Tweet, Sweet Eliot

Come forth to carry me,
humbly I ask to hear myself
reading you, or anything
that has to live at least
as long as I do.

Oh, great well-known name,
your suggestion boxed in by your book
and the curriculums that use you,

we have fallen into following you,
or more specifically (because
this is the age of pinhead thick
specificity staking their unsewn,
since threadless, claims)
your request for us masked
as a request for you,
we have learned to sit still,

and no teachers were tenured, paid,
given apples or old-fashioned respect,

we only needed computer screens
to keep our knees correctly bent.

Yes, past master of the estuary
where the empty sea spits up
wriggling streams on the shore
that die so beautifully back
into that uneconomical
expanse,

yes, we have been taught to sit still,
but only while the world shuffles itself
for our eyes to run through like a thumb,
flicker and up and down,
we have learned to sit still,
but not yet how to listen to less than
those thousand things of our inheritance.

The Short War of the Wilted Roses

Neither I nor the woman
would throw out the brokeneck,
flop-cropped, crinkle-lipped roses,
once assorted from a sort of pinkish
indigo to a purplish, royal maroon,
since I didn't buy them or give them,
and she didn't ask for or receive them,
but found them, fait accompli,
replacing her favorite fake flowers.

With real water to weight them,
delivered from the neighbor's burdened
dining room vase to grace
the cranny of counter space
between the dishpan and the saucepans
stored on the stovetop,
and the errand requiring shoes,
seventeen steps and smelling them,
now that their perfume had reduced
to whatever sweat mold makes
while churning rose-stems into
Vegemite, not to mention sniffing
the garbage already in, or worse,
losing a tick on the mental
cupboard door counting odds
or evens on who's carried more
plastic bags out to the bin or
whose just stuffing one more
thing in. Last week I swabbed
the whole kitchen, excepting
only that green, glassy resin
vase. I'd even emptied the toaster's
crumb-catcher and paper-toweled
bacon-spatter off a mirrored star
hung over the oven.
She played the same notice-this
trick the week before that,
washing some dishes and finishing
up and just happening to mention,
hey, time to wash that too,
but not now, not me, I'm done.

They were dead longer than
they were alive, not that
that's untrue of anything,

but I ran out of silverware
to soap and rinse while the
music was still on, so I
carried them out, brought
the vase back to fill
with hotter water and one
tap-root made of arm and
hamper-ready washcloth.

With the song over, she sees
the absence of corpse-blooms
and an "oh" of hers surfs the laughter
spuming up, the backwashing wave
from her day dropping overboard.
"Thanks for doing that. Lets
put the dead ones back in,"
she says, meaning
the folded fabrics cut and dyed
to resemble drawings of flowers
left out of nature's spring
collection. "I love them, for
some reason."

Diploma Immunity

What color drab with pragmatic promise
or loosely corralled with pastel salesmanship
can properly rejoin the story and the teller?
Mouths have not been eyes for some time,
according to verifiable pop-quiz answers,
but there's the biology on third watch
for the age of painless armageddon.

Should stud-sharp eye-blinders
become common courtesy off screen,
with every giftbox built of mirrors,
stores may stop selling contents
for them all together, just various
translucent wrappers since
a hint of taste is already
a tongue-piercing.

What paragraphs of ungrammatical,
actual verbiage could hope to set
their vague barbs to keep
the tin cans in hand,
the sacred circle of speaker to ear?

What music should make a man stand
to move to images made in his stead,
what frame sits the spectator down
upon his personal-space-platform,
to forego the seeing he came to see
and judge the parade and its branching,
the swelling rank of examples,
bands of protagonists rolling by
on their universal-joints,
as centered by illusion as
the mouth-gifted critics voting
sheep or goat for every floating
icon hoping that hope still
owns a boat? What map

could hold all these options
to their roads, all these piles
of fiction to their grids,
as each street decorates itself
with lock-step audience participation,
with marching, hand-waving champion
happiness, what colors can

a man paint himself into a corner
with, and still have a picture
in his wallet to show for it?

