Li Po's Uncle's Valentine

By ice-light otherwise
I traveled and through
much yellow-red I bled
and was convicted
multiple Waldens ago

no I hardly know
what I’m saying
till after three days
he started to stink
self-knowledge stinks

but it reorients one
in his dark room
don’t you think
we talked remembering
our loves?

Mango Valentine

Why do we let the ripe mangoes
we bought lie rotting in the crisper
why to compliment uniqueness
do we refer to someone else
I was reading a report

about a comet flying
right through the sun
a bullet through a heart
coming out the other side
spattering blood everywhere

but if that happens
you will never be reading this
and it will be as if
the very idea of poetry
had never existed.

For the One Concerned Death Is a Singularity Valentine

I want to pour out
over those worst days
as if it were possible
to do so in advance
my most expensive perfume

but we’re all still waiting here in terror
behind the gate
at a certain angle you can see
the camps through the fence
dogs barking and sirens

put away three months of food
build a shelter
my timid friends
once led to the abyss
we must deliver.

Valentine Equals Valentine

Let’s love
one another
equally
you no more
than me

would I
have loved
you as
yourself if
there had been

enough
for me I
would have
loved you
even more.

Naked Valentine

Morning in its most
immaculate pants
removes them
this Europe must be
feeling us so much

inside and if
I privilege the senses
in this context
it’s not only my childhood
kicking in and up

here’s where we stay
you’re the best
please don’t leave
me any longer
than you must.

Brenda's Valentine

When I compare it to science’s
ambition or money’s angry lust
don’t you wonder about poetry’s
staged performance problems
or her self-respect

as when beauty’s snubbed or tamed
by the mind in favor of
loose matter sloughing off
or striding down toward some
sandy replication

which is always a beach
in a walled garden
where you can sit so still
you become someone
else’s conflagration.

Rachel's Valentine

All love poems call
poetry back (biatch)
to her sweet onions
not in the churches or stage
nor the last mouthful
of self-worship

but in someone else’s eyes
wickedness assembles me
a search party beats it
out of the night the future
forces it to give itself away

my ideals exceed me
by say a country century while I
was passing through your head
reading
your lovely poem.

Player's Valentine

I love it when he plays
the mouse craven and
beneath himself despite
his good looks earning
those pores on his face

numinous and deep craters
his shirt open as he crumbles
to the floor under
the first punch
if even the forbidden

forbids us we want it
still more always
in good cheer
under the blows
as if noticed.

Diana's Valentine

Among the Taurians
or at Brauron in Attica
the equals the similar ones
the river unyielding and
then gently swimming out

isn’t it only a question
of giving in to a god’s demands
a goat as if she were
your daughter or
a cock-and-bull story

half savage half coward
she carries us little ones
both animal and human
while we’re still enemies
to others and ourselves.

Turquoise Valentine

You can’t refuse
the first love
not at first
you’re not qualified
for discounts

but the second
is up for grabs
and must decide
to settle on the third
and only alternative

the most amphibious
of all my children
who carries a stone heart
in his pocket and
the other one in your heart.

Tell Them Valentine

Tell them heavy
on everything she said
over her customers’ heads
that way you’re sure to get
what’s fresh not something

that’s sat around all week
she made the happy talk of the guilty
unless there’s nothing
fresh today a day without freshness
would be like no other day

finally a day
the finals day
tell them
heavy
on everything.

Too Early (Paul's) Valentine

Still in the tragic half
of cozy morning before belief
steps in with its one giant misperception
must be forwarded
separately postage due

still in the darkness that won’t
quite recognize itself cornered
still breathing diaphragmatically
as if nothing will happen
until it gets back

in the earliest thing you can’t
even imagine happening
all we love is but
the shattered picture
of what’s really here.

Love System Valentine

There are only two children
of metaphor
birth and/or death
what part he goes
don’t you get

smartass you know
I love you and
you’ve always used that
in my favor
but the love system

works like that
we its heirs
and ripe falling
to the ground
its hearts.

Student's Valentine

God is simply the evolution
of the human portrayed at the highest level
he worked to get there
what’s so difficult
about that concept

how each wave of children
brings another stepping forward
into the loss of one
thing the acquisition
of another

we are the students of
birth and death
this work
just what the gods
won't do.

Late Summer Valentine

Is there something more important
about personal feeling than an
accurate description of nature
which privileges depiction over caring
if every single poem defines poetry

outside of its success or failure
why is there still an animal several
blocks away who knows
I’m sitting here can sense
me the abandoned tenement

of his heart and several lakes
I’ve managed in several dark places
I would like to see again
mostly the color green though
you and I could never get enough.

Children's Valentine

Of those who cross
some drown some are never found
let me pause here
so you can fill in the blanks
with more empty spaces

or some are beaten raped
flung far upstream
abandoned or shot why
are thousands of children alone
running toward Manhattan

is it just to feed their hearts
with stones and send back
does that make sense
a few dineros
to their families?

Exploding Valentine

I wanted to know how
you could be taken
by something that would
devour you that would
bestow its circuitry

on you so you could
finish your desert
and take me home
later always a little later
when everything is finished

or when a glass
of wine explodes
in my heart
no I mean
your hand.

Stony Valentine

The tiny stones
we carry in
with us
for their final grinding
into the ficus hurled

or the cactus
that must first
bite the tender soles
of our bare feet
so we ascend or leap

shattering
into matter fast
whatever comes
poised as gratitude
or lust.

Hero's Valentine

I didn’t want a crown
or wings on my feet
I couldn’t even feel the infection
but he said the stitches
were purely preventive

I lay on the table and gagged
and gagged making
my mind say our prayers
have left us O lord
I am here all alone

so if you must praise
heroes and the brave
nation we are
look first
to the people we tortured.

