Lineage

 

 

 

I used to have parents.

Those were good days.

Sometimes they’d let me out in

the yard with the okapi

and the ocelots.

Sometimes they fed me on rich foods.

I grew to spite them.

They did not know that, anyway,

I would become a man.

 

 

                                                                                   

 

 

 

Highway 61 Revisited

 

 

 

Driving north on Highway 61

the lights of Clarksdale

look like Las Vegas

 

the way the surrounding darkness

ends in them.

And indeed its Pizza Hut, its

 

Wendy's, its Sack and Save

seem exotic as palaces.

Toby sleeps in the back seat

 

huddled over his pillow

in delicious fatigue; Cheryl next

to me nods, her

 

chin on her chest.  The Delta

is a long black dream,

the serenity of India rubber,

 

the swallow of a whale.

Off to the west a skyrocket explodes.

It's 10:15, July Fourth, 19something.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A New Lust

 

 

 

 

 

            “I’ll try to say a little more:
            Love went on and on
            Until it reached an open door…”

                        Leonard Cohen

 

 

 

 

I used up my lust for you

in three short days.

It was such new lust it did

not last, not in the sun,

not in the desert

where I wander. And by

leaning heavily on it,

as if it were my own true

state, it slid away

like mercury, like a planet, lost

to the bible-black sky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9/11/01

 

 

 

One magazine editor

responds by emailing all

potential contributors:

Donate blood, money, clothes;

New York sure as shit

doesn’t need your poems.

Another asks poets, writers,

dreamers everywhere to

try to make sense of the senseless.

It is in this dichotomy

that the dilemma nests:

a demon in one of Leda’s eggs.