After Marge Piercy's "Sentimental Poem"

You are such a good lay.
I am such a good lay.
If we get together
our bodies will waste, two wires
of competent sinew
around our small bones,
then nothing, empty sheets.

("Sentimental Poem" included as an appendix in the comments.)

Fragment Found in a Prayer Wall

God is my witness that if Augustus, emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honor me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me for ever it would be sweeter and more honorable to me to be, not his empress, but your whore.
—Héloïse d’Argenteuil, first letter

I have committed a filthy sin: I have recognized my brother. We have made love and removed our names from the marriage wall. They say your brother's semen burns your viscera like Drano but in truth it burns you up and you're gone.

Shabbos

The gods will come and ride you if you have prepared.
If steam is rising off your clean hair,
and your boyfriend has gotten on his knees
and massaged lemon oil into the floor
all Friday afternoon and dissolved the resin
choking the vaporizer's screen
away into grain alcohol, so that when you wake up
and shit neatly and close the bathroom door
and lift your white coffee cup away from its saucer
you can draw the vapor smoothly into your lungs
between sips - if you have maintained your
body's cleanness, so that both your heart
and your blood vessels may cry out in response
to God - then they will come down
and ride you and ride you and ride you until
your body metabolizes all the acid in that
miniature postage stamp of blotter paper,
those stamps that will mail you into any painting
you look at, that will animate Van Gogh's Mulberry Tree
with the crawling intricacy of a Mayan codex.

Would have lived, will have wanted

night falling,
crickets chirping,
hammock swinging its
 slow orbit around the world.

The sad song of neosporin

Cold sore scab
like bird turd
on my winter canvas

Fraternity, Liberty

Spring leaves coiled
Tightly in buds.
Such tender restraint.

Nostalgia

An empty room
filled with echoes
of murmured plans.

Poem In Which Everything That Happens Has Already Happened

— the surreal reverse-Christmas
of a successful nighttime burglary —

A sort of sonnet on the subject of your dinner.

Breaking brown bread, oven fresh,
a last faint puff of warm unfurling steam,
an avocado, careful spoon scooping,
scraping along the bumps felt through the skin,
then olive oil in a fine slow drizzle,
sea salt in fine fat flakes

that will crunch under teeth,
pushing inside the yielding yellow flesh
fragrant oil running to the tongue, salt's bite,
crackling crust, the warming fragrant bread,

a hand rests on a hip, insistent, firm,
satisfied, demanding satisfaction.

and what we carry will come to carry us.

The box had spent hundreds of years migrating up and down the silk road, bartered over on mongolian steppes and back alleys of close in cities, carried over narrow mountain paths in late spring snows and pelting rains, strapped to dromedary humps in crushing sun, taken blood crusted by moonlight, wrested from fingers still and stiff, traded, stolen, singed and soaked, back and forth over hundreds of years, thousands of miles, uncounted lives, rubbed with sweat, blood, musk and hair of camels, donkeys, horses, men, carries of burdens all these long years. This box has held gold, sapphires, silk, pepper, pupae, a man's shaving kit, a man's ear, the toil of a lifetime lost with a broken strap on a high mountain pass, cryptic unknowable notes found ages later after a spring thaw, papers rotten and crumbling, inked in foreign hand, turned over by thick trail dirty fingers and dumped into the mud and reeds, the box now nestling in the folded robes of the next carrier, his treasure tightly held therein.

Psalm to Jupiter

Jupiter the wrecking ball
swinging above the vineyards of Ukiah,
over the mist in the hops fields and the marijuana gardens -
wheeling between the carrion birds and cold Orion
and over the wrecking balls we are all driving
and over our skulls and the skulls of infants -
the great pendulum god with the face of Kali
unwinding its gravitational chain
far over the uncrushed skull of a leaping rabbit.

Dragons without, dragons within.

We saw him after a half hour walk across the late autumn desert, sky threatening rain and twilight in the offing. No bag, no visible water, camo parka, camo pants, long black hair. How long had he been following? From where? Our car sat lonely and alone on the road's shoulder, somewhere behind. He hailed us with a raised hand, and fished from his jacket a ziplock of dried dull green leaves, a bright bic lighter. Poor english, poor spanish, howling wind and uncertain distance. A couple of attempts, then he turned to walk on through the prickly scrub, the bare pads of his feet trailing behind him.

Not long later - the sun fell behind the mountains, the full moon's glow muted by heavy cloud, chilled november rains. The landscape a monochrome in ever darker shades of navy. Hiking back in file, flashlights swinging, what appeared to be trail markers ahead always turned out to be stunted joshua trees, their motives cryptic, inscrutable.

