think about this day
outside offices
nearly
your toes might
cauterize
in
tough, rotten
dirt

science like every publication
prints

no madness, straight-faced
out to harden.

I was feeling really ****** and low,
coming to from an affair that bored me.
Frankly, I was rut down
in a mind that all ladies had bored me,
and I happened into this woman with a large brain
covered in a drunken and sly confidence
mixed
beer, shots, smokes, violins and
billiard *****.
We flirted a while in such an unusual mansion
owned by a millionaire racist
who we all later came to adore
and drank his Polish ***** in welcomed shots
by the dozens
as I (feeling ****** and low)
was coming out of my rut that women are a bore,
I watched her shoot pool trying to relax my wanton urges
and the thing that really helped
was this very long silence between flirts
while we traded the stick
and I could plan my next geometric move
as haphazard as the geometry of my brains.
We were clever,
so clever, and cool, that
we didn't know we didn't know
and hardly knew that we didn't know
that in a few short hours we'd be hopelessly
desperately undying linked
in a nicely confusing and endlessly evolving
affair of our own that would
go on for years--
offending her younger brother at parties
running drunken through the streets of Denver
rocking to sleep in a boat in San Diego
staring at geysers in Iceland
and mumbling Viking songs in Stockholm--
so much so that everyone
turned lovers around us
and it goes on and on
and the years passed and
it all seemed like a match strike
so quick and delicate
but so emblazoned and fierce
that the wood might snap or the sulfur degrade
or the flame stabilize and flicker
but the lighting fluid seems endless too
and she's still evolving to burn
even hotter
and I stopped believing that women are boring
or at least there's hope for the rest of them.

"Some say calamity
and some catastrophe
is beauty."
Some think rolling
hills, hay, joints–
madness in the head,
in bed, on paper and canvas–
soothes our souls
but our soles wander
and we're trainers
following the egos
of Hollywood and Penguin,
Netflix and Dover.
I say your beauty,
encompassing calamity
and catastrophe,
and never letting less
beget sad days,
sends me out,
spurs me to transact,
create, build, fail,
love.
I think running
alongside your stride,
fingers down your back,
scripts about our language,
reigns me in,
slows my transience,
comforts me to breathe,
decompress, heal,
care.
We, the ebb of calamity,
the flow of catastrophe,
are bound.

Pull me into you.
Let your waves crash over me –
your currents push me deeper.
Grip my by my thighs and let me wade into you.
**** my fluids with your salt tongue.
Let me float inside your cove and sleep next to the roll of your shoreline.
Let your spray permeate my beard, so I smell you everywhere,
taste you when I lick my lips
and yearn for me when you meet rockier tides.
I am land, locked and solid.
And, you are my ocean.

The college kids still pump out poems;
my heroes haven't published a book in years.
The academics are moving to visual arts
kerning letters on the page, adding artist statements.

Fuego en juventud. Sabiduría en viejo.

Passion fades with age, I suppose. A symptom of
the cult of happiness.

And I love to read poems
from twenty-somethings who just want to get ******.
I picture my red pen exciting them as I destroy
their fine-tuned metaphors, all muddled with conflicting allusion,
as if juxtaposition alone adds meaning.

In school, it was all Cezanne and hydrogen jukebox birdsongs,
and equally interesting but useless adjective strings.
The academics are doing the same, but with form.
It bores us, don't they know?

Fuego en juventud. Sabiduría en viejo.

**** these kids for having such easy means to publication.
I read their journals, their magazines, their "editions"
online, vivid, vomiting color and opinion.

I long for publishing classified ads and
scribbled chalk portraits of the women I loved
and the twenty-somethings who just wanted to get ******,
and reflections of how I never mastered either craft.

I long to rub the ink off newsprint in my fingers,
smudge the words on the page and ***** my hands,
watch the chalk run into the red brick
during ten-minute monsoons, smell the library's adobe,
light a cigarette and remember that the stacks are filled
with ages of greater work than these ******* kids...
and these ******* academics.

Greater than me.

You exist in this world and your sheer impossibility is comfort. On this speck of dust, you move and shake me. If the potential to rearrange a hundred books is greater than there are atoms in the universe, how lucky are we that you find your way into my bed, that I kiss you while we talk to trees, that you love me and I love you? And no manner of oceans – little blue streaks on a teensy blue marble on the edge of tiny spinning cloud – can squelch us. In a world where you are possible, my love, nothing can go wrong for us.

We are possibility.
Nothing undone:
the red key swung,
the pins aligned.
     Spite and Malice -
you won in Burque;
in Buffalo, in April,
I'll be writing in coffee shops.

Cage made fake acrostics
and clamoured more than us.
He watered himself in blenders
tacked his piano like stigmata.

But really, he just put the right letter
on the correct line (if he
ever wrote a line),
but our house was a mess
of books and skulls
and everywhere you looked
too perfect a nest,

so we tore ourselves apart.
Why don't we stop?
Someone will spend graduate school
anthologizing our correspondence,
analyzing the details we missed,
et al., hic et nunc.

The girls dancing in Budapest
and the guys making passes at you in the snow
reduce us to baser instincts
by counting how we
could, might, tentatively
hurt again
on our second-class driver's test.

Fortunately, I am with you
when you look at computer screens
and you're with me at the bar
when television commercials
show off their bras and the beer hits
harder than libretto
and snus drips down the candle wax
making arcs like the Scott Monument.

The imperfection is bliss,
the knots loosen and move
up our spines. We'll soak
the tub and swell
our glands with menthe
and tumble
     further down the mud,
until we either love or ****
what makes us whole.