A Monday Poem
I always forget:
Is today the first day of this week,
Or is this week the first week of today?

This subtle reordering reminds me that structures we place on pedestals
And signify through complex rituals
Are banal and meaningless
As traveling for some unknown, still, despised enterprise

And yet:
To ignore the difference between a month, a May
Or more particularly, a week and day
Is offensive,
Punishable, even, if maintained
By being made redundant at a job we hate
In the same way days become weeks
--Or was it the other way?—
We slowly fall into line

Our whole civilization is founded on such times
Delineation between yours and mines
Months and seasons, seasons climes
Climes and seasons, suns and shines
Generations and centuries,
Januaries and Februaries

We maintain our separation
And produce indoctrination
With the idea that Monday is a rhyme
Which ends with giving more than half your time
To the owner who insists
With pleated pants and flinching fists
The difference between week and day
Is a year’s labor
Handing out stock animal’s salaries
To the ones who know the difference between
Week and day.

I was fading out
Searching for the horizon
Fading on... To the wind
My sheets carried ideas,
my sheets restricted flesh to flies
Eyes sailed... Did my bed
On...                 My tears
Four years... Toes tingling with numbness
Held sky... Inside this room
And that
of prior walls dooring
to that dock
I waft... Away
I waft...
After the fade
I will waft

On the Mediterranean coast of Africa
I waft
with the seeds of a Phoenician queen
in my corpuscule
her sweet fruit
being eaten
by your
heavy tongue
perverse, Moloch sun.

Today, I watched a heavy insect of
indeterminable species
repeatedly slam into the wide picture windows
of my college library’s
third story as I read a book
analyzing one poem
Teilhard de Chardin wrote
after carrying casualties
on a stretcher
all day
from a war for which no name is presented
to me.

It is inferred de Chardin's time tells of world wars,
yet his poem deals with virginity
and mothers
although of each he was in just one.

Resistance to our ****** urges
and the potency resistance drains
was compared to
minute prosperity provided by the pursuit
of retaining 'innocence'.

The book was named "Eternal Feminine"
and its author's argument functioned
as a double victory for remittance
to a cloud kingdom
and shivering loneliness
seen through invisible barriers
on earth.

Hooray!

He seemed to be
rationalizing the struggle
with sickly pleasure
from repetition of denial.

But I lost interest in his foolish, war-time words.

Watching the flying thing reverse directly,
then continuously speeding ahead
into various windows
which were thought to be bare air,
confused and jolting with every attempt
and frantically circling in my sight,
I was led to thinking of a
demolition derby
at a fairground to which
my parents brought me
each year
of childhood
in the Autumn.

I watched, fascinated
machines stave-off
self-induced decimation
until the very last collision, after which
their motive force removed itself
rushing off to pilot
some variant of bumbling insects
and stretchers
in the form of French theological poets
throughout the past
carrying bodies
into the hands of a college student
backing up determinately
to burst through, toward the one who bares
no sons, who may become warriors
or demagogues.

This kind, secular Hannah
crosses my vision
walks out
beyond frames and doors,
clothes flowing with her
body, like a
sweet corona
sweltering with unseen heat
the fading horizon
of my day.

He sees her reflection on the moon.

Now he may not see space’s vacuous expanse
while
she may not be able to touch time’s clear fabric,
although they each feel
glass’s frozen liquidity
in silence.

Each
continuously strikes their head
against motion’s transparent barriers
with force
stubbornly flapping
into matter
with passion
and wings pulsating
toward a new direction
which does not seal them off
to the outside
of a building
in which they would be swatted,
punished for what they are.

Then the moment passed
and the sun’s thousand year combustion
had reached my neck
and penetrated matter
to massage me;

for eight and a half minutes
it travelled
toward a shadow I pushed
across the table
when the sun suddenly was helpless
to tell me where I ended,
which windows I flew through.

I was on top
de Chardin’s stretcher
as he looked at me to say I shouldn’t
charge in that way,
but I fell down
when he let go
or he evaporated
when I doubted he had lived.

Pressing my cheek against the glass
I reversed my propulsion
like the flown insect
and sounded again
my body's tinging
reverberation
on every surface.