The Garden Cannot Hear the Gardener

Think no ill of Eve, alone
allowed to know her error
until she shared it.

To conceive of punishment,
and receive no judgment,

ashamed to show herself, knowing
that they know not what they see,

with only beasts and trees
for confessors and priests,

her throat full of names
Adam did not give them,

a bush whose flames were fruit
taught her with the question
of buds in the sun bursting
beside blight-dry brother
branches, so she asked

the drowsy worm whose
mouth had held that same secret
flesh, why one flower
closed to bloom again as a womb
while some unpollinated sister
was chosen to wither
instead of giving.

It cleverly kept chewing
over the answer.

At first the fruit
was just another shape
until it tasted like
the time between one bite
and the last,

and then,

those roots surely
held something,
a depth where a fist
kept the trunk from reaching
that sky-moon-blue-good-sun-white.

Good.

Do not blame Eve.
She invented burdens either
so she could learn to lift things
or to be lifted.

Fours

Eggs, apples, roses, tokens,
seeds, yolks, pollen, cores,
shells, petals, peels, skins,
baskets, bushels, dozens, scores,
brambles, branches, nests, perches,
baggies, cartons, paper, stores,
scrambled, juiced, arranged creations,
roses, apples, eggs, patience.

A Bucket to Drown Ideas In

Thoughts may thrive on empty space, breathe through mud,
exchange wings for gills as the deluge nears,
while organic lungs must drag each atmosphere
for the sole molecule that reddens blood.
Skimming the breeding sea of seeming
sustains no earthly stomachs, yet for nectar
the godhead swallows whole pantheons, teeming
broods of illusions become food for one collector.

A sink full of thinkers takes one thought to drown them;
so many synapses have one skin around them,
uncountable voices and only two chords to sound them.
We are both souls by the soulless bounded
and bodies by the bodyless surrounded.
We are rods to keep the lightning grounded.

Benevolence

All good gods are female, in that they give.
All gods of good are male, since they know
best what should be received.

What Five Terry Cloth Quadrilaterals Can Make

If the black bath towel is the basic face,
noseless, hemline for lips, tag for a tongue,
(flippant little fine-printed thing)
the red hand-towels sharing the rod
must be his elongated irises,
perfectly off-centered folds of rectangles
somehow capable of looking drooping,
the washcloths back to black
are pupils, so short they hang the highest,
therefore pointing both whole eyes upward,
asking the cloud white ceiling
why it is so close and yet so dry.

Filling In

In a glass fatter than a carafe,
brazenly clear and unhandled,
but with the lip of a giving pitcher,

sits a conforming half-quart of sand.
Speared in the center, height made to mar

that orifice by passing through it,
green plastic struts expand
to their appointed red silk burdens.

The sand holds neither water nor
nutrition. Yet it is real sand.

Uncoupled

A poet cannot know peace or wealth,

for peace and wealth know nothing else.

Man Spies on Bird

The squat telescope invites hunching,
both the lowering of the backside
and the flowering of procrastination
seeded as fruitful speculation.

The most expensive black plastic he owns,
the richest cousin a coffee can ever had:
entitled to claim its range as its domain
the glass steals the spirit of a gray hawk

and pantomimes it in the eyepiece.
Fluff and pinfeathers he says, maybe
a young bird, why else would that image
be paralyzed from the waist-down,

neck directing eyes from an aerie
with no spotted nest, but sword-feet
kept in the bark-sheath? Strength
so still for so long an aw-shucks
had time to unshelve the spyglass,

that's some clutch he's got,
eggs or not, with the wind up there.
Focus. The crow who gave him away is gone,
parabolic jaunts and hyperbolic taunts
off counting coup or himself

somewhere else. The gray hawk
stays until the ocular is safely
away, the man on to other symbols
and the work they represent.

