on his son’s possession of his wife
DOOR:
Catullus, that’s not all they say,
and not just in Verona,
but throughout all of Brixia,
amata mater meae,
along Chinea’s watchtower
wherever the river Mella flows
everybody knows
she’s done it with
Postumius and Cornelius
CATULLUS:
Now here someone will say, What? Door! How did you know
all about us without ever leaving the threshold? Without
hearing people talking in secret away from you? Aren’t
you just fixed under a small beam to shut and close as
much as usual and to open and expose what’s going on
in the domicile?
DOOR:
I don’t have to walk
I can hear her talk in a low vioce
about all she does to her maids
She’s not aware I have eyes and ears
I could mention one gentleman by name but I won’t
though I can tell you he is tall
without lifting his red eyebrows
He was in court lately defending himself
but the pregnancy was false.
with Don Yorty
Two from the Greek Anthology
You mother
You’re so fucking pregnant
But not feeling contrary
You turn over to have some fun
I’m rowing you
Over your great ocean
This labor’s not small either—
I throw you overboard when
I come in your beautiful ass
I’m giving instructions
In how men love
—Dioscorides #54
You sing and play the lyre and I’m on fire
I want to strum the whole fucking universe
you know I want to loosen your strings
—Anonymous #99
with Rosemary Mayer
The Incorporation of
Sophia’s Cereal
Two mad men and to mad men what poetry is
Fine lines written dumbfounded and high
& equally always the syncretistic goings-on
because everyone is furnishing everything
With the body they already have to live in
Beyond even believing in living, there was
This morning’s bowl of puffed wheat, the bananas
Were the teachers, the cereals were the kids
And I Sophia said was the giant and
My spoon was my spoon
Max Carries the One
Dont look at me, look at your own self
In the given weather it’s raining harder
The world is round & falling down, so rocks
Look out! it’s nice to be exact as she & he
Fall like rain to a little bit lower than
Young & watching something without participating
Where you begin or above like snow flying up
The curve uncriticized by us, the child
The dumb drips exist when the sun
Beyond the stupid rectangles is the ancient flower
Shines on them? comes out? so what? criss-cross?
Counting nineteen humans plus eight trees equals
Twenty-seven living beings and that’s all
And one is watching this something, you carry the one
Ode on
Everyone is dead handwritten
We keep writing anyway
There is a sought picture finish
Parentheses cross out hamlets
Arma virumque cano
I feint in imitation of a proven
You arch art act you do not
Belog to a particulate selx
We plan at the lakes & places
Let’s hark to your ass daddy
So firm even without dactylls in it
Then meditate as dumb daughters
Laughing to be fooling with our
Female fellows, Father
If only you could see us
First turn to me. . . .
First turn to me after a shower,
you come inside me sideways as always
in the morning you ask me to be on top of you,
then we take a nap, we’re late for school
you arrive at night inspired and drunk,
there is no reason for our clothes
we take a bath and lie down facing each other,
then later we turn over, finally you come
we face each other and talk about childhood
as soon as I touch your penis I wind up coming
you stop by in the morning to say hello
we sit on the bed indian fashion not touching
in the middle of the night you come home
from a nightclub, we don’t get past the bureau
next day it’s the table, and after that the chair
because I want so much to sit you down & suck your cock
you ask me to hold your wrists, but then when I
touch your neck with both my hands you come
it’s early morning and you decide to very quietly
come on my knee because of the children
you’ve been away at school for centuries, your girlfriend
has left you, you come four times before morning
you tell me you masturbated in the hotel before you came by
I don’t believe it, I serve the lentil soup naked
I massage your feet to seduce you, you are reluctant,
my feet wind up at your neck and ankles
you try not to come too quickly
also, you dont want to have a baby
I stand up from the bath, you say turn around
and kiss the backs of my legs and my ass
you suck my cunt for a thousand years, you are weary
at last I remember my father’s anger and I come
you have no patience and come right away
I get revenge and won’t let you sleep all night
we make out for so long we can’t remember how
we wound up hitting our heads against the wall
I lie on my stomach, you put one hand under me
and one hand over me and that way can love me
you appear without notice and with flowers
I fall for it and we become missionaries
you say you can only fuck me up the ass when you are drunk
so we try it sober in a room at the farm
we lie together one night, exhausted couplets
and don’t make love, does this mean we’ve had enough?
