About face

Drizzle would work for Keats, I'm sure.

A beautiful thing made more beautiful

by being reflected and put in a mist.

Drizzle, I shivered. So hard there were two

of me. In lanes came virgins in track suits,

headed towards a rose garden where no bike

would dare enter neither would we.

The thought had crossed my mind

already poisoned by the lead infected

water fountain which I drank from,

where I drowned once, twice and before.

Am I talking about the weather?

Invisibility could be our personal forever

Or am I talking about myself and you?

In your knapsack, a book full of vowels

[that's what you sang about yourself].

That is what I have in my sang, the I's

the O's, the E's and U's. Not an A in sight.

But I can't see Scotland from here, no,

nor do we merely feel it for too short are hours.

"Thy lyre shall never have a slackened string"

Crosses the mind of one running virgin

headed towards that rose garden where

Apollo is said to be resting, not you.

I'm loose myself, my spirit flies before me.

But comes back in your gentle squeeze

in your golden hair, in your golden fire.

Thy lyre shall forever invisibly whisper to me.

Drizzle works for Keats, I'm sure. A kind of mirror

and mist in one without making any distinction.

I could deal with that, I could. This beautiful thing

made more beautiful by being reflected and put in

a mist. I am not a virgin [as pointed out over breakfast].

I maybe a belle dame sans merci. No, not really, no.

See, what I'm trying to say here dear Keats is

something about the weather and that rose garden

something about that bike and something about

you and the invisibility of slackened strings and I.

Am I talking about the weather? Maybe the image

in a ditch turned mirror by water [poisoned with lead]

is really more beautiful in reflection and mist.

Or maybe I love you and that's just what it is.

There, I said it, Keats.

Torture

is a few days. the waiting

to be in you for a month

set to vibrate, watches

closely as the screen fades.

Is also sick. At least,

struck silent. Prior to crucifixion

[nothing rhymes with month]

if conducted in secret.

Alive and unmarked

victim. What good is it

the damaging position?

Take it.

here's my confession

inflicted.

The woods

Now that the night begins, there's

Something you're not telling me.

I speak of foolish things

Like lyrical evocations or

the very sense of kitchen at 4 a.m.

Here's my tongue for a word

Skin me. Get rid of the fur.

Watch the juices gush, the body drain

to the center of the flesh eating earth.

Obscure oracles came to me, three.

You know the story by heart, remind me

Double, double, toil and trouble.

Your grey pants too tight and your hip

down in the lake of my favorite question

I am called sleep, hesitation and so on

down your throat as your hands fumble.

Tell me off in your silent speech

a coward covered in hair, whatever

splits or breaks like glass infected pathos

torn between the clock and the bed

between waking and sleep. My clock, your bed.

I bring bad weather

Yours is paler than grass, twig of willow.

The light wasn't helping either

Nor did that night, equilateral heart.

In lambent silver, a delicate knuckle fight

I'll touch yours, you'll touch mine

paler than grass, kindling willow.

Leave me some of your mother's tongue

And allow me in your binding Eos

So we can always undress in the dark.

Wrap me in limbs, igneous willow

Ignore the weeping in our first name

and the ashen breath of our little death pyre.

You're pale again weeping willow,

no wind now, left to squirm in the mire.

And yes, I forgot to mention the rain.

Dear Weldon,

The ground here is wet and the sun is always set.

So, maybe, words sprout like moss, close together in clumps or mats.

Moss is found in areas of dampness and low light.

Words are found in between whites.

This, dear, is a stone cold fact.

You either do this or you choose to do that.

So I try with all my might to choose words over blight.

*

This water...

I'm afraid of it for I can't see into it.

When you weight into it

It's like being dismembered.

No fish dwell in it as far as I remember.

For half of it is the sky.

To a Here and a There

An analysis of space leads us not to a here and a there,

but to an extension such as that which relates here and there.

Or rather crudely - space is not a lot of points close together;

it is a lot of distances interlocked.

These distances, no matter how interlocked they are,

are nonetheless distances. Distance may refer to a physical length,

or an estimation based on other criteria.

In most cases, distance from A to B is interchangeable with

distance between B and A. In most cases.

And there, in the distance, not a promised land, but the in-between,

the waiting that happens in the space between one e-mail and the next,

one trip overseas and the next. Midnight January, February, May...

It can go on for years, the way we move through time and space.

But,

tell me we'll never get used to it.

And when I say this, it should mean laughter, not poison.