This is the day I shall be wed;
As I wait my thoughts are dead.
They lie stretched on the rack of love,
Embalmed like so many dirt-filled gloves.
And each stiff finger remembers
Nothing of the cold black embers
It once caressed with so much care,
As if each branch would lead somewhere.
But now the fingers of every thought
Cannot remember what they sought.

This is the day I shall be wed;
From my heart all fears have fled.
My heart alone is alive today,
A living, beating lump of clay;
Sustaining life with every pulse,
Incapable of feeling false.
Doubt cast out from the heart of life,
The tell-tail heart that found my wife.
I love her though my thoughts are still,
And when I say "I do," I will.

He stirs,
discerns a thought and
flinches,
wrenches to see
the clock-
face

throbs
with gaping charges --
he crumples,
shivers,
swears
beneath a breath.

Then,
in time,
he concedes his plight,
sheds his cover,
and ventures into a universe
of blindness and numbness and
music

resounds
with singing forces --
and he rests there
and beholds
the harmony

fades
into the noise
of missing class.

The lawyer casts an artificial worm
along the bank of a City Park lagoon
as the sun goes down upon another day
of casting among digests and reporters
for cases to support a point of law,
and bounces the bait among submerged cover
until the unmistakable tap transmits
through her bones the signal to set the hook

and before she can think it reflex sets hard
as lawyer and fish struggle in shock against
each other, the bass running with the line,
the lawyer lost for the moment in the trial
of instinct versus passion, reason, tech,
the triumph of one predator’s success.

Dare to handle fire and burn --
It will not run away.
Dare to grasp it, it will turn
To meet you and to play.

Pet the pretty, sensuous cat;
She purrs as you approach.
As your hand descends to pat --
Claws repel your broach.

When you invade another's space,
Expecting to be loved,
Watch your back -- it's not the face
In which the knife is shoved.

Love is in the smoke
of this motel room,
never in the air.

Even the lewd life-
like performances
on the screen, where johns

turn for role models,
are cabled in through
insulated wires.

She makes a point of
smoking cigarettes
before and after

every breathless trick --
to pollute the air.
Johns never object.

I notice trees
along the highway and beyond,
tempted as I drive
to ponder each design,
to estimate its weight
in life’s green scheme,

but each lone specimen
evades me as I speed
toward unknown peripheries
of darker and darker groves
and forests and jungles,
implicating blackness
in the blur of green until,
impatiently,
I change the station
and watch the road.

        It’s just a short cut and nothing but.
        It’s nothing but a short cut.

In the tangled humps
of exposed roots I walk
among in preference to the flat
meander of concrete sidewalks,
no subtle clues
of something to do with souls
impress me now,
no metaphoric mazes come to mind
to puzzle me with riddles
of the meaning of roots,
nor do ideas or images
or intimations of immortality
surprise me with the force of things
unknown or new.

I walk among the tangled roots
only because the way is straight
and short.

        It’s just a short cut and nothing but.
        It's nothing but a short cut.

It all looked unfamiliar
and felt the same,
as if a veil had dropped
or had been raised.

Inside utter darkness
brightly shone
on rows of blank spaces
and beds of bone.

With so much of nothing
everywhere,
an air of emptiness
filled the air.

He peeked out through the mouth
(it had no eyes),
but shrinking at the sight
of two skies,

he stumbled back inside
and slept once more,
dreaming he was alive,
forevermore.