Thanks for the shrimp
and the butter on my chin.
Thanks for the way they pop
going in.

Thanks for the momentary,
the transient, the true
for a moment.  Thanks for
sharing my ineptitude.

Thanks for the level gaze,
the fingers tip-tapping on my wrist.
Thanks for the falling, the landing,
soft focus, pulse, resist.

No knee to take, no head to bow.
Thanks for the upright posture, your stand
in favor of receiving my difficult offer.
Thanks for open ears, open hand.

Gratitude’s a piece of charred wood
with a core still sound and deep grained.
Thanks for your willingness to burn
when you lifted it from my flame.

I would like to write a poem
full of butterflies and rainbows
and chirping, and I could dedicate it to you,

but instead I write the poem of love
that is industrial, that steams and clatters,
is filled with tiger blood and red-eyed anger

because I do not believe in love as beautiful
gentle sweetness all sparkly and whee,
I am the Lover who sees the war of charmed claws

and raking fire as more beautiful,
who understands that an ever-certain pain is better
than an uncertain ecstasy that may end

with a whimper and a good bye folded
into a card and a bundle of soon-dead daisies.
I roar the love like Charlemagne’s armies

sweeping back across Europe, of Crazy Horse
raising his rifle to sight in upon the usurpers,
the love of how I am when I’m bleeding in your arms

and you are bruised in mine because that is how
we sleep best.  I would like to write the poem
of pastel and lace, of average joy, of something suitable

for a movie theater full of easy children, but I’m the poet
of loveflood come a-carrying corpses
and the ruins of lives, of animal stink in the street

when the water sinks away.  I want to be the obvious
but I am the other, as you are the other, skin soft and flushed
fury, teeth at my neck, deep in my flesh, roll me like

tobacco to be consumed.  I want your poem to be
the pen tip’s open gush of too much to take, and I want to handle it
the way I barely handle the massive storm of us.

A lifetime of data.
Almost none of it information.
I want to go back to school —

I want you old school,
high school,
no mature fancy wanting here.

I want to remember what it was like
to just want you
and ask for what I want.

I want to relearn
how to yearn.  How to show
it with no parsing of millions

of internal rules and sifting of
reasons.  Just to want again
old school, hallway glance,

brush-by, staring for hours
and hours.  Want awkward
but obvious.  I want you

old school, smell in the air
of crucial locker notes and incidental
books notable for covers doodled full

with obsession.  A lifetime
of data hasn’t turned into
information of any use; I want you

old school, want to carry
books, lurk around your schedule.
I want every friend of yours to whisper.

It ought to be obvious to you
how I old school I am.  It is to me.
I’m still twisting my toe

in the schoolyard dirt,
and I still don’t know what to do
with my hands.

Come get me
off my shoal.  I’ll do the same
for you sometime.  We both need
water under our keels.

We both need more flavor
in the diet.  Salt in the milk,
blood in the fresh cheese.
We both like the faces we make

when we taste things that seem
raw and wrong.  Always go back
for a second try.  Make the same faces
again, try again, declare it not so bad.

Back on our boats, quick to declare
we know nothing of the sea
but love the way it feels. Love to rock
and grind against what’s under the surface,

sticking on it occasionally but that’s
what the other is for.  Gimme a shout
sometime when you’re stuck out there
afraid of foundering; I’m waiting.  Got the salt

and the milk and the blood for your cheese
waiting when we get to the dock.  Got a rock
for the pillow and a chain for the feet.  I’m
your boat-floater, you’re my boat-floater, let’s see

where the tide take us when the rudder breaks
and we’ve got no compass, nothing but ourselves
as weird as meat and old potatoes doused in acid and the wind
to drive us ahead.  Boat-floaters! Extreme eaters

with appetites we don’t dare define
for fear of losing them; sailors who are never seasick,
never cold, always in danger of drowning,
but never too far out of earshot to miss each other in the fog.

Three were asked
to stop and speak of love,

and the first said,
ah, the hunt and the capture,
endlessly repeated.

The second said,
there, the trophy —
always on another’s shelf.

And the third:

it’s the blueberry bush
happened upon a week too early
for harvest,

then a single berry plucked
that is sweet, the next three sour;

waiting, then, for the ripeness
to come.

Choose hand grenade
or horseshoe
if you want to speak
of love to
just anyone. 

If you want
to talk to me, though,
use the longbow;
practice a long time
before you draw;

I’m no broad target
to be bludgeoned
or shattered by
just any old effort
if you want me.

My heart’s small,
tough, and exacting.
Aim carefully and be sure
to still yourself.
You don’t want to shake

when you release
the arrow.  You don’t want
to miss, I don’t want you to miss,
and I don’t stand still for more
than a breath at a time.

definitions are
a poor coolant
for this shared
inhalation of flame,
this exaltation that
may yet kill
or at least thicken blood
until thinking stops;
no reason left to use,
so happily far from safety,
not in hell
as far as can be told.

it shall not
be named, then.

let’s just say we’re crazy with something.

let’s
just burn all the way through,

and remove
all our clothes
just to be sure.

(Revised, with thanks to Edgar Gabriel Silex for his comments.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I love her when she is Washington D.C.,
tangled as a budget bill
wrapped in backroom deals;

love her when she is Seattle
full of homeless and
resigned wet;

love her when she’s New York City,
beating me hard,
keeping me up all night.

On the days when she is Boston
I can’t decide: which part of her
do I like best, which do I fear most?

One day I hope to find she has become
Redemptia, that no one has founded yet;
I want to walk its streets at a loss

to understand
its neighborhoods,
how it was built, how it grew.

I fear one day I will learn that
she is and has always been Angkor Wat
or Babylon, swallowed, abandoned

to jungle or sand, streets only memories,
walls nubs of remainder and lost glamour,
and no way at all to rebuild her.

Some days she was Washington D.C.
as tangled as a budget bill
and wrapped in backroom deals.

Some days she was Seattle
full of the homeless and
resigned wet.

Some days, like New York City,
she beat me hard
and kept me up all night.

And on the days she was Boston
I couldn’t decide which part of her
I liked best and which I feared most.

I hope one day to find she has become
a city I call Redemptia that no one has founded yet.
I want to walk its streets and be completely at a loss

to understand its map, its neighborhoods,
how it was built and how it grew. I want to discover it
as if I was its only inhabitant, now and forever.

I fear one day I will learn that in fact
she is and has always been Angkor Wat
or Babylon, swallowed and abandoned

to jungle or sand, her streets only memories,
her walls nubs of remainder and lost glamour,
and no reason at all to rebuild her.