ALL RESPONSES |
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There are two glasses.
One of them is empty.
The other makes me thirsty.
My left hand is shaking,
and the paint is drying.
Red looks good in this corner,
next to the black wedge,
by the blond table,
with our drinks,
and the bottles
empty. |
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Ravished in the evening, she is ravished, her
Arms, her hair falls in exhausted triumph. The
Vine’s produce, vino, stands bottled on the table. Then
I remember how delicious love can be: a good toss in
Shhhh, not so loud! a red bed. Love won in an
Hour which is its own world, walled, an escape to
Euphoria, peopled by emmigrants from the
Daily numbness rooted in the ordinary. |
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(i)
she is not ordinary—
even as she sleeps,
notice the slow, progressive
dissolution of her shape
only the artist can express
what he is seeing, sitting
at the other side of the table,
restless with his brush
unstable, wanting
to scream with dark
oil paint
(ii)
she laughed earlier
in the evening, entertaining
him with her expressive hands
her body moved quickly,
fluid as a gazelle
economic, even
her hair, black tightly braided
scalp, like painted ropes,
now loosed, ends bleeding
into the shadows of the bed
there’s a strange mixture tonight,
silence broken by the clicking
of the radiator, a wire clothes line
vibrates like wind chimes
the artist does not see reds,
browns, oranges—
he feels them
as she sleeps
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She to wake me eager of tip and tongue
all at the risk of desiring
what would drown the heartier man
She rises
having held my hand to myth
She rises
with flesh as perfect as the feathers that shape the swan
She rises She rises
soon to tea, soon to morning’s confessional
soon to whistle
She rises
to a feral light
in which no smile can dim
She rises unabridged, she rises gilded
She rises in the quell of yesterday
She rises having stolen the rain
Rising as that blameless thief
She rises She rises
She moves to what will move me
She has led me to where she goes
Should it happen
dreams pull me again from her:
Bite at this heart ‘neath naked breast
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Love was like waves
building and endless, calm
then mounting, made of
air, water, shore.
That sometimes he would be
the wind stirring her,
until she could no longer contain
everything he made her feel, until
she spilled in relief.
That sometimes she would be
the shore he crashed into,
the place he found peace.
That the shape of their lives
would always be in response
to each other.
All she knows is he is this;
the air that moves her, the
skin she craves, the taste
she wants on her tongue.
He is
the sun pooling on her body
sinking into her chest, resting
on her lower back until
she is bathed in heat, her
color rising, her blood pulsing
always & only for him.
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I wasn't asleep.
Terribly, the one-
armed ghost lingers under the bed, the
bed, the last time he kissed me with feeling, the
name I was given at birth, the cold blue of the night, night never
forgets itself the way I do I
am not...because I cannot think. I told him as much,
but he was asleep.
What good is a man who is always here? What
good is a bed if it cannot hold me? I don't
want to pay for what I've done, I just
want more. |
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Why does she do this to herself?
She feels the hot flush on her face
from his drink. An easy avenue
of calm strolls down her limbs.
She will give in to it.
She is fluid now like water
becomes stream moving
eddy current.
She feels his breath come
close, fog her skin, sending it back
a mirror, a window.
He enters her this way,
snatching what’s offered.
She’s spread like clay, pliable,
eager, letting to the point of fury
scratching him crazy.
His wife and children,
ever thieves of her mind,
steal the last drippings of ecstasy
as she weeps the loss
holding him hard, squeezing him tight
the way a mother shows her baby love,
the way a rose holds firm its petals
then one day unfolds.
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Once was a painter from Loten
dumped by a lady besotten.
She drank all his whisky and gin,
and promised to love him again,
but by morning her heart had forgotten. |
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I would only see her as the night wound up, from her painstaking choice of push-up bras and eyeliner and off-the-face or framing-the-face hair, through her hatred of all things pretentious and overtly political, to the girls-in-this-together feminist rants, to the loud talking and the razor words and the laurels laid upon her for her skills in karaoke, to the theatrical story-telling of her pseudo-disco dancing, to the whisking away by the anonymous boy, waving at me, snorting at the lunacy, carried over some boy’s shoulder, and then later on the next day, walking in the door in her clothes from before, a story exploding from her about how ridiculously garish he was in the morning, how awkwardly he asked her to breakfast, asked for her phone number, asked her to leave before his girlfriend came home, asked her for all sorts of promises and commitments she found ridiculously funny, no matter how tiny.
I would go home early, you know. I never went along. I was prudent. Not a prude, but prudent. The more I drank the more I caved in on myself and became unbearably cynical and started fistfights and fucked in anger. The boys that liked me were musicians or comic book artists from the underground who liked that kind of fucking, or religious freaks who could not hold on to their gods all the time and needed an outlet. Either way, we ran our passion plays in private, because they were real.
