I am not obsessed with you

though I’ve been slyly caressed.

 

You’d be nude in an expensive tub of mud

fingering flecks of clay in sullen strands of hair,    

a cost efficient critic, wry dark-eyed doe.

 

You’re rain’s white philosophy sputtering in the eaves

with your dreambook’s alligator teeth

in the library’s shadows and hourglass sheaves.

 

There’s your flagrant skin and its semi-intellectual aura,

lips glistening at the party like nighttime jewels

as my poetry treads the dusty road to Cordoba.

 

The gown of the future turns sheathed in the clarity

of tranquilizing distance, milk and vodka.

The gaunt spectre of derision snared in yesterday’s folly.                       

 

From the antique ventriloquist’s svelte velvet beak, “La dolce vita.”                   

 

 

 

Coward’s Bible or (After the Séance)  
  

“It rained Wheat of late,”

and tongues of rain wail in the soul’s conservatory.

Rice pudding drowned in sweet milk curdles                                           

the eyes of ghosts glowing like candlesticks.

 

On the road home there’s ague, uncontrollable barking.

Dear God Samantha! that sign says Bullwinkle College.                       

I’m tempted to turn, face the lightning’s antlers!

I’m seeing things darling. Well I’ve said that all along.

 

You say lots Miss Cream-Dream, blithe spirit, all along.

So, say I’m a pinched, reversed image of Nietzsche.

I’ve felt a crooked bit of thorn: A symphony in prose.

I see a white rose: Church unfurling in layers in the sky.

 

Its bricks swirling like sugar cubes in my Earl Grey.

Unfair to stir the mind in the dark, ambiguous muck.

But I take it back. None of it’s true; there’s nothing,

just a grand barometer, our mercurial spire.