Past Corporate Love

It’s been a while.
I saw you undress in my mind.
Saw your figure so perfect from
distance.
Saw it imperfect in glances
underneath me,
with folds and moles.
Saw the light of the closet
cracked into the darkness of
the bedroom.
Disheveled, unorganized, and
human,
decorporatized for a moment,
like grapes on untended vines,
a vineyard
beyond the reach of the census.
Decorporatized when we lay
with each other
in fire and blood,

smashed
in fire and blood
together
in darkness
where we needed a reaching,
so we reached for the light
enclosed in our cell.

Our ancestors last human
in the restaurants
of the middle class
dreaming the way that
kept them sleeping.

The lights, the lights,
they’re golden around there,
dreaming the way that
kept them sleeping.

The Thing No Longer Howls

In the winter
we eat sharp white cheddar
and drink the sweet cream sherry
we bought at a rural supermarket
in Oklahoma on a roadtrip.
It’s what we do to get us through
the spurning of the sun.
The thing no longer howls as close
to us out in space.
We sit by white walls
and fireplace fires,
old books
and feel the fibers of sweaters
against our swollen skin.
It’s what we do to forget lovers
who spurned us
and learn to know each other,
learn to grow old,
to somehow have courage as
we become cowards.
The memories of autumn,
the smell of fallen leaves,
the emptying of the streets,
these things seem sweet to us
now.

For
the thing no longer howls as close
to us out in space.

Rocka My Soul In The Bosom Of Abraham

What did Abraham do?

He did what all other fathers
since him are striving to do.

Abraham just bought a color TV.

The color TV looks right
with the tones of the air in Brooklyn.

Abraham likes to walk about.

He likes the city at twilight.
The orangeness, those ancient
kinds of
things.

Now Abraham has been watching his TV.

So Abraham goes home to his wife
and her Salisbury dinners
and the cool truths of the evening
news,
but then Abraham has a previous wife
he loves more too.

He imagines her ghost will trail him
through
to his last breaths.

Their son has gone off to college
by the good hills and woods and
fresh air
of rural Pennsylvania.

Three Hundred Fifty Five Million

The waveform people took it.
The form of love between us,
the gravity.
Back to their mansion in the woods,
on a planet
three hundred fifty five million
light years away.
Can you see it leaving in the city?
In every city on the planet,
past the grimey stains
on subway stairs.
The people leaving the cities
to live like the waveform people,
in their woods
three hundred fifty five million
light years away.
Let them walk upon earth and snow
in the winter.
Said the waveform people.
Let them cherish their human
manners.
But the mansion is not there.
Only the blue sky
of the waveform people above.

The Trees Have Been My Friends

The trees have been my friends.

When oblivious businessmen
go to their upscale gyms and afterwards
clink their glasses of red wine
together over steak dinners
I will be able to say
I was nestled in a house of impoverished people
where I dreamed the ancient dreams
of the microcellular arrangements
from a very long time ago
and there beside it,
though not in sterile air conditioned
air,
there, on the stagnant outskirts of an
industrially polluted city,
there the trees have still come to live
and the trees,
the trees still loved me,
the trees still loved them,

and the trees have been my friends.

What Westernized Adults Are Waiting For

Cars go by the windows
and Westernized adults
seem depressed
indoors.
They wonder,
is this,
all this,
really a scam,
some sort of sham show
they judge themselves
and others
by.

So the fan turns
on
the ceiling,
the air conditioner hums,
and
they get up to check their email,
then
go back to work tomorrow.

For it is in some other world
where they do not
go
back to work,
but meet other adults
from their
community
to discuss and address
the real problems
actually relevant
in their lives.

For in this other world
they
are not
propaganda bejeweled
dominators and subservients,
obsessed with myth and power,
but rather
objective listeners
and
compassionate actionnaires,
vested in both observant locality
and also relational reality.

And these Westernized adults
realize this other world is

waiting to be built.

Suburban House Love

We could be in a kitchen,
someday.
She and I.
A kitchen in a suburban home
in Wisconsin,
someday.
A Saturday afternoon,
for our little boy’s birthday party.
Wood grain cabinetry
and splatter sprayed dry wall.
Light blue balloons,
pink and yellow ones too,
taped to the walls, ceilings,
kitchen appliances, and doorways.
We could be there
with the
fluorescent light
merged with
the sunlight from windows
to warm us and turn our feelings
to goodness.
To know what it’s like to have
relaxed muscles and breath.
To feel cold iced tea move
over our tongues.

Old House Made Of River Stone

  
Because I was afraid to sleep alone
I turned to her.
I turned to her boobs.
I turned to her food.
I turned to singing folk songs too.
In that old house
made of river stone
in that old neighborhood in
Fort Worth.
I turned to my cats too
when they’d go clickety clack on
the hardwood floors in the night
my heart would call out
and I could tell the click and the clack
of my polydactyl girl cat from
the pit and the patter of my little blue
boy cat
there
in that old house
made of river stone.
I could call out in the southern
darkness
and they would answer me
and come lay by my side through
the night
until the morning sun turned the air
into that phosphorescent tone
of orange and white.

Turn To The Land

  

Let us turn to the land.
You and me.
You.
From this pollution.
The purpose of humans.
Turn. Turn. Turn to the land.
Or abandon the pollen fallen
from willows.
At night the stars show
then in day still burning.
We refute such odd existence.
Being but not yearning.
So turn as a plow turns,
turn as the leaf turns,
turn as the tree turns.
Turn from the rock, bone,
threshed into soil.
Turn. Turn. Turn to the land.

Handjob Tyrants Of Hollywood

She will not be perfect.
Her skin will fall and flop.
She talks and talks
and I of course make the mistake
of judging her value by
the changing of her physicality
while granting myself privileges
of mind, lintellect, and earnings.
My breath stales to phlegm
and stinks its sad mature mucosal
isolation of men.
I become known as

the handjob tyrant
and look towards other women,
but as I grow old and my hardons
no longer work
do I have the courage to love her
as she turns into something
beyond time,
eternal, beyond stupid words?
Something my mother told me
as a toddler,

listen to that feeling inside your head
and maybe I’ll still be afraid of.
This poem was not written for the
fashionable young people or the
vainfully rich and egotists
rushing in and out of the stores and
clinics of the City.
This poem was written for the leaves,
grass, and particles
still vassals to the wind,
not the human negrotude
put in place by the ancient Court
of Ine, ingrained in your movies and
television.