Letter 1

Darling,
Here are eight of the pictures I made while I was in the hospital. Since they are in the same notebooks in which I wrote "Asylum Poems", they ought to be onsidered as a sort of accompaniment to that text, although in an inexact sort of way, and not as a "background", either . . . more like visual versions of the same sort of verbal commentary with which I combatted boredom. There is nothing natural about a place like that. Everything is made of linoleum and cotton swabs. Even the other people. I'm ecstatic to be away from there, and able now

to resume life as a shepherd, shepherding words and senses together and now, also, of course, wow, thank you for sending me all of those beautiful pictures of your gorgeous pussy, which I will shepherd as well, with my hands over the hills and dales of your voluptrix, leading you to the cover of some high brush where I'll lay you back and lick your bush and slit and core your asshole with my finger until cranberries and stars befall us from on high, and then, gushing with erotic light, I'll work my cock into your slit and make you wide inside as it and I go slowly up you, like a weighty ferry floating a load of marble up the Danube, to "Vienna", where I'll lick your lips for breakfast after I fill you full of juice, after our torrential rains, after our hair flies, after you make the base of my cock a gleaming pool of pussy juice. I can't wait

to meet you in the Jerseys. I been there, baby, I know that ground, and I'll help you walk it, without stepping on any angel droppings or shreds of black plastic garbage bags that are the New Jersey state flower. The state bird there is the snark. It looks a lot like your pussy, and sings like the poems I write in honor of it. We'll hunt this creature out, under the boardwalks, evenings at high tide. The swell of blood at your face and between your legs will make it easier to see it. And it will be a good exercise for you, too, to begin to differentiate between a big white gull and my throbbing cock. The language of each has the same IE base, but mine flies wingless and goes on automatic pilot.

Okay: Love letters ought to be as short and suggestive as love-making is long and explicative: Real pussies for real cocks. Real saliva, real sweat and real cum. The letters ought to just make us stiffs of anticipation, excitable enough to jerk off under stars, but with plenty of suggestible reference left for unbuttoming actual buttons, and kissing, licking and sucking whatever reality drops in those moments from ceilings, pants and dresses.

I love you, baby. I'm love crazy. As you said in your note with the pictures, or asked, was I ready, for, "it" . . . and, yes: All I want to do is, touch you, kiss you, lick you, suck you, finger you, fuck you, walk around with you, sit down and have a meal with you (squijili), then go down on you again and eat you for a few more hours or days or centuries. Ah, hummm. Not to say my cock doesn't want his share of your lips, as well. Sweet.
Yeah.
XX
Your Honey


*

My Life, Part 1

I want to be a Berber.
- Kathy Acker

Starlight on backside
of cloud, whose light,

unseen, seeds the next
day's rain, or morphine

shot through dirty
khakis for a short

lifetime's case of
virulent hepatitus:

We laughed so hard
in Haiki's trailer, that,

then, so, yeah, we all
knew much, being

the children of bus station
personnel, about

what was present,
getting it, and transporting it

metabolically, well,
you know what I

mean to say
when speaking incoherently

about a picture painted
entirely in black:

Haiki stood on his head
and said "Malevich"

while Cream wailed
White Room on the stereo

as we waited for Aurora
Borealis. For months.

"They grow nice grapes
in Belgium." Some wit

actually said that, way past
midnight. I have always

loved the bleached stone
of the earth, stoned

on some sweet rock honey
Red Leb hash, watching

the air go white, with
the rise of the sinister

Sunne, at that precise
point, a mythological

being, like Sinbad the Sailor
against whose juicy lips

I press my own, as if
he in dream were my own

mother, yes, the impenetrable
Gene Tierney, with asps

swift and soft in her hair,
blown by sweet sea breezes

of the Persian Gulf, topless
in pantaloons, with a rag

wrapped around her subtle,
thin wrist in mourning for

the moon. The door opens,
and the world goes

green against eyes spent
with the black scrawls of

some inner alphabet
that scorches the horizon's

rim, ash by bitter ash
so we can read it, hold it

and keep it "for later."
Fuck, baby, I can no wait

tha' long. Johnny, from
the next room. There is no

"next room." Voices
in my ear are like fish

in water, still racked
by thirst: I hear all

that is but impossibly
present. All is present.

Here comes everybody:
The Sunne emerges

from the outer world
and with a crushing roar,

bruises its way into
the nave of my church

and locks my throat
in place. Beljiki. What?

