Complete Valentine

1.3 pounds of
poetry please
language English
in a 5x7 inch
product dimension
picture it and five
star reader review
among the first
50K best ranked
writers ever in
the world O happy
birthday Walt!

To Anyone Who I Love Valentine

Don’t forget I am hungry
for touch even if only
the touch of the mind
the mind of a clothes dryer
spinning my sodden thoughts
the mind of a freezer
cycling them on and off
the rhinoceros mind
of the garbage truck
charging up and down
these valleys I mean alleys
the Thursday mind
of the mind’s week off
the by then we’ve gotten
over it mind empty and afloat
fresh out of everything
thirsty for you

Magician's Valentine

Don’t forget there are
four hundred virtues
in the world still held
in thrall by a wicked
magician who will
rescue them stolen
from heaven’s giant
painting gallery and
taken hostage here
on earth unearthed
in every human life
a fairytale gone wrong
a strangled song

You Look Like You’re Ready For Some More Fucking Said The Banker To The Bridge Valentine

Don’t forget Liberace was bald who knew wearing his Emperor clothes one realizes how much he had to cover up to create a continuing distraction a circus of high-wire fingering playing to the rubes who hated him and loved him and even the people who played him had to laugh with embarrassment and faint disgust to be doing so in interviews

Pretentious Valentine

Don’t forget in those days you had to play the game when there was still a game to be played an audience to play to who was flogging whom but the effort had to be made the pretense asserted and laughed at the subject averted and cursed at to think of the density of matter as the depth of our dishonesty all the world we built to cover up our truth

First Valentine

It seems to me we are always losing ourselves and then in some other way finding ourselves losing ourselves to what we love and serve and then finding ourselves inside ourselves in our loneliness let’s admit it and in our cravings a kind of rocking back and forth but the first faith was to lose all conviction in this world to stand freely inside it and to know it as the real dreaming in which we struggle to wake up with perhaps a blow to the head finding ourselves in the little finger or the fifth metatarsal bone of some great being at last

Memorial Valentine

Is that the shadow of a hoplite soldier leading away three tied captives behind the orange tree or what I just noticed them passing the window thinking how Wagner would have loved Puccini how their first operas were both titled ‘The Fairies’ different plots but oddly both premiered about the same time after Wagner’s death this was the manuscript he gave to Ludwig and subsequently came into Hitler’s hands perishing with him in the bombing of Berlin neither one of them produced much these days but how they both confirmed the magical origins of music

Call Me Valentine

Don’t forget if we were clairaudient as originally intended we wouldn’t need these phones leading us around by the nose if we could listen at the level of the soul unspeakable idea would you stop that pounding don't forget if Tristan and Isolde had gotten rid of that ‘and’ between  them they could have become ‘Trisolde’ a being in love with itself but
in a good way whirled from the dream of the world to the stillness of everything everywhere behind its faithless frontier

Night Watering Valentine

Don't forget me walking in the dark yard with a hose in my hand bestowing blessings on the black flowers into which the world has lapsed taking my garden with it though I can hear the larkspur slurping and the grass licking its feet and now the moon silvers wherever the water’s fallen little icy drops outlined as leaves unlike the sun the moon will sleep with anyone we feel it could be human but the sun we know’s divine

Tender Valentine

Don’t forget though I don’t think clearly I can sense someone else inside me who does at times without whom I/we could not continue he or she or it who thinks me through and through returns every day to his idea and picks me up as if I was his baby he has raised from the dead and taught to walk and talk and almost to think on his own terms at times

Old Valentine

Don't forget I’m a naturalist
of quarreling things

let them carry on to get along

limited as we are to this world

 its harsh and tender skies

but I think we took nature somehow

 a wrong turn into ourselves

and what works innocently

 on the outside

not so much on the inside see

 where we’re torn apart

and flayed and lifted up

 always promising ourselves

just one more middle passage.

