Why I Am Not a New Yorker Valentine

Because the Guggenheim
reminds me of the rotor
at the county fair the floor
drops off leaving you
pinned to the walls
like any dodgy work of art
made wholly irrelevant
by the concrete joke
of the building it’s in
currently housing when I
was there the “non-making”
of decoration mistaken for art
by someone famous
and because New York
is where everything goes
to happen last but with
the best possible score
and because of the dirt and
the noise and the people
everywhere you go
when for me three trees
is a crowd which is why I also
couldn’t enter Central Park
it felt like a museum
with its chocolate clouds
and finally because of the Frick
which is now a museum formerly
the house greed built and which
holds a treasure that never travels
and won’t be loaned out Rembrandt’s
magnificent ‘The Polish Rider’
how can I look on that face
and not remember the deaths
of the millions of peons who made it
possible for that asshole Frick
to buy this place in the first place
and all these wonderful paintings
even if Frank O’Hara humorously
tried to redeem it somewhat with
his reference to it in ‘To the Harbor
Master’ or was that just
our private joke?

Valencian Valentine

Watching the bullfights on TV
I start to understand
why they must do this
 
to the music of the corrida
the matador is St. Michael
the bull is the dragon
 
the bull is the soul’s
uncontrollable rages
that must be given up
 
baffled and overcome
by some godlike being’s
dazzling footwork  
 
courage and grace
so they reenact  
the old sacrifice
 
and because we still can’t do it
they have to go on
showing us how.
 

Ted's Valentine

That bear again
a matador a rocker
whose bull is the poem
and the bullshit thereto
appended by dawn
by death all that
upper body and beard
hiding a shy altar boy
sipping wine after mass
uppers for consecration
asking mockingbird when did
beauty become the enemy
the religion of the new
shock-deaden all
sense for what's true?

Oscar's Valentine

He thinks the earth
is out to kill us
that hiding behind
every gray beneficence
is the red planet itself
continuing death
that part that finds
more excitement in
hate than in love
which some even wilder
strain of us continues
to love extravagantly
still intending to make
itself very blamed
before it’s damned
how madly extravagantly
absurdly he loved
thee earth.

Starving Valentine

Maybe we’re more plants
than animals don’t animals
protect their young and
feed them though I respect
how the old ones wither
and wander off voluntarily
which plants do ever also
oceans are nothing
to cross them with
thinner and thinner
coats of sunlight
but to be an animal
you must have a soul
a natural dignity or place
and a clear technique
for avoiding thinking.

Retrograde Valentine

The little pieces of leaves
the dust shards on the floor
what a marvel of concentration
where summer sits eating her feces
her concatenated species
of griefs and goons
while we in our terror
all we can do is shake well
those last steps before
invisibility walks in
the doped autumn sky
the twilight season’s vestibules
with all its carnage
in its arms
 

Fenris Valentine

The brain is really a compost pile
from which false weeds flower
and continually prairie out
but what will bear the fruit
if fruit be bourn again
way out on long nights
when the wolf sleeps in your lap
I feel such envy for you o moon
but listen here comes
mastodon mousey
man that horn still
stuck in the middle
of his forehead at
that attention-seeking
stage but in some books
it’s Christ the lord.

Bloody Valentine

All that matters anymore

is the unicorn of clear thinking
still uncaught and still
completely misunderstood
so wash your hands
before you come to
the table of poetry
your virgin lap
must bear the vision
of those blue eyes
while the tip of its horn
enters your heart
at least imaginatively
which sounds harsh
I know but really
it’s nothing more
than a little blood
from your finger
such silence awaits.

Forgotten Valentine

First thing every morning
ask yourself
what am I avoiding
nothing is more convincing

of the frangibility of thought
than forgetting what I was
just saying or where I was
just going with that

after all who taught me to iron a shirt
because I wanted to be useful
or to run when it came time for soccer
instead I fell in love with the Incas

whose prodigious memories
only needed a few knots on strings
to remind them of hundreds of different dealings
each with subsidiary rivers of information

accurate down to the sandals
and to the hour even down to the hours
of their loves and the mountains
associated with all their debts.

Untitled - #4 Valentine

Would you rather be a royal
believing in all that shite
as the Germans say it

or one of the middleclass
grubbers supporting it all?

these were Po-Chu-I’s unspoken

questions as he asked for the menu

in 1841 he wanted to see

where the greatest haiku
falls short of a beer

not how modern monarchy

equates with style in poetry

ruling better when deposed

and living monogamously

in Brooklyn near a cool

French seafood place
we tried and liked.

