767 Humor poems

I need everything else Anything else Desperately But I have nothing Shall have nothing but this Immediate, inescapable and invaluable No one can afford THIS Being made here and now (Seattle, Washington 17 May, 1955) MARIGOLDS Concise (wooden) Orange. Behind them, the garage door Pink (Paint sold under a fatuous name: "Old Rose" which brings a war to mind) And the mind slides over the fence again Orange against pink and green Uncontrollable! Returned of its own accord It can explain nothing Give no account What good? What worth? Dying! You have less than a second To live To try to explain: Say that light in particular wave-lengths or bundles wobbling at a given speed Produces the experience Orange against pink Better than a sirloin steak? A screen by Korin? The effect of this, taken internally The effect of beauty on the mind There is no equivalent, least of all These objects Which ought to manifest A surface disorientation, pitting Or striae Admitting some plausible interpretation But the cost Can't be expressed in numbers dodging between a vagrancy rap and the newest electrical brain-curette Eating what the rich are bullied into giving Or the poor willingly share Depriving themselves More expensive than ambergris Although the stink isn't as loud. (A few Wise men have said, "Produced the same way . . . Vomited out by sick whales.") Valuable for the same qualities Staying-power and penetration I've squandered every crying dime.

Then one day she noticed the forest had begun to bleed into her waking life. There were curved metal plates on the trees to see around corners. She thought to brush her hand against his thigh. She thought to trace the seam of his jeans with her thumbnail. The supersaturated blues were beginning to pixillate around the edges, to become a kind of grammar. She placed a saucer of water under her lamp and counted mosquitoes as they drowned. Soot amassed in drifts in the corners of the room. She pressed her thumb into the hollow of his throat for a while and then let him go.

First there was Jim, clamping to my long black hair that nine-pound Cleopatra wig with nylon bands and bobbie pins. Meanwhile I was on fire for Chad, who coached me a bit impatiently Tuesday nights on my Joan-of-Arc inflection. Then Terence said I’d be perfect for the lounge-singer- turned-whore, and as it turned out that was a fairly easy gig. Max signed me on soon after, claiming I was a natural for Eternally Aggrieved Girl, which in hindsight hurts me deeply. So by the time you followed me back to the green room to wait in the hallway—whistling!— for my scrubbed face to emerge, naturally I was wary, waiting for the script you never bothered to come up with. It was damned awkward sitting there, nothing but milkshakes between us. Maybe, I thought, you’d assumed I was the one with a script. Finally I decided to give Terence a call. I didn’t like the way you looked at me so steadily with your chin resting on one fist, as if the table were a table, the boards A floor. Listening there as if you meant it, as if something I could say were true, and every moment from now on would be my cue.

I realize there is simply no way to stay up in the air with a sustained flapping motion. Sucks! But that doesn't mean I can't try. How odd to eat only white bread for levity. In spite of its limitations, you must consider the possibilities of leaping, daily. Whatever monster ails you, leap into the cool wind. I hope you consider me an authority. You don't know what this means. Yet. I have the necessary education for this type of work. I will imitate the sound of your father laughing into a microphone through a public address system in your place of work. How did that idea get into these instructions? I'm going to put stickers on the back of your shirt that will instruct people how to behave around you. Then, I'll leap through the air above you when you exit the subway. I just wanted to give you these instructions in a nutshell.

Hans Richter What if the moon was essence of quinine And high heels were a time of day When certain birds bled The chauffeur is telling the cook The antler would pry into ice floes Swim with a lamp And we’d be shivering in a ditch Biting through a black wing There would be boats There would be a dream country The great quiet humming of the soul at night The only sound is a shovel Clearing a place for a mailbox

The unit of wine is the cup. Of Love , the unit is the kiss.That’s here. In Hell, the units are the gallon and the fuck. In Paradise, the drop and the glance. Ants are my hero. They debate and obey. They can sit at a table for Eight hours, drawing. They spot out the under-theorized . . . Have some. For they are as abundant here as the flecks of mica in the Iowa night sky. What are twenty-sided dishes of fancy almonds? What use jewels? He is Kālidāsa. You are nothing. Or rather, you’re a tray of stainless steel cones. Meanwhile, one opens Kumārasambhava to rainbow-colored crystals pointing every which way. Nice try. You’re a tank-builder but you refuse to build tanks. And so now you are to be watched over By three heckling birds, evilly named, discomfiting to children. ¡Fijate! you’re to be watched by three fowl, commonplace in Florida. Even these Three hearty objectionables: the blue tit, the woodpecker, and the swampcunt. I’m one to talk. I’m so twisted up, my only hope is Salena. My physical therapist, With the eyes of Athena, and the hands of a destroying eagle.

In my medicine cabinet the winter fly Has died of old age

For the second time this week I've watched snow fall at sunrise, dawn arrive on a breeze (the way I think it always does). I don't know which, time or the weather, woke me, charmed me out of a dream where a few of us floated around, gravity's jokers, face-up in the quiet water and the jetsam of a slow life. I had one line that I'd saved and let it go as though it were mine, calling for “Darker days and brighter gods!” Then I only had my waking instant, but it opened with that same shadowless light, a sense of change, of something both near and remote, first and last, blowing with the wind and snow through my reflection in the window. And then I lost it. So here I am, with cigarettes and cold coffee, an unfinished ode to idleness, cobwebs in high places, a spider that rappels down the bookshelves, and a commotion recollected in tranquility; sunlight pouring through, and another bright page with a peculiar darkness flowing over it — shadows of heatwaves from the radiator, or my thoughts going up in smoke. The glass, when misted over, reminds me of store windows, how they're swathed with soap, shrouded in secrecy before a grand opening or after an ignominious closing. Either way, not very interesting except, perhaps, when the grafitti, the anonymous messages appear scrawled across them by some child of the air, words you can see through or a clear smear. And at twilight I'm still here, the same place, the same light. Nothing to do but move with the view: snow, wind over soft ruins, unfinished buildings that loom like monuments to a spent curiosity. I'm in the tallest, up here with the Nopes roosting on soggy flunkgirders. Want a cigarette? Nope. Got a match? Nope. See any alternative to solipsism? Nope. Hedonism? Nope. Sloppy stoicism? Nope. Did you know that Maryland has no natural but only man-made lakes? Nope. The creatures of idleness are pure speculation. They follow the weather, shadow the wind, fill in the blanks. Some are big and clumsy and sly and like to lick my watch; others, like gerunds, have already drunk themselves into a state of being. Another, with time on his hands and the sense of how windows are both inside and outside a place, stands there watching his silhouette change to a reflection as the light shifts and he moves forward or back, plays like a god stepping in and out of himself, and hears the wind as the breath of change when the last flurry whirls away in the light. The last flake grows larger

I will grieve alone, As I strolled alone, years ago, down along The Ohio shore. I hid in the hobo jungle weeds Upstream from the sewer main, Pondering, gazing. I saw, down river, At Twenty-third and Water Streets By the vinegar works, The doors open in early evening. Swinging their purses, the women Poured down the long street to the river And into the river. I do not know how it was They could drown every evening. What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore, Drying their wings? For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia, Has only two shores: The one in hell, the other In Bridgeport, Ohio. And nobody would commit suicide, only To find beyond death Bridgeport, Ohio.

Eyes that spurn yet invite Like spikes in the sunlight Of Manhattan’s high-rise— Babylon’s ladies outshine Daughters of Jerusalem, Zion is no easy climb