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Poems
by
j krut
(aka j a jackson)

She's Gone

I know what I'm told by the tattering bird.
Outside on the sill when she visits my world.
A thin hedge row dividing me from that place.
Escaped from a universe fantasy farce.
A coolness of glass on a forehead against.
Outside in the yard dichotomized forebrain.
The rain on the window defies my becalm.
She didn't tell me what could happen if when.
Emptiness vacated shell of a dwelling.
Outside in the world she is flown to begone.

8-24-10

Everything Seasonal

Waiting is, the summer, which I get so used to thinking of as a life of warmth and "vacation" that I forget what real waiting is.

Waiting is, an indoor (pre-)occupation, out of the cold outside.

Waiting is, hunkering down and busying yourself with other concerns until times change and life gets easier again.

Waiting is, sticking to your investment strategy as the bottom drops out of the market and all hope seems lost and the companies in your portfolio seem to be threatening to go under, because you know that one day in the unforeseeable future, it will improve.

Waiting is, feeling assured that your society will not change so drastically that all your waiting rules will be rendered useless.

Waiting is, knowing that, at some point in the future, a time will come to act, and you will know it when you see or feel it.

Waiting is, plants growing, especially those that have to develop over years to produce crops; and those that winter over indoors, providing food or waiting for spring to begin producing again.

Waiting is, the same process with ideas that winter over in your heart because your mind refuses to entertain them until the freeze of your personal winter thaws.

11-20-08

substitution

You are an image, in my mind, nothing
much more, dear. I still survive, when you're not
here. The world still turns and I yet adore
the presence you withhold when you pass by,
your essence trailing after you, uncaught
by my attention, leaving your allure
of conventional magic inside me,
transformed into an alliterative
malformed stutter fraught with faulty ardor,
left up to me to sacrifice and die.
So I create images, selective
bits of hopeless substituted beauty.

5-18-08

Massage
(a prurient interest)

From her neck, low, where it meets her shoulder,
deep down, below the flesh, at the hard bone
I feel, my fingers pressing through relenting
resistance, softening muscle guarding
the point where pain most intensely pinches,
yet so gradually so as not to hurt
but create, the sensation of relief,
coming back to the spot while after while
after divagating down her vertebral
steps, feeling back and forth like a tourist
examining precious temple objects
left intact by ancient processes
of the Indian artists who visit
her ancestry, who are responsible
for her warm resilient auburn skin,
to where it thins out and narrows far down
between her hips, still feeling, the sharp bone
structures beneath the surface pushing hard
back against my rigid plying fingers,
up and down, for hours she'll allow it,
thinking it is she who is so pleasured
when, to feel this way her inner framework,
to privilege the softer periphery,
while wandering back up to the central
point, the pinch that radiates discomfort,
gotten to, manipulated, pressed
temporarily into submission,
I turn her over and begin again.

1-3-08

Three Stupid Limericks

I know most of you never care
that my balls are lighter than air.
They used to be heavy,
like the weight of a Chevy;
but now they're so damn debonair.

There once were some men in D.C.,
who thought they were better than thee.
They said 'thine' and 'thou'
and worshipped a cow,
and in the end couldn't agree.

I could do this all day and all night.
At stupid verse, I am a fright.
I write it and write it
and rhyme words like 'bite it'
that no one would dare to recite.

1--28-07

Spinning Logic

Scientology: Science::
Christianity: Christ::
communion: defiance::
Hot tea: Iced.

Labels are deception
meant to misconstrue.
Immaculate conception.
Jesus was a Jew.

White is black in Babylon.
Up is down reversed.
Just politics in Avalon,
religion is the worst.

