They sat together like that, two old-***** birds
on the edge of a wishing well,
wondering when the other would fall asleep on all the
years of park bench they had known as a four-armed
entity, wrapped in ice creams and bed sheets.

They sat together, huddled against the earth for an hour,
in the confines of love and death.

The wind tore branches from the mother in the hospital, in death, kissing her child goodbye.

The wind gave the hawk speed in catching the field mouse.

The mouse sang no praise to God in his atheism.
The hawk thought God good.
The mother wanted to see her child again.

There is a way that love works in my heart
That can’t be counted on wristwatches held by dead old white men
Burying each other with fleeting gestures of hello and goodbye.

There is a way love works in my heart that is more honest than a
Rainbow after the soft way teardrops fall from God on so imperfect a
Creation of clay and stone that one could only call it perfect for its
Oddities of dying men, futile in their searches to live forever.

There is a way that a woman leaves a room that spoils me more than
The dead ever could. It’s being so alone in a whitewashed room, staring
At a corner, wondering who will love the sinner with his dunce cap and
*****, torn shoes?

There is a way that I look at a woman and feel the tears of God manifest
In my heart. It is sexless and noiseless, but holds a mirror to my face and says
This is who you love more than you. Not the vanity of rivers, but the tear that
Comes when no one is watching me watch her. I will now fall into her and drown,
My final performing act.

There is a way a bird sings so carefully in the rhythm of time, that doesn’t give a lick
About me or how beautiful I think he sings.  He sings simply because
There is a voice inside him and a swelling to sing, as nature warrants. I, too, sing,
But for others to hear. How shameful am I?
Maybe he sings for a lover? I don’t know.
Maybe we both sing for a lover to hear?
Lyrics were the inventions of lovers who
Realized words were not enough.

There is a way she walks down a flight of stairs that make
Her calf muscles tighten and loosen like all the days have done.
Her yellow dress falls around her upper thighs
And I wonder how many other strange, lonely souls see
Her this way and dream of salvation in the fat pink lip I would
Bite a little if she challenged me with her eyes and we
Kissed.  

There is a way I close my eyes at night and wonder if I will
Awake one more time. Or will I be eaten by the blackness of space,
Forever one lone astronaut going nowhere and everywhere, but no longer
Confined to time. How will I get back to her and kiss her and tell her
I love you?

So much depends on manners, and when one dies, and manners
Don’t matter, so much depends on death.
How will I get back to you after death?

is littered with
     butterflies
pollinating

living things
         at ten o’clock

in the morning
as I

forget to buy
cigarettes on my morning

drive down the boulevards
littered with flowers
         and
antique  dreams

that still haunt like
     forgotten mothers

who sing quiet songs
that live on the

edge of our childhood
           memories

There was an old man
Who sat on a park bench for years
And nobody noticed
And the seasons changed
Like they often had

And still he sat

Unspoken  for

Nobody even knew he was there
Which is the same as not being there

But not to him
he knew he was there

Nobody

Stopped to ask him
If he had a wife that died
Or if he had caught the game last night

People just kept on
Passing

And the seasons

Kept on changing

And one day
He just simply wasn’t there

And nobody noticed or cared

It wasn’t even sad
Because
It was spring

being a world and not being in one is a hard scale to balance,
because balance is a ghost sniffing butterflies
that have once flown but are now pinned under glass windows,
still in the act of trying to fly, maybe through time, but probably not,
for the flowers still need pollinated, but this is their charge, to be in hell pinned
to a board while the ******* flowers need pollinating errr….

Who will pollinate these flowers? asked the lady.
Me, said the ghost

But only in a way that the past makes of me, said the ghost

You’re a gas, said the lady.

