Voltage

“Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me.” Walt Whitman

When I am drawn to any room with you
My neural chimes ring at your fingertips.
This closeness forms an unseen field
where synapses stand on end
like steel shavings near a magnet.

We have come together for a silently charged lunch
and a teaspoon turns in a cup to indicate us.
It pivots through warm tea like a compass needle
to meet the axis of our new emotional north.

Whitman only burned with a subtle flame ---
You have set fire to every forest in my mind.
Galvani only guessed at human voltage
when first he sent a primal spark
twitching through the severed leg of a frog.
But I am positive
that the gentle brown arc in your eyes
can span a room
to speed the smooth muscle in my heart.

Subterranean

Every time I allow myself to fall
free of all the reasons this particular
latched garden must not bloom,
into those sullen brown eyes of hers,
I find myself chest deep in a pristine river.

This uncharted river has gone
subterranean over the years.
On the genteel surface above
she has danced to every melody
but her own buried ballad:
that song that still
rises around her like a mist
some early mornings
before the machinery of duty
engages its oily grey gears.

Fishing from a small boat (a poem for my dad)

My father balanced in the stern...
I was high in the bow
where I couldn't
hear the tarpon tearing
at the little thread
over the blue
brim of his cap.

My dad sounded over the
motor like bubbles
breaking when he told me: "It's too early
to be here. Son, I'm afraid
the oyster beds are barely

below the surface and our boat

feels too thin for this
black water."

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Note: Tomorrow is Father's Day... I wrote this poem over two decades ago, about a fishing trip with my dad that happened two decades before it was written. Dad is 80 years old now. We have not been fishing together since. My father has never seen this poem, because, well... he simply wouldn't like it and he would not see the point. I am having dinner with him tonight.

Uncomfortable

A "found poem" is made up of phrases, extracted and modified, from some other source.

Here is a found poem I created, constructed of lines taken from the film Waking Life, by Richard Linklater.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

It has to come out of the moment.

It's just a moment,
which is holy.

You know…
like this
moment
is holy.

We walk around
like there's some
holy moments

and there are all these
other moments...
that are not holy,

Ah, this moment. holy.
Like "holy, holy, holy" moment by moment.
But who can live that way?

Because if I were to look at you
if I were to let you be holy for me--
I don't know…
I would
stop talking.

I'd be open.
I'd look in your eyes
and I'd laugh or cry...
and I'd feel all this stuff and that's not polite.
It would make you
uncomfortable.

Requiem for Whitman

My cosmos is not so tightly jammed
with swirling Van Gogh skies over my head
and not so blasted with big stars
screaming brightly over schizophrenic fields.
My planet is not so teeming as yours
with divine humans for whom I ache
regardless of gender details.
My heart races only for women that way.
I am awakened, only rarely, by the odd
miracle that opens me for an instant.

We have entered a new puritan age, old Walt,
and you would wilt and perish here.
We would ship you to Guantanamo
with a black number on your orange back.
We would feed you meds to twist you around
to face a little flickering screen and sit content.
You would grow sullen; your huge soul
compacted for the gated lifestyle, or die.

I would walk in your shoes, old Walt,
but I am a little leery of the open road
and its song, that nowadays sounds like diesel trucks
and screeching mustangs.
I would inhale the perfume of sweat
and love it as you do, but these days
we have all learned that humans stink
and there is illness lurking in every deep breath.
I long to unbolt the rusty door of my heart
and allow the ravens to flap out and fly free.

I am dreaming of your thick inky fingers that grasp
every steaming loaf of fresh bread
while gulping down huge mouthfuls of red wine,
fondling flesh and singing your crazy songs.
Poets are replaced by blind consumers
who collect gadgets and eat dead stuff from colorful boxes.
We sleep, we dream, and in our dreams, we find you.
There you sit, softly stroking our cheeks
and asking us to awaken and take your hand.

Dearest Walt, you are a white bearded monster,
a great wild smorgasbord of pulsing blood,
straining to burst the thin grape skin of a holy sage.
Walt, you strange old goat who roamed
the taverns calling out for anyone to drink you;
booming out an invitation to every mortal to embrace
your big body and become divine with you.
You are always bombed on the frozen now...
the amazing yes of being.

Lizard Aware

If I were secretly human, I would strive to meld, invisibly
into any habitat where I found my little lizard self,
I would nibble on wilted greens with the geckos in my tank.

If I awoke as a sapient skink, I would still listen and I’d laugh
at all the slimy, saurian jokes. I would easily speak
in the clichés common to a culture of lizards.
I would shift my scales to mimic the colors of silicone and steel.

If I had shed the tactics of reptilian roles, I would keep that
a secret, and pile the prettiest pebbles in my corner…guard them
tooth and claw; I would scuttle across the floor of my circumstances,
frantic for the feast of struggling fly, or a bloody, squirming worm.