We are desert people,
nomads living in the detritus

of spent America, thorns,
no, thrones, in the apple

paradise of the eastern
seaboard, lacking for

nothing, and without
east coast unilateral money:

We haunt the skins of
one another, searching out

some semblance of
pixie dust, and fresh dried

sweat is sexy, but
I like, you know, the works

giving sweet taste:
I wanna be pricked by

the thorn-apple and feel
in the torso of meso America

at my middle, the sharp
tin of a star's edge

gash, that whatever
possesses me, might emerge.

Sleep possesses me, so
I wake to it: Press

my heart between
the sun and the moon,

hot and cold, or
in my left hand, a four-

pound torch and in my right,
a pint of clear water.

Draw them together
and burn me, drown me:

Throw me on the floor
that I might consume myself

in peace, in fury: Nothingness
come and been gone.


*

Memorable Lunch

Camp? What camp?
-Anon.

No lunch
and a memorable

fog descends
just above

the rattling
black plastic

sheet I'm
squatting under:

Just me,
Mother Nature

and her drenching
pelt of rain.


*

Extasy

for Peteris Cedrins

Rumi said
that people

in his country
love to hear

poetry read
to them

as an
entertainment

to delay
their having

to act: Exactly
what they are

too frightened
to do. In fact,

they hate
poetry, because

it comes
through

a constituency
of acts

that are
continuous

and contingent
upon

feeling deeply
for others

and for
the things of

this world.
The Sufi must

reveal God's
intent

in everything
that otherwise

cannot be
named. We do not

ask to be
called a beet

or a carrot
when we are

cousin to
the rhutabaga,

nor do we ask
our human

dependents
to yell, Hey,

you big, fat
turnip, get up

out of the ground
and report

for kitchen duty,
without also being

prepared
to be totally

torn from life
by our hair.


*

Theosophia

for Jess

To be driven to near
madness, without

losing the grammar
necessary to say

any and everything
through which

sounding I may become
the illiterate

goldsmith who leaves
pink finger streaks

in the light alloy
of your skin when

he touches you:
The grief of lover

and beloved is not
absence, but

refusal to address
the void still present

even when pressing
skin to skin,

the identity of
separate action, yet

remaining completely joined
in the act: Sexuality

is equational, literal
and numeral as well as

perfectly metaphorical:
We do not see

the blue sea for
the foam we stir up

on its surface,
and what we see of

that has little to do
with the weight of

the fluency pounding
down from the heart

whose blood hums
between both your legs

and my own: The exchange
of salt, the Roman

salary, to pay the legions
for our mutual

intervention one
upon the other: Consider

not only the image
in the mirror's glass,

but the glass itself,
and what becomes of

time: The silicon
in the sand clock becomes

the device by which to
reflect upon one's looks,

the vegetable state
become conscious again:

Wing a tomato at the moon.
My experience of

the numinous is from
direct experience with your

gleaming pussy
and the moistness of

your armpits: Smell
your elbows while I

squeeze both cheeks of
your ass and let my hands

slide up the Spanish
peninsula of your hips

to the ball-and-chain
baby maker of your belly

rounding side to side
against my own, while I

sniff the fur of your
musky underarms

to complete the Soviet
twenty years too late

but right on time:
Spread your cunt lips

with your fingers
so I can work the head of

my cock in the personal
faith of your opening,

and lodge its weight up
against the biological

endeavor to resist, yet
equally feel its gash

widen measurably
with pleasure and real

juice: Then is hijira,
withdrawal, and again the push

forward, jihad, spark
of the convincing:

hijira, jihad, hijira, jihad,
far in beyond

the plush purple
horizon of your thighs,

this conscious rebellion
against the injustice of

ennui, or its shell of
interesting dailiness,

for our inclinations
toward and movements

within each other are
intrinsic affirmations

that the gods are being
reformed as inevitably as

snap beans grown long
in a late summer garden:

Inevitability is a catastrophe
of divine disinterest:

Things going on as before:
No. There is no original

sin from which to fear
retribution, for then I am

free to praise thee, it matters
not, of the two ways:

Selfishly, to the occlusion of
all else, for my own, or

giving my all, not to own
but to see thee as to

thyself pure value: Both
praises, either side of

a single coin. I finger
its edge: What sustainer

would make those in wont
to be satisfied, fearful?

I look in your face
and say Who is this

mirrored so fully back
through the bright, dark

cups of her eyes? She is
the working of the dissolution

of subject/object
relations: The undifferentiated

"difference" of being who you
are, with another into whose

heart you have disappeared
but to manifest there

and be manifested as
one of the faces of

the Godhead, seeing itself
through your looking at

me looking at you seeing me
see you: The first sound

realized in the church of
the obsidian night, forever:

You a single, me a single
and the shares of each

a singular presence, perfectible
love, an encounter

that will burn, with
esoteric delight, the names of

all the substances at hand
tenderly into their own

cognition, felt invisibly, yet
fully, in perfect blasphemy

and faith, right to the tips
of each of our tongues.


