Reaping and Sowing

And then she said,
"Love me please,
please love me please,
or these lonely days
won't ever leave."

And I replied,
"I love you so!
Oh I love you so!
But this kinda love
from lonely grows!"

My Better Half

Sometimes during the night
When I wake up lost in that limbo
Between cognizance and the purgatory of sleep,
I see out of the corner of my half-closed eyes
My own leering wickedness.

Undulating in some type of rhythmic lurch,
He throbs like some primordial artery
Always in access of
the ancient deposits
of shadows lost in the cold
fractures of consciousness.

Slithering in periphery
He—I—seduces with gnarled
Fingertips of mirror-like obsidian
The Fetus of memory trembles
Inside its dismal shell.

Quick! I feel his head tilt
And the eyes like drunken nebulas
Tumbling gently in the frost of the night
That drapes upon us as he sings:

“Merry lost child! So far from the green path!
How many lives you have trampled upon!
Your happiness the solemn fruit,
The red liquor drenched across
Your arduous trek—how many children
Have you transformed to lonely
Women and men? So quickly
You grabbed her neck and felt the power
Surge through your arm the sabre.
Know this, child—before you squeezed,
She could have sworn in the midst of that
Inferno, that blur of rage and shame,
That hairs sprang up on your coarse neck,
And fangs of venom and white white love
Corrupted your sweet sweet smile.”

And before I turn away from
My manic, leering self,
Before I rid myself of guilt and agony,
Before I dream easy,
My loving wickedness, My
Better Half,
Whispers so sweetly
To the night (our cool sweetheart):

“You love so much child, you
Gon’ be the death of someone!”

Cool Like Blue

To see you beneath the lights and shadows
Dancing slow, dancing low, with a rhythm
Stirring, from the heave of your hard, cool hips
Like water throbbing softly.
Slow and low, your ebb and flow,
your hips in the light
Wet like snow.

And the sax player tilts his head
And sways his hips
And my sweat runs cool like blue.

To see you turn your back into light,
your hair wet and awry, strands of silver
Dancing beneath the haze and twilight,
like wild grass in the wind.
Slow and low, your ebb and flow,
I move to you
under lights that glow.

And the club members whisper,
And your hips quiver,
And my sweat runs cool like blue.

And to see you so close now, to feel you
Urge your cool heat, your flushed lips
Pushing soft, hushed air on my damp neck,
Like the smolder of whispering coals.
Slow and low, your ebb and flow,
I close my eyes
to feel you slow.

And a cool smoke trembles
in the air wet like sweat,
A sweat that runs cool like blue.

Seasick

It was our third date after the first break-up.
A weary crossroad, a painful juncture of
Comfort and awkwardness like re-blooming adolescence.
I wasn’t afraid to kiss you or tell old stories,
Intimate, erotic, silly, all were fair game.
But my skin felt like it was moving all over
And I couldn’t sit still or look too long
At the soft spots on your neck that often
Tasted of sweat and yes, of love.

I was trying to be better in the formal sense,
by going out on a dinner date.
But it’s so hard to be formal when your
skin won’t stand still and the little money you have
Is warm and wet from the sweat on your palms.
And No-one would formally take you to eat
Half-off seafood at the buffet underneath
Those ugly neon-lights shivering in the autumn air.
“No-one! is taking you out to eat. It is I, No-one!”

We sat and ate and talked and ate and I naturally
Ate too much and asked too many questions,
Threatened by greasy silence
(No-one! No-one!)
And the shivering of the neon-lights outside.
Finally, I paid and we left to return home
To return home, ah, so long now!

And out in the parking lot your face turned
Like a green maelstrom
And it would have been funny to see you
Get so sick in public if
I didn’t get sick as well.
Two heads lunging
On an asphalt ocean with crisp air
Kissing the sweat on our skin.

I drove us home and straight into bed
A place of familiarity but now distanced
by the ebb and flow of time and of lurching emotions.
Our mutual sickness overcame it all, however,
And for once, at last, we lied together
On the sweaty pillow next to the bucket.
At times we switched in intervals to vomit
Painfully, childishly, lovingly
Into the bucket next to the bed.

The distance was forfeited briefly
Overtaken by weakness and the need,
For once, to be taken care of.