Bug on an Umbrella's Underside

Under a stretched cotton shade-maker,
clung on so effortlessly that standing upright
seems a wasteful way of bearing weight,
contrasting a human green so garish,
so unnatural they named it forest,
there dawdles a lima bean,
six legs, two wings and one head
so aware of all the mouths housed
by the surrounding air, stone-strong beaks
the spearheads of mountains somehow aloft,
objects of the myth that flapping is
to giants what buzzing is to cousins,
a wind as full of slathering mandibles
as puckish gusts, she's forced to shelter.

This leaf-eating beetle
sees no mirror in her sisters,
cannot see how her ancestors
became their meals, and her a flat lobe
of fern-pale color, a surface worth
sampling if she saw her own backside.
There's a hem to try hiding in.
But unlike most manufactured cracks,
man's handicraft has left no space.

The upend of this inedible frond,
this metal-veined, tree-wide leaf,
is boiling beyond yellow, too hot,
until she recognizes her languor
is this tasteless shadow's torpor,
the cold that threatens every calm
with permanence. She crawls from
right-side left to left-side upright,
right around to down back down:

stabbed at every angle by life-size
spears of sunlight, soon so full of heat
she cannot remember feeling fear
or breathing until her body bursts
into flying, her whole body
open to share her bullet-beat rhythm
with the deaf, buffeting air.

For Whom the Ball Rolls

The boy kicks the tennis ball
like a dog, punishment for never
growing into the proper size for soccer,
or because you can’t kick people's
cars or dogs either,
or for missing the target:
a six foot tall fiberglass chicken,
fattest weathervane in the world,
(she would have been fired for immobility
if she hadn’t rightly filed for disability).

He’s been trying to ruffle her
all afternoon. The barn-slant returns
every salvo with the tit-for-tat
exchange of ballistic energy
pop-dropping on the asphalt
to ricochet by dint
of whatever dent it hits
toward the customer’s windshields
and paint-jobs – that’s the real
roulette he’s playing, counting
crescent grit marks on glass and waxy
hoods, exultant that nothing breaks,
except some stupid rule
about throwing things at cars,
and that’s being bent for him,
it’s the roof doing it.

Mom's in the store, under
that chicken is a lot of feed
and pet supplies. Maybe a bin
of tennis balls for the dogs.

One Worker Down

A bee flew into my temple,
and since mass was keeping
the door to my frontal lobe shut,
and momentum was in my favor
by a factor of granule to granite,
her crash continued, and she graced
the table with her final flight.

Her buzz died as she righted,
no secondary flutter, no turning
it over one more time, she stopped
sounding like a bee at all,
and began to slowly, humbly crawl.

I lifted my forearms from her
appointed path, whether self-chosen
or still directed by the chemistry
that had made her taste order,
smell truth. She walks right
into a fall, trusting the table's
edge to provide the ground,
wings silent, she's found instead
an armrest. Backing her end
past the cliff my elbow once
overhung, she stares straight
at my ribs as if they'll tell
her to let go.

She scrubs her face,
her face all eyes. Her right
forearm is surely too short,
a stump if such a wire-thin thing
can be called a stump, not
braced against her body, but
still working, running over her
head again and again, as if the work
would make the ability to work return.

Her right antennae is also short.
Whatever eats bees only licked her.

While she's still ticking
(but never buzzing, never again)
those right eyes she can't wipe clean
are staring straight at my torso.
I hope she isn't begging.
My gut is no buddha.

Possibly she's only hiding,
maybe from her own sister-kinship,
my city-wide stench an effective blockade
of their hormonal-GPS,
there's the shame at having smelled wrong
or for getting sideswiped by some sparrow,
or she's truant to the mortuary bees
who'll carry her too far
from the air she'd like to breathe last,

slower and slower she shifts.

she may be in pain, I don't know.
I imagine she's stoic, she's flown
alone to her own funeral.

Maybe she's silently asking
for enough strength to forage
one more leg of pollen,
even if the gaurds
won't let her back in with it;
or why she never grew old
enough to soldier herself
before this dying thing,

or if in that highest of hives
her abdomen will be promoted
by glowing halo to queenly
engorgement,

and the wax there will taste
like royal jelly,

and she'll get to sting
and sting and sting forever
in the great chorus.