She was the opposite. Not prudent at all, reckless even, from what all the others saw, and we all saw it, because she loved the stage, but really she was a complete prude. The boys that chased her, the beer-smelling boys with their baseball caps and their well-worn jeans and their med school textbooks, they called her a dick-tease. It was no surprise to me that the med-school boys loved her. She had intelligence and wit. She drank like a European and got funnier and more attractive by the glass. And then she would fall, hard, and tragically, and would need to be taken home and taken care of for the night. She would need the glass pried out of her hands. She would need a blanket. She would need to be repositioned on the bed so she wouldn't keep falling off. Or so I imagine.
Those med-school boys followed her like she was a toddler. They loved that taking-care-of-her part. I suppose it was the thing that brought them to that profession in the first place. That need to save.
In fact, nothing about her surprised me then. The others would ask me why I put up with her, because it surprised them. But it didn’t surprise me at all.
What surprised me about her happened later: She married a man who could not take care of her, or himself, and she ended up taking care of both of them.
She lives in Oklahoma City, last I heard. In a suburb somewhere, and she works at a bank. I've tried to get a hold of her, but nothing. I hope she's okay.
The ones that would do it for her, they suffered for it, I guess. We all did. We all suffered in the end for the way we took care of her so much that we depended on it as one of the universe’s lucky guarantees. Who in the world would not want to take care of a woman like that?
I still wonder what she looked like at the end of the night in those days, wherever it was she would end. I bet she was beautiful. I bet those med-school boys think of her all the time, whenever they see a patient with her hair.
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Carnality: A Dream
Forget cars, forget schedules
Latinate words, forget how your face
in the mirror once startled you
how your body went it’s own way
be a stranger someone
wear leaves
Maples turned on here
in the wood, you loving it
a ripening from green
to red, you without a stitch
on, only leaves
You are not the wood smoke
I am not that wraith Diana
but you are a satyr
penis unsheathed
to the shining leaves
There’s the book of breathing
the book for transit
the ceremony of the opening
of the mouth, of the body
the ceremony of leafing
after having me
you leave a teaspoon of sperm
on the mossy ground
like the blade
of sunlight on a south facing
trunk
your mark before you disappear
between leaves
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I.
her lily nails
etch names
encased in hopeless
hearts on
wooden floor
II.
we fall asleep
with bloody
fingers and
snowy mauve hands
around dreams
III.
shrouded in blankets
of cold sleep, we wake alone
to wake the other
and etch our lips
sweetly upon
a moonlit face,
an unsure lover
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When the moon is but a shard of milky glass
Hanging low in the western ebony sky,
Remember me, and know that you
Misplaced your faith when you decided
I wasn’t important enough to glance back at.
Sometimes it is good to ignore the
Wild beating of your thoughts as they
Fall down inside you like rocks
Off a ledge where only seconds ago
You had been climbing... but
Sometimes it is a grave mistake to
Pretend that what you heard your gut
Telling you wasn’t really that at all,
But only a passing fancy, like a
Mediterranean Dream: warm, exotic, ancient--
And also far-reaching, less than sure-footed, and
Not what you could possibly really actually want.
Remember me when the waves come
In to greet you on the coast of whatever
Island you end up washed ashore on.
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Mid day is peering through the window,
Demanding me for an answer, fighting to wake me up
Truth is..I lived last night to the fullest, did not unclothe myself to bathe, I love this moment
Don't Awaken me,
The bottle of wine is half full, I'm innocent as I can be,
it's in my dream of wonders,
I'm flying off my seat,
Don't Awaken me,
It's all too good to be,
Half met man, stiff before, leaves me alone,
To enjoy the cleavage in my shirt,
Utilizing his one chance to paint this picture of me,
stealing this portrait of me..
truth is I'm still asleep
and don't you dare awaken me....
For when I do awaken this moment is painted in a moment of time..
and don't you dare blame me..
I'm as innocent as can be.. |
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Best to pose in a double bed
singles are too slim,
a trap to hold the dead
no amount of exposure
can capture images
of just one’s composure
not even in the cracked light
of lightning, striking
directly to the heart
take precautions,
leave it to experts
on the posing of complex
body parts
when the internal lamp
matches the subjects’
brightness, other less
important brightnesses
will all give the same
results—
odd bits of ceiling,
distorted sheets,
empty, tipped glasses
of chardonnay
a colored lens, a border
line, soft openings
into an unlit room—
the snow outside
in flat light—
pure white, loss of sense
manually operated,
one frame at a time
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Making madness in
the night our
liquid scents commingled
limbs of self
in pools
of ecstasy merged
There we swam and
drank to exhaustion
glorying in reflections
of such perfect form and color
neither up nor down
nor air nor water
held meaning
Too soon
the morning cast
its rain of light
on love-drunk dreams
Eyes would strain against
the sharp of quickening day
seeking answers
from a bedside stand
counting:
1-glass, empty
2-glass
not half full.
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