Dark Flowers

preface

I present these dark flowers for your enjoyment. As with life, I prefer my weeds on the wild side. I’d rather see them scattered chaotically in the meadow than artfully arranged in a vase on the table.

It is a matter of spirit versus poetic expertise. Give me the exuberant wildness of the untrained rather than the caged accuracy of the professional. Every poem should be imperfect, for life is the same. Imperfection imparts value, since experience must have troughs in order to have heights. And this explains why heaven can never satisfy us, and Eden must harbor a snake in its garden of delight.

The poetry here, flawed as it may be, is meant to be an expression of the natural singing spirit. Let the reader be content with that. Our bodies desire to burst into spring and worship the world, and I hope my poems reflect this. Peruse literary magazines, however, and you will discover that the primary objective of many professional poems is not singing spirit but finely arranged esthetic. The cerebral has gotten elevated to art and treated like a gateway to profundity. 

I think this is wrong. Our focus should not be inward but outward. We should attend not to an esthetic of the inner mind, but face outdoors to the great meadow around us. After all, human life belongs outside; life is an outdoor enterprise. No surprise then that outside poetry engages us with the world, whereas inside poetry traps us in our thoughts.  

We are not minds that happen to be embodied. Rather, we are bodies with minds. Our primary identity is bodily. As bodies we come with wonderful sensations, moods, needs, desires, memories, thoughts; invaluable elements of our existence all, but their role is secondary. We should celebrate consciousness in its myriad manifestations, but we should never forget that consciousness exists to benefit the body. 

Bodies we are, first and foremost. Get this wrong, mistakenly elevate mind to primacy, and the result can be pernicious. When we find ourselves trapped indoors, caged in our mental cells, it leads to perversity. 

Modern poetry often seems isolated from the body, alienated from the encompassing world in which we move and dance and breathe; it comes off overly cerebral and songless. We have a culture that worships music and singing—as the ubiquitous earbud demonstrates—but our infatuation with the inner has driven the musical out of our literature. Like Narcissus we have fallen in love with our own mental reflection in the pond of consciousness, and forgotten about swimming in the pool of life.

I hope these weeds and flowers put the focus in the right place.

When done right, writing is a religious act and poetry is its Sunday service. And the real object of worship, as of old, is the sun herself. Worship not of the acquired cerebral consciousness we have locked inside our heads, but of this wonderful world of bodies which the sun annunciates.

---

resurrection

The first Sunday
after the first full moon
after the first equinox of the year,
rise early and lean outside
in the spiced air, listen to bells ringing.

Morning bells
bells of far churches
chuckling their delight for the advent of another spring
in a world that has dawned.

Easter 
and already the snows have grown weary
they drop their coats
and troop back into the darkness.

Already the gale, barking wind
discards his piercing shrillness
and his iciness
he bounds forward on us warm and naked.

Already the distant sun, long aloof
forgets herself
wanders our way, smiling broadly.

Already the crocuses and daffodils
the jonquils, the dogwoods, the wisteria, even the white iris
alone in the field by my house
cast off their shyness, vulnerably
expose themselves before the world
unprotected and beautiful.

And it is spring. It is spring.

I look beyond the empty lot, out past
steeples that stand like toys 
on the far street, suddenly
I see earth supple before me like a gardener
like a mother suckling rich seed-mouths

and they spring up.

They spring up, they spring up
in eudicotyledon splendor of living
resurrected in body once again.

---

battalion

I have been beaten down
by the external threats
of the thwarted people
in this thwarted world around me
until welts have come to my skin.

Then
I watched my own feelings
like an odd, frenzied battalion
fly to the surface of my skin
to do battle.
So that I didn’t recognize their song anymore.

I watched them die
hardened, fortified,
as they withstood the onslaught of the world
until battle was won.

Now
in the calm of afterwards
my feelings evaporate
into unreclaimable nothingness.

