Poemunity — your poem community

It's not about the sex, really, it's not the ache of the bruised nipple or the burn left by his two-day-old beard in the crook of my neck where the pulse is taken, it's his breathing when asleep that draws me near. When I was seventeen, I'd check beside me, hope I hadn't rolled and squashed flat my one-year-old brother. His sigh on my ear, the rise and fall of air beneath his ribs, was a miracle to me. The nightly surprise of what I saw under the bulb's dim glow: I saw the small heart beating like wings unfolding in the body. Here, with this man, ideas of flight return.

Seen on a Night in November How frail Above the bulk Of crashing water hangs, Autumnal, evanescent, wan, The moon.

They don’t play loud music. They don’t have a dog. I think they’re both mimes.

for Hsing Hui A thing as delicious as turning the last sound I heard into a word it cannot be or calling your hidden wish out into the broad space of the public to make you touch me instead of asking that I go naked, a thing as delicious as any of that would not be as safe as a dumb silence. I am resting my back with a cushion against the chair, sitting inside the ache when I soaked myself in a balm the way women went to the river and held things down until they were as wet as Jesus hanging in the rain, his pain the invocation of roars destroying the temple. The things I know are not the things you wish to know, or they are and I cannot give them to you until I see what you think of contracts, of what binds the mornings to unkind sunlight, what takes a hawk and lets it know there are things less grand than flying, things that crave.

The niche narrows Hones one thin Until his bones Disclose him

I am a miner. The light burns blue. Waxy stalactites Drip and thicken, tears The earthen womb Exudes from its dead boredom. Black bat airs Wrap me, raggy shawls, Cold homicides. They weld to me like plums. Old cave of calcium Icicles, old echoer. Even the newts are white, Those holy Joes. And the fish, the fish— Christ! they are panes of ice, A vice of knives, A piranha Religion, drinking Its first communion out of my live toes. The candle Gulps and recovers its small altitude, Its yellows hearten. O love, how did you get here? O embryo Remembering, even in sleep, Your crossed position. The blood blooms clean In you, ruby. The pain You wake to is not yours. Love, love, I have hung our cave with roses, With soft rugs— The last of Victoriana. Let the stars Plummet to their dark address, Let the mercuric Atoms that cripple drip Into the terrible well, You are the one Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.

Celebrated, the moustache, And near enough ignored His “beautiful hands”. Capable on a keyboard, improvised A polonaise, his own artistic Compositions “dull and decent”. He could see, some, but much swam, out there: Knives and forks, print, street signs. Then, his mind made up, he laid about, Sank immense nets into the cultural acid. When we winched them back in, on fingertips, They rippled with rainbows—herring and sprat He could fling, raw, in the teeth Of the Bürgertum, God rot it. Ah, no God: So to invoke the impact of quanta on quanta And extirpate for keeps the German cabbage, His fingers, subject to whim, and rounded Like objects in a metephor, made good the feeble Peering eyes. Each tip housed a labyrinth, Circling in or out, from ivories an octopod Pressed the torrent of a tune. From Cretan pots Their gestures, snaking out, apprehended, Turn on turn, a tumbril in the stars. Those fingers must have held, no less, the comb To bush his hairy icon out, to primp. On long mountain walks they jotted Gothic Letters on a page, deleted angrily Brainwaves, on a page one trouser leg Segregated from his knee. What a joy, At long last, to know the knower not deceived But disobedient, at his word. Underneath The creams of language here’s a tongue can taste A universe, cyclopic, but propulsive, alien To a species blocked by self-torment, To shopping, authority—all the cockahoop Engines of flesh not fuelled by despair. When Nietzche, squinting, trimmed his fingernails, Did he care for suchlike slighter things? To a turning pot a potter’s fingers do not cling.

She minces squid and a marinated scallion, Mixes rice with shrimp and olive paste. . . . Hope for the English meal, though half Italian With her jet black hair and her elastic waist. Unlike the other television cooks, She brings to life a lobster that was dead With common spices, her exotic looks, And recipes she dreamed about in bed.

Even alleged militants blame the vanishing of the summer sea ice on “Ghosts” (short version) by Albert Ayler. He disappeared while he was getting his sound together. No one knows what happened but the water high in increments like a crown around his cries and glass is a liquid and you have to forgive your parents for whatever it is and they have to forgive themselves I would like to use this craft to fly with him I feel that saddle the morning after and try — again — warm in the habit of our warning and yearning for more of  them until We finally need to see this reckoning But when it’s time I’m not ready and when I’m ready it’s not time — that’s fate. And blind in the halo of so-what, so-what, we make it a future I say,I don’t know who you are. I say,It don’t matter at this point,I do it all for you anyways(long run) — gorgeous photographs of industrial ruins so lush you want to lick them, be them, become a trend. Crushed under the debris, an instrument is so tender it breaks and mends in the same note. Becoming men is like that, degrading, uplifting, denial, lazily caving in Isis and ice until all of our guesses are obsolete we can’t see nobody who isn’t disappearing

It's all right Unless you're either lonely or under attack. That strange effortful Repositioning of yourself. Laundry, shopping, Hours, the telephone—unless misinformed— Only ever ringing for you, if it ever does. The night—yours to decide, Among drink, or books, or lying there. On your back, or curled up. An embarrassment of poverty.