. Feed me.