interlude

what is the taste of love?
-beers drowned in amaretto, liquid almonds with a little poison, steeped from the stone hearts of summer, love does not taste like you.
-orgasms, love does not taste like you.
-james joyce, oh poldy, poldy bloom, your molly who is going to leave you, yes, yes, oh yes, and i yes, yes your stream of conscious sweetness while you sleep, love, love does not taste like you, nor your old nostalgia pages.

am i blue? billie asks me. blue billie, i'm not like you. i don't cry, and no man's left me. the world is old and filled with lies, and i can lie too. it was a woman who killed lucifer.

-

there was a fire in chinatown, and it left a blackened stone-brick skeleton, all concrete and charred, and i fell in love with its burnt hollowness. is it bizarre to feel this, to love decrepit, aging buildings? the attraction's all in the expression, the honest ugliness.
they can't lie, so they stand in the rain, waiting to be demolished.

there's an art to lying; it is the craft of story-weaving and selling desire. you take a set of images, linked only by the person who commits them, and tie them together to make a narrative that people want to buy, like a bundle of frail papers with secrets, or withering blossoms.

i don't want to be eloquent. i don't want art. i don't want jacquard floors. i don't want to know that we are only chemicals and fiction.
i don't want to make love letters to ugly, miserable, disgusting (beautiful!) despair, who digs into me with her hooked ring, and her androgynous twin, desire, who possesses the space where my metaphysical heart should be, and breathes through my pores, and lives alone in his/her mirrored chambers.

perhaps i am poetry. i don't think poetry can live in a body like mine, or maybe that's why it does. or perhaps the world is too heavy sometimes, with it's grey nights, and overflowing fog, smog in the city. or perhaps i don't love people, only ideas, because people can't appreciate the world. or maybe i was born strange in the head, and now i love walls and dirt, and blackness, and mourning, and see truths too clearly to want to play cat's cradle and repeat cycles with liars; they are all liars.

or maybe i don't know the heart of what's real when it looks back at me.

lunch poems hunger

O'hara, I miss
your Billie holidays, your broke
lunches, you must've been so skinny;

That's why you ate the spring-summer air,
the may fragrance
of subtle toxic petals
where those damned kids, pubescent
library office girls, threw dirt and flower balls dispersing
fast, damp,
in the less than Katz-sandwich breath
of the sweaty, grease-cheeked, American boys of construction,
so professor, you would've rapped my knuckles
and then beg'd t'kiss it
'cause I name-dropped the cereal
that I spilled
out of the box
and off the graffiti'd square chess table.

They were like O's, her mouth was an O,
his asshole was an O, the shape of processed grains
into dusted fields underfoot,
the way I plunged my mouth on it,
like it was the pathway shaped like my mother's cunt,
and up into somebody else's flushed-face o'sms;
oh, oh,

oh! I loved blasphemy, it's the way
I am gliding across your walls (repainted white),
like a bug (a roach), and under my bed,
and I peeled the coat with tape and my nipple
to find an imperfect grey heart,
or maybe a pointed penis head,
but you know y'can't find sex, or love the way I'm grinding
against intangibles to sate
my birth-controlled soul of the need for Pollock and Picasso,
decrepit cities, dirty, ugly New York, high grade vibrators,
and kasha, brothy and deliciously filling me.