Beauty is Imperfection

You have to have a lot going on
You have to keep yourself busy
You have to stir things relentlessly
While you tear the focaccia
Like a banal half sentence
From your mouth

You drink inertia,
When the light hits your inertia in a glass
It makes a dark red wine stain
On the white tablecloth

You have to do something with idle hands
You have to crank a pasta maker
As if you were Penelope making a shroud
And your virtue
Is the pasta getting squeezed out
And somebody else can eat it
Cause only other people enjoy
Eating your virtue.

You married a boob. You know that now.

You have to let the sun hit your face.
You have to eat the Vitamin D,
You and the accidental child

You married a boob,
And the green sun slipped behind the building
At dusk in June
Embarrassed for you both

You have to keep many irons in the fire
Cause you might cheat or gamble

The minutes of the day
can seem so long

Much more than your heart can stand

You might have an oven full of prayers
But you can’t quench desire
You have thirst to do wrong

Time, when I stir you into my heart:
You make fire

You have to have a lot going on
You have to wear an aqua lung
Just to breathe real air sometimes

Time to study the fluid mechanics of time
And try hard to be able
To not see
Where you began

I closed my eyes tight and saw phosphene butterflies
Closed them tight and saw
A yellow cloud in space with a hole in it
I closed my eyes tight and saw brown outer space
With colored stars, red, blue, green, yellow, purple

My eyes:
They knew exactly what to do with the dark
And the light they drank in
Spilled back and forth like milk in a saucer
Free from whatever animal gland had expressed it

I closed my eyes and the light was mine
mushroom cloud shapes
They pinched off some yang
And made some yin

I tried to be many eyeballs
To untangle logic from insight
Because I know the danger of seeing
Springs from its own privilege

I squeezed my eyes tight against the oppressive danger
Of a world that is all reflection and no source

I squeezed my eyes shut tight
knowing that playing with the light
And being with the light
are different

I squeezed my eyes shut tight to know there is no blindness
And everything
from a taste
to a smell
to a sound
makes a picture
And that this constant forming
of pictures
cannot be helped

I squeezed my eyes shut tight to see my future and my past

Conspiracy of seeing
I am a part of it

Conspiracy of seeing
You have to see it
And so you must constantly
Squeeze your eyes shut

I ran home from night school
                Where I ate pencils for hours
To lock my door and watch Carmela
                I broke into a sweat on my neck
Slobbered like an ogre to pass
                My driver’s test

And I never graduated,
                Never went naked in a graduate robe
With the toenails she painted pink
Instead I rode
my bicycles in many Italian races              
                Only to watch Carmela give her face
To a thousand other faces

Vulgarities are red in a mouth—the raised red glass
                A kiss sealed together with rubber
                A kiss from a stranger
will get a raise
While you wait for the love you can light with matches
Love you can’t know from praise.

And I wait for another race to put me down
                Not ever knowing the first one’s fate
                And I race Carmela in my mind
And carry her cross from time to time
No matter how many years she’s late.

–begun 1991, finished 2021

You put the juice on the table

You put the spoon deep

In the soup

You watch a sun that’s been angry all day

Put its anger to bed,

In the purple sea.

Peace:

It’s a different kind of struggle

You say it’s more than a rose

Four thousand years ago

They pierced your nose

You were ready to marry

That’s how the Bible story goes

And now the father Abe

Don’t know what to do

The bride’s got a nose ring

And also a tattoo

The dreams of the fathers

No longer within

The values they taught

Just a picture on skin

A memory for those

Whose values will never win

The minute you met her

On the gypsum colored street

You’d lost favor in gold

Lost the flavor in meat

You saw she had a ring

And you know he had one too

The father loves your woman, son

But he gave her to you

To pass his ideals

to his blood in the sand

And then far away he flies

Not knowing where they land