Your Valentine

Hide the cracked bowl
in the back of the cupboard
you might need it someday
but without air fresheners how
will we trust post-modernism
which may seem trivial to say
but in a poem you're allowed
to use symbols as walk-ins
when your t's aren't tall enough
or your m's don't quite gallop
over the hill sometimes what
makes it a poem and not a bowl
is that the horrible ugly vanity
of the world got frightened
by the thought of all
the stronger taller you's.

Pantanal Valentine

Props to the purple horses
on the Pantanal a blue
mist strolls through
even to be amazed doesn't
make it anymore our
little bit of ignorance
is how we know where
affliction is greatest
time-limited flat rate
sleeping solutions provide
but to squelch or fuel
a tumor or a war requires
cooperation of all
the surrounding
as in love person.

Unruined Valentine

Arriving noises but
no one's there
you can't start cleaning
first thing in the morning
it ruins the whole day
sit down or stand peering
out over the ocean a calendar
yes but think of all the damage
and despair you could succumb to
for the thousandth time
the pleasure of no pleasure
but you just can't rustle up
the tears for it anymore
can you who'll forgive you
if today's a beautiful day?

Maybe Valentine

Maybe what color
attempts and desires
having deluded the world
into luster and image
light and weight

is finally to side with one
or go over into the other
as whatever it enjoys without
expressing its own purpose
desolates both somehow

reminiscent of the Majorelle blue
you see in Morocco and the dark
purple streaks on a white ground
in the sky that night chocolatey
as the new stars came round.

Mountain Valentine

Oddly-canted oddly-mounted mountain
which I move and love I must
seem to mean to them
or do they think and see

me leap these lizards
as lightning or as dream
when I attempt to put
them in a seizure of repose

the grass the breeze
remembers then as now
how my fancy widens and returns
wearing orange wings

braked like a hawk high up
above the clovered plain
waiting for the Braille below
to say me soon.

Falling Leaf Valentine

And just as I read
'also a shrill descending
kee-oo' I heard it
faintly a few
houses away

what was it written on
by warm air in cold light
now it's no longer there
gone into farthest space
as if nothing inside

can be trusted anymore
only what returns
thoroughly learned and
thoroughly relinquished
by way of a god's reply.

Frank's Valentine

I can only stand so much
O'Hara at one time like
being tickled as a child
up along the thigh muscles
that was the worst
howling like virtue he
cannot be tragic
barefoot in the cool
grass chased by ruthless
giraffes objets d'art or truth
you don't find he wants
to possess you to replace
your mind with his
though sometimes he makes
me want to read only him
his amused absorbed and
free life like his friends
still flesh in his words.

Flicker's Valentine

A book in four parts
a flicker comes to drink
a few feet away
or a four-paned window
a heart in section
where warmth builds
to the point of combustion
light breaks out
of darkness into color
a flicker flies off
and the source of warmth
a condition with no apparent
radiating body
the mounting heat of love
a flicker enters.

Morphological Valentine

Every minute these days
I try to spend searching for
the equation of a plant the x
drawing it up divided
by the y pulling it down
those ratios reflected in the
shapes of leaves thrown
off by different sums
under different conditions
but always life enters
in a counterclockwise
fashion from distant
stars while death which
can only happen to something
that's alive unravels upwards
from deep inside the earth
after death is not
more life but being.

Collision Valentine

Thinking backwards
finally you come to the city
where you ran out
of moon ran out of self
at the end of alone
covered with ants
you stopped to writhe
of a million irritations
you unburdened me
you fixed stars but
who does the thinking
when you come to the end
of matter the end
of antlers frozen
in the high beams?

Old Notes Valentine

I wish to do better
who would not so wish

1st quarter to full -- wailing soul
and just before dark of moon

association linked to pleasure
more and more now
life is abstract

an exchange of wills
in attraction
consumes or creates

when trees and clouds
stop talking
the goal becomes
getting them
to start up again.

Urn Valentine

Yellow buds of
Christ's anthem
numb in their red
Chinese urn about
to surface again
past seeing colors
is hearing them play
the notes as leaves
have written them
each in its own timbre
is that word gay or what
dumb questions
like that throw
light on how little
thinking goes on.

Kosher Death Valentine

Not having had
not having now
a Jewish life
still I want
a kosher death
that way the animal
in me is killed
in the gentlest
possible way
not a trace of fear
in the blood
for the gods to consume
how ungrateful
I am in the end
not to stay longer.

Bridge Valentine

Getting hairier
getting heavier
slowly being
re-animalized
not a far bridge
I thought it was
a plane but it
was an ant right
where the eaves
meet the rain
once he started to
speak in apothegms
and grottoes
no one coming to lay
siege to his brain.

Mourning the Leaves Valentine

It looks like I killed
the Sweet William
that's not its name
it will come to me
when it's not needed

fertilizer burns the
way bodies fertilize
the fields why does blood
stop flowing when
the body dies

something in
the blood steps out
of the blood
itself unable to die
or to return.

October Valentine

Is it merely fall
because everything
feels finished and yet
ready to work on
and just as it was
getting to a roar
the dream of
summer cools
settles and sinks
as the dead roll in
some still pleading
with their eyes
others still locked on
some profound
pleasure.