---

tree climb

Falling
falling 
yet falling not 

asway in the flimsy 
crest of this colossus sweet gum.

Collapsing horizontal in a great 
gaiting swing
then flipping back

drunk in this dizzying breeze
rhythmic amid the flap and flutter
the caressing bother 
of these green, sweet gum fingered leaves.

I search over the hazy distance:
a thumbprint of vertical thorns on the horizon
is all that remains of the city.

I pull my eyes from that specter
back to my tree
my sky-open, scanty-clad tree.
Scanty and at ease

I feel like one who is lost
in a pathless sky, like one dipped in the wind.

I lean back.

I lean back and dream.

The dipping breeze lifts me and pushes me
above the top-lipped sky of trees
above the hardness and the heaviness
that drapes so clumsy over the distance
of the unfocused earth this eve.

And over the clouded brow of hill
beyond the hazy pallor of the sky
again I see the distant specks and thorn-towers point at me

warning I cannot stay the storm
which drives me back to duty.
Uprooted

from my birth, imprisoned
in a tower that waits
and scorns
this momentary freedom and respite

I remember I was born
slave to an urban life

chained to careful responsibility
curt judgments, trivial pursuits—
no place for me
high and floating
feeling freedom in a tree.

Unhook the tackle and descend the steep
flute trunk. Down rippling ropes I glide.
Yet part of me 
protests, in defiance yearns

to plunge the mute
vast vertical of the tree, plunge mute
in one brief ecstasy against the roots.

---

landfall

As dusk looms on the tide
and descending darkness lops the swills
do you feel the luminous rise
of the ocean’s furrowed hills?

Do you feel the swelling flood around us
see the dark and looming wall
hear the tidal wind that gusts
upon us, as the darkness covers all?

The night now claims the seaside
and the darkness maims our will
as we face the ever-luminous rise
of the ocean’s furrowed hill.

---

under the tree

Look how this night is marked with night-pox
its smooth black skin festered with light
like sores on a face. Look 
how the darkness is shocked
by the unceasing bright of neon and tungsten eyes
halogen, fluorescent, cathode-ray glowing eyes

a thousand terrestrial eyelets infringing the dark.

Is there no respite?
Even the fireflies strobe as they spy
on our hurried pace. Even the stars above
join the banter against the living dark.

§

Look! There’s refuge
inside the umbrella of this leaf-thick magnolia
within
its welcoming embrace, out of sight
of the glowing eyes, beneath its cloak of black.

Come under the boughs 
while I hold them back.

Slide under, so we can hide in the womb 
of the tree, free 
from the lurid light—secure in blackness
safe from everything outside. Here 

in this palpable nearness, here
where we lack
even sight, let touch be our guide.

§

Now that we have escaped 
from the spark
of unceasing light—come

into darkness with me. Please come
where we are naked
and blind
where our bodies can turn off the visual mind—
under the tree.

Help me spread our clothes against 
the unfathomable ground
silently, so we can lie down
naked in the luring dark.

§

How silent and black
how unknowable everything is!
Yet I sense you, beside me
like an invisible pull, like dusk
after sun has gone down. Your back

your arms, your face out of sight
out of mind
yet the touch feels right.

Grope 
down the darkness with me. Feel down the slope
of blind life—away from the blight
of day-consciousness. Come into the living night
of bodily life. Come with me
to the core of delight.

---

laura

In the morning
sun peeks golden in the window; with a glance
it glints across my eyes and nudges me
to wake and rise. Then
I turn your way

with belly brushing belly
I glisten your sleepy mouth with a touch of my lips.

§

Sometimes I find myself slipping downward
drawn down
as your slight

touch on my shoulder 
guides me down.

Tipping my tongue 
along your breasts' soft mounds
I dip 
further down—to the dark

petal 
of your underground

and awaken your underlips with the slightest kiss.
And watch 

them rouse and part 
like a shy 
smile between your hips.

