Three Poems

Underground People

I like your loud music.
You make it easy to read omens in license plates
and furry, pepper-studded rain-heads.

There is so much I want to say. Maybe we should stop.
Have something to eat instead. Buy bathing suits,
or masturbate in separate rooms while we read
aloud the Russians scored by your fathers’
underhanded commentary.

Don’t tell me anything while we repose, not until
you learn something worth the page it’s printed on.
When you finally do, we can tip ourselves
back into the van under falser pretenses,
approach our limit. Not a boundary,
but a mathematical kiss that may never take place.

Here’s hoping that it does.
That you’ll swing from that parabola
like a tire over a swollen Virginia summer
and you’ll splash, surprised and silent
into my pink wet mouth.

Onward, To Manhood

A boy stood by the bar in a ring of strangers.
He looked at the gaunt girl beside him
and offered an anecdote.

I know a guy, undercover cop for eighteen years.
Waiting for the A train, middle of the
night, saw a tweaker across the platform
holding a woman around the shoulders.
Kissing her face like a feverish child.

She was dead. (He could tell.
Eighteen years and all.)

The strangers shrugged in unison, a verdict.
The girl’s parents were surely tweaker-
millionaires and she looked
feverish to them. Like
fever’s favorite drink,
or disowned sister.

They found her the next day,
wrapped in a colonial cloak,
hanging in the British Art Museum.
Her wall text was about tense subjects
and false objects.

They called her Lilith, thought her an owl,
scribbled verse on the back of her picture
and sought her vacancies to fill them,
expecting Mesopotamia from British paint
but no such luck.

Their owl was a magician’s dirty dove
and public death makes for dry narrative
amongst strangers, so the boys
finally smoothed her picture on a dashboard,
rolled up their philosophy in her cheeks
and smoked it.

Not bad, they said, as they left her town
but hardly worth the trouble.

They are Trying to Tell Us About the American Womb:
To the Beats

everything here is cock
towers of trembling monumental cock
cock spurting soft diamond in morning sunlight
fucked and fucking
dirty cock, crusted in salable
eloquent shit

cock of the junkie
sold and gloryholed for hamburgers
swell jealous you are still hipster oxygen
outrageous now
the childhood cock withered and propped
by cocaine straws in impossible old age

black jazz cock
erect like a middle finger flailing insult and potency
cock changing its name
giving itself over to black cultural nationalism
instead of Jewish wife-mother cunt

or secret black cock betrayer
covert cock infiltrator
penetrator
contingency revolution cock

French catholic cock never fathoming cunnilingus
smothering instability in benzedrine and tracing paper
jizz spurting endlessly across pages pages pages
unedited because
Buddha is on the mountain
God is in the bottle and
this
this orgasm
is THE orgasm
THE truthgasm
nirvana’s burstingbloomgasm!
and everyone has sympathy for a
stumbling
brilliant
drunken
cock

gay jewish buddhist cock of confusion
cock of sensitive apologetics
of gentle firsts and naked hysterical love
tender cock surveyor of uncharted terrains
howling cock of misery into lunatic mother’s
vacated center

zen cock
in infinite stillness
like unfolded lotus
placed in the right hand of
educated and honest inspiration

all you philosophic cocks of promiscuity
holy in your intersections wrote
telepathic pictographs ‘till scripture turned cliché and
contact points wore out like veins
and it was excellent

but besides cock
is there more for you to tell us
about the American womb?