 

Emperor's Valentine

Don’t forget after a week or so even the clenched fists of the peonies slowly open into shredded variations on the rose luxurious pink and red and white clouds you want to rest your head on who drink in the sun the way I drink my coffee in gulps and starts in the cold mornings of the north they are cut down and brought here yeah even unto the desert so this ancient emperor can remember his early childhood there

DOA Valentine

Don’t forget in Phoenix mostly the rain is dead on arrival until the monsoon season cometh which I think of as a giant brain in the process of its disintegration there is so much forgetting it starts to pile up like icebergs melting on the highway in the distance and what we call instinct in a bird or animal some larger soul encompasses as its intelligence displayed in parts separating from the whole which whimpers in the pain of their delivery rain we had forgotten how

Break-Up Sex Valentine

Don’t forget if you want to be around a man it means there’s still a woman inside you enjoying being there and if you want to be around a woman it means there’s still a woman inside you enjoying being there this is true regardless of your current gender because slowly we're all becoming women again though right now we go back and forth loving and hating our sex loving and hating the other sex as if we still haven't gotten over that first fight and break-up

Bathtub Valentine

Don’t forget when I kept dreaming all day that I would finally break down finally just surrender to helpless sobbing for ten hours or so and then sleep for two and a half days the accumulation of so much sadness from the world outside and in until drop by drop the bath overflows a continuous stream of blessings though some would not see it that way tears as a blessing in disguise but how can what’s disguised be good as a bathtub feels

Competitive Valentine

Don’t forget I got your back how you got my back when you got nothing to get my back with OK so I got your front the better half the one you keep up as if I didn’t guess sooner or later you would take off down the street in the middle of the conversation to inhale one or two leaving me to face the inescapably competitive nature of poetry alone which I loathe and understand whence the prizes like Justin Bieber asking to have his craft taken seriously thus bringing to that word a whole new focus ‘I am not a gimmick’ which reminded me of ‘I am not a crook’ except now the Watergate Hotel is the whole heart of America a heart which has always believed it’s being seriously burgled when it goes along with things

Whitsun Valentine

Don’t forget I’m actually afraid of writing which is why I do it every day I force myself to say something worthy of balloons or lovers to speak up even if only for the sake of the language itself which can only evolve further by wasting away into some new unspeakable language until by the end of time we’ll have as many languages as people living or having lived on the earth and after that there will be silence the final silence of incomprehension like the silence of a mosquito inserting its needle exact as a hurricane lovely as all power funny how the feast of flowers is also the feast of flames and the feast of screams

Debtor's Valentine

Don't forget the almost laughable unsustainability of human relations short term and still there is nothing else boat-like to sustain us with and for not that we haven’t worked with substitutionalist propaganda before as in Uganda once there rose up the harvest of a people as here in America more slowly we ate the natives and the natives ate the natives as they came upon them in their way but how can there still be this dreadful meanness in the world that wants other people to die for us if not each succeeding innocent-seeming generation until all the debts are paid

Don't Forget Valentine

Don’t forget Joe Brainard
fucked Joe LeSueur but
he was in love with Frank O’Hara
don’t forget how I have made it
so easy for you to be my slave
first of course by being terrific
so you would want to envy me
if you could but you’re too good
don’t forget I am like a beautiful lake
smashed by a highway
I will arrive and drive by
as in the body of a boy I did
craving those cattails when
the water still looked cold
and pure when the sky
took off its clothes
and slid its body in
don’t forget that incoherent meal
of malice and buttered leeks
thinking the only thing I trust

is my desire to get something done

don’t forget...

 

Jacob's Valentine

I had to climb a ladder
to get to where you fell
to where the vines
were going off the rail
so I said to my cock
no it’s not you it’s me
it’s entirely not your fault
innocent fleshy plumage
like another ear or extra hand
in the shape of one large finger
whether you were large or small 
had nothing to do with you
essentially blown up like a balloon
but what I want to know
is who does the blowing
that everything be subject
to desire and the vine
increase 

 

Leftover Valentine

Scrounged from old notebooks
a person of unending desire
like the rest of us fissile material
the way the future relies heavily
on the past to tell it this
is all yours these women
walking in the morning like
when you see your motives
standing up behind your feelings
or a map leading to
someone forgotten in
I can even tell what town
and all this interspersed
with words like these –
it’s not enough I get
the whole world
       but you as well
always so much
leftover
 

