873 Life poems

The fields are white; The laborers are few; Yet say the idle: There’s nothing to do. Jails are crowded; In Sunday-schools few; We still complain: There’s nothing to do. Drunkards are dying— Your sons, it is true; Mothers’ arms folded With nothing to do. Heathens are dying; Their blood falls on you; How can you people Find nothing to do?

After Paul Chan Biggum Wallah, Biggum Wallah, why so glum? You in heaven, na, be happy. You are Hip Hop’s Grand Panjandrum in white foxy mink snuggly over your Bluto belly, & this fleet of white Cucci Gucci Hummers is for you, ji. Like a short-order cook slinging hash browns, you slinged so many rhymes propho-rapping you will die, now faput. Dead. Why so chee? Ayaya, you in heaven for white people. Wrong ear-sucking heaven. Heaven does stink like mothballs, bibbit & whatsit, you smell wet dog? Milksop chatty angels with their Binaca grins, twibble: “No Hennessy just seltzer, please,” before they sing your hits a capella. Shataa, Baagad Bullya, very last straw, this Angrez-propogandhi. Silly as a cricket in pubes. Biggum Wallah bringing up demands, yar. A smashation of clouds part to reveal the uretic sun and swatting away chweetie pie cupids, looms Fatmouth God, frowning like rotten turbot. But Biggita is VIP, sold records in millions tens, so God sighs, relents & the Kleenex sky melts to Op Art swirls of Cherry Coke red, burning upup white magnolias into a chain-link planet of asphalt & black cell phone towers. This more like it, sepoys, all hoosh & video girl boomba-lathis drinking lychee lassis. But where is your number 1 rap rival nemesis? Where is 2Packi?

Some problems of self-loathing, worry: the thumbnail blotched in a bank box door grows out, three-quarter moon marrow spot filled out with white bruise travels down my thumb at regular speed, so when I glance down it's what I see left of center, not the odd breast, the malformed scruff at head, the old thought leaking pain on the pages from my brain, which ought to be gainfully occupied with rain as an emblem of loss and gain, and is not.

Out of your whole life give but one moment! All of your life that has gone before, All to come after it, – so you ignore, So you make perfect the present, – condense, In a rapture of rage, for perfection’s endowment, Thought and feeling and soul and sense – Merged in a moment which gives me at last You around me for once, you beneath me, above me – Me – sure that despite of time future, time past, – This tick of our life-time’s one moment you love me! How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet – The moment eternal – just that and no more – When ecstasy’s utmost we clutch at the core While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!

Toggle me up on one last vanity flight half drunk on a screw-top frizzante. It takes a hell of a lot more to get me here than it did when I had beauty, boys when bedding me was the easy way to know me. Don’t tuck me in so tight. I’m not your grandma. This rough blanket its green red yellow indigo stripes I traded for a perfectly warm beaver pelt. Fly me once more over my disloyal youth and its hangdog slavering over men whom age has de-sexed right along with me. They broadcast impotent outrage from aluminum tablets. I collect speculums with Bakelite handles arranging them by size though it no longer matters.

I want no horns to rouse me up to-night, And trumpets make too clamorous a ring To fit my mood, it is so weary white I have no wish for doing any thing. A music coaxed from humming strings would please; Not plucked, but drawn in creeping cadences Across a sunset wall where some Marquise Picks a pale rose amid strange silences. Ghostly and vaporous her gown sweeps by The twilight dusking wall, I hear her feet Delaying on the gravel, and a sigh, Briefly permitted, touches the air like sleet And it is dark, I hear her feet no more. A red moon leers beyond the lily-tank. A drunken moon ogling a sycamore, Running long fingers down its shining flank. A lurching moon, as nimble as a clown, Cuddling the flowers and trees which burn like glass. Red, kissing lips, I feel you on my gown— Kiss me, red lips, and then pass—pass. Music, you are pitiless to-night. And I so old, so cold, so languorously white.

The girl was known for shitting in her yard. I did so little for her.  She was small, a dandelion orb with ragged hair like an old woman’s burnt from dye. Her face showed little sign of poverty— it was her dusty shoes cut open at the top that told. A bone look she’d mastered young, yet the curve of her face was edible, like a rounded sparrow in hand. She wasn’t mean, but did what she wanted—quietly, with a lift to her chin, while I struggled to teach her anything. I’d like to say I brushed her brittle hair, called her beautiful, coaxed out sight words that dawdled on her tongue. I dream of her spinning like a fairy dervish in my failure. Consider this a prayer, a foolish one.

My grandmother never trusted calculators. She would crunch numbers in a spiral notebook at the kitchen table, watching her news.

I like the generosity of numbers. The way, for example, they are willing to count anything or anyone: two pickles, one door to the room, eight dancers dressed as swans. I like the domesticity of addition— add two cups of milk and stir— the sense of plenty: six plums on the ground, three more falling from the tree. And multiplication’s school of fish times fish, whose silver bodies breed beneath the shadow of a boat. Even subtraction is never loss, just addition somewhere else: five sparrows take away two, the two in someone else’s garden now. There’s an amplitude to long division, as it opens Chinese take-out box by paper box, inside every folded cookie a new fortune. And I never fail to be surprised by the gift of an odd remainder, footloose at the end: forty-seven divided by eleven equals four, with three remaining. Three boys beyond their mother’s call, two Italians off to the sea, one sock that isn't anywhere you look.

What was it for the longest time but lore, lure; A heard-tell growing gold in the mind. Word said (and word’d spread) it was well on back Through the underwood by Bowen’s Canal.