Poemunity — your poem community

He put the spirit essence the light pip not only in each eye’s albumen concentrate of starlight but must have been taught how to do that by first finding it in the pearl he posed then corrected in dusty studio light that pounced on the window behind which sits the cheeky girl pear- and apple-blossom cheeks a fake description naturally of their plain fleshiness drably golden and her lips from Haight Street’s darlings nose studs jacket studs girls with that kind of eye one by the atm machine casual juicy and so fair a Netherlandish type panhandling strangers pomegranate seed ball bearings agleam in her nose pearls not sea-harvested but imagined seen put there by a certain need and fancy because love says it’s so picture that picture this.

Pink Dawn, Aurora Pink, Misty Pink, Fresh Pink, Natural Pink, Country Pink, Dusty Pink, Pussywillow Pink, Pink Heather, Pink Peony, Sunflower Pink, Plum Pink, Peach of a Pink, Raspberry Pink, Watermelon Pink, Pink Lemonade, Bikini Pink, Buoy Buoy Pink, Sea Shell Pink, Pebble Pink, Pink Piper, Acapulco Pink, Tahiti Beach Pink, Sunny Pink, Hot Pink, Sizzling Pink, Skinnydip Pink, Flesh Pink, Transparent Pink, Breezy Pink, Sheer Shiver Pink, Polar Bare Pink, Pink Frost, Frosty Pink, Frost Me Pink, Frosted Pink, Sugarpuff Pink, Ice Cream Pink, Lickety Pink, Pink Melba, Pink Whip, Pinkermint, Sweet Young Pink, Little Girl Pink, Fragile Pink, Fainting Pink, Helpless Pink, Tiny Timid Pink, Wink of Pink, Shadow of Pink, Tint of Pink, Shimmer of Pink, Flicker of Pink, Pink Flash, E.S. Pink, Person-to-Person Pink, City Pink, Penny Lane Pink, Pink Paisley, London Luv Pink, Pretty Pink, Pastel Pink, Pinking Sheer, Pink Piqué, Pink Silk, Plush Pink, Lush Iced Pink, Brandied Pink, Sheer Pink Champagne, Candlelight Pink, Fluffy Moth Pink, Softsilver Pink, Pinkyring, Turn Pale Pink, A Little Pink, Pinker, Pinkety Pink, Heart of Pink, Hug that Pink, Passionate Pink, Snuggle Pink, Pink-Glo!, Happy-Go-Pink, Daredevil Pink, By Jupiter Pink, Stark Raving Pink, Viva La Pink.

When they confess that they have lost the penial bone and outer space is Once again a numinous void, when they’re kept out of Other Places, And Dr Fieser falls asleep at last and dreams of unburnt faces, When gold medals are won by the ton for forgetting about the different races, God Bless America. When in the Latin shanties the scented priesthood suffers metempsychosis And with an organ entry tutti copula the dollar uncrosses Itself and abdicates, when the Pax Americana cuts its losses And a Pinkville memorial’s built in furious shame by Saigon’s puppet bosses,God Bless America. When they can be happy without noise, without knowing where on earth they’ve been, When they cease to be intellectual tourists and stop wanting to be clean, When they send their children to bed at the proper time and say just what they mean, And no longer trust the Quarterly Symposium and the Vicarious Screen,God Bless America. When they feel thoroughly desolated by the short-haired Christ they pray to, When they weep over their plunder of Europe stone by stone, releasing Plato And other Freshman Great Books, when they switch off their Hoover and unplug Nato, Pulling the chain on the CIA and awarding Time a rotten potato,God Bless America. When qua-birds, quickhatches and quinnets agree at last to admit the quail, When Captain Queeg is seen descending from the bridge as small and pale As everyone else, and is helped with sympathetic murmurs to the rail, When the few true defenders of love and justice survive to tell the tale,Then, perhaps then, God Bless America.