Wildly I dip and press
unstoppable—

delicious

kiss upon kiss
on your underlips

then my  mouth 
slips 
to your clit
and with soft swirls

flits
textures of tongue
on your clit

unable 
unable to quit—

§

I hear your whispered moaning sound

feel your blood-full arms 
reach down
to tug me up from the underground.

Kiss your belly, nuzzle
your breasts, as you pull me up 
I feel the sleek
slip of your nipples past my chest 

slipping of nipples
along my skin
exquisite you
against my skin.

Your groping
unexpected mouth

surprises me on the cheek
and I turn to meet 
your lips with lips.

§

Thoughts fade. 

I barely remember
a movement below in the undergrowth
a blood-thick me tipped with delight
stoutly tugging at your lips

hello

hello—

and you part

and I am lost with you
in six-lipped ecstasy.

Lost in the rocking, exquisite tup
of me against you

locked together
swiving

me abreast you

swaying
tupping
tupping

oh never enough

never enough. And I rock with your blood
my blood locked in you. Rocking

and tupping, rocking

together me abreast you. We rock
with ever

and ever and ever and ever the bliss

that erupts

in

flood.

§

When I notice your eyes
languid-brown, looking up at me
searching my brow, my cheeks, my lips

I hardly remember the surging blood
that brought us blind

or why we now drip
with a river of sweat engulfing us.

But feel only the need for another 
dark

another there
greeting me.
A coming-out-of-the-darkness
thereness

here
so royally here.

Touching me, hair waving
lips apart
eyes stirring, brown

naked
delicate-tongued you I have found.

---

darkness

Darkness, it is beautiful. The dark.
It is my lips sucking at what I know not.
It is my fingers gone into dark places, like a ship of explorers.
It is me forgotten in my desire to explore.

Yet I am the vessel that does the exploring.
It is my toes when they meet ground, power flexed against power.
It is my knees conscious, like springs, of their final connection to the ground.
Ground is not-me.
Sky is not-me.
But my potency declares itself against the sky, against the ground.
Where I  am is not-sky.
It is not-ground.

It is a mystery.

I  am darkness. I move like a ship among the unknown.
I myself am the unknown.

The unknown darkness.
I shall lap over you, another unknown darkness.
I shall splash over you in darkness and un-know you.
In the dark rain of dark life, we shall be.

---

sanity

Only when we realize we are mortal
that we will die
does some semblance of sanity come upon us.

Then we recognize
with a sudden 
gasp
the life we failed to worship

the wonder we denied
before our faces
while we worshiped a malignant and distant image of ourselves

and called it God.

---

kiss

On the other side of the hill
I found the Queen Anne’s Lace
as it swayed in the dying wind
and the grass was matted still
from yesterday’s embrace.

But now
the perversity of his grin,
your unbent pregnant will
contaminate this place.

All that we might have been
betrayed again, the shrill 
laughter, eyes that brace
on mine, a kiss starting to spin

collapse 
on the reddened hill
at the memory of your face.

---

what it was 

It was not her face
which seemed wryly amused
at the unexpected haste
with which I made the move

It was not her eyes
which were golden brown
as they gleamed in surprise
when I kissed her frown

It was not her lips
quivering dewy and strong
as my hands swept her hips
where they didn’t belong

It was not her mouth
or how she fought the kiss
that knocked me out
what it was—

was 
her 
fist.

---

thunder

The clouds went streaking like birds across the sky
while the birds fell like leaves in the wind
which whipped across the ridge. She stood and clung to him,
clung to his muscled tautness and watched the spectacle up high
as he sprayed the air with thunder from his gun.

She cleaved against his strength, cleaved in admiration
as the bird bodies thumped and gathered on the ground
in tribute to his aim. She wondered if they could comprehend the sound
that staccatoed through the air like desperation,
while the gun’s smoky retort obscured the sun.

