Love Songs

I

 

Spawn of fantasies

Sifting the appraisable

Pig Cupid his rosy snout

Rooting erotic garbage

"Once upon a time"

Pulls a weed white star-topped

Among wild oats sown in mucous membrane

I would an eye in a Bengal light

Eternity in a sky-rocket

Constellations in an ocean

Whose rivers run no fresher

Than a trickle of saliva

 

These are suspect places

 

I must live in my lantern

Trimming subliminal flicker

Virginal to the bellows

Of experience

Colored glass.

 

 

 

II

 

At your mercy

Our Universe

Is only

A colorless onion

You derobe

Sheath by sheath

Remaining

A disheartening odour

About your nervy hands

 

 

 

III

 

Night

Heavy with shut-flower's nightmares

---------------------------------------------

Noon

Curled to the solitaire

Core of the

Sun

 

 

 

IV

 

Evolution fall foul of

Sexual equality

Prettily miscalculate

Similitude

 

Unnatural selection

Breed such sons and daughters

As shall jibber at each other

Uninterpretable cryptonyms

Under the moon

 

Give them some way of braying brassily

For caressive calling

Or to homophonous hiccoughs

Transpose the laugh

Let them suppose that tears

Are snowdrops or molasses

Or anything

Than human insufficiences

Begging dorsal vertebrae

 

Let meeting be the turning

To the antipodean

And Form a blur

Anything

Than to seduce them

To the one

As simple satisfaction

For the other

 

 

 

V

 

Shuttle-cock and battle-door

A little pink-love

And feathers are strewn

 

 

 

VI

 

Let Joy go solace-winged

To flutter whom she may concern

 

 

 

VII

 

Once in a mezzanino

The starry ceiling

Vaulted an unimaginable family

Bird-like abortions

With human throats

And Wisdom's eyes

Who wore lamp-shade red dresses

And woolen hair

 

One bore a baby

In a padded porte-enfant

Tied with a sarsenet ribbon

To her goose's wings

 

But for the abominable shadows

I would have lived

Among their fearful furniture

To teach them to tell me their secrets

Before I guessed

-- Sweeping the brood clean out

 

 

 

VIII

 

Midnight empties the street

--- --- --- To the left a boy

--- One wing has been washed in rain

The other will never be clean any more ---

Pulling door-bells to remind

Those that are snug

To the right a haloed ascetic

Threading houses

Probes wounds for souls

--- The poor can't wash in hot water ---

And I don't know which turning to take ---

 

 

 

IX

 

We might have coupled

In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment

Or broken flesh with one another

At the profane communion table

Where wine is spill't on promiscuous lips

 

We might have given birth to a butterfly

With the daily-news

Printed in blood on its wings

 

 

 

X

 

In some

Prenatal plagiarism

Foetal buffoons

Caught tricks

--- --- --- --- ---

From archetypal pantomime

Stringing emotions

Looped aloft

--- --- --- ---

For the blind eyes

That Nature knows us with

And most of Nature is green

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

 

 

 

XI

 

Green things grow

Salads

For the cerebral

Forager's revival

And flowered flummery

Upon bossed bellies

Of mountains

Rolling in the sun

 

 

 

XII

 

Shedding our petty pruderies

From slit eyes

 

We sidle up

To Nature

--- --- --- that irate pornographist

 

 

 

XIII

 

The wind stuffs the scum of the white street

Into my lungs and my nostrils

Exhilarated birds

Prolonging flight into the night

Never reaching --- --- --- --- ------ --- ---