The Creme Scene

How amazing
Rocking back and forth,
Those hollow eyes
Could still shout love and all.

As golden rays bring faint color
to faded hair;
As folded skins touch
in silent affair;
As feet interlock
and scarred nails share;
As smiles spark across faces in false teeth
here;
We only realize
How wasted youth
Could end happily
ever after.

When we become fathers
I'll send postcard in remembrance
how rare this understanding
with smiling pictures of children
(although my Eve is yet to be taken
out from pieces of my rib cage)

like trophies,
they will make us proud
and make it easier to forget
   summer nights, beers
   (my cheeks took a light punch from your knuckles
   brimming with attention)
   late afternoons watching sunset
   the waves collapsing beneath our feet
   (your tales of virgins and sordid relationships)
   midday jokes
  morning miseries,
  (I tried a comforting hand over burdened shoulders)
 
In your room
I was Pistons and you were Mavericks
( I lose one against two)

They will fade like scars
though your number is in my phonebook
and we never really live so far apart

When we become fathers
I will never use your name
(In hope that you will also learn to develop
a little dislike in my name's discordance)

It will never be forgotten.

then then then
as i watched your reflection in the oil scarred glass
your scarred lips
the indictment of a thousand forlorn seclusion
the longing of a sweet kiss
the damaging aftermath
when you did a dunk
near a basket full of wanderings
because the console is vibrating
and im left meandering
in a river of sweet deceptions
from my drunkenness.

If i knew you so well
would you talk to me still
with remarkable "sires"?

The propeller of the ship is humming.

The edge of the world is saffron.
close to the omen of a blind night
i searched for that piece of metal
(without actually looking)
unzipping the fly
(the other is busy air-crobating)
while keen is my observation of the sunset.

I can sense the air.
Standing near a ledge. In the ocean.
The breeze, like a ripple,
de-atomizes the chain of water
from the bladder.

Oppressive
the way your grin crept
like tiny legs of cockroaches on my arms
the underside;
(where the splash of Tokyo took refuge to de sanitize the smell of my early morning
disembowelment)
compared to your underside
supple when i accidentally brush
from your sofa.
You are on the bed

Married to the thought of bouncing
while dancing
to Mama Becks.

Tuborg sweating cold
numbness in my sense of touch
The Danish version of punk rock
is screaming Danish loud noises
in my ears
(the only cartilage free from piercings in this
hazy environment)
Over the counter
Malaysians screaming,
smoke in between fingers
jumping thumping
O swollen breasts

On my side
smoke in between fingers
Danish carrot top
whispers mexican on my hazy head

I was mexican too the other day.

I jerked my cerebrum yes while
The billiard balls made a clamor on collision
obedient to Newton's laws

I calculated the years left wandering shores
But i have forgotten my age.
Sometimes, i have no idea how i was even born.

O the effect of alcohol.
silver hairs.
The effect of danish scream
In a danish bar
In a danish soil
With the Danish crowd
skin to skin head banging.
(the only epithelial tissue free from needle googles
in this hazy environment).

Blue is my favorite color at 15 minutes past 12 midnight.
In it,
the hems travel shorter from shoulder to waist
the fibers stretch like blue plastic rope in tension grip
with all due respect to white:
the pious light
of all eternity (my hands a zillion times shorter
wiping the ever affinitive peanut butter
whose sole interest is escaping
sandwiched between onto hungry biting).

If hunger is a worldwide problem
midnight is famine
and yesterday was a hunger-- a strike
but my blue outfit?
the hope that soddens the after grief.

Silence is my favorite music at 20 minute past twelve midnight,
with peanut butter and cheese
and a cup of milk.

I want to write guitar solo poems
because I have run on sentences
and they have lead me no where,
with my feet, pacing, measuring
a mile within my bedroom or upon
my hands, fingered and palmed
with my feet to the clouds
and so I will write in guitar solos
wail and screech and hammer and strum
everything I would have wanted to say
and never learn the words for or
know the words but fear them
for their saccharrine or sour or bitter
and really, if I couldn't say them myself
I wouldn't write them down either

So yeah

if i make you a poem tonight
would it be alright
if my hand shakes like a newborn babe
in his sleep
though it may not be disarranged
the hue is
lighter than the shade of day
when i am alone
and you are wishing under gemini sky
june is sudden
so sudden my timid mind
is lonesome before auspicious thoughts
scatter like whiskey influencing
when i am disheveled
and you are drunk
by irish coffee


let me think in punctuated dots.

There are no awkward firsts but only recurring seconds;
details to keep to a precise minute. This man,
like clockwork, set to accuracy, predictable; stepped
into a span of years, walked a clockwise town. He is always
right. My fingers marked the moments, counter.
I am to be left. Behind his face of numbered
movements, he turned upon himself, grinded silently;
clicked a hidden tongue, disapproved.
I look for where he had touched me: my eyes
are deeper set, more shadowed and lined; my mouth
a little more pursed: disappointment dulls
at the passage of time and turns into a habit of sighs,
renamed melancholy, stored away with tedium.
Because by the pendulum swing, the return is a lighting-
up, a flutter, a rekindling and an unmentioned welcome-back.

We who never took anything seriously
would find this situation hilarious,
right?
We thought that making baby tees
out of real babies would solve the population boom
and that meritocracy should temper democracy
and nothing is as funny
as a failing, consumerist society practices
exercises in futility
to save the money to afford its own vanity.