Deep Creek

River running frantic where we cross the rock shelf
Serene stone slabs amid white water rushing
September sun dropping slowly behind a stand of spruce
Sliver of white moon rising in a mist of chill rain
Stopping midway, we sit on a flat slab of stone, listening
Black water gurgle and splash, tumbling down the gorge
Black granite, wet and slick with moss along the water's edge
Taking your hand and climbing up the gray stone
Walking up the steep bank among myrtle and beech leaves

Your sudden laugh bounces between rock gorge walls
Startled squirrel chattering unseen in the dark green above us
Gray lichen carpeting a fallen hemlock with vegetable fur
Brown boots sinking into mud, finding footholds between roots
Reaching a logging road, grassy ruts just visible in the twilight
The road is vague and hazy in the cold drizzle of rain
Rhythmic squish as we walk, wet socks inside soaked boots
Turning uphill into the red clay road toward home
Yellow porch light a beacon through the branches of dark trees
Wind blustering high above in swaying spruce boughs

Up wooden steps, stomping our soles on dry pine planks
Unlacing boots, stripping drenched socks away
Stepping inside the cedar cabin, a warm fire still in the hearth
Wringing water, peeling out of wet denim and flannel
Standing and shivering, bodies painted by fluttering firelight
Rubbing your cold feet between my hands, kissing toes
Smiling mouth merges into smiling mouth
Hands along hips and fingers through damp hair
Black night and a storm gusting hard against the windows.

October’s End

Somehow it just seems right
To see you again at October's end.
Halloween is a time the world celebrates
horrors...This is horrible:
to disguise our faces --- to scream in the dark
to see the streets filled
with fanged demons --- ourselves fanged demons.

Tell me about the beauty of
bright, new candy.
Show me your brown bag full of
sweet things from other dark doorways.
Tell me how you've been
haunted by more colorful masks.

Step into my parlor now.
My carved pumpkin grins ridiculous:
a perfect likeness of me.
I cut this grim expression out
Of a soft, thick vegetable skull.
I know that hot burning behind his eyes.
It is mine.

Marshmallow

Chips of raw ice tease the coals
and make them behave themselves;
no fingers of flame can grow
to spoil our even cooking.
Your Georgia girl drawl smolders.

You are sunned khaki in your
cream socks and custard shoulders.
This slow burning fills us both.
The charcoal smoke covers us;
we are drunk with it and run.

A bag of smooth marshmallows ---
We rip our wonder open
and thrust the crooked wires through
soft, powdered flesh and you turn;
twist the skewer in the wound.

You point it at the moon,
say it looks like another
marshmallow, comes down like glue;
viscous like molasses running down
the hot spit into our palms,

melting down along your arms ---
along your blonde arms my arms
touch the stuff around your bones.
Your tongue reaches for the moon.

Something in me can taste you:
it stirs and turns in my stomach.
It moves under all our words;
deeper down than that, it purrs.

Waiting for the Rapture

During Wednesday night prayer meetings
I waited for the preacher to get hot.
I waited until I wouldn't be noticed
and then I'd slip away
out the door, holding my breath
out into the cool and sinful world
hoping my father couldn't hear
that heavy door closing behind me.

I found a ladder behind the church;
I could climb to the roof of the house of God
my mind's eye still aflame
with snapshots of Hell.
I could sit in the shingles up there
among the billion eyes of an angry god, blinking.
I waited for the fierce worship
raging under me to end.

I waited for some of the stars
to morph into trumpets and blaze
calling every body but me
to drop every thing and go --
to drop their car keys and skin conditions,
to rise through the roof where I sat.

I waited to see Sister Popkin
flailing her fat legs
swimming up toward Orion.
I waited to see Sister Bertha
dropping her blue vinyl purse
from the Van Allen Belt
and I waited to see the sky
slamming shut behind them all.

The Language of Mango

I learned the language of mango
and filed it within my cells,
so I would have a way to praise
the green skinned fruit when it appeared;
so I would have a way to embrace
the tearing down of its yellow meat.

I designed this mundane dust to cover my nerves
like Novocain to modulate the pleasure,
that intolerable energy flying through my bones;
to step down the frequency of wild aliveness,
to block the one wave length that matters:
the complete rush of just standing on the planet.

I devised you, with that lovely x chromosome,
so I could tell us apart
and I invented the euphoric shock of sex,
that slippery disturbance of the neurons,
so that your sweet skinned body and mine
could revive the experience of being one being.

Five Visions of the Afterlife

1
People float.
All your wants sprout
like mushrooms every morning.
You dice them into unheard-of
soups of heaven.

2

Everybody’s mother is there,
all of them as golden as your own mother.
Eternally... she knits for you
sweaters out of her sweet, warm breath.
She has quit drinking.

3

Silk scarves travel in flocks
like liquid birds and sing
The food is strange
and weightless; you can eat it and eat it.
It only fills you like music.

4

There are black eels with human faces.
They laugh at you
because you can never get away
from this place that is a fire
fueled forever by the fat of your soul.

5

Shopping with a Zombie

A zombie knows precisely what he wants.
Purity of purpose guides his every spastic step.
He stumbles his way through Dadeland Mall,
oblivious to low low prices and everything must go.

Crashing into shopping carts and tipping over stalls,
he is as thoughtless and as empty as the cold, vented air
that gently ruffles the filthy shirt he was buried in,
wholly numb from the broken toes to rotted earlobes.

The smell of strolling flesh inflames his relentless hunger
into hell-bent lust, a hunger that screams to be sated.
All these yummy shoppers are wafting their fragrance of mortal meat,
all searching ravenously for a bangle to kill their own endless ache.