So the woman clung to her man. And as she watched the saga
her thoughts began to tire and drift toward home—
drift to the bedroom, where she would have him to herself alone
this man of hers who would need to take Viagra
before he could spray her with thunder from his gun.

---

up from the farm

Down in the highlands
high up in the downs
we ascended the hill.

At top you clung to my arm
with warm-fingered hands
which banished my frown.

The summer wind stilled
as you disrobed my alarm
on the hill’s exposed band.

In a world without sound
we unclothed our naked will
above the silent farm.

With kisses that ran
up my body and down
you uncovered my lovemaking skill.

---

luna

The girl and the butterfly dance under the slow dark moon

---

importance

Imagine tiny mountains pretending they are huge

---

quiet

Teach a boy silent wonder but never say it

---

satisfaction

A burning ember in the west
then a purple bruise

then the darkness I love best
then the night with you

---

prayers & queries

When I bend my knee meekly
and throw up a thoughtless prayer
to a God greater than me
I feel better immediately.

But it works regardless who I supplicate
with my fevered wishes.
I can pray to the moon
just as effectively.

More so, actually
since the moon is so beautiful
and moves through the cloudy darkness in such majesty.

Or Mars, or Marduk, or Minerva
Aten, Aphrodite, Athena.

It doesn’t matter the god I pray to
so long as I can feel its greatness
its greater-than-me-ness
I feel better immediately.

But if I happen to come out of feeling
if I dare to put a thought behind my heaven-sent address
if my prayer 
transforms itself into a question

a query, or series of queries
then the great ones hasten to disappear.

Even the moon sneaks behind her clouds.

Likewise, if I pierce God with a few hard questions
if I skewer Him with whys,
he runs and hides.

Apparently he can’t take the heat.

No matter.
Whether query or prayer
I feel better immediately.

---

october fate

October and the sun was high
And in formation like a "V"
The geese were angled in the sky

I think of all you meant to me.

As when we stood on Skelton ridge
Surveying all the hills of home
We linked our arms into a bridge

I told you that I had to roam.

§

Standing by the door that day
Like a foal on unsteady knees
You begged me not to go away

I could not heed your pleas.

A wider world lay in my sight
Of people not yet free
Heroic battle for the right

Against august tyranny.

I knew I had to find my fame
On some distant sea or shore
And though you yearned to stay the same

I yearned for more.

I left, and since no word from me
Has gone your way. No call, no note
To ease you from your misery

No record of the fate I wrote.

§

And now that geese are flying south
And will not stay the winter through
I see the sadness of your mouth

Your lips, your eyes, the whole of you.

Though you wake in sunny room
And sunlight floods the bed—
Your day is hung with pallid gloom

Amid the things we left unsaid.

And though clouds may paint the land
In whiteness when the winter comes
I see you watch the distant band

Where the darkness meets the sun.

While here the sunlight frames the bars
Which twist of fate has forced on me
And cruel the turning of the stars

That transforms dreams to mockery.

§

I reached this land last October
Evading past the palace troops
Nor was my cause ever nobler

When I flagged the rebel group.

And trained in these rebel hills
Through winter and through spring.
Until the summer heat was spilled

And the time was ripe to fling

Our wits against the fascist royals.
We struck—an unprotected outpost 
So we thought—but betrayal

Reared up, and we were routed.

Retreat took a downward course
There came frantic cries of treason
Xenophobic fears —then panic—forced

The ending of my season.

§

From my cell I hear your voice
I hear you beg me to return
And oh, how loud would I rejoice

Could I but homeward turn.

But I know now, beneath this sky
My night is come, my day is through—
Yet the tear which swells my eye

Is not for me, but you.

---

eternal blue

I have always thought the varying sky
with its eternal blueness and variegated white
its manner of speaking a silent
wind-blown language to heart beating inside

us—I always thought it was the best reason
of all the reasons given
for belief in God, in a supreme being
whatever the church, the clime, the season.