3-15-06

the opposite direction

i'm growing backwards
i hope there's time enough left before
i'm too young to remember
who i am

i can sit so long now still
a long time ago i moved when i sat
too long in one place being
too much to dwell upon

what happened then when i was
older before the turn-around
when freedom was played out
and reality narrowed down

to determine the nature of how
i would have died
if growth did not continue
in the opposite direction

9-12-05

Old Reverie

Oh, what reverie it would be to see
Ships like old poems sent to foreign shore.
But modern convenience has leveled the
lofty rhetoric of full sails that bore

me to death. Poets are so pretentious.
And it was far, far worse in olden times.
Now, we're supposed to be more sensuous,
like ragged claws scuttling too many rhymes

and meter; better let her letters pass
unread, because your mistress is a whore.
Old fantasies like fancy ships amass
in harbors that have silted shut the door.

9-12-05

like a koan

I am that person, who did all those things,
who lived in all of those other places,
associated with all of those people,
and now I'm living here, alone.

Yet I am still that very same person!
The discrepancy is an illusion.
The difference is a lame confusion.
Time like an arrow prevents the unknown.

1-19-05

bound

There is nothing, beyond
the universe. Is space
substance yet to be found?
The universe is space

like I am my body
when I close my eyes and
without, thinking, perceive
an infinity bound.

1-15-05

Life Forms

Early evening sunlight plays off variously verdured vegetation.
Animals skirt the yard, wary of coming too far out into the open:
A turkey; then a rabbit and a squirrel; finally, near dusk, a doe;
And later, that threatening snort of the buck back in the woods.
He warns his mate not to get too close. Danger lurks out there.

In here, the dog is hot and tired, but restless, panting, unsettled.
I myself would rather sit and do nothing but enjoy the stillness.
Vociferous birdsong accentuates the heavy, hanging evening air.
Life forms itself between the threads of a specific local tapestry.
A mysterious unseen ubiquitous network suspends our existence.

6-18-04

sunwheel

Wind moves the poplars
like sails rotating the Earth
eastward forcefully.

2-25-04

you too

By the time you knew me, I was an independent entity,
closed off, and this was early on, before the problems.
I didn't trust you. I didn't trust anyone. I was too cool.
And shy, disguised, a tough nut. Nothing got through.

But some few people knew. You. And others. They saw
the soft center, the delicate inner workings I protected.
Nevertheless, you felt rejected. An impossible position.
Independence came hard for me. I survived, but barely.

I was unaffected, someone told me. It was a compliment.
That was the appearance I presented, though quite a lot
got through then, which I resented; not so's you'd know.
I was so affected, so much earlier, it took its early toll.

This is my appeal; I now understand: the split between
inaccessibility and desire. I am here, primed for release,
but not without danger, having been contained so long.
That which has always been, inside, that you knew of,

is, still here. When people see it, which they will, more
often now, because I will, allow, it, they tend to demure.
Circumstances are reversing. I have been so long alone,
I have learned the secret of togetherness: you feel too...

2-25-04

a change of season

the evening sky stretches
horizon to horizon
lighting distant trees at its
edge deepening overhead
where the warm air cools after
the sun has set and crickets
sound like the room noise buzzes
enclosed in our nestled space
in the middle of winter
because she lies here with me

12-14-03

Communal Existence
(a more universal kind of love)

We happen to meet, as when we might be in a sparsely populated area where there are few opportunities to form couples and,
therefore, we take advantage of this fact and form an alliance, against the likelihood that we might otherwise remain alone;
but in this modern world among large populations, many opportunities prevail, so that not only may we pick and choose,
but we may, as well, leave one relationship for another, so that our time and place enables a certain fickleness in our attachment.
A new kind of morality must take the place of this old-fashioned fidelity that we felt for each other when we were more desperate,
if we are to maintain any semblance of "correct" human sexual attraction: we, that is, the better among us, must insist upon
spiritual intimacy until we find the one person that we know is right, at least for a long enough time, if not for a lifetime, practicing
at least a serially monogamous existence, with each relationship lasting, years as opposed to months or weeks, or even days;
and meanwhile, so that we may learn from each other and grow, as opposed to merely taking pleasure from each other and passing on to
the next relationship, we may forgo casual sexual experience for its own sake in order to develop, a more universal kind of love.

