The Workshop

Lush


Baby, maybe
you ought
to drop
the violin,

maybe your hands
should wrap themselves around
the red and green
wreath

on your brow,
pluck the plump
juicy

balls of poison
bowing its stems
by drawing purple

lines about your
neck,
swallow
and regret

for only a moment -- then maybe
those holly sapphires glowing
Star-of-Bethlehem-like
on your thick brow

has, at last, turned you,
Santo Niño, man,
and I

your violin case,
your crown,

woman.



Seven


Seven means the chariot
on which a triumphant prince
rides into his city, wets
the faces of the women with
tears -- the men who march behind
look around with hungry eyes
while the bellend blindly smiles.
 
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Chorus


Some women in Athens conspired, long ago,
to seize for themselves the vote.
"The Deme of Envy" the men called their group,
although, as a joke, they were heard.
And when the white stones for their speech came up short,
the men continued to laugh
by stripping them, holding their dresses for caulk
on triremes for Sicily bound.
 
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Isaac


What new sayings can I make,
son of a father and father of a son
more visionary than I could ever be,
to say what it felt, hung between manhood
and childhood, strung like a beast,

Each and every breath I take
you are collecting,


the silver of his knife sparkling all glad,
greedy to be stained, like a bud before bees,
the bush to our left all burned out,
the tent to our right barely upright,

Limit every second left
'til I'm off balance


then peeping tom, wolf in lamb's clothing,
watching from nearby -- he and I were blind --
we were startled -- wasted time --

I would die for you --
please, see it through.
 
Sewer


The lizardmen built our modest party basement
at a crossroads: all the city's toilet
pipes drain here. I can't stand the smell.
I'd rather die than go back

to Facebook, Twitter, and the like.
Even if friends and readables frequent,
the minty freshness of community
cannot overcome, distant relatives

who don't know how to live
in an age where the lies won't stop
at the edges of towns or by points of crowns

flush their diapers full
of shit and shame, senility's costume,
down the drains, clogging pipes to burst.
 
A Long Week


You struck a well
and had your fill
of rage. Disgust
blew like a dry

east wind. You wished
for water, got
a block of ice.

Cum dribbled out
like typhus from
the maws of lice.

Then your baby died.
Why do you care?
Your momentous
is the world's mundane.
 
My Many Sexual Conquests


If there's one thing I know best,
it's sex. How many women have I banged?
Not many, but not one
left disappointed. I call it conquest
when I call
before I come.
And I never come.
 
"In a suburbia...."


In a suburbia of firsts,
my room's on a second
floor. Its window faces west.
Evenings I climb

down stairs my parents
are too old to climb, the sun burns
through even the thickest

curtain as it descends,
its blinding heat a sea
swallowing the east.

The world ends
everywhere
for everyone: the old
and the unproven.
 
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The Purple Rose of Cairo


1
Here we have another separation.
I'm flying home to Hollywood while you're stuck
divorced and desolate in the theatre
watching over and over Fred Astaire
carried by Ginger Rogers' charm to heaven.
Last year I featured in a fancier flick,
Death Takes a Holiday. Not your kind of picture.
"There are only three games: love, money, and war."

2
Tell me what war
a woman of our time should fight
other than a thankless job
or a family that broke apart
shortly after the honeymoon.

To say you failed by some fatal flaw
would be a thoughtless, pointless gesture.
After all, we're in the same boat:
evenings you hustle with glitz and glamour
while I work a diner by day.

How did I catch your other-you's eye
anyway? I'm nothing.

3
Don't be obtuse, you're Mia Farrow:
the director is your partner.

4
"I wish that we may never meet
when you are less beautiful, and I must be less kind."
I caught it, alright.

I suppose all words on the subject have this strange way
of stumbling back to cliché. "Love is a kind
of madness, love is blind."

If you say I'm an actress on a screen,
fine by me. I'd think you were too kind
if I wasn't blind.

I suppose we were always actor and actress,
our story all a creature of the screen.
The screen that fed us, entertained us--- kept us blind.

5
And Fredric March, in a booming voice, replied,
"What could terror mean to me, who has nothing to fear?"
 
I have a backlog!


Modern Love


Death is only a step
away from love.
What an obtuse course to take,
to do anything for love,
that pale and fickle emotion
tethered to bottomless reference
or that mad stream of thoughts
roaring in miserable montage
through rifts in the stricken mind
or something more objective---
nature's course, a fact of life---
even something sacred.

An ambivalent gaze,
a rare yet irresistible smile,
and adornments of the sort
that breathe as you breathe,
that curl up as you curl up:
in the night, on the screen, there is glamor
where you are dressed to sleep,
where your eyes are half-shut
and your whispered words run
like tender touches, buttons pressed.
In the night, there is more truth
to our imagined anecdotes
and half-drunk intimations
on thoughtless, pointless things
than to the walls and shelves and desk
the sun illuminates
as it rises,
as it warms the cold air.