Doppelganger Valentine

I want Joseph Beuys
for my doppelganger
I watched the Queen
with the sound off
giving a speech
with her crown on
as if she was reading
a fairy tale to a dying child
it’s not only as above
so below but as before
so after we glimpse
the truth the past
shows up in the future
an uninvited guest or
the prodigal resumes
but how do you bring
your own clean hands
to the scenes of the crimes

 

 

Because Valentine

Because death is the only
real thing on earth
time is how the truth
is slowed down
is watered down enough
for us to taste it a little
at a time and learn to
tolerate its crushing
yet dissolving weight
like moths staring at the sun
but that’s because
we like to attribute
to ourselves capacities
manifesting through us
not yet our own

Why I Hate Dogs Valentine

This body’s already
dog enough for me
bathing it taking it
for walks feeding it
cleaning up after it
until I just want to
board it out or take
it to the pound or put
some of its pictures
on lamp-posts – free body
looking for a fresh start
friendly if lumpish
adapts easily to slight
changes in light with
a tendency to moan
upon awakening
won’t roam

Marjorie's Valentine

All these years poetry
having to struggle
under the heavy lash
of trying to make sense
while still keeping
musical time which
is speech-worthy
gregarious and prophetic
and now the conceptualists
the new nominalists
want to plant one half
of reality outside reality
to widen the gap
between rich and poor
is that a metaphor
or what to be the memory
of a people or a single
thing at the moment
of its conception
tongue of flame
if you would be
my steeple

Mistaken Valentine

He wasn’t who
we thought he was
he seldom is
and I wasn’t who
I thought I was
often emotionally
but without that
essential misperception
on all our parts
at any given moment
we’d have nothing
to become aware of
nothing to transform
the plot which is
clearly what
we’re good at

Ascension Valentine for David on his Birthday (talk about convergence)

Frankly I don’t believe
in revising even though
I do revise at times
I don’t hope to make
a perfect poem that can
be kept in books everyone
stares at reverentially
but no one reads
I want all my victories
small accommodating and
final in the sense
that that’s over now
and now is moving on
the poem is moving on
imperfect but with you

Worried Valentine

Sometimes I worry
about my death
how it will come
upon me how it
won’t find me
for a while in
another city how
it will search
the web its spider
as if for something
misplaced a page
among piles of files
how I will miss it
repeatedly in my sleep
how it will drag me
home from this
its temple

Annual's Valentine

They grew where
they fell in the
ovals of their
casting the arc
of a wave set
on its side as
everything gets
rounded off
at the swerve
of death’s different
direction its
refusal to keep
straight on
as hoped
as planned

Bus Valentine

The old crow coughs
like a myth it’s me
caught in another life
like drops of blood
on the snow I am
not the grail but I
love the grail-bearer
that one can begin
to see through
time’s gauzy curtains
the necessary architecture
and recurring rhythms there
from the back of the bus
from the next to last seat
holding love’s hand

Cassandra's Valentine

To assure that something new
comes into the world
on a regular enough basis
some amazing incomplete
troubling truth
even though it continues to go
unnoticed or noticed but made
nothing of the hierarchies of the clouds
and time grow more fearful
we will miss their call
and as in Julian’s day
the real mysteries will be obliterated
while again the so-called ‘Christians’
will try to destroy the earth

Novalis's Valentine

All my life
Toda mi vida
in the second line
you can still feel
how the newly-minted
consonants are set back
from the full-throated vowels
letting them shine so that
we can speak is one thing
but language stems
from another level of being
outside of time which
slips down to earth
for brief periods
to bloom and die

Soul's Valentine

Not to put words
into the mouths
of gods without
practicing three 
hours a day
playing something
hard and seasonal
in memory of the soul
remember the soul
the lost soul of music
for example or of time
use it said the appraiser
pointing at the antique rocker
that’s what keeps it alive