Marriage Proposal
December of 68 I was lying on LSD on my bed downtown Baltimore.
Walls, floor, ceiling, doors all painted flat black.
Metallic mobiles and assorted assemblages hung from the ceiling
turning at will in low green and blue light.
My future wife walked in and sat so she could see me in the mirror.
So and so just got married she said.
That's nice.
Silence.
Watch her reflection watching me.
So and somebody else also married.
More silence.
Watch her reflection evaluate my reflection's reflection.
Even through the LSD I could see she wasn't talking what she was saying
so asked.
I just want to know what's going to happen she screams
stalking into the living room.
I lie there amid my hallucinations and resentfully realize
I'm too weak not to marry her.
Another's strong needs always overrode my indifferent apprenticeship.
20 minutes later she skulks back to the bedroom.
OK I snap.
OK what? she snaps back.
We'll get married.
When?
Six months I finalize
feeling sure the artist within will wither once reduced to marriage,
suburban boxes, the upperclass hypocrisy rampant in her family and friends.
We had a rich wedding in a high Episcopal-cum-Catholic cathedral.
Reception held of course at the country club.
None of my freak friends came.
The day of the wedding
I put all the trash left from moving in the middle of the floor
smoked the last of my grass
took off all my clothes
and slowly danced naked about the trash
sprinkling it with my box of monosodium glutamate
and chanting unknown chants of sorrow.
Night Fragment
As has been said
The night weighs upon the city
In tired, fat insolence. Rat scurry.
Old papers flap down empty streets.
It is an ugly season. Full.
Day slouches in, in shameless anonymity
Devoid of great chained excuses of being
A voided has been of god, notion and country.
Unfocused without, we hunt worms within
To bait further cold excretion of reason, rationale.
Refuse refusing our naked nothing.
Cautious.
Strip steal by night.
Wall Street
Pushing through the night
Eastward to the moon
Not yet risen,
False dusk of reason dons
Its mantis mating respectability
Sans honor, self or soul.
Money talks of dawn, damns
The discarded husk of culture
And enlightens genes for green,
Without the warranty.
Mausoleum, Museum, Movie
Entombed in night, uneasy
In the wrought iron knot
Of the grey spider's thread
vague eternal, emberThey scurry replete, unfree
To such preconceived thoughts
As are hung from the dead
Flesh
Like love and money
We weave about the focus
A melody of maybe
In silent forest ritual
Growth duration flesh essence
We stand in the snow
Embrace the cold
And leave no tracks
Though we stumble
Frosted amidst redemption
I need a dollar like a dead man
Needs a coffin
Old women stare at my crotch
Suck sun in summer
Seek sin in fall
Shard
I thought on her leaving and smelled the musk
Of grasshoppers held captive
In a mason jar.
Cain in Isolation
There lies a sorrow beneath this yellow
Odor which rises on two legs and mocks
What little man remains behind. Shallow
Selfish greed of love and lover's talk
Of trust in self made shadows mere shadow
Of hallowed spell disguised by holy frock.
Varied the means of divination, certain
Though time and dark demons conspire, despair
By this hand shall never rend the curtain
Nor set wraiths cull delusions of lone fear.
What is, is, beyond lamenting, Canaan
Isolation. Love and love alone stands bare.
Muse
From winding river's run
She comes discrete
Completes her Tarot mutant in desire
I can't play nearly normal
She cries from shadow
Rippleless in time and obsession
Self seek solution
Ancient in execution and repair
Heroin
Groping toward the easily vague
By crawling away from the future.
Drifting upon the powdery plague
Infesting this newly won suture.
Beginning in the silver tunnel
While sipping the pain blackened cup.
Ending in the tragic skin funnel
Forever flowing down into up.
Suicide Note
Poor naked ape, melancholy Dane
Dying the silent, sinking orange
I offer my praise to mad Ophelia's black mass.
Receiving Laertes' pain poisoned harangue
I'll soon join that fortunate lass
Morpheusly oblivious of pain
(Camus' first question of philosophy reweaves Thane Hamlet's "or not to be,"brings Kant's "progressive unification ofsense manifold" to termination: totalpsychic expiration. Hence our soleexistential goal becomes fervently wishinggood death's black ghoul to sensually becomeas one with our whole)Where God assumes skull Yorick's reign
Stay yet awhile Horatio, give lie to my name.
Wild Flower
Prefering seas to fame or same
In flame of darkness fired
Mired not in mud but flood
Enfused to birthing Nature's tug
Of moon blood duty
Beauty firm in eye,
Could she in time
Or even rolls reversing
Ever mime wisely nursing
Pagan cures of curves and learning
Firm in flesh unswerving
Tall and elegant prime?
Aye.