Death is only a step
away from the screen,
and a life lived
is still a life,
a love felt
still a love.
 
Over It


The night before we flew for Singapore,
I feared those days that lurked beyond the dawn,
those four days of silence. I knew they'd feel like forty.
What temptations would the devil bring
in your absence? and would I stumble?

But days passed by like hours
passed by like minutes, while the desert
proves a jungle. See, see, see,
sang a hanging parrot, and so flew
the elusive rufous hornbill:

it was just past noon. I was hungry and alone,
a fatal rock in the heart of a stream of tourists,
while the sea waited for all of us
just beyond the birdhouse.
 
Oceans---- rise-
to swallow-- lines,
to widen--- the gap
between us.-----
 
Okay, these few next poems were posted in discord. But gosh darn it I lost the drafting notes, which makes me sad!


Gentleman's Pastoral


Let's steal ourselves a patch of wood
then pluck up pinkish buds and clumps of green
between our legs, beside those roots, below
those all-beclouding arms above and blow
loose leaves, grains, flecks of dirt, and mites
too small to see
into each other's lips. Let's peel
some bark from birches, braid some rope,
then tie together twigs and build
two seats, a table, and a wicker bed
we'll wrap around an olive trunk
whose cousins we'll uproot.
Where now a laurel gazes at the sky,
we'll floor with stone
and pile ourselves a pyre. Let's civilize
our vagrants' paradise
with what pastorals often overlook:
four walls to keep the beasts away, a roof
that leaks whenever showers bloom to storms --
and love subdued.
 
This one's a very specific insult, so it's of little value unless y'all follow a certain discord chat xD

This golden wit so quaint
it rains like piss, the pot
cannot contain:
it shatters at the slightest drop.
But then, it is a pot:
it's made of slop.
 
Artist's Study


There's peace outside my window, peace and sunlight.
Wasp wings flutter. Ravens roost on the leafless
tree in the nearby distance, caw, then fly away
as a west wind blows against the glass

past rusted roofs and concrete walls of houses,
churches, malls that fill
the ever-growing distance. Out there is peace---

here, where the air is still
to the point of choking, where the sheets
stink of sleepless sweat
and stacked books gather dust and webs,

life narrows. Death is imminent.
Love is desperate.
The night is faithful, the concrete just.
 
Words that ring "save me", flawless yet hollow:
man you need treatment, not boy go wallow.
Sunlight is free, where love has a price:
a job in this market, no need to play nice.

Girl I'm not tender, that's all I've got:
I treat you special's not much of a lot.
An eloquent loser who brawls with his brain:
I'll wait for your answer, you'll leave me in pain.

I've got my troubles, you've surely got yours:
"baggage" is just politesse for "divorce".
But you are no weed I'll pluck from the plot:
it's clear you're a flower, a forget-me-not.

It's clear I'm a bud, I'm blue and I'm closed:
I'm you in manskin, manheart, and manclothes.
Words that ring "save me" ring "I can be saved":
what better to pleasure with than your own grave?
 
A Cycle

(Not really composed as a cycle, but I think it could be read as a whole. They were at least written in quick succession, although I have neither record nor recollection of what order precisely.)


Amour


It's hard to wipe my face clean
of this smug smile when you're on
and typing, you stumble over words
like I trip over feelings. It's hard

to shower for more than a minute
when I reply and you're still on
and my phone sits next to the flush
eager to shake. It's hard to clip

my nails, it's hard to shave, to sleep
at an early time of night and make my bed
next afternoon, to fry two eggs
to top my cereal bowl. Maybe I need

the military.
Maybe I need an alarm.
Maybe I need you beside me
to prod me awake, to nag me to bathe,

to wait with a plate
as I cook us a proper breakfast
of eggs, alright, and bacon,
of beans on toast and strawberry compote.


Arroz


Red onions tramped by the edge of a cleaver,
sauteed, then stewed in a pot set to simmer
with butter, tomatoes, peppers, and wine,
saffron, chorizo, chicken, and rice:

tears for a potion that will finish brewing
too late, you will step out to witness her drink with
her mate and his mates, the nail to your coffin.
A hellebore tended with patience is poison.


Amaretto


All hours betray.
This morning sun
burns you away
like present time
blinds, while the moonlight
through the curtain spotlights
the blank half of my bed
that remembers your body
though you've yet to lie here,
though you lie here every night.
 
A thousand minor cuts for every kiss
ungiven, every loving word
unspoken, I'd prefer
over the never-closing wound
that is your prolonged absence.
 
2020


Add a day to the month of purification
to scrub away the skin,
pinking red mingling gold
to white of bone.
A dance I miss: I've found a job
and words and words I cannot say
all's crap out here, I have a room
and bed and internet. I am alive. I watch the sun
arc above rooftops and treetops bare
into the western sea,
starlings and crows and gold eyed mynas
rain their white flood like ash, like viruses,
and I am alone, Mark and his shrouded corpse,
the plebs slaughter Cinna, Lucan's April bath.