She's beginning to list.
Half of her is too much weight
for only two right legs.

Without wings and trumpet, my lips
withold the homily for her apocalypse,
I will not even hear
her next or final breath.
Yet it still hovers in my ear,
this waspish lesson, this
soon to be ghostly-bee that gleans
that being built efficient means
any injury at all is death.

Amoret

(a) (deed to title of poem [provisionally approved])

Allusion is not her usage.
She is as presently there
as any problem stays,
dragging its splinter of day
on board every vessel
of the current now, beat, now,
whether blood or freeway,
errands or focus,

not even a seed, simply
the soil-hole, poked
by finger or mechanical
replacement for whichever
Fate demanded benefits
when she cut herself.

She has simply been named,
not from the Spenser, surely,
nor with some mere noun,
listed one, two, three
like explanations, no,

the word sounds like her. It is
a name now bound to conjure
or better to banish
her unfertilized beginning,

a label to tape down
the spring-loaded lip
of her file:

Amoret, a term assigned
to her regardless of associations
listed in order of
see-it-seen-it-so-see-its-important
by a search-engine,

no, it means her specifically,
three syllables comfortably
incommunicable, for
if anything, Amoret is
a deliberate infection.

(b) (sufficient disclaimer)

Any pretty girls, alive
in the mind or dead to rights
in the eye about to enslave
their image to the service
of some abominably empty
mirage of a mistress:

you may be buffeted with glancing love
or half-heart-sickening lust, but

you are not Amoret;
Amoret is not you.

Any resemblance between
Amoret and any imaginable
candidate for Amoret
is purely imagined
or serviceably (read
intentionally) imaginary.

And to be clear:

Amoret is a girl.
If you are also a girl,
this is merely a coincidence.

(c) (necessary disclaimer)

As brief as brevity is able to be,
I recite as required this witless list,
composed to codes of strictest legality,
those free of any and all responsibility
should Amoret read this and get pissed,
and decide to sue for damages monetary
rather than just shaking her shapely fist:

first, the owners of all servers, wires,
routers, satellites, tin cans and airspace
through which this poem's bits will race;
second, all bandwidth sellers and buyers
whose rental of any and all transmissibility
may be, by writ of evidentiary admissibility,
temporary publishers (willing or unwilling)
of poetic content (filling or unfilling),
third, any and all possible readers,
human, search-spider, credit card,
or English department’s hunchback bard;
fourth, any third-party world leaders
or third-party service providers
or their fifth-column free-riders,
fifth, all manufacturers of computer parts,
or computer wholes, plugs and ports,
upon which the poem arrives or departs,
are hereby released from all claims and torts
should sweet, smart Amoret ask me to courts.

(d) (poetic license fine print)

By no means does the granting of this license
reflect any approbation of artistic merit
regarding this author or any intended or accidental
figurative language of said author's
by this licensing board or its members
in any (infinite list of modifiers) capacity.

All rights to say we liked it after the author
is dead are reserved.

(e) (actual poem)

Spunky, brunette Amoret:

more fun to fish for
than to net

with winks and smiles
profligate,

so quick to twinkle,
smile, and yet

as frosty as
a suffragette,

excepting when
she sparkles wet

in hopes of
a spiritual
tete a tete

her temperature
can almost get

as smoky as a
noirish bete

with eyes like
apartments
with rooms to let.

Then as soon
as the match
is set

she leaves
him with
her silhouette,

her hooded
heart trained
like a pet,

a hawk
to the dove,
a bullet
to the jet,

no mawkish,
sock-hopped up
Annette,

no kingless
princess, no
soprano Cossette,

not your vibing string,
never the
note-holding fret,

more fun to meet
than to have met,

pretty, put-upon
Amoret.

Lines on a Polo Shirt

Preferably horizontal, one color,

no thicker than a quarter-inch;

no more than three.