Painless Life

Description

2 poems from Painless Life

Love and

We have air and we have water and even good coffee—the rest is neurosis…

(love
can give time and love can certainly take time
but time only takes love)
Someone’s knocking because the bell doesn’t work
(and time will kill us,
you and I,
all,
taking the best
away)
Someone’s knocking
and the sound reminds me of
the taste of my own tongue
in my mouth
It’s you
You’re knocking because the bell doesn’t work
I’ll answer it like an addict
and look at you
(and the sad Hawaiian shirt blue ceiling of the world behind you, as beautiful as a wall of butterfly wings
but in that instant that you realize that the butterflies all had to die to be pinned there)
my mouth full of rope
and tasting like my own tongue
and my eyes stung with rusted moths
or dead butterflies
I will say
(or roses that bloom after they are cut
that is,
after they are dead
as well)
I will tell you
(all I want is something appropriate to say when people ask me how I’ve been doing, how I’ve been, something that won’t sound false, something to say that won’t mention you)
something
stupid

sense

I say
I babble I mumble
&
I slip in
front of a whole big Pile Of Myself
& I speak I demonstrate:
I keep Forgetting I still miss her

I say
I attest
her lips so soft she wakes me like a HAT she could wear

I say
I demand
bring us a pilotless ship

I say I plead
I am bound in joys
that nag us to emulate Paris
dead in bloom;

with sighing
and then, arbitrarily
I yearn
I pray I implore
whom heedest our desires?
spoken
as the black
sweet eruptive flower in exquisite warmth

I say
I shout
I give voice to thick plate glass
I sound and hum
through to state
a sound between soulless and solace

I chant I bleat
morning/slash/birdsong
like a scratched skipping
record dripping
millefiori false splendor

I say
I entreat
smother me in blankets of sense
stun me with reasonable blindness
ride me on the back of this slipped spidered goal

I say
I speak
I assert
writhing behind this precise curtain of meat