I Gave You What You Asked For

 

I gave you what you asked for--

a funny book which I know now

you surely never read.

I gave you what you asked for--

someone you could maneuver into

saying, "I thee wed."

I gave you what you asked for--

someone to tie the tourniquet

every time you bled.

I gave you what you asked for--

a foil to be the fodder for

the monsters in your head.

I gave you what you asked for--

seven years of love alive and

six more stood up dead.

I gave you what you asked for--

my heart's writing you called "nice."

That's when I gave you all my scorn

and back your rotten rice.

________

for What's Going On?--"Home Made"

Music: Sara Bareilles Wicked Love

Breviary

 

If you won't put wildflowers in my hand

don't leave them on my grave

I'll have the haunted hillside there

with oaks for palisades

around my bones and all my silent

reveries around

my life of soap and wax and flesh

I've left without a sound.

If you can't think me beautiful

like pennies on a sill

that catch the sunrise slanted light

which wakes the whippoorwill

or liken me to harbor water 

at the set of sun

then please don't give me tepid words

you'd say to anyone. 

If you need a holy man

with Latin on his tongue

to spin a mothball rosary

to tell you where I've gone

just leave me here the time of year

when winter's hardening

I'll curl myself in a berry husk

to rise in rainy spring. 

________

for Word Garden Word List--Madeleine's Ghost.

Śūnyatā

 Sunya, reaching for your hand is like trying to recall a dream I haven't had yet,

but still you wait in the tattered chair

in the water-damaged bow-wooded house

where the bulldozers come to cry.

They shove up great golden cities out of bricks and candy wrappers

while you, Sunya, fanged monster, 

queen of the canopy, collector of 

sunflower sunshine in a woven shoe,

wait with that faintly mocking smile I sail inside of.

Sunya sister of Shiva, cigarette punk from down the block,

are you a tin can tied to the tail of the wheeling Heavens,

or Love itself

in a saffron sari,

taking my bones out with a kiss just to show your quick hand

to catch the  ball we both sway upon, under stars, in the ether, or nowhere at all?

Sunya, you are a man in the morning, a woman in the evening, 

a dolphin all afternoon

and I stand in the surf that doesn't exist

in my flesh that appears and disappears

dealing with a world that seems to be but isn't,

and wait for Sunya, summer plum winter branch marigold kat in an open window.

_________

for Dverse Poetics "the four elements." 

music: Mint Royale "From Rusholme With Love." Just try not to dance to it!

Good Friday

 

In 1978, I found a man crouched inside of my borrowed tv,

building an engine that resembled Dick Cavett.

I accused him of stealing my off-hours, asked him if he

was my father or my child and he said, "No, I am just here

to eat my way out of you from within."

I turned the channel knob and he appeared in tails,

then drag, then a Broadway production of "An American In Paris"

and finally in a ridiculous purple wig that kept sliding off.

I told him he had to leave before Easter, which was

expected presently, but he clung to his mechanical Cavett

and broke for commercial before my mother arrived, complaining.

"What have you done to my tv, it has a dent in it 

and the Jesus is gone." Before she could stab me, I moved away

to a flat in Chelsea where Sappho knits booties for monsters

and I lie on the table like a place mat, serving six and howling.

_______

a second poem for the Corso word list. 

Loaf

Here is a loaf which is mostly nothing,
to put in your mouth, described the same.
When you feel empty, fill nothing with nothing
and be satisfied with such legerdemain.

Give me back words which symbolize something
but are, in themselves, nothing at all;
aren't we lucky, drenched in such 
a trove of quicksilver wherewithal?
_____

a flash 55 for Toads. "extremely close but worlds apart."