I stroked your hair while you shivered
And I shivered from stroking your hair.
At times I thought no time had passed
(I, No-one!)
And at other times, it felt like years.
Years that I had struggled through this story
And that story, this bed and that one,
One island to the next, wandering,
Wondering if you were still looking to sea.
And in our mutual sickness, we have found each other.
All it took was bad-seafood to see you
Here again, next to someone,
No-one.

A Ghost

Those who don’t believe in ghosts must not have dreams. Ghosts visit us with stories beyond the horizon where the light cuts abruptly to dark. That axis is the land of dreams, and ghosts await us there. Last night I saw a ghost. My dog returned to me and to home. In my dream, he stood there in the garage with dirt caked over his white and shivering body. He stood there like he always did when he was ready to come inside and be warmed and loved. Our love was the hearth to his little heart, and I’m sure it was beating still and rapidly in my dream when he found it fitting to finally pay me a visit. The soil caked over his shivering legs. His eyes looking at mine as if to say, I am home again. His head turned in that quizzical canine way, as if to say, I have returned from where you buried me beneath the dirt and the soil and the twilight and the shadows. And in my dream I saw his shivering body quiver to be loved again, to come inside from the dirt and the earth and return into the beating hearth of the home. His shivering legs quaking in the quietness of the air and the dust. Not cold. No, he was not cold. Only relieved to return home. Back inside and away from the musty soil and the lingering darkness and the stillness of my dream’s periphery. He wanted inside to be warmed by the beating of hearts. Hearts that missed his presence, that could only warm themselves by replacing his absence with soil and flowers beneath the shadows of trees in the dark. And I was scared to let him in, not because of his presence or the soil (which could never get inside anyways, because to get inside it would have to first reach the heart and that is always protected by the threshold of warmth and the hearth) but because I knew my father would shiver there beneath the trees and the shadows. But here, in the softness of my dream my dog had tried to come home again. And I don’t know how long or how far he wandered in the shadowlands of other dreams to return here. Despite the warmth of the collective hearts beating beneath the trees, I shivered and with this shiver I heard the trees whispering to the shadows and the children behind the trees making these shadows. I shivered thinking him wandering softly underneath the horizon where the darkness coalesces with the soil and the shadows. I only know that he followed the timbre of our hearts beating against the twilight. He followed the rippling dust as it shivered in the air, all from the pulse of our hearts there in the shadows. And I am ashamed that I was scared to let him in I only wanted to clean the soil off so that it could not come closer to the heart. Clean the soil and the dust and the silk of the shadows. I wanted to say that I’m sorry he had to travel so far just to find me beneath the shivering trees in my dream. . I wanted to say that I’m sorry that I was scared to go out there in the shadows and search for you. I’m sorry that I cannot explain the shivering or the loss or the twilight. I miss you, and I’m sorry I cannot retrieve from the soil and the dusk.

A Woman In Love

I sit at this coffee table like a ghost.
Listening in on strangers' sincere insights.
A child screams somewhere, but the constant clanks
Of porcelain mugs calms my silent self.

There are two women near me, who appear
from the corner of my eye, attractive.
One is in a new relationship,
fresh from a decade of a dead marriage.

She seems happy, truly, with that
sweet sickness of adoration.
Like this seems too good for her,
like she suspects that happiness will
one day eventually fold up and head to
the next carnival town.

Her ex-husband hit her once.
And she speaks of it almost with
affection. Love, it seems,
Love is a clenched fist.

Not Looking Good for Tess

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say ‘See!’ to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply ‘Here!’ to body’s cry of ‘Where?’ till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied, or even conceived as possible. Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came. Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes, and passing-strange destinies.


By chapter 5 of Tess, the noose is beginning to tighten around the precious neck. Falling In Love, not to be mistaken with Love, perhaps is only coincidental, only ironic and temperamental. We meet and disjoin, the tiny rivulets of our daily lives diverge, but how often we reflect upon these brief meetings and their possible contingency within our little schemes. How are we to know of our own possible Saviors? She has been fed the crimson fruit, her electric blood and crimson lips polluted by the "narcotic blue-haze" of Alec the tempter. Where is Nature to help her out? Why can Nature devise so many cruel twists of fate to lead her to his house all alone? So many intricacies, yet no help to fend off the wolves.