Religion comes at last to the beauty above
to a variegated wonder we cannot try
to comprehend, to eternal blue and varying white
that permeate the fundamental sky. How
the colors speak to us—silently
in silent wind-blown language which strokes inside
our hearts, widens our eyes with streams 
of love

or so the sunlight seems. As if waked 
from a dream
of God-sent heaven, a dream that penetrates

until colors seem to swim about us
in violent dream. Spanking our eyes
with love-spanks of delight
until awake we strive

with the folding, the flashing
the varying sky.

---

cloudy you

White blew across the blue
like lucent paint on sky
and one was shaped like you
with head and breasts and thigh

You said it could have been
any girl I ever knew
but in that cloudy heaven
I saw only you

You who sailed across my sky 
when I was seventeen
and before you said goodbye
vanished from the scene

---

to a woman found dead in the rapids

We pulled your nude dark body
out the river here today
where this restless eddy
brow-beats shore away. 

We stand numb; we cannot guess
what thought, what emotion
crossed into your consciousness

when water’s rough commotion
the rapid’s foaming whiteness
rushed the full capacity
of its translucent brightness
against your lush opacity.

Was the struggle frantic?

Or did some weird serenity
come to ease your panic
when facing death’s obscenity?

Now you are gone
the extinction of experience
no manic pain, no calm
no soul, no thought, no sense.

How do we explain it?

Alive in tender transience
and then a rapid damage
exposes our impermanence.

Can dying spark a gap
to some new finity
or is it rude end-cap
to our nude sublimity?

How violent was the struggling
left us with this mystery?

Questions we find troubling
in your tragic history.

---

dying day

Sun, low in the west
greets me eye-level
behind a windy branch

like an old friend
winking in mid-September.

Though the leafy sycamore
clings still to summer
and the grass
is loose and green
and a few florets still bid
their insect lovers home to them

my old friend knows
its winter draws nearer.

Together
we look at the downward side

and wink
like old companions.

---

nuptials

Commingled wines
of you and me
lie in this cup
a swirling brew
an ecstasy
of passion new
which I raise up
and drink to you...

Next you take
the chalice up
and press your lips
against the cup
drink down the mix
of passion’s brew
commingled wines
of me and you...

Now we toss
the chalice down
face to face
we press our lips
to touch the trace
of wine that drips
in ecstasy
from face to hips!

---

retroact

Before I got to kiss
your parted lips, before
the glimmer in your eye
leaned into mine, before

the long ‘I love you’s and
the halted breaths, the sharp
surprise of love

before
the mingling of thighs, before
the evening and before
the blinking stars above the bed

the moonlight over legs
and arms, and the rise
of naked sunrise, before

the ending
of all our 
lies—

before
I got to kiss
your parted lips 

love died.

---

you’re the one

I do not know, I do not know
Which way the wind is going to blow
It may blow West—but I know this
You’re the one I want to kiss

In its wrath, it may blow hard
It may knock things about the yard
It may blow North—but I know this
You’re the one I want to kiss

The wind may shove, may make a sound
And in its fury twist around
It may blow East—but I know this
You’re the one I want to kiss

It may blow soft, and gentle too
And touch your face like I love you
It may blow South—but I know this
You’re the one I want to kiss

The wind is wild, its path unknown
I do not know, I’ve not been shown
It may blow Up—but I know this
You’re the one I want to kiss

---

condemned

A hurt as wide as the ocean
A gap as deep as the sea
Is my open wound, the emotion
Since my parents left me.

I was reading a book of jokes
When the policewoman came to the door
Lowered her head as she spoke:
My parents had wrecked in their Ford.

They were dead. They were dead
That day in September
Of all the things that she said
Nothing else to remember.

My family is dead. I am alone
In the big wide house
Entombed
Unable to rouse

A gap as broad as an ocean
Has opened up in me
Yet I go on, robotic emotion
—I have to, you see

October, November, December
Day after day I go on
Condemned to remember
Until this nightmare is gone.