The hermit-monk sat smoking.        the young boy,
having ridden long from the West     his spurs and armor
glistening the eyes of harems in Damascus     driving the
untouchables crazy near New Delhi     catching Guinevere    
naked, bathing in the Ohio (She blew him a kiss that ended
his world)    having conquered Eve    slain Lilith beneath the sheets of blue skies and seas
laid waste to Leviathan in a bar one night (he remembered
her naked scales,  peeling back each one until he uncovered the pink skin)
he snuck Helen from Troy  to see her golden locks blow over her *******
in the summer time,

but the egg of the world he was walking on would
not accept him entrance, and to **** the dirt sounded unthinkable
and got Uranus castrated,
so that was out

in Brittany, long a year had passed before the death of our  lord and our other king,

the cup would not accept his lips, and the lovely boy whom the cup accepted
first would not accept his lips either, and anyway, he crumbled up in ash flakes
and died, being carried to heaven  by the angels one night: his son dead, his king dead, and
the lord, there were no men to love and yet he remained the ghost of the night,
his blood-soaked (and blood-thirsty) sword slaying water-dragons for a time, the courage of defeat defied him
and would not put him to bed with his king and lord, so he wandered until death
would claim him, but it refused him, for a man without purpose does not die in
flesh but in soul

the hermit-monk with his great eyebrows and one eye sat staring, dirtily rolling cigarettes
his bath robe, bleached pink with holes        It was my day off, he said, turning over Lancelot with
his wise eye and wise tooth       What brings you this noon, when the cranes fly without love,
and the crows fly without ‘why?’

I love a woman who haunts me, he replied
Though that is long gone by
and for now and all time
she haunts me at night.
In the pale moon light
her ghosts come in shade
to bury me alive— in the living air.
Sometimes four or five images of her at a time.
She lives on though she dies.
She carries me through the night,
a golden calf with blond-ash hair.
We fly! Oh, how we fly! She refuses
to drop me and let me die
when we fly, fly, fly!
The perfect angel of death.
The death muse.
She has never been born, and she will
not die in my mind. She has never lived at all
so she cannot be killed and never will.
I want to die. I want to die. I cannot.
She is a perfect angel and no one can
be her.

the hermit-monk replied with his one blind eye     opening up his one
black patch, he showed the young man a hole—
a hole that was an abyss—
an abyss that was a heart—
a heart that was a kiss—
a kiss between two lovers that never
was    and   never
           were

And will it never be? asked the young man

Desire never is. Love never was in the heart of man. Maybe to conquer
her mountains for a time, that is what love is. Maybe it was to plant
your flag in her valley. To roll your lips over that spine and hips of
the earth. But time will fix you. Make you nothing more than the ghost you
seek—
the ghost that never is,
and so shall you never be.

and for a time, he rode on with this in mind, knowing to lie down and die
is what he had to do, but still she came at night, cloaked in white,
holding two flowers in each hand,
one a daisy of continuous clocks, the other,
not quite a rose and nothing like a rose
but what one might think a rose
around her head were thorns, like the thorns of Jesus Christ,
she held out her hand for a time, wanting him to come to her in the night
strip himself of his armor, so she could love him and **** him within a time

she wore the vessel of the lord around her neck, a gold chain held it,
wrapped it like a tube tied       in it was wine      in the wine was blood
the blood of a child        the child had been given to a mother by God
but God took that child and said, never mind.
that mother cried for she didn’t care about matters of state, or lenders in a
temple     she loved that child, and that child died, being crucified by the world—
a man taking the sacrifice of a woman for the world

in this vision Lancelot cried      God’s worst holy man       God’s best k(night).
and every night, pressed against her dead breast, he would cry,

I want to die! I want to die!

Not yet, she would reply.
Not yet, she would reply.

but in his heart he knew she meant, not ever
for she was his mind     they belonged together—
as ghosts stalking the night, unable to die for the lord

This was his charge.

and some say at night, in the hither lands he rides
undead, undying, forever searching for the girl in his mind,
who haunts his nights with dreams of sleep, but still he awakes
every morning,
alive, unrested , undead