[	Tags	|	cited for abuse of gifts	]
[	Current Location	|	I shoulda eaten more dinner	]
[	mood	|	bitchy	]
[	music	|	I wish you'd go back to not asking so much as just accepting	]

Three Colors on a Palette, Two Nearly the Same

By now I have written dozens of poems.

Some of them are quite short

Others longer perhaps than they need be.

How many did I have to write before I could claim the station

Poet?

How many more will I have to write to keep the name?

“O!” I shout despairing to my Patron God,

“Why poetry?!

Would that I could be Yours true, oh Patron!

Hollow me out—the channel will flow.

Diminish me—the words will manifest.

Obliterate the poet for the Poetry!

I hold too dearly the thing that stays the Work.”

No lyric God, no Grace, no Muse—

The One who claims this half-fired vessel

Taken too soon from the kiln:

Trickster

            sharp and yearning and keen.

f  m  gender: queer

We are not in wrong bodies

We do not have wrong spirit

We are not misplaced people

We do not love improperly

We are not Other

We do not represent ambiguity

We are not enigmas

The crossroads is its own place

We are as we should be

[	Tags	|	not that you didn't but i definitely did	]
[	Current Location	|	might as well be nowhere	]
[	mood	|	envious	]
[	music	|	tick tick tick tick tick tick tick	]

 I hummeded this on the drive home:

One day the heavy burden of your heart will lift

and it will be a product of your own effort.

And I thought this:
You sure got over me easy

I sure can’t do the same

God I wish I could

I love too truly for that

In the car on the way home I came upon the thought:

Mayhap true love does happen, when we let ourselves love truly.

Snow in March

Last night I couldn’t fall asleep.

My legs kept getting tangled in my sheets

And a fever passed over the small of my back

Over and over.

I tried muttering Arabic to myself in the dark,

But I kept forgetting words.

What’s the word for shiver?

What’s the word for kiss?

The sound of my forgetfulness,

Incoming waves of an outflowing tide,

Pushed me further from rest.

Finally I gave up trying to sleep

And trysted with Cavafy and his deviate, sensual pleasures.

Late at night

Two hungers growled in my belly.

[	Tags	|	well that's rare! a pocket verse	]
[	Current Location	|	abed	]
[	mood	|	numb	]
[	music	|	Repo!	]

Signs of life, the distant stars

Who pulse numinous cadence

to a sacred, silent song.

What energy drives pure light to dance?

What reason to reel, to wheel eternal?

What fills the void for untouchable, unknowable fire?

Why burn, Star, when all immortality is spent

witness to passion’s conflagration far below?

And for every one of these and every other

ever after, the silent song in answer—

L O V E !

