I took you out to dinner to celebrate
Your upcoming Rehab stay.
I took you out to dinner to comfort
You when you missed the train.
I am forced to catalog these collisions. Exquisite
explosions of potential flow through me…
She lies upon the sheets
and bifurcates the whiteness
with the sheer black of her body
the heaving of her body
Now how smooth is that, I say,
wrapping my hands around her,
placing the apron gently over
her head as she chops onions
I’m down there, sexy as a pear,
Grasping the stems of my ankles,
When signs of war
Static from your potato radio.
Words rolled forth like the splendid carpet he walked on.
Citizens gazed ahead
Their hearts twist,
Tortured to not break the spell
I have no use for the daily news,
wasting away the protracted minutes,
waiting for the triumph of diagnosis.
No pretensions here.
No ornamentation of
high art.
No gods or kings,
No nymphs or castles.
You can start at the memories
Of putting on your dad’s shirts
Pretending to be a detective
Is that Samisen, the swish of geisha?
Those strings, that fragrance…
A tattoo in silk’s fluidity,
The clear mystery of sheer notes strummed
I begin to know the streets, Spy tunnels
And their depth.
The pavement where homeless men decry passerby
For lonely cigarettes.
you who carry the world in your palm
the weighty equivalence of Alexandria’s wisdom
inside a slender electronic case
may never know
This is a collaborative poem by one American and two Australian poets that explores Gerard Manley Hopkins’s philosophical themes found both in his poetry and in the personal struggles of his inner life.
we are on our travels with
the remains of conversations we almost had,
promises cracked through the middle,
wrapped in the cloth that blinds us