Punked Valentine

To pray to ourselves
as if to a god or goddess
that kind of reverence
due benevolence
wherever it happens

and in the morning crowded
with dew and forgiveness
the deft alertness
of the light
spun from ourselves

into the darkness behind the things
clicks forward
to the midnight sun
sung by June Christy
not Julie Christie.

Scary Valentine

Valentines are only things
for sieving words
like paintings are to
color alongside of
and despite the seascapes

of abstract humanism
what’s moral is what
it means and therefore
generally avoided or
traduced by whatever

flowers
it is the heart open
alone and alarmingly
red that serves
our purpose.

Vellum Valentine

Now we live in the day
thinking starts to think
about thinking in less
intellectual less
brain-bound ways

in which thoughts
make use of their own residue
to heft a body through
the crumbling vellum
of some greater mind

who wrote to us long ago
the current episode puts it
letting them move us
all the way back
to the original mood.

Strange Drapes Valentine #54

On the luciferic side
of the issue the drinkers
and talkers and other kinds of
ecstatic folks I go back and
forth between the Vikings

and the monks of the kells
the holy inlets where the
elves and pale sylphs
were last observed
and written down

and those who don’t trust words
lost in the art of sailing around
them and the plunder of time
and place the more violent
side of the argument takes.

Ripe Valentine

I have taken a skilled saw
to my ego it wasn’t pretty
but now it’s a useful piece
of furniture festooned with
geegaws and gorgeous peaks

and three wrinkled pluots
grown near Mount Tamalpais
staring out of their plastic box
when I think certain thoughts
or open the frig too quickly

why have I never tried one before
they look sour but are probably
quite sweet ripe often
as sweet as it gets
out here.

Enough Valentine

A life lived between
two deaths spent walking
but if you have to visualize it
it’s a lot less
contemplative than that

that would be enough
if not the permanent as such
who or what experiences
the permanency anyway
that would be enough

that the light come
with you through the door
whether you are leaving
or just getting here
that would be enough.

Nothing's Valentine

What can’t be thought
can’t be brought to the table
except as a category of emptiness
only imaginable within
some greater fender bender

which goes on and on
creating out of nothing
where some new thing
comes fully into being
capable of devouring

mere you and me
being mere you and me
nothing meaning the invisible
something meaning matter
you meaning me.

Neighbor's Valentine

He knew she liked
his garden when her
husband mistook
the plan of it
he talked daylilies

and roses between
us and our teeth’s
vast wisdom
a storehouse of desire
for all things

when he began to see
how the world had to be made
something had to come
from nothing
disguised as us.

Hungry Valentine

Blame the shallow
gate between
the doe’s
and the daylily’s
gardens

the wild inhuman
and the cultivated
weeds between
fog and coffee
animals feeding

on dreams
and a woman
in a seaside room
who’s already
bloomed forever.

Wall's Valentine

Where a pale wall
with some pull
and some dusk
in it blurs
the shadows of its branches

can you tell it’s a
pomegranate tree
can you see where it’s
sitting sketching you
as visual poetry

and aren’t you excited
to be living now
when we’d rather have
the apocalypse
than to have to care?

American Valentine

My need became
so great it became
a right my rights
so great it became
all your wrong

painfully it became
unconstitutional in
the molecular sense
I could see the bombing
the dollar was dead

and the people
soon upon the disease
so who do you love
take them
hold them.

Calm Valentine

As many dead
flow out with the dawn
that many newborns pour in
with the next full moon
light ferries

them out that last
in either case
few yards
where often
one can panic

and feel like turning back
catching a glimpse
of the immensity
of our lives
so calm.

Trouble's Valentine

Big big trouble
have you ever been
in big big trouble
since the fourth
grade dude

no dude I mean
serious prison trouble
death trouble love trouble
you have no idea what’s
going up your butt trouble

no you haven’t have you
but you think
that’s somehow
all your doing
don’t you dude?

Eclipsed Valentine

The muse is paid
to tell the truth
not merely to amuse us
but what is that
from his vantage point

as a being of air
and light but these
dark baggages
our thoughts
mine of you

yours of me
how not when at this
very moment
everything we
touch is moral.

Evidential Valentine

Sometimes I can feel
the speed and chill
of the darkness all around
us as it leaks through
some opened door in space

floating back
at a certain angle yellow
cycles into life
a breathing system
an exculpatory system

and a set of wrenches
with which to tweak the heart
love pounding
and pounding
just to make it go.

Wet Valentine

Catching my sandal
on the lip of the sky
of the abyss I tumbled
forward down
into a puddle

into which the blood
from my turned
knee flowed out sweetly
into the delta I thought
of a new day

but some other trip
or bird of fate
it will take
to push me
from this nest.

Barbara's Valentine

Only by chance
did I remember
to look outward
through a clear
clean window

only by chance
did I remember
to find you again
the tell of new
laughter

only by chance
did I remember
my life in
the act of
giving it away.

Money is Made on the Moon Valentine

Money is a moony substance
a mercury the more you hold
on to it the more it scalds but
if you let it flow right on through
you bringing it forward and letting

go the more it harbors you
starts to heal you from within
all these your children
your sisters and brothers
you can help

no one so special
as to be above
another
or refuse
to share or shine.

2009 Valentine

A long rap of violence
which the myth masks
of a kind country
a godly and a free
while you were running naked toward me

reading a long frog poem
about what destroys
is death and death
is winning all of us
tools of the banks

the greedy who fear
death most buying
death off with more death
or at least we who do little
keep letting them think so.

Wave's Valentine

You mean to
make something
particular with no
particular
meaning out of

grasps at meaning
lunges at it
as against great
darkness a wave
breaks in and out of

meaning rain as
wind ensembles
under my hand
I could feel its hand
slowly expand.