Ultimate, maybe.

Knit

A tangled skein of poetry in my lap sits,

Things we wrote for and with each other,

Things others wrote that seem to apply,

And new ones, Like this the end of which I hold

And trace with my fingers,

this I've loved you since November,

But here the line is lost and knotted with

I said today I take my chance

And kiss above the clavicle

That soft spot of skin

which has been winking at me

Each time we say goodnight.

So many knots in the lines.

So young, indecisive,

And this must be a mistake, but remember,

here it is cold and

I see you shivering so

I lend you my hat.

It is cold, Robert, and I shiver.

I fall upon the thorns of life; I bleed.

You also smelled like pancake syrup and I've

loved you since

November and the surface of our touching

foreheads is the center of the known

universe and a ring of Amethyst

I could not wear here, plainer to my sight

Than that first kiss. The second passed in height

And poor Jeff and Through the river I'll cross, deep

somewhere in this

confusing mess is an end

and oh, I have loved you

since November.

* * *

An Insect From Porlock

A gnat had landed on the page,

And lingered in the pleasure-dome

That Kubla Khan decreed.

He stayed and cleaned his tiny hands

In the sacred river Alph

And wondered at his reflection.

Where I had to scrutinize the incense-bearing trees,

He looked up at them and inhaled contentedly.

To be a gnat with flashing eyes and floating hair,

Might help this poem.

I'd wander in the valleys, instead of in the words,

And see what Coleridge In his stupour might have.

Then, when the final line leaves me unsatisfied,

Poetus Interruptus,

I would dust off my wings,

And move on to somebody with a longer attention span.

* * *

Sfumato

Language, a closed system,

Can never more than hint, tricking you into thinking

That which is not there,

Has never been there,

And may not, in fact, exist.

Like the painter,

Turner making you think of a steamship,

Cezanne the far side of the fruit,

Kandinsky the musical chord,

But suppose ceci est un pipe.

Suppose that words have margins

And that what you almost say in nonehteless real.

Then the Bible can't be looked at in the eye.

The darting shadow of God in the periphery,

which moves askance of words,

Has,

Blink, pause,

What was I going to say?

* * *

Patti's Scones

I couldn't really tell if it was butter

Or sunshine she had baked into the scones,

But as I ate first one and then another

A brilliant warmth suffused me to the bones.

* * *

Poetry $1

Colorado Springs needed an enema,

So I stationed myself on the busiest corner with my sign

And my upturned hat.

I expected people to jump at the chance.

After all, a poem for only a dollar?

One buck to repair your pathetic life?

But after thirty minutes, my only customer was an indigent.

All he had was a marble, which I offered to accept it in lieu of the dollar,

But he was unwilling to part with it. I wrote the following anyway:

"My marble is the entire world:

Shiny, round, and if you rub it really hard,

You can see yourself in the surface."

C'mon folks, only a dollah!

After that, business picked up.

A man who had been observing from over his coffee

Asked if I had seen the moon last night.

I responded yes, and that it was a blood moon, the first of Spring.

He recieved this:

"The moon watched as I approached from the West.

Wilkerson Pass and I looked back expectantly,

Waiting for it to answer our stares with a purpose,

A reason, or even a laugh,

But it just smirked and returned to business."

Gettem while they're hot!

A line began to form.

"To touch the small of your back . . ."

"Life never takes away, only adds . . ."

Written while you wait!

"My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun (remix). . ."

"Ode to my plaid boxers, which are hanging out:"

And now this.

You owe me a dollah.

* * *

April

The present is the cruel moment

Where memory and desire mix,

Sneering at each other in passing.

Desperate for Spring, the blistered earth

Delivers monstrous, conjoined lilacs

Flecked with blood.

Water--for so long I thought it pliant,

But it is fierce. It perceth to the roote.

It impales and demands,

And I have reached my capacity.

A delicate meniscus holds me together with surface tension.

Each moment is a battle between the clenched dike

And the resolute aquifer.

The fossil water grows and presses,

Patiently insisting on release.

Legend has it that in April

Judas absorbed one drop too many

And burst noisily in his middle.

* * *

Detras Del Divan

The murdered poet read to me, and I thought,

"Donde esta mi sepultura?

'En mi garganta,' dijo la piedra."

The crows turned their backs to the sun

And, the light clearing their ashes, became doves.

Attending at the base of the Sphinx,

Invulnerable, conversing as peers with the sun and the wind,

I felt again a colorless emotion.

If I was in human company, if I had any cogent thought,

This would be desperate lust or despair,

But I am alone in the throat of the stone,

And it is not fire but water.

* * *

Deepening

To sink through a bottomless

River,

A stone, always seeking depth

susceptible to the flow, shifting,

But never, never stopping.

To bump into a fellow on the way down

And to notice that some of the chips and scuffs

Match my own,

Scars all across his chest and belly from

He hasn't told me yet.

To hear him admit that his name is not Mike,

As he had said in January,

River,

Although I had already figured that much out,

To hear faint water all week.

* * *

Lenticulation

Convex

She was a child of wonder, Susi was,

Who hasn't talked to anyone since June.

By 'anyone' I mean me.

When people diverge, I usually can tell

Whether our paths will cross again,

But I can't feel her out there anywhere.

Probably because she's high.