On the Economics of our Present Hermitage Shortage

Being a hermit ain't what it once was,
What with the short supply of lonely peaks,
The bumper crop of sages, and that new
Fad for climbing everyone does these days.

After surmounting mountains, seekers must
Clamber over high piles of wise men. Day
Break's racket of self-actualizing,
Endless conferences, panel discussions
on listening theory -- unbearable.

Then come unto us the mountain lions,
Carried a tongue and ear to stony home,
We listen now to cat's teeth worry bone.

hi koo

my shadow splayed on yellow grass.
the buzz of hummingbird wings.

Human Design

Human design told me that I am a hermit.
That I am aslo a role model.
Wander into my cave and I will show you how
To live the hermit life.
Think the hermit thoughts.
You will be engulfed by a sense of crowdedness.
The sense that you should leave as soon as the air drifts in
As the door is left open.
I will not accomodate your comfort.
There is no room to sit.
You will listen to me as I listen to you.
Observe me observing you.
You will learn how to disintegrate the meaning of
Participation and the need to be heard.
All meaning to most symbolic things that you
Thought were truths will become toilet paper
And empty shopping bags.
Soon enough you will forget me forgetting you.
We will not know of each other.
You will exit my cave and wander mostly
In front of others who demand your eyesight.
Your lessons in listening will guide you to their
Wants and needs and you will nurture them until
They suck you dry.
A flattened and swinging tit that can no longer
Provide life.

It's the vertigo that makes you kneel.

Pulled over on the PCH to watch the sun dip into the pacific. In the haze and vaporous distortion coming off the ocean at the horizon, it doesn't look like the sun passes behind the waters so much as dissolves into them. Ten minutes later I'm on winding Skyline Boulevard in the failing light, peaks of the Santa Cruz Mountains before me in the palest oranges against a blue sky rapidly washing of its color. Then darkness. Windswept pine trunks in my headlamps. To the left, when snaking past a crest, the sweep of silicon valley's low rise architecture, spidery orange lines of sodium vapor street lights densely layered between the mountainside and the bay, what would be stars circling and queueing and landing at sfo. To the right, breaks in the trees open up vast swaths of black nothing that can only be the pacific, the sand, the stars too dim for my slow retinas to see. Were it not for the engines bass line, the rumble of rubber rolling over asphalt, could I hear the waves breaking on the cliffs so far below? Probably not.

Eating garlic fries and a tri-tip, sipping root beer in what turns out to be the alice's restaurant and no mere reference. It feels like the logging country this all once was, sweeping vistas hiding behind the old growth and the folds of the mountain. The staff all eating their shift meals on the counter next to me, long day ending in a quiet sunday night and nearly time to punch the clock and go home. And what am I doing here, this notebook and pen sitting next to my root beer, head swimming with the scent of the forest and memories of rocky cliffs dropping into oceans lit with the evening sun, stripped bare and quivering before the force of the landscape, dumb and overwhelmed. There is no home for you here, what you love razing you even as you loose yourself inside it.

Pulsar Beacon Haiku

Heartbeats, coming regularly
as beans come in the pod -
that other pulse.

Tonight's dinner, or Glory

2 inch thick dry aged bone-in new York strip -- wondrous marbling obscured by the salt. Will be cooked over a covered charcoal fire supplemented with applewood at 200 degrees until barely medium rare, then uncovered and given a hard sear at outrageous temperature.

I think I will name this steak Vincente.

Poetry challenge: obvious. Leave'em in the comments.

Seedlings sprouting,
rocky soil,
cloudless sky.

Thoughts on Leadership

 I found him in the fields,
 A golden boy with an easy smile,
 As though he had been waiting,
   since forever.
 He said come, and it was to me to follow.

 He strung the lyre as we walked,
 The beauty of his music, the beauty of his form,
 My feet hardly touching down in his steps,
 Deeper in the woods, winding paths,
 Barest tracks last used by deer long dead,
 And he led with such certainty
 I could but follow.

 The rent in the earth, the rough rock,
 The narrow passage into dark,
 His beauty, my command,
 And I followed.

 In the passage in the earth
 He was my only light,
 He added his voice,
 So rich, so sweet, a key
 Unlocking me.  I followed.

 Cerberus charmed, we passed.
 Brutal Hades and he, quietly talking.
'A trade, a trade!  Let me see the goods.'
 He bid me come forward, I did.
 At his command, I turned, I stopped,
   I kneeled.
'Deal is done.  I take this one.'
 And I was left to follow.