sky’s debris and
Still the green stems twine around
Their stake of civilization
The one word it would hurt me to chip
From the glitter in my mouth
Instead of the phone call this poem
And can’t say it. The murkish flood
Idle logic now distilled in your flesh
The silvered tears
Images of our separation
When I remain untrue to
Anything The desolation
Shimmers in my pleasures
And takes back my thoughts from you
Instead of my raw breath, I give you
Fear drives me back to the convention
My feelings, to have for an afternoon.
Then we understand each other,
All is returned to me And
Still it resembles the thoughts
Of me you keep in a beautiful
Carton in your room, somewhere
Across the city that now seems
So strange, accepting the convention
We live for but never mention:
You are not free to acknowledge
These terms such is our agreement
Then we understand each other
You got it. Then slowly walk out
The room and out in the gathering
Street. The gold flood of the gut-
Ters sunlight and motor oil
Thinking that what our beauty
Finds in the street’s disorder
Can return in the quiet hotel
The conventional neon light making it Spain
Anything else we wd want to believe
Shoddy sense of improvement and
An immaculate joy. Standards
Concerning the function of beauty
And all the love-light shining
In the eyes of a deceased photo
The gone Election Day signs;
Simply to anticipate feelings you had
Already included in your sighs
She offers me the terrain
Of her heart in bondage
I enter and provide its wage
When I sat down at this table
A prophet and now to finish
This ravishing book and have it
Bound in expensive white paper
Filled with the conventional words
Bringing a little strain
Her breath and mine play tag
In lush, bitter arbors
Our wasted hammocks sag
Gladiolas filled with tears
Wrung from the scattered burden
Of trees burnished with rage, our rage
Autumn embroidery in a raw cage
Containing joy, leaking disdain
Holes full of sky in the trees
Her lover crosses his red knees.
Embarrassing. That’s right
She offers me you offer me a jeweled
Motorcade to trust my heart to
But I am not interested. The one
To whom this heart belongs is she
Who hears it singing everywhere
Conventional as honesty in love is.
Discarding daylight’s forgery of
Manners, midnights’s emerald stair
Then we understand each other
Except the Africa of her mouth
SONG
You asked me to sing
Then you seemed not
To hear; to have gone out
From the edge of my voice
And I was singing
There I was singing
In a heathen voice
You could not hear
Though you requested
The song—it was for them.
Although they refuse you
And the song I made for you
Tangled in their tongue
They wd mire themselves in the spring
Rains, as I sit here folding and
Unfolding my nose in your gardens
I wouldn’t mind it so bad
Each word is cheapened
In the air, sounding like
Language that riots and
Screams in the dark city
Thoughts they requested
Concepts
