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For Frank O'Hara I The lights are out The cats are hungry The room is full of gangsters II The dishes are dirty The icebox is empty I dream of celery and a compass III The roof is upstairs The window next door A guitar in the shower IV The hours disappear in my room Where is my blue pistol The door-god is knocking.

Scott Helmes is a longtime visual poet who has produced works in a variety of forms, including mathematical poetry and rubber-stamped poetry. His "haiku #62" is part of a series of striking poems created from scraps of colored text torn out of glossy magazines and arrayed in three tiers. These tiers approximate the look of haiku, and the text flutters in and out of different colors and typefaces, giving the poems their ineffable beauty.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>

In a side booth at MacDonald’s before your music class you go up and down in your seat like an arpeggio under the poster of the talking hamburger: two white eyes rolling around in the top bun, the thin patty of beef imitating the tongue of its animal nature. You eat merrily. I watch the Oakland mommies, trying to understand what it means to be “single.” * Across from us, females of all ages surround the birthday girl. Her pale lace and insufficient being can’t keep them out of her circle. Stripes of yellow and brown all over the place. The poor in spirit have started to arrive, the one with thick midwestern braids twisted like thought on her head; usually she brings her mother. This week, no mother. She mouths her words anyway across the table, space-mama, time-mama, mama who should be there. * Families in line: imagine all this translated by the cry of time moving through us, this place a rubble. The gardens new generations will plant in this spot, and the food will go on in another order. This thought cheers me immensely. That we will be there together, you still seven, bending over the crops pretending to be royalty, that the huge woman with one blind eye and dots like eyes all over her dress will also be there, eating with pleasure as she eats now, right up to the tissue paper, peeling it back like bright exotic petals. * Last year, on the sun-spilled deck in Marin we ate grapes with the Russians; the KGB man fingered them quickly and dutifully, then, in a sad tone to us “We must not eat them so fast, we wait in line so long for these,” he said. * The sight of food going into a woman’s mouth made Byron sick. Food is a metaphor for existence. When Mr. Egotistical Sublime, eating the pasta, poked one finger into his mouth, he made a sound. For some, the curve of the bell pepper seems sensual but it can worry you, the slightly greasy feel of it. * The place I went with your father had an apartment to the left, and in the window, twisted like a huge bowtie, an old print bedspread. One day, when I looked over, someone was watching us, a young girl. The waiter had just brought the first thing: an orange with an avocado sliced up CCCC in an oil of forceful herbs. I couldn’t eat it. The girl’s face stood for something and from it, a little mindless daylight was reflected. The businessmen at the next table were getting off on each other and the young chardonnay. Their briefcases leaned against their ankles. I watched the young girl’s face because for an instant I had seen your face there, unterrified, unhungry, and a little disdainful. Then the waiter brought the food, bands of black seared into it like the memory of a cage. * You smile over your burger, chattering brightly. So often, at our sunny kitchen table, hearing the mantra of the refrigerator, I’ve thought there was nothing I could do but feed you; and I’ve always loved the way you eat, you eat selfishly, humming, bending the french fries to your will, your brown eyes spotting everything: the tall boy who has come in with his mother, repressed rage in espadrilles, and now carries the tray for her. Oh this is fun, says the mother, You stand there with mommy’s purse. And he stands there smiling after her, holding all the patience in the world.

Eating is touch carried to the bitter end. Samuel Butler II I’m going to murder you with love; I’m going to suffocate you with embraces; I’m going to hug you, bone by bone, Till you’re dead all over. Then I will dine on your delectable marrow. You will become my personal Sahara; I’ll sun myself in you, then with one swallow Drain your remaining brackish well. With my female blade I’ll carve my name In your most aspiring palm Before I chop it down. Then I’ll inhale your last oasis whole. But in the total desert you become You’ll see me stretch, horizon to horizon, Opulent mirage! Wisteria balconies dripping cyclamen. Vistas ablaze with crystal, laced in gold. So you will summon each dry grain of sand And move toward me in undulating dunes Till you arrive at sudden ultramarine: A Mediterranean to stroke your dusty shores; Obstinate verdure, creeping inland, fast renudes Your barrens; succulents spring up everywhere, Surprising life! And I will be that green. When you are fed and watered, flourishing With shoots entwining trellis, dome, and spire, Till you are resurrected field in bloom, I will devour you, my natural food, My host, my final supper on the earth, And you’ll begin to die again.