12-14-03

It's Summer, Stupid

i

Being, outside, feeling, too much affect
to contain within narrow frail chest walls
spreads through ever-broadening curtained halls
of green and wood that leave too soon to see
an intense smile that distracts my self away
from forces seen of the arriving day.

ii

It's not fair that the weather must turn cold
and we humans must still turn old and die
whistling through leaves of trees like a sigh
on a perfectly calm hot summer day
when life can't care to go away so soon
as midnight when it's only afternoon.

iii

In evening and on late into dark
crickets accompany nostalgic songs
of loss of love diminishing all wrongs
of all the tender moments stolen and
never blighted by nature's ravages
till sighted by laws of averages.

iv

Some of us die and some of us live on
in the minds of others, the mystery
being sundry volumes of history
we write ourselves into, saving the life
that moves out of day and night and crosses
the blind thin line between gains and losses.

v

In counterpoint to early morning doves,
autumn, clocking its rapid near-approach,
demands a meditation to encroach
upon transcendence of experience
like ordinary fire transcends the wood.
I'd stay in that place always if I could.

8-23-3

Unity

The woods grow to enclose the yard in summer
and die to expose the industrial park
as the winter winds blow the dead leaves away,
my spirit departing, unclothed, missing green

walls defining the open essence I am.

I hide well away, inside cold walls of wood,
feeling a definite loss of boundary
threatening revelation, reality,
until the spring begins, to grow it again.

7-4-03

A Wish

I wish I were up, in among trees,
in treetops among delicate leaves,
where irregular green sunlit halls
mysteriously change space into
a world of difference and yet still
divide Earth into nature above
and artifice below and between.

7-1-03

Up There  

The Peace will not descend, today, from the treetops where It hangs
and sways and drifts, the leaves jealously guarding Its distance.

Usually, on days like this, when the air is still and the traffic quiet,
It sinks to earth and absorbs Itself into anything that will not move.

I do not move, but my mind moves, my motives are churned up.
I wonder how it knows, so far off, to stay away, understanding

the pollution an unsettled human will creates unwittingly emitted
into the surrounding air to compete with The Peace up there.

6-16-03

i am, now, nobody  

I used to be someone, of relative importance, not so
you'd so much know it by my appearance, or by what I did
for a living: more prestigious than some, not so much as others.

But people knew me for what I was, apart from my profession,
a person who engaged others, whether benignly or aggressively,
but in any case honestly, without a hidden motive or agenda.

Or else I would not engage them at all, preferring anonymity
to the manipulations and deceits that social interaction brings,
like I was before I taught myself to socialize and get along.

But that's all in the past. No sense crying over spilled tears.
Now, nobody calls, and I hear him clearly. Even telemarketers
have given up, now that there's a list I willingly support.

Nobody is nobody, but I am. Here. Today. Observing
others interacting without a thought or care, as to how
I do not feel, alone, waiting, for the world to end, again.

6-16-03

The Grand Tour

This is a tour of my wandering mind. Watch that first step. It's
a doozy.
This is the entryway to dreams. Don't go in there. It's too
confusing.
This is the main compartment. Everything conscious goes on
in here.
This is where most of the stuff gets written. Watch that over-
hang there.
This is the antechamber to the depths. Beyond here you can't
come back.
This is the three limpoleum boyne grouching down in the
living detch.
This is the exit. Now you know everything. Make yourselves
at home.
This where you abandon all sense of responsibility, ye who
enter here.
This is the last time I will allow anyone in here. No, it isn't. I'm
so pedantic.