For all her rhetoric, "Marriage is obsolete," etcetera,

She never stopped wanting the quicklimed picket fence

And for Paul to raise their kids with her.

Will was not enough; She wanted Ozzie.

So her parents probably are raising the kids

While she evangelizes that the life she craves

Is unnecessary, and that she is happy.

Concave

I already feel myself being phased out.

They have couple friends now.

And although I would like to disapprove

(She has married a frustration)

I can't, for they are meant.

The wedding was yesterday,

The last time I will be needed.

"What are we doing with the cake?

Over here!, Sherri needs her makeup done!

Are you finished with the centerpieces?"

She would deny it,

But I am an old chapter.

They will be happy,

And they can take the decorations down themselves.

I looked good in a tux.

Every relationship between a gay man and a straight woman

Has a sell by date.

It must either disperse or conclude,

But there are other lenses out there.

* * *

Enseñado

El espejo

El polvo, la arena, la ceniza,

El ruisenor, quizas el hierro,

Y por que si el laberinto.

Esos son las palabras que Borges me enseo, y los que soy

(Pero no los fui cuando leyendo a Milton o Petrarch).

Possiblemente cada persona es los palabras de Borges, cuando lo han leido.

* * *

Ash Wednesday

There is no sky today.

I don't mean that the sky is clear or overcast;

It has disappeared.

The vast expanse where the sky used to be doesn't even have a color,

Although if pressed, I suppose I would call it ashen

As though the slumbering purple logs of the Rockies

Had been kindled and quickly reduced.

Even now, the oblivion has encroached on the city, covering it

And falling on my hair in pulverized, colorless flakes

As I wonder what or who is next to disappear.

* * *

Limits

Para siempre cerraste alguna puerta / Y hay un espejo que te aguarda en vano.

I pierced my septum with a silver ring,

And asked to be led through Oenethera.

The universe, that most obliging thing,

Me riges al laberinto alla.

The evil genius of the DMV has,

To guide or to confound, it matters not,

Los paredes y rectas galerias

delineated in a twisted plot.

Coincidences lead me by the nose,

though to what destination no lo se.

And twice today has Joseph Conrad's prose--

A black cat in a white man--crossed my way.

I'm reading too much Borges, for I think

In mirrors, labyrinths y Espanol.

Each pencil is a sword; each chai I drink

Tal vez olvido es, o un arbol.

* * *

Palette

Gay men, seeing as they do through two windows,

Painting as they do with Yen and Yang,

Have a superior palette.

I couldn't say for sure whether it holds more colors,

But what colors there are have a startling precision,

Not like the names of paint--summer delight, ocean wonder--

But real colors of actual things.

Ask a straight man the difference between taupe and ecru;

You'll see what I mean.

So as I watch the moon rise, I struggle to give it an exact name.

Lighter than jonquil, darker than parsnip,

Too yellow for linen, more vibrant than shell.

I have long known that words only point at truth and never reach it,

But as it happens, perception is the same.

I see the moon only indirectly,

A game of perceptual Battleship.

My thoughts can only tell me where a thing is not

Or at best where to find one end.

And so, even as I decide the moon is exactly goat's milk,

It has ascended another fraction, and become something else,

Not even technically the moon, but my thought of the moon,

Whose past light reaches me and hints.

* * *

Clearing Out

The world has diarrhea.

This winter, it must have ingested something disagreeable,

Because now that it is Spring everything is being expelled from the system.

This brisk wind pushes everything out of the city;

The tree above my windshield ejaculates sap,

And my own body has been doing some unpleasant cleansing as well.

So I fully expect to release all resentment about Jason,

All internal damage about my leg,

And all resistance to being cute, as Neil David observed.

After all: it is Spring.

* * *

Master Haold and the Voice.

Clearly indigent, he sat outside the window of the coffee shop

With his djembe. I was expecting to enjoy a percussive treat.

Surely anyone who bothered to busk would have talent,

And the djembe is a cinch anyway.

But he started by flailing his knuckles in such a manner

As to make one think he struck the drum only accidentally.

The result was somewhere between an unattended mixer striking the counter

And a mongoloid child happily slapping her desk.

Then he began to singish,

The cries of a sheep trapped in a bog,

And finally to wave at the sky, glorying

In the comparative paleness of his palms.

Finished with his descant, he angled appreciatively into the shop

Bleating as he signed, he indicated that it was cold,

And that his name was Haold.

I told him my name, and he spelled it fluently with his arthritic fingers.

Declining my offer of a cup of coffee on the grounds

That it would prevent him from sleeping,

He then lost notice of me and began to finger alternately

His rosary and his knit reggae cap.

I should have given him a twenty and told him to get a room.

It is going to freeze tonight.

* * *

Para Espejar

The mirror does what I tell him to,

But his mind is elsewhere.

Even as he duplicates my laugh,

My smile, my knowing stare,

He never hopes, expects, dwells,

Never wonders or reminds.

I want to reach out and kiss him,

but it would be like kissing myself--

or worse, my brother--

And surely he would be flat and cold.

* * *

Re: turn

I think this year I shall resolve

To rest my legs like ancient roots

And photosynthesize my food.

In short, I shall become a tree,

To settle, naked, in the wood,

And cease to talk, to love, to move.

I'll let the moss grow up my stump,

And vines will bear fruit on my head.

Lovers will picnic in my shade

And never even notice me

As I look down on them.