People wish to be settled. Only as long as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
-- Thoreau

My life has been
the instrument
for a mouth
I have never seen,
breathing wind
which comes
from I know not
where,
arranging and changing
my moods,
so as to make
an opening
for his voice.

Or hers.
Muse, White Goddess
mother with invisible
milk,
androgynous god
in whose grip
I struggle,
turning this way and that,
believing that I chart
my life,
my loves,
when in fact
it is she, he,
who charts them--
all for the sake
of some
as yet unwritten poem.

Twisting in the wind,
twisting like a pirate
dangling in a cage
from a high seawall,
the wind whips
through my bones
making an instrument,
my back a xylophone,
my *** a triangle
chiming,
my lips stretched tight
as drumskins,

I no longer care
who is playing me,
but fear
makes the hairs
stand up
on the backs
of my hands
when I think
that she may stop.

And yet I long
for peace
as fervently as you do--
the sweet connubial bliss
that admits no
turbulence,
the settled life
that defeats poetry,
the hearth before which
children play--
not poets' children,
ragtag, neurotic, demon-ridden,
but the apple-cheeked children
of the bourgeoisie.

My daughter dreams
of peace
as I do:
marriage, proper house,
proper husband,
nourishing dreamless
***,
love like a hot toddy,
or an apple pie.

But the muse
has other plans
for me
and you.

Puppet mistress,
dangling us
on this dark proscenium,
pulling our strings,
blowing us
toward Cornwall,
toward Venice, toward Delphi,
toward some lurching
counterpane,
a tent upheld
by one throbbing
blood-drenched pole--
her pen, her pencil,
the monolith
we worship,
underneath
the gleaming moon.

The fat lady came out first,
tearing our roots and moistening drumskins.
The fat lady
who turns dying octopuses inside out.
The fat lady, the moon's antagonist,
was running through the streets and deserted buildings
and leaving tiny skulls of pigeons in the corners
and stirring up the furies of the last centuries' feasts
and summinging the demon of bread through the sky's clean-swept hills
and filtering a longing for light into subterranean tunnels.
The graveyards, yes the graveyards
and the sorrow of the kitchens buried in sand,
and dead, pheasants and apples of another era,
pushing it into our throat.

There were murmurings from the jungle of *****
with the empty women, with hot wax children,
with fermtented trees and tireless waiters
who serve platters of salt beneath harps of saliva.
There's no other way, my son, *****! There's no other way.
It's not the ***** of hussars on the ******* of their ******,
nor the ***** of cats that inadvertently swallowed frogs,
but the dead who scratch with clay hands
on flint gates where clouds and desserts decay.

The fat lady came first
with the crowds from the ships,s taverns, and parks.
***** was delicately shaking its drums
among a few little girls of blood
who were begging the moon for protection.
Who could imagine my sadness?
The look on my face was mine, but now isn't me,
the naked look on my face, trembling for alcohol
and launching incredible ships
through the anemones of the piers.
I protect myself with this look
that flows from waves where no dawn would go.
I, poet without arms, lost
in the vomiting multitude,
with no effusive horse to shear
the thick moss from my temples.

The fat lady went first
and the crowds kept looking for pharmacies
where the bitter tropics could be found.
Only when a flag went up and the first dogs arrived
did the entire city rush to the railings of the boardwalk.

“The sound that pours from the fingertips awakens clouds of cells far inside the body”
Robert Bly  1926-

You could say that the sound that tips deep cells are waking      
                                                                                                
                                                                                                   heralds with bugles divine revolution

You could say that the sound that echoes from spirals                
                                                                                                
                                                                                                  gossamers emeralds’  scintillant light

You could say that the sound that squishes from mangoes            
                                                                                                
                                                                                                   is luscious and opulent tripping with pearls
          
You could say that the sound that slumbers in harp strings          
                                                                                            
                                                                                                   howls round the polar bear’s tumaceous couch  

You could say that  the sound that tremors  from tadpoles        
                                                                                                
                                                                                                   triggers eruptions of undersea mountains

You could say that the sound that sits on the windowsill              
                                                                                              
                                                                                                   on Arcturus flickers as icicle fire
      
      You could say that the sound that bounces off drumskins            
                                                                                                    
                                                                                                          loosens the shackles of acuate cacti

You could say that the sound that shivers off rainbows                
                                                                                              
                                                                                                   silkens red poppies at sunstrike unpacking

You could say that the sound that rumbles round moonrocks        
                                                                                              
                                                                                                    passes on purple to stillness of shadows

You could say that the sound that echoes cicadas                      
                                                                                              
                                                                                                    crackles through canyons of memory rising

You could say that the sound that gallops through nightmares
                                                                                            
                                                                                                    shrinks in the face of the falcons glissade

You could say that the sound that is diatomaceous

                                                                                                     tangles up synapses  sparking at random

You could say that the sound of deep cells awakening                      
                                                                                        &n

Half silk, half steel—
you ride the lines between stars and gravel roads,
carving paths in bruises and brushstrokes,
with laughter that crackles like neon signs
in midnight cities I’ve yet to see.

You’re a riot of color and grit,
an aerialist suspended
between the weight of gravity
and the pull of the infinite,
turning chaos into choreography.

Your pulse beats in drumskins, in engines,
in the hush of forests,
where you hunt secrets in leaf and bone,
collecting the world’s oddities
like charms strung on a silver chain.

A rugby warrior,
yet soft as moonlight through rice-paper screens,
you blend fierce and playful,
the hellion and the muse—
wild enough to shatter the stars,
gentle enough to cradle them whole.

I wonder—
in the quiet moments,
do you trace the shape of constellations
across your own skin,
mapping where you’ll roam next?