---

gleam

She was just a woman
with a dark gleam in her eye
ordinary human best I can surmise

but her broad eyes gleamed
with a sort of dark delight
it made the daylight seem 
more intimate than night

made the air twist inside me
made the sand beneath my feet
unbalance

waves of sea 
began to wash under me

Dark hair against the sky
backlit in the sun
while foreground were her eyes
until I—

I came undone

She kissed me loose and long
—kissed me there in the sun
no fireworks, no favorite song
no music, no right no wrong

just kissing in the sun

---

seen

A hint of faun
in the dawn-blue eye of a girl
lilting down the avenue

---

desire

Here beside the sidewalk
squatting in darkness
among the weeds in the sunny yard

here and there
below the dusky shadows of weeds
above the moist rich loam

I see vulvas
erupting
bursting
tipping into daylight.

Vulvas among the dandelions
insouciant vulvas
striving against the henbit.

Desire
thrusting for sunlight, longing
yearning
tender

lips of love.

Beside the sidewalk
this bright
nude display of desire among the weeds

orchids in the sun.

---

evil

Live is backwards evil
but living eschews past
since lived is backwards devil
and time goes by too fast

So embrace the present evil
banish memory to the trash
keep away the devil
and eliminate the past

Let evil be your rescue
with enjoyment rude and pleasant
as I kiss you and caress you
in the effervescent present

---

fragile

Life is fragile and transient
that makes it wonderful

if life were eternal
it would be eternally boring

if life were unchanging
it would smell of death

life is a living thing
it must flower and fade 
before it can flower again

---

sinners

Christians talk a lot about Sin. They say 
we are all Sinners.

Little do they know
Sin was a moon god
worshiped 
four thousand years ago. 

In Ur of the Chaldees, ancient city
on the Euphrates 
near the Persian Gulf in present day Iraq

there is
if it has survived the war
the remains of a ziggurat 
built circa 2100 BCE
to worship Sin

If you worshiped a god named ‘Sin’
would you be a Sinner?

I’d like to see this ziggurat myself. 
Like to bow 
down at its crumbling bricks 
beneath the full moon rising in the darkness 

and worship 
Sin

Maybe do a little Sinning myself
there on the moon-spilt ground. 

Be a Sinner.
Sinning with other Sinners 
under the beacon of the cloudless moon.

---

naked atheist

I was born a naked atheist 
and born again 
atheist at age of twenty
as we are all born naked we are born atheists

If there is natural religion, we find it 
in the inherent atheism of our human bodies

Our sensations, our thoughts, our emotions, these
are the body at play; it is the atheism
of running and jumping, of throwing and catching
of sensing, doing, thinking, talking, eating, peeing, and yes
defecating too

This is my atheology, my sacred ground
worship of life, the human body 
—no God
because no God is needed
no afterlife, because afterlife 
can only be the degradation of life 

and life 
is the ineffable goal

---

door

Atheism is the door to the religious heart
in all its unknown majesty, this surprising result
defies the synagogue, the steepled church
the preacher spitting hellfire at his frightened herd
the priest in robed finery, the communion cup

None walk more religious than biologist
astronomer, paleontologist
the chemist in her lab coat of fluorescent white
mixing samples in a beaker over heat
just before the next eureka

Not religion of the herd, checkmated
spirituality, the mental lies
of the believing mind desperate in its need
of certainty to savior self from death
but scientists stepping honestly across the years
opening windows to physic mysteries

The dark heart of atheism, where life is
unknown deep, runs strong and physical
where blood flows dark amid life unfathomed
and all the lies of mind, of disembodied spirit
lay exposed like spilled blood
that reddens in the light

---

life

What is not conceivable
even God could not conceive.

