POEM

           I am not so hard to please
in the gusting rosette
of Love’s want—
something like a nun’s peace,
but my emotional-processing physiognomy
is like Frankenstein’s monstrosity-making,
or am I pinning it down right?
          Swallow your pride, My Sinking Ophelia,
my Unsinkable Sinking Ship—
you make me full of allergens
like swimming in a bath
of ragweed; the usual quotidian...
           I am not so difficult, not so difficult
to please—so fill me, will you, fill me
full of scalloped categorical putty—
       beautify me into the puppet you want—
       let’s bicker until we deflate
the unburstable balloon’s bouillon—
            I’ve got my hands on something
crude like subliminal eroticism
in Shakespearean codexes—scrolls
unraveling like cornfields
in the golden-halo scalp of morning—
           Nurture me, Great Nurturer,
with vile phrases, enthralled,
disgorged in “the usual” corona-scruff
the way blurs make sense
expelled out of a photograph,
like what Weegee saw in the distorted
nude woman showering outdoors—or
          I’m a fool’s piccolo playing
for a king’s belly-aching laughter—
                    I am not so difficult,
                    nor am I difficult to please,
I am trying to tell you!
                  Climbing up the stepladder
towards the Angelic Upstairs
with a lion’s urge—the road is so narrow
that I can feel the side-shoulder-spaces
crushing my hips,
the way you crushed me like a toadstool
caricature underneath your boots—
this rude urn I’m in, Wormwood
coming down with a burn,
coming down, heaped upon, that is
your prosperous uterus
routinely inflamed?
               Before my youth vanishes
into too bold, blunt, sun-tinted
eye-mirrors
              of my awkward childishness
in reverse,
“I am hid” like William Blake
in a Grand Opera of earless sound—
hearing your car’s blinker
             like a happy traveler,
going any direction
with elephant-memory—
I am in the shrubs, a spiderweb
             in a dewy bush—go ahead
& crown me as King of Foibles!
You, Queen of Eats!
Soups, shops, dark coffee,
jazz clubs, vintage theaters . . .
           Let’s sift out
           what we adore,
           what we do not adore
while the finger in the sand
becomes a “realist”
& intersplices into a coy compass
of commandeering acuteness.