ROMANCE i
Romance is a word, cryptic and designed to be pinned, like butterflies on the scientist’s bathroom wall. All of this desire is integral to the sound/ No. It’s the air which doesn’t refuse the sunset, as dull and selfish as it might appear. That’s John Coltrane doing Luxury, the demanding cool. I’m only going to read biographies from now on. . .
Why is it necessary for all of this lovely stuff? the hand, reaching for that tiny ocean; lovers the size of vitamins? It’s tremendously helpful: a crust of decorum: the original quakes. A friend died last night and the idea of reading the Bible to him seems like sacrilege. Instead, memory particles fill the radio as the empty angels roar into town.
It’s impossible to show up at weddings and not be drunk. Playing relations to frozen peas and Swedish meatballs, romance comes in, dressed like a whore, and is radiant, volcanic, and slightly cheap. So if you’re dressed with an eye for detail, you might notice the dust rumbling in the groom’s dressing room closet. And the gravity of the moment draws attention to Georgia O’Keeffe eating a TV dinner and crying over scratched vinyl. And that’s Peter Fonda’s cat you’re sitting on. . .
Language gives romance a reason to love. Without her Germanic grandmother, we might not ever have known. But that first kiss, that soft, empty building, at once filling up with water and butterflies, wings making waves until everything topples over spilling art, beauty, lullabies, all over the grass. That’s what I mean. Not the inevitable clean up of dead lovers who had forgotten to hold their breath. . .
DESCRIPTION WHITEii
This is what’s
happening:
A kid crossing
on some grass.
His fat foot makes
him distance
himself
from the others.
The vague outline of
summertime
pulling him along
like a cow.
The breeze is
terrific
and rocks seem to be
gathering
under a tree.
And the story
goes on;
a kid
waiting
to be murdered.
…LITTLE PERSONAL ENDS PASS OUT OF SIGHT…iii
teeth. Wrapped in a ballad, there was only this increasing light. Say “right” or “dawn” feeling figuratively or seeming lovely. His eyes are meeting with baseballs over by the sleeping knowledge. An episode of the belated. And I see a fist in glass and it favors all kinds of physical paint to music teachers. And then in all ways catching, a general beaverskin drifts brown-skin down and eventually parts with him. That killjoy never enjoyed this position or the language I used. There’ll be no more going to Juan’s, I guess. But you carry on – you dissolve into dreams and slide into life. Every dick I see reminds me of you. Every meaning: a coffee. From the ruins I’m not permitted to think about; from the edge of your palm. This flexible sentence has been sent and in such, it will
NOTICING BABY PICTURES OF THE TOY-MAKERiv
Just before the earthquake broke your skirt, I glanced at the table in front of us.
“Don’t touch that!” you said, noticing my eyes move away from yours. (They are blue.)
I pretended not to hear you and opened the book that I saw closed on the table.
“There was a time when I could trust you, when I felt like we were together, really together in my thoughts and your actions,” you said, turning away from me and the table and crossing your arms (like your mother always does at Christmas dinner).
Inside the book were various photographs of a blue eyed boy: playing with red trucks; with yellow stuffed marmosets; with plastic pigs attempting to play billiards with green virgins.
“I don’t see the need for all of this secrecy?” I said, closing the book.
“You wouldn’t understand,” you said, showing me one eye bruised with liquid.
And at that moment, I understood.
And I fell into your lap and started to cry. Quietly at first, then louder, more savage, until I was shaking so hard the south wall began to tumble down in consolation.
LOOK THE DEADv
An old man
sits down
and erases
the mistakes
he made
on his cross-
word puzzle.
A young girl
picks up the
tulip under her
scalp and
smiles, scaring
some of
the neighbors.
A baby boy
wakes up to
music and
shadows
and is in-
different to
the drums.
An insane
woman
dreams of
black shoes
and cauliflower.
And a rock
sits
and thinks of
nothing
but the dirt
deep down
and above
and nothing.
REPUTATIONvi
I was the first boy at school to get breasts. I thought I had cancer, though, so it didn’t seem too cool. My aviator father would say things like “what a knock-out!” and “wowzers! gee wow!” He would often be guilty of dropping his morning cup of coffee when I would step out of the shower and dash into my room. Mother would get on her hands and knees to clean up the mess, often reading Catholic things into the shape of each separate puddle.
My sister seemed jealous of all the attention I was getting.
She spent her remaining years at public school fucking every boy that wanted to be friends with me. They said she never, ever took off her bra, even when they begged and cried into her pillow. . .
SELF PORTRAIT, WAVING ADIEU! ADIEU! ADIEU!vii
Such waving always tires my arm;
but at least the scenery is nice. A warm
breeze – but I’m wearing a hat.
Hundreds of ocean liners in the left
corner. My mom is on one of them.
She is no longer waving, her arm
having fallen off.
Each drop of color is petty.
There is an abstraction of blue,
which is wrestling with the idea of
god. It seems puny next to my
glittering visage. Just stand still:
this rocking makes my stomach hurt
and scares all the birds away.
I am leaving the land of the ditherings.
That smile you see is painted with fire,
with a nosebleed, with grandfatherwine.
Black violets grow up through the water
and become braided with the water-girls hair.
Erotic boys, acid shadows, and dogs on the run
were there too, but have since been censored.
If I were you, I’d look under the portrait
to the other portrait painted before:
It shows the hundreds of orange fish,
devouring my father, dead at the bottom of the sea.
MISS EROTIC MONTANAviii
He doesn’t feel too much
like waking up today. Okay.
She’s basically chilly,
if not the optometrist
she says she is.
Behind the oval,
his children are pretending to be
grown-ups, talking into tin-cans
and tulips.
“Go get ‘em boy!”
the old man next door with the
tender stick says to the bitch he
thinks is his son.
A splattering of
sunset is already moving across
the grass, amazed it’s next in line.
Our girl’s masturbating again.
Her fingers dreaming of science
experiments and painters
unaware
of the children under
her bed, trying so hard
to be children.
i This was before 9/11. I never could present it to anyone after, thinking they would think I was being stupid. I took out the parts about towers falling down, even if that’s what towers do in the end.
The poem doesn’t work half as well, now, without them.
ii At the time, I thought this had something to do with Dennis Cooper. And William Carlos Williams.
iii One of many break-up poems.
I was breaking up a lot when I was 21.
Like a lot of 21 year olds, spent a lot of time making fodder for writing. I looked at everything in stanzas, or at least, words.
A life made of sentences, period.
iv I was a big fan of Russell Edson.
This one was always my favorite:
It’s called “Conjugal”.
A man is bending his wife. He is bending her
around something that she has bent herself
around. She is around it, bent as he has bent
her.
He is convincing her. It is all so private.
He is bending her around the bedpost. No, he
is bending her around the tripod of his camera.
It is as if he teaches her to swim. As if he teaches
acrobatics. As if he could form her into something
wet that he delivers out of one life into another.
And it is such a private thing the thing they do.
He is forming her into the wallpaper. He is
smoothing her down into the flowers there. He is finding
her nipples there. And he is kissing her pubis there.
He climbs into the wallpaper among the flowers. And
his buttocks move in and out of the wall.
v I think a lot in sequences. Always have.
vi A poem about one of my obsessional topics.
I really was obsessed about having breast cancer. I was.
vii This poem (and the next) were among those I still have that won a prize and $100.
I felt like Sylvia Plath when I won that.
The poem was written for my father. I still don’t know if he’s ever read it.
viii This is the one I can still say I’m happy with. It was sort-of inspired by mmemories of my high school girlfriend’s grandma’s house, particularly her bedroom, where we used to fuck.