4-6-03

The Alien    

I'm not who you think, I am. When I am, alone
I am, someone else, a foreigner perhaps, someone
unaccustomed to attention, unwilling to participate
in social experimentation to determine the limits of
personality and being. These are private matters,
a science of the individuation of spirit. Left alone,
I welcome your concern, your presence, the contact
you allow. Yet further investigation is perilous
for you. I, myself, know the art of self-protection.
It makes me what I am; not compromising being,
the way I know, to be safe, in this world, which is
not my own. I'll fall, to Earth, for you, but that is all.

12-1-02

without, death      

I know what illusion is. But what is reality?
The images that form and dissipate, no longer
retained, obsessively, held onto, like I am
seeing now, dissolve into the light from which
they come, composed of light, all things.
Images melt away, but I remain, apparently
a solid object, within a hidden inner light.

11-17-02

Haunted House      

I visit the place all the time in my dreams.
My father sits asleep in a chair in a corner of the dining room.
My whole family is there, living and dead.
Whether there was a miracle once or they got out on their own,
they were led to these places where they commune.
I am an interface to a wide variety of dimensions,
some of them normal, but some of them far more bizarre.
I am so many things, I cannot keep track. Certain people
I am are not so nice, and they are sometimes taken for the whole.
It can become very confusing to realize everything you are.
It can be disconcerting not to have a personality focus.
Anyone who is anyone is everyone who ever wants to be.

5-21-02

Searching For J.D. Salinger

I don't want people who know me to know me, but if people who don't know me know me, that's okay.
I don't want people who know me to read what I write, because when they do, they begin to really know me.
But if people who don't know me read what I write, that's okay. They don't know me, so they can't know, me.
The problem is that when people who don't know me read what I write, they begin to know me, better.
As long as they never meet me, that's okay. But what happens if one day people who have read me meet me?
People who don't know me will then know me. It's like matter and antimatter coming together.
You've got to keep them apart, or else. The universe ends.

1-23-02

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers

What do you do when the person you fell in love with is not the same person any more, when you come to the realization that you loved a young, substantially different person and not the one you're living with now?
[This isn't something I'm going through now, but I have gone through this in the past. What I did was to go and look for someone else, which was probably a mistake. Thus, in retrospect, I ask this stupid question.]
I'm still in love with an image of a woman that has passed, away. Still, today, the woman lives, a separate entity. But then, she was a girl. It's as if she has died and been replaced by someone else. People change.
[And I don't mean just physically. If it were a physical phenomenon, I could handle it, I think. A spark of life is gone, and not just between us, which wasn't all that conscious anyway, but in every respect. She isn't]
the impish delight she used to be, the spark of light surrounded by a dark world, wandering, wondering. She's become a fixed entity, a pod-generated nano-being living in a utopia of brain technology. Fascist baby.

10-26-01

Doubt        

This unkind weather always reminds me of the shore,
overcast skies threatening rain, moisture in the air,
a motive of nature indecipherable via mortal means,
some impending significance, some event of import
waiting to ride in on wayward air or ocean currents,
or calamitous circumstances circling, cosmic vultures
too high for us to see, or a forbidding doom dunning
in the dusk like the ditch in Donovan Leitch's song.
Weather has multiple meanings. I could be wrong.

