Hush Hush

Under the rug go the verbotens;
foetids and foecals and fossicled
fish rots pile up beneath the tongue
like a fertile vault of what’s not
proper to speak of by the light
of dry days. Language is rigored
by love’s winnows away
from the mortally hot,
securing dayside domains for
home and office, its curves
bound flat and hidden from view,
its rhetoric remaindered
in terse nones of filtered blue.
God’s foot sits so heavy on the
tongue that its margins swell out
in bootyful bounty, raising just
behond the last light of town
rich mounds of forbidden rooms --
barnyard, bordello, honky-tonk,
playground, shitter -- each
mansions the delight’s reverse,
writing the Ten Shall Nots
with a scalloped and filigreed
hand, painting them on rococo walls
where cupidon and priapals
sport with the nymphs, giving
them a good jolly roger on
rogueish rolls of the tongue,
afloat on a vast vineyard’s
scat-singing tide. Such vandals
crow and pound at the gates
of my day, threatening Rome
with all a tongue slakes
singing the wild side of things.
Once -- I was eight or so --
I hid in a garbage can behind
our house while playing
neighborhood hide-and-seek;
it seemed like a good place to
try out my curse-words singly
and in streams. There was a light
above me, and I looked up
to see my mother aghast
holding high the garbage can lid,
finding her sweet blonde boy
cursing up a storm, drunk
on the paps of a gross suckling
pig. It was one of the minor
epiphanies on the road which
leads here where I sit at the
dead bottom of the night
fully awake and aware of the risk
of singing God’s privetest parts
to the world, with a joy reserved
for lovers frying in their oils,
crying as they coil. Praise to the one
who first hid out of view
to rollick the tongue in nasty
waves of sweet blue, delighting
in salty labials and pussy-breathed
moos, perambling the rooks
and souterrains of a naughty god’s
nookie juice, boldly going where
no good son would dare
to sniff lick and stare,
much less cathedral
the undertow’s blue underwear.




TALK DIRTY TO ME

2004

Talk dirty to me barks the sea
As I amble down the naked
Shoreline of a prayer. Shake it,
Shake it like a horny Pope down
Under. Angelic apes stand in
The wash stroking huge erections
& mouthing every name of God.
When old men enter puberty
It’s a rude uproar: Our lust is
Brown-eye ugly to those oiled girls
Sunning for young kings & hard hooved
Rings of fire. I’ve stopped caring for
Good press -- It’s time now to get down.
Watch me lower my shorts down to
This ankling tide -- I’ve seas to screw!





TANGLED UP IN BLUE
2005

Out the hall window
at 2 a.m. my car blares
silver blue and black
in full moonlight.
Wild light bulbs that
midnight blue; the two
are icy blondes writhing
cheek to cheek over the
abyssal mother of all moons,
blueblack and cooing
wave surges toward this shore.
My bluest fantasy
disappears into sex
the way sex fades
into something roaring forward,
a tide maybe, or an age
both newer and older than
any reckoning by saner,
drier, sated Dons. Blonde on
blonde I’m tangled up in
blue in a syzygy of sames,
moon and sea like
heart and sight like singer
and psalm and all halves of
bone in parting delight,
the one melting forever
out of sight, the lucent
gleam of all that remains.
My car in vast moonlight
takes me to a shore
where savage waves pound
wondrous grains now pouring
ineluctably from the window
glass, like a naked woman
walking out a door which closes
in a silver roar of collapsing
wild blue foam. And her eyes
which caught and held me
one in that so pregnant dark --
so blue and silvery with
desire for my blueballed streams,
amid a dark which nailed me
forever to a blueblack tree
of arching fire, evanescent now,
haunting, free, bone on bone
now dreaming of silver’s swoon
in blue, reflecting every sea
which delved the ache and
arch of me to you.




