for all who understand perfectly why perfection can never be,
                            and Adriana Barreiros~**


                                              <>
Todays new millionth sunrise bids me stand,
observe the river traffic from my kitchen window,
accept that my takings are debts,
a few, even paid back,
yet, most still owed,
for the origins of all my poems,
are oddly and oddity old,
unoriginal, second, third handed
as I look through the eyes of the dead,
and yours too,
this my unoriginal,
original sin....
(pretending  I am a poet)

“your arrhythmic rhymes, skinflint perspectives,
this is what I ask, what I need, what you can give,
what is in your possess, what you need to unburden,
making me better for making you lessened”  

<>

she offers me this,
a way out to more,
a way in to lessen,
knock on heavens door,
a suggest tendered,
treaty of mutual arms-ments-to-be?

perhaps is my answer,
utter the skinflints perspective,
maybe it is no treat, this treaty,
but a rad road well traveled to
mutually assured destruction,
the intended embrace
of unintended consequences

~for r, just because~


put her in my mouth and she became my
mouth.

put myself inside her and she became my
insides out.

spill good words on her belly, licked & laced us together, then came my 
poetry.

on elbow, she claimed coauthor-ship, demanded her name above        
          mine.


I smiled, answering most matter-of-factly,
surely they’re your creations, you-a-ruler, procreator, foremost, first,

the ABCedarian

the muse goddess of alphabets, all that is poetic divine mistress to
thousands

I’m mortal,
your transcriber, copyist, alphabetically seconded, merest mere,

the ABEcedarian

I’m rudimentary without you, lost midst the masses o’poets nameless.

She snorted, said
“sounds like poetic ******* to me”*
but returned to her sleepy heaven,
mumbling most contentedly.

<>
“Stop this day and night with me
and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun,
(there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things
at second or third hand,
nor look through the eyes of the dead,
nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either,
nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides
and filter them from your self.”

Song of Myself (1892 version) by WALT WHITMAN

                                                      ­§§§

*These admonitions are the ten conditionals
commandments of straight talk,
boy,
you’ve spent a life lessening and lesson-learning
and all laid before you for taking, gaining,
but for what? for naught?

Start this day, having spent my night with you,
possessing less than what is my now
completed,
this,
my unfinished commencement,
provisioned, a simultaneous beginning and finishing,
emptying a void of
fulfilling questioning.

What does this life desire of me,
that it granted and then removed,
the knowledge of perfection?
leaving me striving, writhing,
shivering unceasingly,
in my saddened, bursting, hacking
and hackneyed chest.

I walk the same cobblestone streets,
observing the descendants of your ancestral tugs
portaging, paying homage to East River tides,
carrying those goods,
the origins of all poems,
from where? to where?
unknown,
but always past our conjoined eyes.

And yet do I look, with our merged eyes,
filtered by a century’s discoloration,
forgive me Walt, for now recalling sights
that you first observed,
that I witness first hand,
100 and fifty years later,
sharing a stolen wisdom with you.

Todays new millionth sunrise bids me stand,
observe the river traffic from my kitchen window,
accept that my takings are debts,
a few, even paid back,
yet, most still owed,
for the origins of all my poems,
are oddly and oddity old,
unoriginal, second, third handed
as I look through the eyes of the dead,
and yours too,
this my unoriginal,
original sin....
(pretending  I am a poet)



                                                   §§§§§

6:24AM
Manhattan Island,
By the East River
Thu. May 14, 2020

Shakespeare predicts the future!

  Marian. The devil a puritan that he is, or anything constantly but a time-pleaser; an affectioned ***, that cons state without book, and utters it by great swarths: the best persuaded of himself; so crammed, as he thinks, with excellences, that it is his ground of faith that all that look on him love him; and on that vice in him will my revenge find notable cause to work.

Twelfth Night Act 2, Scene 3

But I always forget to tell her

and I tell her that too

and she asks why I forget

reply comes easy

it just a wayfaring, stepping stone

on the way to my

kissing your neck,

and thus overlooked,

but always the first thing I see...

upon the thick chill of modern life

she reflects, drawing over the body,
a thin blanket of cashmere,
how it miraculously
denies the chilling, its darkening physicality

I,
I listen in non-responsive, full attentiveness,
thinking perhaps a poem she is demanding,
“we all need more miracle blankets in our lives”

two suede secrets

a blue violin plays instrumental come-ons with flamenco hints,
various pleasures merge, a three lane highway becomes a
county road with slow and steady the unposted speed limit
I am well and full accompanied and accomplished

and I am alone

my hands laurel my temples, my head is crowning,
laughing from the pleasure given to me to give to me,
snare drum solitary keeps my time, my two palms say psalms,
guttural and cultural, my emissions, emptying my commissions,

and I am alone

a-poem came with this morn to mind, and pleasure me, it did;
music and flesh, words and tissue untested but harmonizing,
hands prancing on strings of sterling silvered guitar body mine,
shouting glory glory, am risen am fallen, salved, soothed,

I am alone, refreshingly happy, my poem *******


and and and
both of us will die in due course, dead unread, alone together

3/17/18 9:05 AM