8-19-01

Eternity

I

Desireé speaks to me in French and, surprisingly, I can understand her.
Maybe it's because she's not French and speaks slowly with an accent.
Desireé's not her real name. She created it for herself, after she met me.
I had been walking between the fire hall and my home for several days.
I did this sometimes back then, when I began to feel alone (not lonely).
The firemen were doing renovation on the old road I walked back on.
We examined the places where water ran across it from the hillside.
They would have to dig up the road and underlay it with drainage ducts.
Back at home, Jason met me in front of my house, and we talked.
Then, restless, I went walking again, leaving him alone to wait for me.
Along the upper road, weeds grew out from the hillside, overtaking it.
I had to walk out around them, far out into the middle of the roadway.
That was when I met Desireé, who led me to her street and her house.
Her house was up over the hill, on the same street where Jason lived.
She talked to me about my parents when they were still young and free.
She knew about my grandparents; she thinks she is psychic. Maybe so.
She settled in on my mother after telling me briefly about her mother.
She detailed her young romantic life when she had met my father, but...
She didn't know how accurate she was, and I avoided telling her.
After a brief description of her teenage years, she described a road.
She didn't seem to know it was Sandy Creek, but I recognized it.
Mom walked along the road past the businesses, then mostly retail.
Now, like then, especially down by the boulevard, seedy bars opened.
This was after a long time where only light industrial plants existed.
An atmosphere of thirties' ambiance is slowly returning to the area.
She told me of my mother's meetings with my father at the far corner.
Traffic passed by rapidly on Allegheny River Boulevard as they kissed.
She didn't know I already knew these stories. Mom had told me them.
The year before she died, in an effort to preserve the past, she talked.
Maybe Desireé intuited them, or maybe she found my notes, pretending.
I didn't know; I wanted to think the latter, but I didn't really believe it.
As she talked, she kept closing in on me and then drifting farther away.
She acted as if she were teasing me, trying to entice me to approach her.
But I sort of felt it was an unconscious act, as if she didn't realize it.
She did this especially early on, when she was speaking French to me.
Later, as she talked about the roadway corner, she began to get closer.
It felt as if she were empathizing with them, using me to become them.
We stood outside the bar on the corner, close. She leaned in against me.
At first, I resisted her. She acted as if she didn't know we were close.
But soon enough she began kissing me, so that she knew she began it.
We became like one being, until she pulled just enough away to exist.
She said she had to go, but I encouraged her to stay, teasing her mind.
I told her this was what women criticize men for, resisting intimacy.
She relented at the argument, because she knew I was right, and stayed.
And in staying, she had to allow us to merge once again into one being.
This time, she let it happen, and we stood there, outside in the dark.
Against the building side, out of the line of sight of passersby, we kiss.
She asks me how long this could last, and I tell her it lasts forever.
She believes me, but at the same time, she knows she will have to leave.
She can't seem to reconcile the two opposing states within her mind.
I tell her that this moment is forever and what will happen is illusion.
She understands and does not wish at all to allow the awareness to end.


II

My mother and father are dead. During their life, they allowed it to end.
Death lasts maybe for only minutes as a final state of non-illusion, but
while we are in it, we are eternal, aware of the entirety of the universe.
If this is so, which I do not doubt, and there is little I can say that of,
then our lives will never end, because awareness of eternity is eternal.
I know this for a fact. I've had this experience on numerous occasions.
Always, though, I have returned, because we never give up illusions
while we are alive. During the most intense experiences, we hang on
to the tiniest thread of deception, so that we may once again return.
Scientists (I am one of them) tell us that the death state reported to us
by those who say they have returned is an oxygen-deprived existence.
Experiences reported are exactly what we see when we are out of air.
Thus, we may conclude that afterlife is illusion based on false reports.
But what about those few moments when we are experiencing the bliss?
If we could prolong that state, devoid of the attachment, we would be
forever. When we dream, we are detached. Consequently, we feel freer.
If our waking life is an illusion, and the best minds do believe it is so,
then dreaming is less of an illusion, not more, which we fail to interpret.
The freedom we experience in dreams is less than a real thing, beyond.
The moment of death, like the moment of life, is the same state, alive.
Except at death we know it, while "alive" we do not, being, conditioned
into so ordinary a state that we believe we are finite creatures who die.
We die, and for a moment, or an hour, or a day or days, we are alive.
Free of physical attachment, we know what is, independent of what is
not. Love can make you one, with one another, and with the universe.
I have been completely detached and eternal and I have been in love.
There is no difference, if you do not accept love's physical limitations.
When I die, I know, I will live forever. That it may be only a moment is
irrelevant. It is only a moment to you who "live." To me, it is, eternity

5-30-01

Imprisoned

You may be prevented from getting what
you want, but nothing can ever stop you
from wanting. My life is a fantasy
in this regard: I want. I have conquered
the worst of attachment, meditating
upon causes of human suffering,
separate from an illusory world,
with freedom few recognize, let alone
understand, but suffering continues.
I still want. No external force of law,
no unjust regime disenfranchising
citizens, who then pray to futile gods
as recourse to unattainable wealth,
can imprison a soul that wants. These are
both positive and negative effects
of life of mind: we are free after all
to want, to create, specific prisons.