MINNE'S CAVE

2004

Hands as big as my lust for You
Surely built this love grotto, deep
Under this hill where sheep graze and
Slumber. The stones which vault Your bed
Could raise cathedrals, but instead
The Old Ones hid them far from view
Beneath the turf, to barrow old
Ferocities of star and sea.
They are gone but we remain, fresh
Heart inside stone ribs. Only here
Can we let ourselves go in the
Star and sea frenzy that first kiss
Unleashed. Here, my love, here we will
Coil on crystal linen and sail
Verbatim into wild blue hell.







BLUE NOIR

2004


Each day I mount this
pale white writing chair
and comment my verbal
self to waters wild and wide
with no oar nor paddle
or compass or sail.
This pen voyages where
you bid, or where I
fancy you remain as
I shut my eyes and
recall a trace of you.
Today I think of the night
I followed a busty
redhead home after
the bar closed down
in the year when I
had left my wife behind
and made my way
back home. Let’s color
that sinular night blue
noir, its saxophones
sexual and evil,
transgressing what I
knew was wrong
and flinging myself anyway
in the name of revels
I could neither submit
to without a wedding ring
tight around my heart,
nor resist as any
more sober man might
have. We drank burgundy
a while in that monied
professional apartment
and then she left to
go pee, leaving me alone
to stare out at the
streetlamped night
of 3 a.m., into that
maw of lost darkness
in the belly of the
whale. Everything
thick with drunkenness
and fatigue, Joe
Jackson on the stereo
& the door not far away.
So much in me still
demanding that I just
get up and go but then
she came out of
the loo wearing just a
half-buttoned shirt,
her breasts swaying
heavily into dark.
The embrace that soon
followed was like a boat
offshore at last on waters
profoundly deep and
wild. Oh how we went
out in the pure salt
of abandon, this way then
that, never fucking --
I didn’t have condom --
but going at it every
other way. Exhausted
spent & glistening with
all our expended oils,
we unclenched around
5:30 a.m. when she
told me I had to go
(she needed to write
a paper the next day).
And so I got zipped
and shod and kissed
her on the cheek as
she slept quenched
and sated, never to speak
to me again. I drove carefully
and raggedly back to
my mother’s house where
I was sleeping in a spare
room, aware at once
of such keen delight
amid the ruin of real love.
My wife in our house
20 miles away alone
in our queen-sized bed
with our cat curled
nearby, she believing
that I was gone for
good. A few months
later I told her I wanted
back, to somehow
find a way home.
A year later I moved
back home, sober,
sobered, all my errancies
named and laid at the
altar of a love
that promised nothing
but the love. It was
an evil voyage into
that blue noir night:
hurtful and expensive
& damn near ending
all the poems that I’d
yet to write. But god
the satisfaction of just
reaching into that
gal’s unbuttoned blouse,
to clasp and hold those
huge warm breasts.
How good that evil,
how warm that demon
spray at the the shore
I pray never to return
to nor ever fully forget.
My song here is pure
in the second sense of
things, not orderly
or moral but complete
as the sea is full
of angels with big
teeth. Whatever
shore I ache and
dream here, the
sea gods intend
their own beach.
In the spectrum
of my love there’s
a blue-black isle
washed in booze.
The ink that
flows from my
pen today is
pours freely that
salt ooze--a bit
of ichor of your
cape which
spreads this
waking dawn
with words
I’d rather write
than lose.




BLUE ARK

2004

The Great Flood became a
History of fresh-sinned worlds,
The emptied ark a skull for
Cathedrally lost innocence.

Judgment now is pounded on
A water cross, & harrowed by
Upwellings of blue radiance.
I live where mystery rims the

Tide with deeper surges than
Mere words reveal, a a marginal
Tumescent wood alive
With night and sea and lunar

Eyes: A Christian world
No more, nor one strummed by
The lover’s harp, nor modern
In the screwy sense of gears,

But a Christ of wet descending lanes
Aboard an ark of wildest names.