watching t.v. we wonder if each other wants to
interrupt the plot; later I beg you to read to me
like the Chinese we count 81 thrusts
then 9 more out loud till we both come
I come three times before you do
and then it seems you’re mad and never will
it’s only fair for a woman to come more
think of all the times they didn’t care
I Am Told I Must Bomb
the Tappan Zee Bridge
There was a sumptuousness that could be shared like
sexual knowledge with children who’ve never made love,
once knowing everything it didnt matter that everything
was so known: I was 35 when she was born, so in 1945
she’d then be ten.
It’s in the movies there is knowledge where is the time, he
said your family is my family, I like love, everything seen
repeat you’re my family family brief closer to my
like love everything seen version of scary my lost,
I am told my lost family now it belongs to you to you
in the store we know nothing but that occasionally they
find like love everything bring snakes & lizards to you
no ki
dding to improve their differences, I like you
better storeowners than they who so giraffe you, I
am your multitudinous free family from nowhere, very
right waters
scifi lee ann
you are you are since you love to be
identifiable things you are the perilous
chance lover of the splashing blue finder (that is hell)
you dont wear a hologram or safety pin you are
I take them one by one both dude & dudette
you are the peristalsis of all our necklaces
you are the back & forth & to Mrs confused you
are backwards the ending is faulty you are funny
but it is impossible even the early spring moths leap around
you are the possibles I wait to leap to the floor to see
that you are ordinary but in the summer of love we get up again
you are evanescing great but with a language problem you
are a big earthquake survivors taken under martial law,
comma, revolution finally, you are in the bathroom again
you are written there is no wild & just as i say that
you are wild you are good and beginning I sit on you you
are ending in details that is the story no one knows
you are absent as the electronic Hitler you are scifi
you are yes but betrayed by robots you are roses you are
vague doctor’s journals you are an alien or two or three
aliens you are the clothing and the blankets fall with mind control
you are we put them back, my precognitive computer game, you
are Arthur C. Clarke, you are the universal ranger you play
gravity soccer & cosmic ball I dont quite get the rest
you are I’ll be gone soon you are a book a cure for cancer
you are cute and this is in order you are poets in the bathtub
you are levels of weird eternal life via something you are
picking up girls with awkward language plus you are boyfriend
you are dilemma but what one you are animals change things
you are back to school with good writing you are inside a
video or the computer game you are good at end what is your name?
you are no one will see a virtuoso there is no story
you are can you carry the baby elephant around you are living
under the ocean you are all at once the seventeen & the thirteen
who might or will convene with prepuce side of who knows what
Sonnet
Suck me my virgin
because we are welcome
as the casualties of the poor
move your cock sideways
& sit your cunt around
let’s not go to the movie
it’s too crowded for everybody
Tiddly Winks, World Map, Clash
Roger Rabbit, Mouse Trap
Solarquest, the Ice Cube game
Past hordes of girls & boys
Some of them are ours
Lesbians wake and go out to walk
All mothers together, the poison hydrangea
Marie You Must Meet Cristina at
the Music School Tomorrow and
Not at Her Home
for Fanny Howe
See the way the water chills the glass is not a story
written as fast as is said you should see the moon standing
out in front of the animals who just walked in onto the
ledges of the . . . no
They sit still as the squirrel paws to its mouth making
a sound of speaking after coming into the house, some of
the animals we see do not exist as
We drink warm water in the living room & a tracing is
made on our faces of the singing of the low & high notes
of all the failings of two dimensions like a chair that
lacks confidence to seat you at a concert of three kinds
of music summing up the work of the century with big bands
in the middle
Of the structure of water we are waiting in the wings in
& I push you into but you are too big or dead to fall
& you pick me up & carry me forward like some kinds of
sex and on my head
I am wearing my South African map-kerchief & the one
animal who chooses to move or attack is a wild snake whose
fangs we disconnect from the flesh of a person & then
the young women
Get together to put on the long right-handed glove that
carries a string for diving so when the descent from the
church’s stainless steel disc set up as a decimated and
slanted pool platform is made, the string will still be
seen as the diver disappears
Into the part where you can finally see the non-sacred room
or school as a girl by the side of the underwater cameras.
