I am sick of insinuation in your stare;
Whenever you ascend the stair
To clean my room and change the bedding
You linger over the stained sheets
And curlicues of hair.

I pay my rent
Yet each week is rent
The solitude I weave
Around myself, to which
The willing company of whores is lent.

It’s my own room,
In it is room
To hide from people such as you
Whose reality is shrouded
In your own personal gloom.

Out, damn you, landladybitch,
Miserable bitch,
You’re too old for me anyway
And besides, soon my girl arrives –
She’s quite good, so why switch?

I felt the powdered cheek
upon my own, and knew
it was not so much love
as misapprehension.

It first was more physical
Than psychic, but,
In time (whose time?)
It metamorphosed.

Now it is comfortable.

No more.

No less.

I enjoy it without quite understanding.

I was wed unto a woman
Who shed fur in passion
And the dander filled my eyes
With tears when we retired to bed.

So that our chamber window remained open
And the air at night would cool my lids
And give me strength
And give her children.

Now she is dead and I lie alone,
Molting by myself,
An animal who knows it is hard indeed
To have sex and call it love.

Tonight was Rorschachs writ in blood,
Was answers cut in stone.
Tonight was anger shaped from mud,
Agues in blanched bone.

Tonight was languor in black sheets,
Was aching, surging flood,
Tonight was broken heart-pulse beats,
Tears mixed with acid suds.

Tonight was reaffirming trust,
Related-back retreat,
Where past experiments in lust
Were justified in heat.

Not of a tiger or other beast,
Not with an animal glower,
Not with jungle crafts or stalking guile,
Not yet with sadness, not yet with hatred,
Not yet with fear of tomorrow
Nor of me ….

Rather soft as candles –
Wax melting cool into the corners –
Green vital flame suggested at the core,
More of longings,
Languid
Wanting
Trusting
Reaching,
Tempting with gentle reproach….

Wide and honest.
Too wide perhaps. Too honest.
Revealing subtle suspicion where none ought dwell,
Revealing distrust where none is justified,
Revealing herself when
She fain would be unto herself a thing apart
and unknown.

Eyes moist with heat:
Caress the universe
And kiss it full upon the lips,
Drawing truth to desire,
‘Til all rests exposed beneath the gaze
That lights the night-time
And, calling forth the legions at dawning,
Bids us do battle beneath the lesser sun of day.

She was the picture of the perfect girl,
Trite down to the wiggle in her curl,
But so taken with domesticity
That she sought to make a husband out of me.
With fleeting glance I would absorb her face
From the secret corners of my secret place
And project her silken features through the years
And resee them ridged with shadows and with tears.
I doubt she ever came to realize
The bitter game I played within my eyes,
Seeing her at first as just a crone,
The lumpy flesh clinging to the bone,
And then distorting all her form and face,
Remolding now her sex and seed and race
‘Til all that stood within my view
Was a rubber mask stretched tight around a screw.

The day I married, her father led her down the aisle.
He wore a white flower, but it was yellow around the edges.
By evening it stank as flesh in a grave, reminding me of my bride’s perfume.

We drove into the Western hills
To partake of those wedded thrills
(oh she was coy, my bride of just a day,
Dangling out her sex in bold array,
As if a snare that used two breasts as bait
with which to find an anxious sleeping mate).
We took a cabin with a mountain view,
Which is the proper thing for all to do,
And when I slowly took apart her dress
And ran my hands across her sweating mess
She closed her eyes and thought –ah, this is life,
To be undressed and be somebody’s wife.

At the wedding her mother spread on purplish face powder.
She looked like a whore, and knowing her I wouldn’t doubt it. I respected the old bitch, though. After all, at least she was honest about it….

We pranced in merry heat up to the bed
And slowly now I stroked her humid head,
Her bony hands with wild abandon flew
Across a land that I alone once knew.
Like a brush dipped deep into the black
Her palm pressed ever firmly on my back
She arched her feeble frame and groaned in hope –
Girls wed syringes filled with wondrous dope.
And just as she began to purr in pain
I put a 38 caliber bullet through her soggy brain.

The very day we were married, her sister’s hand slipped under the table and stroked my knee.
Christ! Some people have no sense of timing.

I took her anyway
In her ripeness
–triteness—
–lack of fitness –
With rolling gait she lumbered on
toward unseen bedless nights
in hoping
–coping—
Inter-loping angular spasms
not quite full of desire.
Time was a three ring circus,
She ate swords of fire.

I have to smile
At her trials
In questing
meanings and
nuances.