The Slaughter House

we are no limp paw on a dumb path

we claw at the door

gnaw at the pane

willfully remembering

the jagged edge of every old entry

the flesh wounds on my flanks

your unspoken animus

mauling and moaning in me

we backstab

at a final branding penetration

lured back to these cold rooms

we unexist ourselves in rituals

of over and over

you from a hawk to a hummingbird

hovering beside my zero hour

and I allow you to drink darkly

from the deep pull

of my bitter thirst

for all of this blooding

 the knife of your never

ending lust

letting go

Sonnet V

Still these small events of love continue burning.

I want to tell you that today I pruned my plum;

(in my mind another field of dreams keeps churning)

If you’re brave enough to wax it, he will come.

He will come! Oh I remember! How could I forget

the swift effusions of delight that always followed

the satisfaction on his face so hot and wet

when he looked down and saw that I had swallowed?

Such tawdry instances of our rapturous glee

should perhaps be saved from public view,

but what the hell, each we are the fruit of its debris,

and surely sex, impure tradition, can still renew.

Why should poems be such a courteous forum

when life is made of lapses in decorum?

Sonnet IV

I was never fully yours, you were never fully mine!

Such is the drama that oft exhausts your will.

It’s time to take a break from all this scheming rhyme

before I imagine that such a hocus-pocus skill

can conjure up more meaning than it does,

but I must confess I have some faith in magic

and to match words gives me quite a buzz,

although I know that so many think it tragic

to appeal to mysteries in a world of science.

I should be avant-garde! I should be new!

And yet here I am in all my old defiance,

concocting poems that star the pronouns me and you—

(despite the thousands spent on therapy and learning,

still these small events of love continue burning).

Sonnet III

They don’t know us. They only know our names

for each other now that we’re not together;

I’m an X, you’re an X, such are the frames

that forecast our meanings, like the weather.

Some like to claim they know what’s coming next

and make decisions based on all their careful notes;

such people are understandably quite vexed

when life ignores their plans and grabs their throats.

It’s raining now, and though that was unexpected,

what’s strange is that the noise against the pane

is soft and comforting tonight. I am protected

by the vagaries of the sky and yet again

the thought that like a moon in its constant ebb and shine,

I could never be fully yours, nor you be fully mine.

Sonnet II

A little circle for myself to hold the fear,

a half moon hanging in a crisp blue night,

a cigarette for company, some clear

white wine and the soft delicious fright

that I am now alone, and yet content

that words may never mean just what they mean,

but to imagine I can infiltrate their intent

and measure out the moves of this machine—

such witchcraft in the casting of these spells—

should I drown or swim? I cannot choose,

for though I know our story all too well,

I still feel there may be something left to lose

by owning up to my accuser’s claims;

but they don’t know us, they only know our names.

Sonnet I

When it seems that everything’s been said,
I’m still stirred by some unformed thing to say,
deep down I think I’ll find it in my head,
some spell to keep this languaging at bay.
My thinking is my blessing and my curse,
thank God today it’s yielding precious little,
but to be silent or be easy, which is worse?
Critics answer in their voices hot with spittle—
How clean such lofty voices sure must be
to have escaped all that upon which it is frowned,
what distances such confidence must see
while I kick about old fruit upon old ground.
I started for somewhere else but still I’m here,
a little circle for myself to hold the fear.

Coda

Perhaps it is not about taming
the language, but rather trusting

the mouth of the river; the flow of the mind
is not to be easily tempered. Speech

is a construct, an artifact, not an essential
revelation. We are tangled in the weavings

of even our most elegant words. We scratch
at the scabs of our efforts to love one another,

to remake the world. We plot ideas,
the instruments of our glory, intangible,

only to find we arrive and arrive
without end. Language is innocent—wordless

we are equally empty. Silence? Perhaps we think
it would hurt less, but would it scorch even more

to feel the pointlessness and be
ignorant of the music we could make?

Deserted

You are gone from me and there’s no point trying

to entice you back to the fleeting shore

of salty allusions or well crafted memories,

these vain attempts to figure out what is

already known—there is a deep elusive sea

at the center of creation and it keeps us thirsty

to sustain the mirage—you were only another

imagining, seemingly more fertile, more muscular

than the others, but you were always the same

impotent poem; you ended and refused to be re-written.