Poet! heal thyself

the empty page not so poignant as the one i have filled with love for you you cannot return beloved which is your real name for all that i love you you are not mine and never ever never ever never ever will be what we have is a very good thing but not a thing to nurture we cannot must not cannot cultivate these fields the tree of knowledge is but one tree of many of the same in an orchard we are walking through and who am i if not adam to eat of the tree but i would rather eat the bitter fruit of the tree of pain which is to say the true tree of knowledge for there is love in pain or pain in love but either way the two are there in the same fruit flesh and touch and breath oh the breath we have shared and the worst part for me is that it leads me to the height of my being as i have known it that is to say that my greatest height is a forbidden place and no surprise i cannot trespass there true enough to say that i love you but when you said you love me that was the knife and when you admitted that you love me and you are in love with me that that that was the twist oh you wretched ruination we were friends and more than friends and for a night or two or three or all of them we share a flesh memory that every other touch recalls and every breeze across my skin fails to resurrect and every other man for all the rest of time will fall short and i told you i told you i told you that we can never kiss because you will not you will not ruin the kiss of the man who would be my otherself if it cannot be you be you be you be you be you be you be you every time i hope the same and every time it is and when i see you walking from afar towards me i have to stop for the failing of my knees to straighten and my feet to move and then you grin your grin that grin that wrenches gut and sinks heart and you grin it like you know what it does but none of it none of it none of it suffices to assuage that lovehurt love hurt lovehurt love hurt lovehurt that i give myself as a present in your presence with no gift receipt or exchange in kind i saw what your otherself made for you the completion of his own self is not to say that forget that i hate that you want me to say it all but you never actually say what is behind that face and why is it that you would rather have this maelstrom of feeling than the ordered composition of distilled thought truly beloved you do not give and then i realize i want more than what you give and then i realize i want more than what you can give and i realize i want more why want more than a lifetime of friendlove and the everlasting memory of a night or two or three or all of them and the flesh memory you keep to yourself from otherself it is with all these in mind and so much more in heart that i come to the conclusion which is also called goodbye or farewell but nothing good or well about it so i name it anew poorpart noun meaning that parting of you and your heartsoul lover but not a man who will claim you though given the right removal from any other plane to the plane you two occupy alone will touch you as you would have your skin touched and breathe your breath from you as you would have him do the poorpart is the parting that is broken heart and reeling sense and bruised sore spirit and that ache between your brows that you never realize is there till it has been on your face for weeks on end and the sigh lovers sigh absence sigh in the absence of the beloved kiss which restores the breath that will never restore me so by some other way must i restore myself just as the beloved has the healer and the healer the beloved so too must this some other but what other who other why other and not you is not a question i can ask is not a question i can stop is not a question but a quest for a heart that is not and never ever never ever never will be for me the empty page not so poignant as the one i fill to heal myself

Ganymede Pours for Himself

More drink, my Lord?

Why yes, oh Lord.

Of course, my Lord!

            On his rounds at the meal, the dogs of Zeus’s table licked clean the cupbearer’s fingers,

            Which tasted of rosewater, sweetmeats, and nectar.

Let me tell You, Lord, of the worship I have heard in Your name.

What laudation rises on the plumed smoke of burnt offerings to Greatest Zeus!

            Honeyed lashes flicked up as the beautiful boy brought the cup to his lips,

            Holding Zeus’s gaze as he pressed a kiss to the rim.

            Ganymede cast his eyes down as he lowered the cup to pour reddest nectar.

            He set the cup with its smudged rim toward the King of Heaven.

I remember even as I rose to the summit of this Mount clutched in Your mighty talon,

Those songs of praise floated past me.

Would that I could draw my thanks through Apollo’s tortoise shell,

That I could join the ringing chorus in eternal rhapsody!

For You, O Zeus!

My silence falls—this syrup from the golden bowl!

For You, O Zeus!

—the nectar on the rim that stings Your tongue before You tilt back Your head to drink!

For You, O Zeus!

—my gaze upon Your throat as it works the nectar down in deep draughts!

For You, O Zeus!

—my life, my youth, my beauty, my pale and supple thighs that You love so!

For You, O Zeus!

—all that I am and was and will be!

Even as the light of my stars that You fixed into Heaven

Falls on the hills where I left my father’s flocks of sheep,

When first You took me up in Your embrace and I yielded to You there

And then again upon Olympus after You sent clumsy Hebe away,

You placed the bowl beneath us and we filled it with nectar

And then You taught me how to mull the nectar before serving it to Gods.

Zeus, who sent me thence to the meal and, with all the rest, watched my hips

Press against the bench as my waist bent over the table, reaching to fill Hera’s cup...

            Hermes called Hebe to the table, handed Her the golden bowl of nectar,

            And lifted the boy from where he slumped,

            Drunken gurgling at the emptied table.

“Where do you encounter the state?”

I encounter

The State

On a map—

Blobs of pastel

Colors and black

Lines

Sometimes following

Meandering riverways

Sometimes straight

Through lakes and

Oceans, lives and

Amber waves of grain.

The State is where the Man lives

The Man who is

All-Father,

Artist,

Architect wielding

Palette of pastels

And rulers

And black lines