King Kong rode a warhead to oblivion--
we died laughing at the end of civilization,
fiddled while more than Rome burned.
New, clear, this is the truth, dangling
on a tree branch with his pants down.

We would find this so funny,
maybe now but eventually,
that we broke up, because
we couldn't take it seriously.

I do not like the compliment "understanding;"
it is never true. My mouth but seals up
with incomprehension, I do not understand
at all. I would contemplate, perhaps,
that silence, it seems to me like secrets--
I am made to trust, calling it privacy, instead,
or maybe personal space. People turn
into distant stars with my recollection
of fusing elements, where there was bright
and warm, and burn spots upon and purple,
brown bruise a sky. I am made to believe
that these are the ways to be, meant, though
cold mornings, long nights and discoloured heaven say
otherwise. The weatherman blames global warming,
but he has rarely been right. So I wear
sunglasses and bring with me an umbrella:
I never know, but one cannot be but ready.
It is a worldwide colding. I cup my own
elbows, for lack of someone to hold me
and people also think me independent.

I am misled with the ease of storms
to forget the color of ocean
maelstrom; other than the blue of dream,
the song of serenade or the shade
of poetry's many cruelties.
The similarities expand like horizon
and I could not find my way to turn back;
I follow sea foam to transmaterialism:
a breaking of form into substance
without seeing the seeming of being. Becoming
a glint upon the glistening skin on heaving breast
of that which swallows whales, and shores
and volcanic islands and mothers of pearls
like hesitation. Unable to lift my head
above water, against a current stronger than past,
nostalgia lost to swing and sway of clockwork world,
raging not unlike an ebbing and flow heartbeat,
a sincere hiccup confession by childhood swing-- draws
senses to muted like numb like blind like deaf like stale
like dark. And such at sea, cupped within its mermaid hands--
once lover lost to the evolutionary march to land,
returns to abyss to realize that therein
can be found expanse vaster than calm.

I understand,
I cannot blame
you for not
knowing-
when lately
I have been
swallowing
words I would
have said but
suffered
indigestion
instead.
Not quite and
may never be
butterflies,
they eat away
at my stomach;
for want of silk
knot my gut
into empty cocoons
to be found
by disappointed
walks along
the garden.

I just wanted to prove to myself that I can still write a rhyme and meter. It certainly felt much harder than how I found it back then.

Looking down entranced for thirty minutes
since sitting six feet above my cradle
on a platform; seeking a calm, not flavor,
so my mind drifts to cigarettes like smoke.

It comes as swift as sudden rain amidst
the arrogant gusts born of August's wings,
the flash of synapse, an idea's sting
wakes me deeper to dream with a stroke.

But if I punctuate this sentenced life
What would spring to mind? What will they have said?
If a neighbor should drop by and arrived
to find me, my fate hanging on a thread

I rubbed the world back by thirty minutes
into my eyes, looking for cigarettes.

I am wearing my clothes, the ones
you borrowed to sleep in, when
you slept over, and was then
discarded and bundled onto
a plastic seat beside my bed.
Your smell envelops me, an embrace
as shirt hovers over my stomach
and they remember hand. Garter wraps
about waist and fabric brushes
buttock because while you are away,
here is enough of you to sustain
a figment of arousal.

My love is a stray cat
who mostly sours the milk
I leave upon the porch
to mimic the moon that I
never see upon my smog
covered city sky. He
is elsewhere-- eating
someone else's opened tin
of tuna or drinking off
a deep dish like mine.
Tonight, he is someone
else's again. But then,
without promise,
the missed moon reappearing
over my metropolis,
or an empty bowl come
morning, is a love
never mine but brushes
against me occasionally
and truer than any
affection I can demand
of the predictability
of commitment.

Is it selfish of me
to miss you when you
are sick? I do not worry
for the throbbing,
a shrinking of skull
against rush of synapse
on the traffic of nerves
in your head except
that you would not think
of me, distracts your
heart, to not expand
beyond its chambered
walls and bony cage
to reach for me. You
strain to swallow
not because you
are choosing your words
to tell me how love
and lust have merged
in contrasting purples,
pinks and reds that sunsets
on the bay can only wish
to be. In truth,
your throat just hurts.
I hate this disease
that takes you away from
me-- I am jealous of a germ.

The Embrace
Mark Doty
You weren't well or really ill yet either;
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.

I didn't for a moment doubt you were dead.
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
You'd been out—at work maybe?—
having a good day, almost energetic.

We seemed to be moving from some old house
where we'd lived, boxes everywhere, things
in disarray: that was the story of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of narrative

by your face, the physical fact of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without strain?

So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth
and clarity of you—warm brown tea—we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.

Bless you. You came back so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.

Those who talk for a living, rest in silence--
you and I, we tread the silent miles between
through a needle, with furrowed eyebrows,
pursed lips and clenched teeth. Unlike
the pace of the husband outside the bedroom
door, muted by rage, we walk the cadence
without drumbeats, pulsing only by the sacred
heart's blazing snapping, crackling pop.
Do not be sorry that you long to be held
within my dead arms, when they are ressurected
from being crossed to rise up to your chest,
to open my sealed mouth, tomb to words,
to kiss you, womb to "I love you so bad,
I missed you, I miss you, I miss you."
Break the wall, not with a resounding roar,
but a maiden's purring murmur.