As/Is







8.28.2007


the front, the sirens

high & live wires make for ecstatic marionettes

nudes walk west pressing overripe blackberries

to their chest and let the juice trace the body

to rest in choice crevices sweet await devour.

***

the thighs of the damned like bisquik and hot water!

the music of the feet of the damned on the pregnant

river’s silted shore! the questions of the damned in

typewriter voices! the computer where the damned dot matrix!

***

the turntable where the record forever waits to be turned

over, it’s needle arm in continuous repetitive click at

the end of a side, the warm sound you make on the brink

of orgasm that richly fills the room where we lie in redtones.

***

tornado before siren after rains wash out paper and only

paperweight is left to fend. the power of water

eroding rock and wind, eroding chemical attachments

keep the sound of thump artist’s rattlesong in your ears.

***

in the whisperdark of an outage we need something

to meditate on to salvage our wits. dwell on an old favorite

cartoon show, Tom and Jerry haply, dwell on the French

kiss you gave Jeanne to taste the ripe raspberries she’d just eaten.

***

eighth hour of the outage, in the moment of flood wading,

remember the room of nudes by Picasso, Manet, Matisse

faces aware of everything but their own inhibitions and our presence,

the still life apple all seeing eyeball unaware of appleness.

***

in the pitch of basement, Nicolette mistakes flood waters

for the River Styx and her husband for Charon keeper

of the raft. when they lay together in the exhaustion

of spent midnights, their sweatskin tastes of pomegranate.

***

before sunrise John sneaks out of bed into kitchens,

somnambulant, he walks over glass mistaking shards

for skins of blueberries, eating floor glass, he washes

it down with milk laced with his blood vampiric stoical.

***

wind predicts. models are nudes are modes

of turbulence. in drifting gray of morning

after a night of no new moon her negligee

tossed carelessly makes a sheer cover for the fishbowl.

***

lightning cracks fishwrist and hair stands electric

thunder strikes slipdisk distant fabric flaps unhinged

unbiased a-burgeoning bacteriality on floors

of favorite moldsmell blackberry tongue raspberry entangle.