The Idea of Freedom Valentine

Listening to Said
how he carried his
illness this morning
I thought how America
is the foolish Achilles
of now the narcissicist
cradled in lovely
genocidal woods
not taught in school
spoiled at home
what is this drama of
freedom to push
others around when
only I can free
myself?

Conscious Valentine

An afterlife is a pure necessity
of conscience not just the
memory of no consequences

in any conscious way
that some things matter
and that we not come too

abruptly to nothing does
as must happen going
forward he insists on

not being carried along
but love how many leaf edges
spines and thorns

must roses consume
to become
this flesh?

Returned Valentine (For the Future)

Today the twelfth of
October 2009 the first
orange fritillary
returned since
summer's hell
to search for her passion
vine on both sides
of the trellis she poked
around found one
new shoot on the
third rung south end
was it for that she
soared high up twice
that thread of a thing
returning fluttering?

80's Nights Valentine

Sometimes late at night
he stood out on his street
empty except for the rustle
of trees smoking a joint
one night a runner
swept past him out of
nowhere a black man
gleaming white shorts
next few nights
he waited for him
at that same time
until the runner stopped
asked if he could take
a toke and smiled
that was the first night.

Daimon Valentine

Of course whenever
I speak to you rose
or tomato plant
you laugh not
knowing it's not
to you I bow down
one humble example
but to your oversoul
the one who fills you
with himself
endlessly reflected
and conflated each
with an amazing
story to tell or
irresistible smell.

Owl Valentine

Mockingbird preaching
down the street yes it's
that day so he sings
in tongues sans accent
and sans accident

target practice moon
trying to escape
into the daylight
my plastic owl turns
its black back on you

closer and closer
to my trees he comes
his wings nostalgic
for his dragon heart
his song still not done.

Crayons Valentine

Somehow yellow
includes us all
it could be a sky
or earth but already
orange separates
itself from us
fit only for certain fires
go urgently goes red
I love even you
green responds
no chance
of peace for many
years whispers blue
thalo undercurrents
of manganese
our mother.

Tomato Valentine

From what depths
you arrive on wet bricks
gentle desert snail
after the unforgivable
summer heat a god

among the pansies
who also arrive to restart
spring where normally
fall would have intervened
we plant tomatoes

in October by May
they're burnt out
here in hell we prepare
for heaven by doing
everything in reverse.

Road Valentine

The eternal past
at $12. each
let's get more
music without
words though words
could conceitedly
be had the canal
clenched its teeth
these are just excerpts
of fragments of the lost
epic I sketched
on the way home
hoping we all
safely arrive.

Lyrical Valentine

These clouds flowing eagerly
from the south a river I can
really look up to and reflect
except a bee mostly
entered my mouth
mistaken for a hive
I was gaping so hard
and begging as if it
cloud-stricken chorister
could be stopped
don't stop I was singing
epic of clouds and stars
subterranean drama
here on my own horizon
all I hymn and hone.

Secret Valentine

The secret of coming
to sex too early in a life
before its incendiary
is ready the table
of hungry love
is it's worked into a weapon
what part of violation
don't you get when
your own dignity
betrays you its
ancient flesh
puts you off
at the wrong stop
or you are stitched into
a passing face.

Death Valentine

What is your imagination
of your death the preferred
of your pictured departures
if you had in mind a description
aneurysm or coronary

or could ride above
the outrages of Lombard St.
the bay in the background
stopping here in the middle
of the street just one element

in a detailed composition
the viewer wants to move you
over a few feet so the street
behind you doesn’t look like it’s
coming right out of your head.

Stone's Valentine

I’m always kidding everyone
how I still can’t believe
every day something even more
breathtaking than yesterday
appalling and miraculous
and haven’t figured out so far
if this is all reality’s way
of punking us or if
the earth’s to blame
for wobbling so but
today I found a stone
pale apple green what
a strange brave cheerful
being stared right back
at me from it.

Baptism Valentine

The intense baptism
by the full moon human eyes
can barely bear it
yet fall stops here and turns
gazing back at spring

the moon’s spring
comes to the dead night
the way a snail pulls back
caught behind a parade
of streaming almost-clouds

shreds of what one thinks of
the letter scene the torn
pieces falling through darkness
the wishful moon’s eye cross-
examining every scrap.

Bloody Valentine

The finch’s secret comes in fall
to get its throat bloodied anew
picking pomegranate seeds
one senses the middle level
even if it can’t get there
and flies off where and
for what unable to resist
sometimes I forget you are
there listening and go on
like a customs officer letting
terrorists inadvertently into
the poem’s true homeland
exaggerating my duplicity
totally but water-boarded
you’d too feel born again.

Children's Valentine

A pleasant tune
endlessly repeated
becomes affliction
or what is thinking
but another book title
the way it’s in love
or hate with the earth
and prefers to pursue
this luminescence in the trees
leaving us staring out at it
even as hard as autumn gets
brittle alizarin pedantic
the sun we shunned
is the sun we long for
as it is with children.