Watered with limitless
Liquor
Amber ton’c
Profane as a red sky
Tonight you laughed so hard
You made a faint
vasovagal syncope
on the Seraglio toilet
The head Selim
Ghazals rushing from bibulous skull
When a sultan thirsts
Apollyon cracks
Visions of Greeks escaping
Wooden smack
Skin flayed
Eyes on Famagusta
Eyes on the Pale Spaniards
And Venetian’s
Every lipstick, a traitor
Every betrayal, a bath
A mouth minty
With curses.
A seaman by nature
Is impulsive;
In dream canals,
He smashed his navies.
Under arched eyebrows,
A grand vizier
birthed Serb Bosnian
Who laddered the bones of
The fratricides
Mapped around the lake,
“Sappers sell to Volga and Don
Janissaries mail for the water
Communication,” said
A shaved beard grows faster
Than a severed arm.
Lent his lettered brain for a
Sot writing about orgies during his orgies
While their Mustafa
Was lent Cyprus ears and noses
To harvest rape grape
And vintage vine
And the sot
Wrote poems of heedless love
As hateful history somehow
left the bastard happy innocent
Dying in her behind.
Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category
When The Sultan Got Thirsty
Posted in Poetry, tagged Ottoman Empire, Poetry, Selim, Sultan on October 23, 2022| Leave a Comment »
What The Aging Academic Said
Posted in Poetry, tagged bicycling, Covid, Poetry on March 20, 2022| Leave a Comment »
My plumbing is all
Messed up after two years
Riding a bike during this Covid
Business
The straws and tubes
With which god made a crotch
Are all bent and skewed
Nothing comes out right
I spatter and dribble piss like
A broken radiator
But I can hiss and sob
A man made old before his time
Graceful in my imperfection
Plato said there are no objects just ideals
So you can think about that as you sadly
Consider my ruined junk
Mandates
Posted in Poetry, tagged Lanternfly, mandates, Pennsylvania, Poetry on January 1, 2022| Leave a Comment »
This corn must know it’s growing
Near a chocolate factory
Must smell the smokestacks
And know its own good murder
And we walk a chocolate town
Known by its chocolate river
And its invasive bugs, red on its
Underwings, stretched across
The calligrapher’s book to write its
Invasive thoughts upon,
Looking up with its orange eyes
In hopes of devouring the corn
And leaving its prolific eggs
The kids and the corn and now bugs know again
They are growing near a chocolate factory
And who slaved for what is sweet
D.H. Lawrence wrote of a sensual need for justice
And likewise
The beautiful red-brown lanternfly is smashed under thought
Blue Converse and mandate of state law
Just as the bug serves his own mandate
To devour the Pennsylvania picture at night
Open Window
Posted in Poetry on July 15, 2021| Leave a Comment »
On the days I beg you for light,
Window
You don’t give it. You have gray licked all over you
And rain
On the days you give me light
It’s too much and I’m so busy it hurts
I chased away all my friends
We don’t see an open window the same way
Thenness
Posted in Poetry on April 16, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Sometimes you hear
A song that punches
A hole in
Your reality
And there’s joy
In it
But also a loneliness
Because suddenly
You feel
You are outside
Of the reality
You didn’t know
You were on
The inside of
And this journey
To outsideness
Was solitary
Love’s Best at the Start
Posted in Poetry, tagged Love's Best at the Start, poem on April 15, 2021| Leave a Comment »
They put their last dollar
In the brand new gas tank
He said it in his vows:
How he’d always be frank
That they had no idea
What kind of life was in store
How he might give her nothing
But he might give her more
So she took to the diner
And he took to the drink
They loved much too often
And they laughed at the sink
It was full of used dishes
And their house it would stink
But he gave her his all
All the life he could think
And he read her that poem
She loved as a child
“How like you this body”
And her heart it went wild
For the love that’s forsaken
You can taste it in heart
And so he was loyal
Love’s best at the start
But she needed her freedom
A new poem to hear
Someone wreathing her eyes
Who besotted her ears
And she left him that liquor
And she left him to die
And he laughed at the dishes
And sometimes he cried
His love’s inventory
And she’s got the store
And he promised her less
That’s how he gave her more
And he promised her heaven
A room and a drain
And the hole drank his blood
Like the sea drank the rain
But he gave her her freedom
And a new happy heart
Cause just like in Eden
Love’s best at the start
Lie To Me Like a Junkie
Posted in Poetry, tagged lies, Poetry on March 31, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Lie to me like a junkie
Make it soft and intimate
Say it in my ear that we can make it work
It’s all going to be better
Put my ear in something soft
Bathe it in falsehoods
Make it feel like this time
We’re really going to fall asleep
In the water and drown
Tell it to me like I know you’re desperate
That you have no choice but to sweetly
Ever so sweetly smile and cheat me
The moon knows your kiss is cold
And that lie that the moon shone on
Was old
But it felt good to lie on the grass
And pass this lie south
From mouth to red and stupid mouth
Lie to me like a junkie
And it’ll feel so fine
‘Problematic’ Is Not A Word
Posted in Poetry, Politics, tagged critical theory, dialectic, problematic on March 30, 2021| Leave a Comment »
You used the word ‘problematic’
To describe something you didn’t like
On TV. You didn’t like
The idea
Couldn’t put
Your finger
On it
So you used a word
That sounds scientific
To English majors
But isn’t
Because every idea
And certainty
Is a piece of chum
Waiting to be eaten
By the shark
That is a deeper idea
And you can’t stop it
And you can’t help it
And “problematic”
Is your blanket
Your cage
Made of straw
But your big idea will be eaten
That’s what your big ideas
Were born for
‘Problematic’
Just like the straw
A word you can break
So easily
So fragile
It snaps
Do People Get Tired In Dreams?
Posted in Poetry on March 21, 2021| Leave a Comment »
You fell asleep
Like milk being stirred into tea
You felt yourself being distributed
into slumber
You floated cold
With the lovelorn shipping heiress
Grasping at chocolate bars
And barbiturates
Sleep as heavy as the look
Of desperation
A tongue waited on words
That wouldn’t come.
Gravity turns your gazes
Into faces
The kisses didn’t know what they were
Until they had ended
Sleep is the gravity of the mind
Seizing on broken things
You can’t turn the heavy ship
To wake against the rudder
You form black water into black ice
Hold her hand
You won’t be in this dream for long
Can’t succor her with a kiss
Can no longer fly
Can’t help
But turn the boat on its side
A person wakes to crash
And for the dreamer’s sake
A person hopes to crash
When she hopes again to wake
Love Is Memory
Posted in Poetry, tagged Poetry on March 18, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Love is memory
Love is a series of past acts
You saw go by in
A parade or a pageant
Or a passion play
Love wasn’t carrying
The cross for her
It was the dream of carrying
In a past whose truth
Was evaporated
Upon waking
Hugs never last for more than
A few seconds
But the memory of the hug
Or the kiss done in passion
Or anger
Lasts a year
A century
They wove it into a tapestry
At the cloisters
That thing you wove
Was love
Because love is memory
Beauty is Imperfection 