Poems 1959-2009 (10 page)

These epileptic foaming fits dehydrate one,

But justify the cost of a honeymoon.

The Caribbean is room temperature,

Rippling over sand as rich as cream.

The beach chair has the thighs of a convertible with the top down.

You wave a paddle and the boy

Runs to take your order.

Many things are still done barefoot.

Others have the breakout colors of a parrot.

In paradise it never rains, but smells as if it could.

Two who could catapulted themselves overboard into the equator.

I die of thirst and drown in chains, in love.

Into the coconut grove they go.
Into the coconut grove they go
.

The car in the parking lot is theirs.
The car in the parking lot is theirs
.

The groves of lemon trees give light.
Ooga-booga!

The hotel sheds light.
Ooga-booga!

The long pink-shell sky of meaning wanted it to be, but really,

The precious thing is that they voted.
Ooga-booga!
And there we were,

The cane toads and the smell of rain about to fall.

The crocodiles and spiders are

The hippos and their friends who shot them dead.

The xylophone is playing too loud

Under the coconut palms, which go to the end of the world.

The slave is screaming too loud and we

Can't help hearing

Our tribal chant and getting up to dance under the mushroom cloud.

 

The young keep getting younger, but the old keep getting younger.

But this young woman is young. We kiss.

It's almost incest when it gets to this.

This is the consensual, national, metrosexual hunger-for-younger.

I'm getting young.

I'm totally into strapping on the belt of dynamite

Which will turn me into light.

God is great! I suck Her tongue.

I mean—my sunbursts, and there are cloudbursts.

My dynamite penis

Is totally into Venus.

My penis in Venus hungers and thirsts,

It burns and drowns.

My dynamite penis

Is into Venus.

The Atlantic off Sagaponack is freezing black today and frowns.

I enter the jellyfish folds

Of floating fire.

The mania in her labia can inspire

Extraordinary phenomena and really does cure colds.

It holds the Tower of Pisa above the freezing black waves.

The mania is why

I mention I am easily old enough to die,

And actually it's the mania that saves

The Tower from falling over.

Climbing Everest is the miracle—which leaves the descent

And reporting to the world from an oxygen tent

In a soft pasture of cows and clover.

Happening girls parade around my hospice bed.

The tented canopy means I am in the rue de Seine in Paris.

It will embarrass

Me in Paris to be dead.

It's Polonius embarrassed behind the arras,

And the arras turning red.

Hamlet has outed Polonius and Sir Edmund Hillary will wed

Ophelia in Paris.

Give me Everest or give me death.

Give me altitude with an attitude.

But I am naked and nude.

I am constantly out of breath.

A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare,

But right now one is coming through the door

With a mop, to mop up the cow flops on the floor.

She kisses the train wreck in the tent and combs his white hair.

 

Will you? Everything? Anything? Weird stuff, too?

I want to do anything you want me to.

I will meet you in an hour in the mirror.

I will meet you in front of the mirror.

When the cars have their lights on in the daytime when it's raining,

And the full-length bedroom mirror is the hostess entertaining,

And the summer downpour thrillingly thrashes the windows,

My naked in high heels shows me she can touch her toes!

The rainy city outside stretches around the world.

The rainy season inside the mirror gets whirled

Into a waterspout. No doubt

The dolphins in the mirror know what water is about!

You love it all.

I love it when you make me get down on all fours and crawl.

I put you on a leash and spank you.

I thank you.

The value of life which will end is unbearable,

And these are just some ways of bearing it. The joy is terrible.

The joy is actually terrible.

The sweetness of life is actually unbearable.

God looks up to His creation by dint of lying on the floor.

God lies there on His back on the carpet and looks. That's what you are for.

Hike your skirt up higher. There is nothing higher or more

Than Him you stand over and adore!

 

Mother Nature walked from Kenya.

Going faster is Italian.

Going fast got you nowhere.

Madagascar is impatiens.

Came the warriors of the nations,

Came the Delawares and Mohawks,

Came the Choctaws and Comanches,

Came the Mandans and Dacotahs,

Came the Hurons and Ojibways,

All the warriors drawn together

By the signal of the peace pipe.

And they stood there on the meadow,

With their weapons and their war gear,

Painted like the leaves of autumn,

Painted like the sky of morning,

Wildly glaring at each other.

The smiling Indian economy is running uphill inputting,

Outrunning a rising ocean of sweat.

The poor stay behind and drown

In their own brown.

Technology is the placenta

Feeding the fetus dreams.

It was high tide.

It was wet dreams.

Skira reproduced the paintings,

Mother Nature at Ajanta,

Her beauty, her big breasts,

Her athleticism, her shoreline, her high tides.

The orbit was Aryan.

Sanskrit debris floats by a boy in orbit in St. Louis.

Anything to see those breasts

In that art book!

By the shore of Gitche Gumee,

By the shining Big-Sea-Water,

Hiawatha liked the white man,

Liked Caucasians, liked their smell.

From the waterfall he named her,

Laughing Water, Minnehaha.

Mother Nature, you, my mother,

Help the paleface ask me for my colored hand in marriage!

And the great chief liked his odor,

And he offered him his daughter,

Redskin jewel from a giant, legend waiting for an answer,

And the frightened white man could not answer.

Mother Nature went to China,

China the vagina.

Wet dreams conceive there,

Where no one wants a daughter.

I pin the throttle on the straight

Toward China all night,

With the moon out and the stars,

And reach Kabul.

