Romance

Romance

There is someone for everyone
is a lie that does not need
disproving again. Attractive

and unattractive people everywhere
are equally alone, staring
into buckets of soluble fish.

Same goes for those at all points
on the intelligence scale, all waggling
opposable thumbs at toothless, gawping

highways. Here's the point I'm supposed
to counter-argue, erect a dazzling
contrary construct, from the left-over

elements of water and air. But the truth
is, I have only one drum, and one stick
with which to play the only dance I know.

~ 

One of Six Meanings of True Love

One of Six Meanings of True Love

Love died
but they carried on anyway
each gouging and gorging
on chunks of the other 
and a kind of sick  
game commenced,
not endurance as such
but a contest to see
who could be the fattest,
who could first metamorphosize
on a moonlit leaf
and wake the next day
a butterfly.

~ 

James Tate

James Tate

The blurb on the back 
of your collected poems reads: 
An Award-Winning Gathering 

of Exquisite Poems by 
a Celebrated Poet. How 
can anything live up to that

I wonder. I usually preface sex
with an apology, and here
you are gathering and collecting

exquisiteness like a tiny god
stepping lightly through the cosmos
with your basketful of stars. Feeling

sorry for these poems
with their pale brilliant eyes
and waif-like bodies burdened

with sacks of expectation, I take
scissors from the drawer and cut
you down to size, Mr Tate.

I am your greatest creation,
Libertador freeing the words you imprisoned
in cages of light and air.










~

Envy

Envy

She thinks she can sometimes feel his sperm
pumping its insidious music,
the bassline of brutes enacting their rituals
as if scored and scratched on a cave wall.

She tells me this over tiramisu, 
the crystal lipstick-stained, the china
stacked, our spoons slicing
the chocolate jugular,
 
her pain adrift on a sea of ambivalence,
my libido anchored 
to her rendering of niggerfist. 

~

Tokyo, early Winter

Tokyo, early Winter

Above the banks of Edo river
printed letters crowd in, push
the blue-tarpaulined people under.

Cats and children punctuate in vain:
their comma curls are soon submerged.

Men with ladders come to ring
the news of their eviction

while in the slowly whitening waters
Koi are mouthing nothing. 

~