767 Humor poems

I don’t like what the moon is supposed to do. Confuse me, ovulate me, spoon-feed me longing. A kind of ancient date-rape drug. So I’ll howl at you, moon, I’m angry. I’ll take back the night. Using me to swoon at your questionable light, you had me chasing you, the world’s worst lover, over and over hoping for a mirror, a whisper, insight. But you disappear for nights on end with all my erotic mysteries and my entire unconscious mind. How long do I try to get water from a stone? It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band. Better off alone. I’m going to write hard and fast into you, moon, face-fucking. Something you wouldn’t understand. You with no swampy sexual promise but what we glue onto you. That’s not real. You have no begging cunt. No panties ripped off and the crotch sucked. No lacerating spasms sending electrical sparks through the toes. Stars have those. What do you have? You’re a tool, moon. Now, noon. There’s a hero. The obvious sun, no bullshit, the enemy of poets and lovers, sleepers and creatures. But my lovers have never been able to read my mind. I’ve had to learn to be direct. It’s hard to learn that, hard to do. The sun is worth ten of you. You don’t hold a candle to that complexity, that solid craze. Like an animal carcass on the road at night, picked at by crows, taunting walkers and drivers. Your face regularly sliced up by the moving frames of car windows. Your light is drawn, quartered, your dreams are stolen. You change shape and turn away, letting night solve all night’s problems alone.

Detective Hardwood looks like Batman this morning pouty cupidy mouth and a lot of black sculptural clanking the statuary in my mortuary, the Masonic Hall having burned again in dreams but everyone still keeps skipping towards it it's a hollow a round shell my life as the shape of the ways I've been fucked by prevailing thought & practice all the conscious and unconscious sexisms selfishnesses affluences assumptions suppressions in drift GET   RID   OF   ALL   CONTROLS—is what the Soul keeps screaming. ____________________ I look up someone grins you're a bloody feral wolf-face I like you. ____________________ I sleep-walked in a dream to a man's apartment— a man I'm doing business with— I forgot, but how could I? how I'd gotten there, and when I die will I remember all such forgotten things GET   RID   OF   THE   CONTROLS I want to remember now. I apologized to the man for not adhering to office hours it was four a.m. Office hours are better he said. Don't arrive anywhere in your sleep don't mix up night and day soul and detective. No. ____________________ There must be so much to reclaim because I'm so limited ____________________ this. They broke your day they fought it you forgot how advantageous to be fit with god and not see eye you forgot gold sun brilliant in this story go in conscious. ____________________ That queen that Assyrian woman was so cruel and that never occurred to her ... but those eyes saw raw smells and gods everywhere dusty this dust I was truly assembled from at least as you, we are communally such. If you say you'll hurt me, do you really mean me I can't be, can I, hurt? ____________________ “Hut Sut Tut Mut there's gonna be a wedding” I dream that's a song. Wake up with, in my head, “They say don't go on Wolverton Moun-tain” (“Her tender lips/are sweeter than hone-y” ____________________ Later. I have a drop of blood on a front tooth I kind of don't mind— This the list of what we've done: It was different structure we killed it put beasts in the refrigerator and that was almost as bad as my own enslavement. Then I saw Christ's blood pumped into a rejuvenating mummy. This great sickness we're part of apple clot and can you really chew it detective Oh sure I can, I'm Robert Mitch-ham. ____________________ you've broke your own sto I'm sort of hysterical the E is it for hope, cutting the E might be for Hope Nope and bloody, the bloodiest is Hope. Where are the E's of exactness? E is my middle name

I TOO have been to Candyland, but I found myself missing the death cult. I missed the spectacle of the wounded bones being opened and instrumented. Bill Varner, when he was still just a boy, wrote a stunning line of Arabic verse. He wrote: “The crescent moon is a scimitar; the sun, a severed head.” ¡Gran cantar! and this, when he still had to keep his books in a locker! And he’d never even held hands with a girl—God! Penn State in the 1980s! In those days, we all sat at the feet of a pig poet, deaf in one ear. One of these Dreadful “white-haired lovers”—oh, but he knew how to touch fire to fuse! That little stick of fire apt to launch a poetic career! But what is it now? Merely a billowing cloud of humidity floating out of a tree. Every turtle, snake, and bird is “born again”—oh, isn’t that so? The first time, Out the fêted cloaca—and the next, through the top of the shell. The “I” is Greek, the “it” Italian, and Dickinson is our Ghalib. But that Ridiculous piece of dirt you’re kissing on can never be anything but. Shut your eyes to what a worm he is, concentrate on his caress—but know Every half-truth is bound to call up its suppressed synoptic double. Close your eyes and moan softly, your head full of packed cotton—but know Every hidden camera’s cockpit must one day be delivered of its black box.