You made me cry in cruel stations, So I missed many trains. You married others In plausible buildings. The subsequent son Became my boss. You promised me nothing But blamed me for doubting when who wouldn’t. If  I knew how to please you — who have found Out my faults. In dreams I’m wild with guilt. Have pity Kill it. Then, when I’ve lost all hope, Kiss me again, your mouth so open — I’d give anything for one more night — That I go without thought. Don’t bite. No, Mark me. My husband already knows Exactly what owns me.

I take the snap from the center, fake to the right, fade back... I've got protection. I've got a receiver open downfield... What the hell is this? This isn't a football, it's a shoe, a man's brown leather oxford. A cousin to a football maybe, the same skin, but not the same, a thing made for the earth, not the air. I realize that this is a world where anything is possible and I understand, also, that one often has to make do with what one has. I have eaten pancakes, for instance, with that clear corn syrup on them because there was no maple syrup and they weren't very good. Well, anyway, this is different. (My man downfield is waving his arms.) One has certain responsibilities, one has to make choices. This isn't right and I'm not going to throw it.

No one was faster than my father on the football field. No one could keep him from crossing the line. Then touching down again. Coaches were watching the way he moved, his easy stride, his long arms reaching up, snatching the ball from its soft pockets of air. My father dreamed football dreams, and woke up to a scholarship at Ohio State University. Grown now living the big-city life in Columbus just sixty miles from Nelsonville and from there Interstate 70 could get you on your way west to Chicago Interstate 77 could take you south but my father said no colored Buckeye in his right mind would ever want to go there. From Columbus, my father said, you could go just about anywhere

As a kid I tried to coax its coming By sleeping beneath light sheets Weeks before The funeral of the summer locusts in the yard; Then when Granny peeled down the crucifix of flypaper that dangled from the ceiling of the kitchen Magic wasn't needed any longer To fill the air with pigskins.   The air itself Acrid, lambent, bright As the robes of the Chinese gods inside their house of glass In the Field Museum by the lake. Even practice could be fun— The way, say, even sepia photographs of old-time All Americans could be pirates' gold Like my favorite Bill Corbus, Stanford's "Baby- Face Assassin" crouching at right guard, the last to play without a helmet on— And the fun of testing muscles out Like new shoes; the odor of the locker room pungent As the inside of a pumpkin; And the sting of that wet towel twirled against bare butt by a genial, roaring Ziggy, Mt. Carmel's All State tackle from Immaculate Conception Parish near the mills; And then the victory, especially the close shaves, could feel Like finally getting beneath a girl's brassiere She'll let you keep Unhooked for hours while you neck Until the windshield of your Granddad's Ford V-8 Becomes filled by a fog Not even Fu Manchu could penetrate.   Jack, Next football weather my son Luke will be in high school, Bigger than I was and well-coordinated—but Couldn't care a plenary indulgence If he ever lugs a pigskin down the turf Or hits a long shot on the court.   At times, I wish he would. So he might taste the happiness you knew Snagging Chris Zoukis' low pass to torpedo nine long yards to touchdown And sink archrival Lawrence High 45 years ago come this Thanksgiving Day.   Still, He has his own intensities As wild as sports and writing were for us: Luke's the seventh Rolling Stone, His electric guitar elegant and shiny black As a quiet street at night Glazed by rain and pumpkin frost.

I used to live on the chalk where clay gives way to the Roman road en route to an Iron Age fort Laid a bivvy bag off the track    squinting into the night bling for meteors and space junk   Hiked for days dodging sarn and tor Woke to dew on blade of plantain shoved aside by the nose of a blind mole Once I flew a homemade kite with the boy who had the wrong smell He tried to kiss me on Gallows Barrow So how could I leave my homeland webbed by common path and famine row where blackberries dared to bleed over my teeth When I’d loved nothing more than swinging over worn stiles chasing primrose trails wiping sap of bluebell from my sleeve On the road my legs seem less reckless now more tools of philosophy And what of this is true? The boy, the kite, the blood of berry, how I can tell a simple lie that weaves the yarn of my country back into my story The bit about philosophy

I have never arrived into a new life yet. Have you? Do you find the squeak of boots on snow excruciating? Have you heard people say,It wasn’t me, when they accomplished a great feat? I have, often. But rarely. • Possibility is one of the elements. It keeps things going. The ferry with its ratty engine and exactitude at chugging into blocks and chains. Returning as ever to mother’s house under a salty rain. Slave up, slave down.