It really is amusing
that for all the centuries of mankind
the problem has been how

Do you mean that
my gaze is not a look
and my clothes decide

I never seem to hear much, except Tschaikovsky.
What’s the matter with me, especially on Saturday
afternoon? it seems that there’s a park nearby

Oh snows of only two months ago!
when will you fall back up into the sky
and fall down again like an airplane?

You may flaunt my looseness, you know
that I go whole weeks without, so, I
get depressed because I’m so easily distracted

Oh night, to hear them once again
as if we were at Kyriena’s and the moon
over the Hudson were blue no movie

A courtier strides along, his feathers
straightening in the breeze. His boon
has been denied. From his clenched left

To take up where you left off!
without a breath of separation
your new movement is begun.

Smiling through my own memories of painful excitement
your wide eyes stare 
        and narrow like a lost forest of childhood stolen from

Picasso made me tough and quick, and the world;
just as in a minute plane trees are knocked down
outside my window by a crew of creators.

I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab
which is typical
and not just of modern life

We join the animals
not when we fuck 
             or shit

I’m getting tired of not wearing underwear
and then again I like it
                                           strolling along

A whispering far away

heard by the poet in a bower
of flesh his limbs stir

The night paints inhaling smoke and semen. 

    The frail face pulses like a parachute,
   corridors of shakes melting from the boot

After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness

I’m not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don’t prefer one “strain” to another.

When your left arm twitches
it’s like sunlight on sugar
to me and my tongue seeks

I am so glad that Larry Rivers made a
statue of me

 

I belong here. I was born
here. The palms sift their fingers
and the men shove by in shirts,

You walk into a theatre in the semi-dark
a tiny stage holding up a candle
a few actors are pacing from shadow to shadow

I sit in your T shirt
with its spots of paint
as a certain fierceness pours

Oh Barbara! do you think
they’ll ever name anything after us like
rue Henri-Barbusse or

The fluorescent tubing burns like a bobby-soxer’s ankles
the white paint the green leaves in an old champagne bottle
and the formica shelves going up in the office

Dante
I could guide you into depravity but I’m not sure I could
lead either of us back out.

The Sun woke me this morning loud
and clear, saying “Hey! I’ve been
trying to wake you up for fifteen