A Final Abstraction

They all go into the dark
With all the old nocturnal smells
Meant to attract attention without eliciting a response

Beginning with consciousness
Preserved as adolescent revolt
Through all accidents of circumstance-

An individual spider web
Where all wars are ready-
Someone turns the page and laughs

The last twist of the knife
Let the dark come upon you
Growing like a tumor

Why am I so enamored with myself
particularly an erection
too brutal to waste on romantic love?

It speaks, it moves—

To be able to and not to
do it—

Let us break through
and go there.

Dear Cut/Throat,

If I could keep her
alert for the swift
interrupted lisp

useless rhyme cluttered
mother’s bitter tongue
episodic heap

language an old house
now a lulling sift
uncorrected script

and you before night
answered other than
poetry uncut

artists continue
their defective re-
cord like the trusting

animals they are
as if beautiful
thing/to discover

this passage follows
a pessimist and
the great sex spiral

enclosing next to
nothing—impossible
yet we stand transfixed

hoping frailty
supreme and the way you
walk and the way you

watch the water’s edge
slowly arriving
that your futile might

hands clapped together
first foot stepping down
hearing/touching/drifts

into the next verse
and sets a slow match
to a mouthful of

phrases old branches
brought down by the same
gesture used for dance!

Dear Cut/Throat,

Blind idiot you
uninfluential
poet stranger cling

only closer still
to sobbing sonnets
and pendulum dreams

a cavernous house
unfused and defiled
dark deserted womb

speak of reason last
there penned into thought
a tortured body

this freezing weather
love sequestered still
this scene has altered

these enclosing walls
a simple story
unless we are lost

I have learned much in
my life simply called
it the sea alone

a heavy dirty
shirt on the bathroom
basin candle lit

your curled lip slid out
beside my penis hung
down pressing darkness

soft sad derision
for your genial
compassionate scorn

idly frightened we
glide our high spirits
past midnight into

frozen cold poems
the oppressive weight
of barely touching.

Dear Cut/Throat,

Until you let down
barriers escape
language of yourself

nameless destiny
clouds outline other-
wise concocted skies

pretending body
and brain unbodied
tongues washed and purged shape-

less a published word
than rain against tin
mind filling alone

quite free exalted
before words concerned
stems leaves roots roses

delicately you
diffidently you
we are unraveled

I kiss you as you
pass a crimson tongue
threatening to speak

the anesthetized
man consonant mad
here mourning poems

left to the un-throat
the uncouth truth we
more penitently

worn by young couplets
abandoned bird’s nests
the rest remotely

gendered pretentious
sympathetic drag
throw back your head: yell!

Truculent waltz wake
wanton to protect
a lifetime of song

bemused syllable
at mere sight of you
I pedestrian

flaunting you starling
body translated
you do not catch them

searching a landscape
you never knew what
happened to the dance

collarless wagging
your finger pressed close
pitifully alone

Dear Cut/Throat,

To coax language out
of poets is to
rescue and neglect

become the feared shape
a lively terrain
relieved in the blood

made up of despairs
the impossibly
crumbling towers

departed before
the faint, climbing moon
to coax language out

I saw you approach-
ing welcoming me
to interrupted

quiet to the grim
retreating waves with-
out outstanding

virtue and delight.
You slapped my face and
and the melody line

laid tentative smiles
measuring the tread
of the setting sun

and I wonder why
the cold headstone closed
unclothed by each dream

tramples each flower
buried in the mud
announcing spring is

here! Silently look
at me in the same
bed dancing, dancing

surrounded by a
heavy printed scent
metaphor’s descent

and at the moment
of impact we are
composition’s loss