---

bright gods, dark gods

There be goddesses dark & bright
Which unbidden from the body spring
& dusky gods who take up wing
In sparks of darkness, sparks of light

So long we hear the music play
We dance the dance of bride & groom
We twine & weave across the room
& make the most of our brief day

Yet once, before this day is done
To touch utmost of all we feel
To seek an interplay of weal
Hidden from the vibrant sun

To seek unbidden from the bright
Daylight valor of the sun
A world of richness, deep, undone
By the flavor of the night

Leave laughter dimmed beyond the door
& exit from the boisterous room
Where music whirs the pending gloom
& sunlight trips across the floor

Leave laughter dimmed & shadow me
Out door to where the blackness plays
Along the beach, where emotion lays
On the heavy silence of the sea

Come, come with me & bind
Together & facing let us face
The timeless beauty of our place
Of darkness, unfolded from the mind

In alien union—alone
& timeless—vulnerable—unkempt
Blind—silent—spent
Sea-washed we—unknown

Then up & laugh we to the door
Open to the boisterous room
Where music whirs the pending gloom
& sunlight trips across the floor

Again we hear the music play
We dance the dance of bride & groom
We twine & weave across the room
& make the most of our brief day

Again leave laughter dimmed & flee
Out door to where the blackness plays
Across the beach, where emotion lays
On the heavy silence of the sea

Our alien union—alone
& timeless—vulnerable—unkempt
Blind—silent—spent
Sea-washed we—unknown

---

the way we know

The way we know is what we know
although you'd never know it;
the world that lies outside the mind
is unknowable, completely blind
to us. Thought can never show it.
We cannot ken it even though
we near-perfect simulacra glean,
a virtual world which stands in place
of unknown reality.

The glass I lift is but a dream
yet something real lies in my hand:
a glassy "object" mapping to
some dark and silent somewhere
that is really there. Sounds confusing
yes I know; yet it simply is
a fact that everything we sense
or think, every factual experience
is a virtual simulacrum, a figment
of the brain, and yet... and yet...
corresponds to something real and true,
some unknown world which surrounds
us all around, engulfing us somehow, somewhere.

Only, somewhere itself was invented
by the brain: all objects and attributes
are but imaginary twine
to twist our simulacra into
a useful model at all times,
to help traverse the wide
unknowable and real unknown
that washes us around, flowing atoms
—but atoms are invented by the mind
and are but models too—
and so the tongue is silent, silent
when it comes to saying
just what the unknown is.

We can never know the world itself.
To physical reality we're blind.
We can but know our knowledge
in all its variegated models:
and if they're useful call them true.
After all, knowledge is
comparative, what works
is all that really matters, to know
is not knowing
what is absolutely so,
but knowing what works, what will do.

Because the way we know is what we know,
although you'd never know it.

---

amber leaves

the active sheen
of amber leaves
spinning in the wind
against the green
a-glimmering
between

daisy heads nod
above the clean
grass-blades blowing
while ants waver
beneath the sod

the active sheen
of amber leaves
a-glimmer against the green
hill behind the trees

---

your clavicle

your clavicle is my delight
i yearn to kiss it every night
press my lips against your skin

and feel the bone that lies within
kissing you with lips half-wide
below your neck from side to side

now i move a little south
nuzzle breastbone with blind mouth

blind hands 
contour your ribs
blind palms grope and slip
locate nipple tips

blindly finger-brush a river 
faintly on your breasts 
until you shiver

until you shiver in delight
and grope blindly in the night

---

conversation in a bar

Words disjointed and drifting in the gloom
laughter muffling nearby to where we are
while at a tilting table in the bar
our anemic conversation fails to bloom.

I barely talk; you spin tales about imprudence
of college boys (excluding me, you stress)
their excuses, obtuse answers on your tests
the general lack of curiosity of students—

your gallant efforts to teach biology
to the uncunning; how you got weary
explaining evolutionary theory 
so switched to punning, then to ecology.