The nightclub bombing in Bali

Shattered Baghdad.

The hotel temple dancers hold the sky up.

The elephant lifts his friend the tiger to safety.

The satellite picks up a faint signal

From the Arabian Peninsula

From long before Islam

Of the immortal Imru' al-Qays declaiming his ode.

Whalesong surfaces in the desert and spouts.

The Arab Pindar pinpricks the emptiness.

A nanosecond of moisture

Irrigates ancient Arabia.

His she-camel is a Ferrari with a saddle

Who knows the desert by heart and is unafraid.

He praises her in his monorhymes of tribal twaddle

About this and that and the brevity of life.

The Prophet Muhammad

Acknowledged his fame

As the finest poet in hell

Where the pre-Islamic poets dwell.

Let shuttered windows shatter

To let the bomb-blast in.

Everyone is screaming.

The exits have been padlocked.

Everyone is screaming.

Muhammad took away their silliness.

Muhammad is the firestorm.

Everyone converts.

Her breast is bigger than I am.

Her nipple is bigger than my mouth.

Let me masturbate to death.

Let my hand fall off.

Islam is submission.

Behead the man

Who will not listen!

My head and hand are coming to an end.

I am coming in Manhattan

By the shining Big-Sea-Water.

I am coming to the end. I am coming to.

The predawn streets are empty.

This is what it feels like.

Everyone is screaming.

I am coming, Mother Nature.

I am coming, Mannahatta.

I am coming in Manhattan.

This is what it comes to.

Everyone is screaming. All the planes are grounded.

The exits have been padlocked.

The asteroid is really coming.

The president in Washington is speaking to the world.

The sea tilts up and down

Next to the silent dawn.

 

A naked woman my age is a total nightmare.

A woman my age naked is a nightmare.

It doesn't matter. One doesn't care.

One doesn't say it out loud because it's rare

For anyone to be willing to say it,

Because it's the equivalent of buying billboard space to display it,

Display how horrible life after death is,

How horrible to draw your last breath is,

When you go on living.

I hate the old couples on their walkers giving

Off odors of love, and in City Diner eating a ray

Of hope, and then paying and trembling back out on Broadway,

Drumming and dancing, chanting something nearly unbearable,

Spreading their wings in order to be more beautiful and more terrible.

 

I shaved my legs a second time,

Lagoon approaching the sublime,

To cast a moonlight spell on you.

TriBeCa was Tahiti, too.

I know I never was on time.

I was downloading the sublime

To cast a moonlight spell on you.

TriBeCa was Tahiti, too.

The melanoma on my skin

Resumes what's wrong with me within.

My outside is my active twin.

Disease I'm repetitious in.

The sun gives life but it destroys.

It burns the skin of girls and boys.

I cover up to block the day.

I also do so when it's gray.

The sunlight doesn't go away.

It causes cancer while they play.

Precancerous will turn out bad.

I had an ice pick for a dad.

A womanizing father, he's

The first life-threatening disease.

His narcissistic daughter tried

To be his daughter but he died.

The richest man in Delaware

Died steeplechasing, debonair.

One company of ours made napalm.

That womanizing ice pick's gray calm

Died steeplechasing in a chair,

The jockey underneath the mare.

She posted and she posted and

Quite suddenly he tried to stand

And had a heart attack and died,

The ice pick jockey's final ride.

The heart attack had not been planned.

He saw my eyes and tried to stand.

My satin skin becomes the coffin

The taxidermist got it off in.

He stuffed me, made me lifelike. Fatten

My corpse in satin in Manhattan!

My body was flash-frozen. God,

I am a person who is odd.

I am the ocean and the air.

I'm acting out. I cut my hair.

You like the way I do things, neat

Combined with craziness and heat.

My ninety-eight point six degrees,

Warehousing decades of deep freeze,

Can burst out curls and then refreeze

And have to go to bed but please

Don't cure me. Sickness is my me.

My terror was you'd set me free.

My shrink admired you. He could see.

Sex got me buzzing like a bee

With Parkinson's! Catastrophe

Had slaughtered flowers on the tree.

My paranoia was revived.

I love it downtown and survived.

I loved downtown till the attack.

Love Heimliched me and brought me back.

You brought me life, glued pollen on

My sunblock. Happy days are gone

Again. My credit cards drip honey.

The tabloids dubbed me “Maid of Money.”

Front-page divorce is such a bore.

I loathed the drama they adore.

You didn't love me for my money.

You made the stormy days seem sunny.

 

The intubated shall be extubated and it rains green

Into the uptown air because it is almost raining.

You can smell the sidewalks straining.

The side streets are contagious but serene.

The disease is nutritious.

The bitter medicine delicious.

The beautiful breasts are repetitious.

The much older man you love is vicious.

The man will be even older by the time

She takes down the book to read the poem.

 

As he approaches each tree goes on,

And the girls one by one

Glance down at their blouses. A nun,

Then six or seven, hop in

A cream station wagon,

White-beaked blackbirds baked in a pie.

In his mind is

The lid of an eye

The dark dilated closing behind him.

Rilke. Arched eyebrows and shadowed

Moist eyes. An El Greco. Swart, slim.

He's late to her. He thinks of her, waiting,

Limb by limb.

Her defenselessness and childlike trust!

Smiling to be combed out

And parted—and her lust

Touching the comb like a lyre.

To have been told by her not to trust her!