Love Song

Though I am more Che than Chavez,

I am still a dove.

I do not apologize

to you. Or to the state

of California. The IRS. New York. That administrator I bit

in the third grade,

who was delicious

and sweet.

I, oh,

so cold.

In the mind, the Dionysian defiles walls

the Apollonian protects.

I am always looking

to take something

down. Usually it’s me.

Two bulls stand on a hill. The younger says,

Father, let’s run down and fuck a cow.

The father, wiser, longer in the horn,

higher on the grass,

reminds his son how Moses was also horned, beamed with light,

that to handle a massive snake,

to charm Pharaoh, to steal fire, to fly, to unzip

the sea, is to speak

and not tap vanity.

Moses descended Mount Sinai with cracked slabs

and saw a golden calf. The father said to the young bull,

No son, let’s strut down and fuck them all.

Thus begins the beef  between bird and bee,

the isthmus isolating

order from chaos.

My mind is made up

of so many different cuts

of meat.

My marbles stay

as mixed

as my metaphors. As my myths.

As myself.

At parties my favorite

icebreaker involves asking strangers

to describe themselves

with three words. Their descriptions

 are a slipping

away to change clothes. Identity and irony

neatly knit in an ugly Christmas sweater.

Sometimes I feel so Socratic: oft-laureled, poison-palmed,

toga-partied, exasperated by the masses:

I wouldn’t have guessed ambitious.

Free-spirited, you don’t say.

Other times I feel like the woman

rambling among the vapors escaping the ground

in Iceland’s volcanic canyon,

making a bus

an em dash

in a rest stop,

where some fifty-odd persons

searching for themselves

in true existentialism

are yellow lupines growing

on the side of the road. An epiphany can

not be achieved,

as a cedar waxwing

cannot be more cedar

qua waxwing. Eventually what we’re looking

for appears. Sometimes incitation opens

at the bottom of a straw, a spoon, a barrel of wine,

the windfall happens while eating farfalle,

while flipping through

The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. At the moon

me the animal roofs

atop brownstones, sin vergüenza.

Upwards our eyes scamper,

a reflex action,

when inserting an object

in the mouth,

even when the object

is a gun. Over hills a road erodes the way home.

Only after the Coast Guard

has readied a helicopter,

do we

descend the cold volcano in Eldg já

to realize we are the woman

in the search party looking

for ourselves.

to poetry.

In moments of ecstasy

we are lifted

 

At the shore of the Aegean Sea

or at the banks

of the river Evros,

he loosened his sandals

while Pegasus stamped the soil,

crushing reeds

and hoofing away

stray wood. The sun bandaged

light on a sky

that would not heal.

Perseus,

with eyes heavenward,

formed the shapes of gods into clouds,

slipped his hand

into the woven sack,

and felt the flint

of primped snakes. He thought,

But it is the cold weight of scales that protects.

As sure as a child,

he lined leaves rocked

to sleep by salt

water waves

for a bed,

so as not to,

with sand,

or with hubris,

bruise Medusa’s

disunited head. One day,

like a beam through skylight,

we realize

life is a puddle jumper of  tragedy.

Some stones sink fast

yet still hold light. So phantom are a statue’s

busted arms and toes. Everything must go.

And yet I still hanger hope

when shopping the racks of discount

stores. Veni vidi vici when I see Vince,

freeze when I see the coiled coif

of Versace’s emblem. Like Sisyphus,

errybody think

they headed for the top.

Sing, started from the bottom,

to my reflection

in the dressing room mirror,

now we here boy

when I remember

that

Oh my god Becky, look at her butt

passes the Bechdel test.

I have eaten from the tree the fig that sullies and seen

that the meat’s not always

fair.

I was,

like Perseus

and Sir Mix-a-Lot,

born by a riv

of water,

felled by pride when

a brown boy, tattooed with age,

obsessed with fame, took his talents

to Vermont to kiss trees and tap

syrup from the sap.

There and there

and there, he kissed. Here and here

he drank.

So drunk he hugged an old

white woman

off the ground. None of the gods

I love

love me. To be tipsy

is to leverage one’s self.

Or so I’m told. The pulley

is considered civilization’s

highest achievement.

Icarus

killed himself

being lifted.