When it’s that time of month it’s like falling backwards in “time.” God has abandoned her glass carriage, she is “dead.” And the edges of objects: wavy in the eye that’s about to cry, a twitter running down the spine of… Oh God, it can’t be. (Insert song of mourning.) God and time, spine of the world— yawn, blah, blah, schma… what I meant to say is it’s hard to be a capitalist. If the world’s time is God, and she’s birds atwitter, then why must I go to work? The answer writes itself: left to my own devices I’d just sink into the soil. That is, write, with dirt as my pillow.   In the hole between twitters there’s random patches of mud-sky. So humid. There’re chairs growing in hell. There’re chairs growing in hell, and people sit on them, my co-workers: it’s like riding on toadstools except you don’t know it, or you kind of know it that time of month. That’s when you feel the twitter, the muddy shiver. You dream of your uncle turning a lamb on a spit high on a green cliff, with fog thickening around him and then he’s made to swallow keys and little hammers— you claw the red clay. Now wake. Show me the bouquet! No, don’t show me the bouquet. Show me the bouquet! If you do, I won’t tell on you to the rose of the world. She can make him hear you up there. Besides, it’s not a cliff, it’s a chair. And the rose is God. Got it? Gott it? This is why women should be President.

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough! Thy winds, thy wide grey skies! Thy mists, that roll and rise! Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag And all but cry with colour!   That gaunt crag To crush!   To lift the lean of that black bluff! World, World, I cannot get thee close enough! Long have I known a glory in it all, But never knew I this; Here such a passion is As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year; My soul is all but out of me,—let fall No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

Sunlight fades the storefront full of magazines. Month to month they boss us—the covers, they tell us that if we want to get happy & alluring (real happy, alluring sexually) we must for goddamn sure take up the breeding of Jack Russell terriers, or else dig ourselves a little backyard fishpond. Days of fish, days of dog, days of sex— in that order, necessarily. In the sun all the titles are trying to vanish—phrases like trout pond diluted, the 20-point sans serif, inked-red passion bleached now, apathetic, ghostly— words that want my attention like movers on the street lugging mirrors, a moment when I seem to come toward myself & then I’m gone too. I am not a greedy man. All I want is to be a visitor to this life.

The goldfish in my bowl turns into a carp each night. Swimming in circles in the day, regal, admired by emperors, but each night, while I sleep, it turns into silver, a dagger cold and sharp, couched at one spot, enough to frighten cats. The rest of the furniture squats in the cold and dark, complains of being a lone man’s furnishings, and plots a revolt. I can hear myself snore, but not their infidelity. Sometimes I wake with a start; silently they move back into their places. I have been unpopular with myself, pacing in my small, square room. But my uncle said, “Even in a palace, you can but sleep in one room.” With this I become humble as a simple preacher, saying, “I have no powers; they emanate from God.” With this I sleep soundly, Fish or no fish, dagger or no dagger. When I wake, my fish is gold, it pleases me with a trail of bubbles. My furniture has been loyal all night, waiting to provide me comfort. There was no conspiracy against a poor man. With this I consider myself king.

Gone then risen Milk dawn gone then risen Our ephemeral fawning done Gone sanguine then risen in spell High with your wrist while nihil busy Unburrowing dice teams from sand figurines Risen to swirl steam scooping passing seemingly A kindred-ided up and up, born of dormant corners Forms filial then filled          Goes mourn and swoon Love have and love loom                    Union and risen

Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home: Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine. Long through thy weary crowds I roam; A river-ark on the ocean brine, Long I've been tossed like the driven foam; But now, proud world! I'm going home. Good-bye to Flattery's fawning face; To Grandeur with his wise grimace; To upstart Wealth's averted eye; To supple Office, low and high; To crowded halls, to court and street; To frozen hearts and hasting feet; To those who go, and those who come; Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home. I am going to my own hearth-stone, Bosomed in yon green hills alone, — A secret nook in a pleasant land, Whose groves the frolic fairies planned; Where arches green, the livelong day, Echo the blackbird's roundelay, And vulgar feet have never trod A spot that is sacred to thought and God. O, when I am safe in my sylvan home, I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome; And when I am stretched beneath the pines, Where the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, At the sophist schools, and the learned clan; For what are they all, in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?

Jesus, I want my sins back. My prattle, pride, and private prices — climbing, clinching, clocking — I might loan you a few for the evening, so you don’t show up at your own crucifixion naked of all purpose. But for God’s sake, don’t spill any redemption on them! They’re my signature looks. Body by Envy. Make up & wardrobe provided by Avarice. Lord, if you take away my inordinate cravings, what the hell’s left? Do you know how much I paid for my best rages? I want them all back if they’re so To Die For. Else shred my palms, wash my face with spit, let the whip unlace my flesh and free the naked blood, let me be tumbled to immortality with the stew of flood debris that is my life.