*

Irony

Jamal al-Din al-Afghani,
whose acolyte Mirza

Reza shot Nasr al-Din Shah
dead in Tehran in 1896,

was protected by
the Ottoman Sultan

when Iran attempted to
extradite him for

"significance" in the murder.
Al-Afghani died

the following year in Istanbul
from cancer of the chin,

after threatening to
castrate himself at the urging of

the Ottoman Sultan
that he marry. In Qandahar,

he brought military ruler
Azam Khan into an alliance

with Russia against
the British, but was forced to

flee by Khan's brother.
A fierce ascetic, he inveighed

against every materialist
from Democritus to Darwin,

saying they had "opened
the gates to the dogs of

acculturation." Prophesy,
he claimed, was a craft,

and identical to philosophy:
Tactical thought in transparent

eye-to-eye exchange
has always been thought

penetrating, devisive
and heretical to metaphor.


*

Your Front is Behind your Rear

for Jess

According to Benedetto
Croce, there are

four sciences. We have
three of them

so easily that we take
the fourth for

granted: The Beautiful,
the Good, and the True,

corresponding to
Aesthetics, Ethics

and Logos. But these
must be grounded in

and activated by
an intending body of

proprioception: Economos,
or the Useful.

Without it, no call
through the other three

can be heard: What is
thinkable, is do-able

and thought ought not
remain in the dictionary,

but flow through
battered streets: The voice

to dent the air, scour it,
roughen it in the same

sense that sex is for
creating in the beloved

an animal husk in
rough desire whose satisfaction

makes the temperate
spirit break forth and rise

to flush your face, yes:
Yours. Let me loose

the leather thongs of
your horizon and slip

my hand between
heavenly and earthly

paradise and finger
the folds of your little

river until waves of
renewal liberate it from

its own positivist accretions:
You are Thera, 2500 BC,

now a small, dark, hard
lava rock I hold in my

mouth: Hear it rattle
against my few remaining

teeth? When I hear
the moan of your syllabic

principia, my kappa
stiffens, and like a child

I think in symbiotic
rhyme: Ka ka, cha cha,

chi chi, da da, kai kai,
and on for all I'm

worth, building by
sound the fundamental

bulwark that will
keep your pussy spread

so that the A at
the tip of my tongue

can touch the rotund
arc of your simple O.

So: Where were you
when I was born?

What star-bright beam
of love carried you

all the way to the rim of
my mortality, and spoke to me

in the language of
the dahlia, the chrysanthemum,

the simple white daisy
field that blinded me with

its pelt (all yours) as
I climbed the tantrik

ladder fondly through
the blizzard of our love

to find myself in clear air
on a snowy mountaintop?

Cream in my throat:
I must have drunk it up

from you, plus
a pitch of midnight

brandy and new ash
from recent fires. Are you

there at all, my darling?
Kosmos, bios, parados:

The green silk of
your inner thighs

and their intense heat
as my hand draws up

to gauge the depth of
your smuggler's cove:

Fucked, and fucked again.
Swollen with eggs,

which grow, as from a dream
into the dangling roots

that grasp the present
moment, ta'wil, and my hand

strokes your Scorpion
moon, which bristles back

fur: The wraith of fire
around a star. The pit

of our bodies reeks of
the Dharma, for all belief

is filth, stolen from libido,
the mate of its own

inversion, and bent on
nothing more than living

on a deserted island
and fucking all 10,000

devils that are stranded
there. But I have,

tucked away in the brush
just up from the littoral

of the deific sea, a full ring
of dried figs, and two jugs

of fresh water. All
we have to do is meet

for three hours a night
in the dark, "in behind

the liver, and just below
the heart," and, accompanied

by the screams of
earthly hell in perpetual

orgasm, begin carving
from our oaken bones,

the prow, keel and steering
oar of the proportionate

craft we'll climb into
when we're finished cutting it

out of ourselves, and set
hard to port, with heart's

wind behind us in our
sails, forward into the rush

of perfect, salt sweet
airs of decanted mystery

and device, to measure
the parasensory sinews

that bring us to
a journeyman's fluency

in our black-gold blood,
and the music of

its impropriety
as it sucks us full into

each other's pores
with total dignity and grace.


*