5-13-01

Communication

She phones me, and as soon as I answer, she says, "Can you wait a minute?" and then, without waiting for an answer,
she puts me on hold.
I wait, patiently, for her to return, occupying my time straightening up the house, until she apologizes, again.
She does this sort of thing all the time, as if my time is hers to do with as she pleases, I, always, irritated, complying.
As she's talking, she pauses, waiting for me to confirm in some way, with some brief comment, a simple "Uh-huh,"
as if she wants me to display an insecurity, like people will do when they feel they must always be responding,
to echo her own insecurity in expecting this response, which she seems to need, to continue on, as if saying, "Please,
indicate that you hear what I'm saying, that I'm not talking to myself, that someone is paying attention to me,"
which most often I will find myself not doing, caught up in her self-fulfilling prophecy, wanting to accomplish
other things, until she is finished overly-explaining all that she feels it is, unnecessary, to explain, insulting me
with her implicit assumptions, that I am not listening, or that I'm too stupid to understand what she's saying.
She'd deny this is true, of course. She's told me that I communicate with her far better than anyone ever has.

3-11-01

Strange Days Personified        


Time is out of joint. Oh, cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right !
 
Hamlet,
ACT I, SCENE V

I worry. How do people take me?
Wind howls, heavy objects, blow
bumping into permanent structures
out in a wicked winter blackness.
A front is coming through. The power
goes out, comes immediately on.
An omen? I turn off the single lamp,
sit in the dark. Electronic devices
cast flashing red shadows across
the room, out of sync, slow/fast.
All day long, in fact for several
days now, messages received indicate
normal routines with sequences with
frayed edges. I am provoked/provoking,
exchanging letters/e-mails, trying
to be civil, careful, suspecting
each felt insult ignored escalates.
I must take time to pick stitches
after passing events threaten
to unravel dedicated operations
long developing, an inevitability
I postpone haunting me, plans, made,
set aside, awaiting opportunity, which
always arrives as others disexpect it.
I have hidden myself away so long, I am
disregarded, until I show up again
with years of results, of purposes
unseen suddenly appearing, full-
blown, as others try to comprehend
steps they missed I am so familiar
with/without them. Each comment
at all out of the ordinary seeming
criticism as they fail to understand
any logic I have not supplied by
my ongoing presence. Quiet now.
The wind is dying down. Structures
list, item by item, each offense,
remark, each passing observation
taken in its turn, turned over, so as
not to re-offend in case it's unintended.
No one else, it seems, would even care,
their daily hustle carrying them beyond
it--except I think, they see it
in my own words, to them, reflecting
back at me, my own strange self.
What is in is out. It happens.

