Edgewood Hotel

Confuse yourself with books, until nothing's left of you,
then throw yourself into a shallow pool.
There will be a girl waiting, there will be a wine
improving, and a fish to be fried in the muck
near the bottom. There will be a girl waiting.
And the wine moving gently for years in the muck
near the bottom, brushed by the fish as yet unfried,
meant for the hands that now recline
in the sun at the crumbling circular edge.

Read books in a sun-lashed room with draped pianos
until there's nothing left of you, until you bathe your friends
to kiss them cleanly, and move the mailbox into the hall
to bring the mailman closer. The hosts divide the house
and the parties get hotter and smaller. The counters
are covered with fresh-sliced onions, and oven fans
keep them moist but the chef is off somewhere flirting.
The customers about to be hurt unaware at their tables,
the waitresses wringing out tears in meathooked freezers.

And a lonely chef, done with the men and the gentle
ladies, asleep in a long final kitchen
with a small television, snoring towards death
while short-lived ferns pulse
lightly in the trash dump on the plunging hill
where the cooks threw their leftovers
when all the buffets ran out
and noodles clung briefly to birches.

delayed command,
machine wants
a different kind of user--a different kind of touch--
and the mouth it puts on
is a humanoid in lipstick

machine wants a simple chaos
to make it a mossy blur
in the corners of controlled gardens

the machine wants to turn brown
and machine wants an orange to be rolled into its mouth
it wants to explode peacefully inside
another machine
the machine wants kindness
it needs kisses to breathe

mounting her on a wet picnic table
the pure spouts clogged up with leaves
nobody remembers the rain inside the rain
nobody pounds on the door underneath

stripped in a latenight latenight
frogs on a concrete globe
veins in the backs of animal hands, electric white
oil pours down the freeway
oily hands grope oily trunks of trees

outside a lunatic cuddling another
lunatic, the nights tick on simultaneously
never touching the clocks, never touching our backs
with their aching oils

Not document

There's a girl waiting in a tree under an airplane
ramming through a cloud in the Carolinas.
Our telephones are eating through the air
toward each other. After all the religions,
after all the politics, there's nothing left to do
but let the oceans fuck us
and let time pull out our hair.

Grandpa doesn't fish anymore.
He looks sad in the livingroom.
Who's the bigger mess for president,
an uncaught fish asks.
The mirrors are not new,
but the rooms in the mirrors have changed.

My love, and my love again lie down
(my love, and my love again)--

I have woven you a crown of black-eyed susans
and lain leaves of pale yellow
on a dry
carpet of needlepine

tonight
look up to your starry origins

while life crawls endlessly underneath us
and I make love to you
with all the colors of my mouth--

(my love, and my love again)

while the taste of half your life is in my lips
while the fibers are raging underneath us
to be kissed by disintegrations

I think of the circuits just above my tongue
I think of the rushing of blood, I think
of two birds falling out of you

touch your mouth
with the mouth
you have re-made for me with your mouth
and the seeds rush in from everything at once

*****

Now that you have re-made my mouth with your mouth
now that you have re-made my hands with your hands
now that you have re-made my chest with your breasts
now that you have remade my rough belly with your smooth belly
now that you have remade my prick with your cunt

the music is quieter in the air
but it's rising in volume again
the music descends
but it has hands to pick us up
now that you have remade my music with your music
a bird like a note pecks hard in the back of our head

I'm glad your kittens

for Jentri

I'm glad your kittens
are comforting you: one on your belly
and one at your feet, one on your face
to make you gigglesneeze,
one purring uncontrollably
against your neck.

They are circling
your hurt vibrations, part of a music
humans made.

I am too deliberate to be a cat,
and the slight gracefulness
(in less fur) of which I am capable
will someday receive a beating
from the police. And the cats
will climb all over me.

The ducks,

The ducks, those perfect little machines,
leave flames in their wake: each trail
of feather-oiled ripples roaring
with fire all over the water.

An old woman pulls up in a deranged automobile
and throws them bread and the meat of other ducks
from her window. They smack their beaks
and narrow tongues together slightly
as they pull the morsels apart, flurries
of meat-eating ducks reflecting in black water.

The woman leaves with an engine snort,
the ducks get stoned on her fumes,
then take off leaving trails of fire
across the limited water.

When I see what a girl you are in your steps,
when I see that radiance coming,

when I stop on a small piece of metal
and gaze out over a cracked parking lot, full of parked music,
[while I'm holding you
and looking over your shoulder]

when I see you being such a girl with the back of your neck

I hurt to be a better man, with big hands on the nervousness of your love,
I yearn in a small bucket, I enlargen the world.