Anne drew in a drag of thick, suede cigarette smoke
she turned to her lover on the pillow,
pivoting her jaw to face him
and muttered:
“I miss the way you used to
spank me, loudly proclaiming your passion
for my inner thigh and rubbing my ****
with your tongue.
I haven’t been happy
in a very long while. I sit here, each night,
waiting for you to tell me that I love you
but you hold it in, like a drag of thick, suede
cigarette smoke.”

Andrew turned to Anne and smiled broadly, saying:
“I’ve loved you since the moment I set eyes upon
you. I caught a glance of you gleaming in the moonlight
after we left the disco in separate cars, friends
surrounding everyone.
I told you then to call me, and you didn’t. But
I waited three days until I found you
at the coffee shop, alone, and said ‘hello’.”

Each sighed and dropped the pretense of knowing
what the other was seeing.
Then, they turned toward opposite directions and slowly fell
into themselves

Everyone has an idea
what music is
to them.
Still, with knobs tuning in
to different concerts within
variegated steel vehicles
that drive toward chagrining
clock radios on Sunday's dresser inside
disavowed hotel rooms with flashing, red
lights and sound
reminding us all
where we are—what for
a time we hold to be real.
But all concepts from shaking heads
forming to join a choir that sings
a hymn to 'here' and flashes,
in the face of fear
a light from stars beginning with one
collision, across time then
claps its hands in unison
with 'now'

Someone’s white golf ball
lies, abandoned
between moist grass and
desolate wanderers through
municipal courses
during Evening on
Father’s Day. Holding my pin, my quill
Frantically stitching point de capitons
between myself and the calm, fair way
I walk with conviction
alone, among firing-
flies toward all fathers
tonight, as swathing sprinklers gush, displacing
***** in-utero, past fences protecting
femme fatales whose unknown aspects
hang off tree rows
protruding from shoulders
sand-like limbs, flexed, stringy biceps
connect to its plastic dimples
through sturdy, wooden
fingers burrowed under grass and
swaying, pink clouds within
my eyes. Beyond hole
nines, red markers markers and ladies’
tee boxes
unacknowledged from
the green.

Rippling blades cede to setting-
star’s sacrimony in
vacant son-rooms, the
porches left of center, gurgling
traffically enveloped by laughter,
disinterested.

For this sight I cut my hair
inside my cozy, beige apartment
complex with a blue shower
curtain-wearing green, graphic
tease
printed by gray palm trees
swoops a hunting eagle, into the ebbing
stencil-tide of late day
orchestrated by man, this occurrence is
vagueary and seductive machinery
programmed by man
producing all, we are.

Waving tufts and leaves fall from
oaks wafting time past my nose with
rhythms out ciccadas, harmonies out
couples pulsating the sky,
ease pressure on vestigial nerves under
their atmospheres, droning vibrations, hollowed-
out and upholding
like arms do, Earth’s giant didgeridoo
We hum beside propulsive kangaroo
Tendons—see!
we’re becoming
taut on
empty bones holding-
black
birds with wings thrown desperately
toward others, panic
aloft in velvety
blue oxygen.

Picturing our streets’ concrete
burst asunder by
metesticized pipes watering formulaic
grounds
unearthing rock
and shrub
I passed the mangled corpses of adults
their kind, sighing.

I know it is as lifeless as his faint,
decomposing golf ball my dad
may have allowed me to
see. Our drowning star swoops
into the ocean
as eagles stamped on chests do,
unknown to time,
and loving shadows
untouched by yellow,
translucent lamp-
glare avoids the fallow structures
built with cement
inside the boudoir
of this day.

If I come
to rule a small kingdom
and should be so picky as
to have you live inside
you’d only have to knit
for me a pair
of socks and hold
my heels
In your soft cloth.
I'll give you money and keys,
ensure
you won't be killed.
Or hurt.
I’ll learn what you need
when you are shy
or expect something in kind
for your time.
My ringed fingers fancy
walking up your legs. My tongue,
running between your thighs,
delighted.
But, when your toes curl, I don’t
know.
And you've removed yourself
by inches, from the ground which,
like me, bounds after you
desperate
to replace itself beneath your
lovely form.
I’d fall out of exhaustion
onto that throne, imagining your face
and your thin ankles midair.
But you’d soar on
past Evening
making the moon your own,
me your last planet
you my new star.
Take cash,
for these socks
which warm my mind.
These thoughts
climb into open doors
in my kingdom's only car
then drive away with you
on unbuilt roads
with plans appropriated
from taxes
on socks you knit.