2-10-01

Real and Artificial Selves

There is a difference between what "life" makes us into and what we make of our own selves. Our appearance is and is not a superficial matter.
We are each molded by our environments, and by the forces of our inner selves. That which establishes our basic identities is paramount
in the construction of our constitutions, which we add to or detract from via concerted effort of our conscious faculties, trying to alter who we are.
Deep inside, the automatic process functions, forming flesh and bone, determining our morphologies, our complexions, our standard grimaces
in which we can be read, albeit by experts, not necessarily so much psychological professionals as intuitive initiates who grasp the sense
of what we are through an empathetic reaction to details of the masks we wear, which are the attempts to counter the selves we hide away
with the sciences of application, of make-up, muscle-development, dieting and fasting, and even, sin of sins, a proper and decided education.
We are always, and never, who and what we will appear to be, being both the products of our conscious and unconscious selves, interblended.
We strive to succeed or fail at being/becoming what we are/are not, altering our outer/inner selves, the former superficially, the latter truer.
Characteristically, we change, toward/away from what we actually are, so that others would not know which self we change and/or we hide away.
Deep-seated changes we manage with a great success to make result in more permanent alterations of our physical appearance over longer time.
Changes in the layers of facade are less lasting, needing continuing attention to maintain. We confuse them, thinking both are self-improvement.
We think, when we will be advised that appearance is everything, it is not true, when we recognize that our appearance is a false standard we apply
to put a face on the existence we know to otherwise be ourselves, to put our best foot forward, yet we know we have over our developing lives come
to look like what we really are, inside, which we will not so often want to admit to, because we try so hard, to maybe be, our other artificial selves.

11-24-00

Mythic Independence

Fall is the saddest time of year, but not because life is dying.
Everything and everyone can die for all I care. I am immune.
Fall is sad because I know, summer gone, it's going to get cold
and with each passing season, I am getting old. Like the trees
that creak and bend behind my house in the wind that blows
their leaves away and freezes their outer surfaces until spring,
hardened bark protecting delicate inner layers unseeing daylight
which in warmer times transmit energy of nutrients to all parts,

I am emboldened by the experience of life, to stand
and take it, even through the harshness of the winter.
But trees are never sad. This is the disadvantage of living
long lives connected in the root-mass, intertwined

among branches: you don't know who you are, insentient
by our human standards. But some say you know yourself
better through mutual definition, no mythic independence,
the American legacy, the cowboy on the range in snow,
braving it out, with cold feet and teary eyes. I don't know.

Fall reminds me I am human after summer has deceived me
into thinking I was some kind of a passionate disheveled god
alone in an elixir of heavenly heat soaking into me relieving
the aches that winter teaches me to bear with stoic grace.
What is mere sadness when faced with this madness?

10-4-00

Invisible Silk Panties

Having been deluded, but now with eyes opened,
sun at a low angle in the afternoon sky,
memories of crows, long gone, cawing mornings calling,
invisible black silk panties too readily giving way

as I slide my hand beneath the soft
frayed loosened waistband
forearm along skin
hand out slackened legband, also frayed...
...I remember she used to run her warm hand
along smooth unseen material and
press her powdered body up against me,
slide up on top of me, slick and easy
in the night, powered by the passion
she controlled, letting it out in spurts...oh...

I'm sorry. Did I lose myself? For a moment.
The afternoon is evening, evening morning. I ease
through it like a highly honed hunting knife
scraping three days of stubble off an itching neck.
I've long since forsaken the razor, its memory
all tied up with shaving legs and armpits folded in
sweet flesh. There I go again. I can't stay away.

The crows. I was going to consider the crows,
the morning birds, my roosters, here, raucous,
big, black and beautiful, ravenous, tearing at
any small scrap of a meal leftover, impatient
with agitated waiting, never ceasing, once started,
the postulated calling, until--where do they go
in the afternoon? At night they're displaced.

Dark feathers descend like invisible silk. Oh,
I remember the silk, how I remember it. Memories
cast black shadows of it across unseen landscapes.
What brilliance, then, the early morning brings.

8-26-96

Conception            

I collect words
As we collect butterflies:
I pin them to paper, but
With the point of my pencil.

As we collect
rocks, string, keys, books,
coins, stamps, boxes,
little toy trinkets,
the leaves of plants
     pressed between book pages
     and pasted in an album,
antiques
old whiskey bottles we once drank,
photographs, magazines, articles,
recipes,
or old dog bones,
I collect concepts.
This is my real collection.
Words are convenient--
A clever method of capturing
Concepts on paper.

3-10-73

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