30 dogs, 20 men on 20 horses and one fox and look here, they write, you are a dupe for the state, the church, you are in the ego-dream, read your history, study the monetary system, note that the racial war is 23,000 years old. well, I remember 20 years ago, sitting with an old Jewish tailor, his nose in the lamplight like a cannon sighted on the enemy; and there was an Italian pharmacist who lived in an expensive apartment in the best part of town; we plotted to overthrow a tottering dynasty, the tailor sewing buttons on a vest, the Italian poking his cigar in my eye, lighting me up, a tottering dynasty myself, always drunk as possible, well-read, starving, depressed, but actually a good young piece of ass would have solved all my rancor, but I didn’t know this; I listened to my Italian and my Jew and I went out down dark alleys smoking borrowed cigarettes and watching the backs of houses come down in flames, but somewhere we missed: we were not men enough, large or small enough, or we only wanted to talk or we were bored, so the anarchy fell through, and the Jew died and the Italian grew angry because I stayed with his wife when he went down to the pharmacy; he did not care to have his personal government overthrown, and she overthrew easy, and I had some guilt: the children were asleep in the other bedroom but later I won $200 in a crap game and took a bus to New Orleans and I stood on the corner listening to the music coming from bars and then I went inside to the bars, and I sat there thinking about the dead Jew, how all he did was sew on buttons and talk, and how he gave way although he was stronger than any of us he gave way because his bladder would not go on, and maybe that saved Wall Street and Manhattan and the Church and Central Park West and Rome and the Left Bank, but the pharmacist’s wife, she was nice, she was tired of bombs under the pillow and hissing the Pope, and she had a very nice figure, very good legs, but I guess she felt as I: that the weakness was not Government but Man, one at a time, that men were never as strong as their ideas and that ideas were governments turned into men; and so it began on a couch with a spilled martini and it ended in the bedroom: desire, revolution, nonsense ended, and the shades rattled in the wind, rattled like sabers, cracked like cannon, and 30 dogs, 20 men on 20 horses chased one fox across the fields under the sun, and I got out of bed and yawned and scratched my belly and knew that soon      very soon      I would have to get very drunk      again.

Thanks, Ray, this is just what the doctor ordered. No, you never see me have one with olives—your father likes olives but I can’t stand them. No, cocktail onions are just picked small. Turn that down, Dan. Avocados, toothpicks. Coleus, root sprawl. The diffident glints of a late-day sun, rays splintered by leaves: they shake and, in their shaking, streak the light. Transparent murk of glasses at the glass. Would you move just one inch over? There. The light was in my eye.

I wave good-bye when butter flies and cheer a boxing match, I've often watched my pillow fight, I've sewn a cabbage patch, I like to dance at basket balls or lead a rubber band, I've marvelled at a spelling bee, I've helped a peanut stand. It's possible a pencil points, but does a lemon drop? Does coffee break or chocolate kiss, and will a soda pop? I share my milk with drinking straws, my meals with chewing gum, and should I see my pocket change, I'll hear my kettle drum. It makes me sad when lettuce leaves, I laugh when dinner rolls, I wonder if the kitchen sinks and if a salad bowls, I've listened to a diamond ring, I've waved a football fan, and if a chimney sweeps the floor, I'm sure the garbage can.

I have made love with Pablo Neruda On the heights of Machu Picchu I flashed the tattoo on my thigh And hitched a lowride with Luis Rodriguez I have held Adrian Louis close And danced a wild reservation two-step Until beer cans and disposable diapers Spun around us like stars. I have surrendered to Leonel Rugama’s Burning adolescent heat And caressed Roque Dalton From a luxuriance of bed sheets and red wine. I stayed up all night reading Sherman Alexie, Nine months later, I gave birth to twin poems. This lust is not heterosexual. I devour Nikki Giovanni and Patricia Smith Like Sao Tome chocolate. I have been known to steal away for An afternoon tryst with Julia de Burgos. I wrap Nellie Wong around me like a silk robe. Tonight, I have a date to share a steamy bath With Linda Hogan and Joy Harjo And it’s gonna be gooooood . . .

A piece of green pepper fell off the wooden salad bowl: so what?

We’re having a Halloween party at school. I’m dressed up like Dracula. Man, I look cool! I dyed my hair black, and I cut off my bangs. I’m wearing a cape and some fake plastic fangs. I put on some makeup to paint my face white, like creatures that only come out in the night. My fingernails, too, are all pointed and red. I look like I’m recently back from the dead. My mom drops me off, and I run into school and suddenly feel like the world’s biggest fool. The other kids stare like I’m some kind of freak— the Halloween party is not till next week.

in florida a giant hamster lays in bed worrying about its future the hamster has bad eyesight and many other problems later that night the hamster drives its car around listening to sad music; the master lightly drums its paws on the steering wheel the hamster is alone but not for long: at home three waffle friends wait cooling inside a countertop oven in the kitchen