It’s good to swim in a church in a partial ellipse of its old
pool destroyed by what is built to interrupt its floors
& now we are gone just like many have houses to sleep in
with doors
I Want to Talk Now about
Reason, Riddle
Meanwhile there is these reasons I keep thinking
that wheretofore nevertheless despite I’d like
to know about everything except death’s dumb bite
without which we can all ride for quite a long while
I dont think it’s tubular to write not no more
the only write I like is change the world ridden
so here’s this riddle:
Gorbachev has a long one,
Bush has a very short one, the Pope doesnt need one
& Madonna doesnt have one at all???
Answer:
Therefore there might be some importance in not writing forever
therefore to say never will I write till this world is changed
therefore to write till this world is changed without ceasing
therefore to write unceasing no matter what begin again
His grandmother’s dead right on the verge of
My loving him more than’s allowable
Lucky I pour water over her body & worry
That hot’s inexact or too late: my children’s grades
Scattered all over the table despite the threat:
I didnt pay the last bill; they wouldnt send them
Amidst the mail
More threats than ever, I want the cure now
I wont live without it, Max has never made love
To get to important love without what, please tell me
With the knowledge I now have, I dont want to write
Instead to make magic or to pay
Better magicians than I for the work without a serious
Alphabet A to Z 0 to 9 as the forethought of freedom
Let me know
The Guild
On the exhaustive forest’s farm
where wasted apples knock the fruit
from the staghorn sumac trees all night
she dreamed I might be dead
so she could have him in theory & then she
stole her sister’s new girlfriend away.
He goes to bed early to sabotage our privacy
leaving me alone to talk and play with her.
(Also Antonio who wears loud flowered pink
& blue shorts & shirts says he likes her).
Late that night Joe & Linda’s loud party
wakes him up but I wont talk to him at first
—maybe I should really be being mad at her.
Then he tells me he’s jealous of how she loves me
And that’s why he suddenly left the room.
This was the same day I got halfway down
a new path by the pond and
turned back.
Now Nicky’s just come home with two sixguns
from Wild West City which isn’t far from here.
Death Is a Cambric Fabric
I’ve had my portion of prison
Ridden with person, desire’s poison
Desire’s person is an unruled idiot
I will wash the glasses now
The person’s poison is a position
You dont have to cook to eat the food
Pay the rent it’s not a portion of the person
Cant pay the portion of rent—you’re a person in prison
Plenty of poisons in forms of potions
Available to all to allay
Deep emotions, that is, no agility to pay
The person who put you in the prison position
Of your city, your house in it
Your own poison landlord, poison govt
Poison company country prison on this poison earth
No portion of which is for each person
The fun is over it’s getting dark
In the city & in the park
To crack the times
We are opposed in mind
Unwilling & disinclined
Too much sex entwines your hair
I dont know if the dawn is here dear
I want some grownup shoes
Like my female children have
I want the dawn to go back
To the darker femaler blue
It was just past sunset so that
Another isolated night can ensue, we never
Do anything bad, do we?
Hi ensuing logic
Please leave a message after
The sound of its intention
If you press the star button
When you get the machine
You dont ever have to listen to the message again
Sonnet
a little tiny poem
leaves us all alone
now that you’re not here
dont ever come home
my cruelty only comes
from death’s elaborate tombs
i talked to all your friends
talked to them one by one
they all agreed you are
a handsome child of nature
if so come here
as quickly as you can
if not I will unbraid