I throw in a word or two, composed
to keep our conversation going,
laugh widely at your jokes, knowing
my ignorance could be exposed

yet who am I? What role have I to play
in your career? I glance at you in fear
afraid to wonder why I’m here
at this paltry bar, nothing real to say

at least to you. I am some common boy
who smiles, attempts to laugh, who thinks your wit
too shiny to bestow on one who sits
dully in his chair. I’m one wit should destroy.

I am uncool. A tenderfoot. A stumbling cow
getting in the way. Yet you turn dark eyes to me
impatient with my reticence, stare steadily.
And ask suddenly, “What are you thinking now?"

§

There was silence in the room, a bizarre pause
a moment long when all the room’s sensations
reached their nadir, an end to laughter, conversations
ceasing, then picking up again, then applause

at some table in the back. All the while
your eyes stared me down, demanding answer
face flush with curiosity: devoid of rancor
I could detect—though perhaps a hint of guile.

§

What was I thinking? Or instead of thought
was there some sensation coursing in my arms?
Or rather movement in your eyes? Did I yearn
to kiss you. Did I burn for something that we ought

not do? And, if admitted, would that upset you?
I think I closed my eyes. I think I smelled
your perfume in the dark. Then I felt
my boyhood melt away, chased by something new.

It was strong, the feelings of a man
roused in my limbs, my torso and my flank.
It was then I felt—one moment only—the rank
power of your loins, your strong élan.

Your body flush with mine, your roving mouth
kissing me on all the muscled places
desire turgid in me rising, heartbeat racing
in anticipation of what we were about.

Arms grappling in delighted space, brushing
and sweeping, swift like fleeting otters
legs powerful, caressing, pressing
in river swimming amid the brackish water.

§

“Seriously” you repeat, “What are you thinking?"
Eyes meet again. I shrug to brush your gaze
away. Amid the cacophony of the room I hear me say
“With all this din, I'm incapable of thinking."

I force a languid laugh, a slow grin
to let you know that all is back to normal
at this our tilted table, that our informal
banter of helpless words has returned again.

---

hollow wind

We stood on a hill in the hollow wind 
and our words twisted like leaves on a stem
in the storm of feelings held at bay
by onslaught of the slanting rain

We stood on top in the hoarsest wind
and words twisted like leaves that hung
on a withered stem, as the rain flung down
and we spun dejected over the hardened ground

We dropped like stones on the hardened ground
and above us death clouds circled around
our wounded agony; in blackest day
we lobbied for hope in the wind

And raised ourselves on broken knees
and grasped to hide the feeling pains
that cleaved us apart. —And still we spin
unable to voice the once or the when

Or speak of the love we never found
as we stood on that hill in the rain

---

sycamore

In the yellow shade
the amber shade of this tree
under your umber-shaded sycamore
someday our day will come

Your sun-browned hair 
unsunned
and I a barefoot lad with a smile
with the broad sun on my back
seeking shade of the big-leaved tree

In the sycamore shade
sunny sycamore
where your sun-browned face can cool
and I’m a barefoot lad with a smile

wanting in

---

adults

Adults are children that have died
They have lost the dark inside
the unborn feelings
that welled up when they cried

---

not the poetry of death...

Not the poetry of death
[without the heartbeat of a body]
[without the scream of its existence]

Examples here and here
of bodiless 
[mental titillation]
of unembodied
[allusionary]
[profound] 
pseudo-poetry
[unscreamed screams]
[unrhymed rhymes]
[unfelt feelings]
poetry of the isolated mind
and its isolated pseudo-pleasures.

Rather, poetry with heartbeat
heartbeat beat beat
of a body-being

poetry [with at least a distant]
rhyme 
[insistent]
[using lungs]
[screaming its existence]
screaming
I exist, I exist, I exist

in all the absurd silliness
of a living creature
[breathing breathlessly]
[bounding in the world]
[searching for a rhyme]
screaming
[increasingly dramatic]
screaming
[insistent] 
[insistent]

the poetry of life
before the final silence of all time.

---

© Copyright 2025 Dwight Lyman