Untitled - #3 Valentine

Super shuttle study group
silently convenes this time
we’re critiquing one another’s
cities for signs of secret
 
assignations settled smiles
cancer trauma symptoms
o that’s what they’re called
interpreted by the scenery
 
like the dark turn this
projection has taken
you are not alone though
the aloneness part doesn’t
 
ever really leave and you
don’t ever really want it to
you just keep it as a souvenir

Untitled - #2 Valentine

A mostly disheveled day
gets off the night train
from Urbino or was it
Pittsburgh shut up I’m

telling this where did

you get that cute silent h from
a long history of making love

but like a tower in the city
of dead languages it collapses
every time you don’t say it

a mostly disheveled day
having come so far

as if on custodial visit

or to give us something gray
then escape in a stolen car.

Untitled Valentine #1

There’s a ferry that goes
around the island or alone
to the separate islands

I want us to try it again
 
we could stop at the bridge

instead of trying to bust

our way through Southern
 
between California
and Melancholia
 
anchorite heart
in the window
what are you on
 
anyway
I don’t get it
a phone call
with no message
 
redundant heart
among so much else
that wasn’t called for

or called

refused

to show

Farewell Valentine

Every day after you returned
I meant to write you a note
saying welcome back but
you hadn’t come back
you’d just left a brief note
and gone off again
something that said
I was worried you
would never know
how wonderful it felt
to be me how grateful
just as I would never know
how wonderful it felt
to be you even though
since knowing you I feel you
in all my feelings which also
include how awful it felt
and still feels to be me
and when you tell me
how awful it felt
to be you how crushed
I felt I couldn’t trust
myself enough to breath
entirely on my own again.

Boyish Valentine

You still like cream soda
a child’s drink you saved
from misplaced days
or maybe a beer or twelve
with shots you can’t stop
but at times burrowing
your head into me I’m
drunk as well again
for a few butterfly
moments of bliss
like laughter coming
from far out at sea
but yes
coming for me.
 

Vacation Valentine

In summer I surrender
to what my senses crave
and drive dreamlike thinking
I will find the place again
robbed perhaps of its old quickening
but a revelation still
dazed and dripping clearer
not as a thought
but as a thinker I can walk
to the edge of the water
to the edge of the starry world
which hides its beauty from the sun
but with the ocean becomes one
to where the summer of myself
gives up at last my self to me.
 

Chez Nous Valentine

If it’s really feasible
that the light of the sun
the light of a billion fires
can fall through a glass door
into a little moon of sunlight
naked on the floor where
we are still sleeping I am
writing this in my sleep
then it must be simply
a matter of mood or scale
by which the timeless is
a quotient of absorption
whose whole purpose thrust
and focus may come down
to just this one particular
evening or late afternoon.

Survivor's Valentine

We who often got drunk on Rimbaud
early in life and ran off afterwards
to sip absinthe with Verlaine
when we should have been
home doing our home-work
we were not just hallucinating
the hunger the blow-jobs
they taught us to survive
like them as objects of ridicule
who suffered childhood as mixed
grievous loss and boredom
we were not just hallucinating
those terrible misunderstandings
we had hidden cameras tracing
their images on big-ass canvases
to line the mental hallways
of our artsy-fartsy hearts.

Doubtful Valentine

Sitting here you could die

I look at the dates

on things as I move them
from the frig to the garbage
I don’t even remember
buying this savannah
unless it was the morning
you slept on the floor
nor those five houses
on the same block nor
that black sail way out
but then what’s not possible
to memory but doubt?

Brown Valentine

Like channeling sparks
toward their slippery targets
in the sun is poetry
not at all like raising dust storms
to bury cities but to show
that nothing known won’t be
amended in some similar way
won’t be embarrassed by the future
recorder or decoder
wearing a fine brown shirt
blown open miles away
from which every drop of sweat
has been extracted
so all that’s left is stain.

Murder's Valentine

All the old plays are about murder
of one kind or another and whether
one can escape judgment or if
guilt would still win of course but
then be trampled by a net of arrows
for nine years weaving a web of disasters
then fix your mind on the voyage home
your safe return a symbol of the middle
phase in the annual journey of the sun
and whether under certain conditions
revenge could be moored like ships
in the dead of night prepared to strike
burnt umber into the skulls of windy capes
and roar who killed whose famous father.
 

Orphic Valentine with Fireworks Background

When the body is male
the soul is female
when the body is female
the soul is male
Orpheus was clearly
the more beautiful one
so finely made
and she _________
your name here
whatever your name
could be dismissed
could be dispensed with
after all we’ve been through
the humble one
the fearful one inside
shut down shut up
by a colder pride.
 

Spaghetti Valentine

A full bowl of spaghetti
and sitting down to eat it
I find ‘La Dolce Vita’ on cable
just at the scene where a pretty blonde
laughingly shouts out, “Should
we go now and have some spaghetti?”
to a parade of early morning partiers
was that a mock-serious reference
I’ve gone and taken literally
maybe he was afraid of himself
Marcello wonders about the suicide
who killed his two children
my wick waxes as my wax wanes
bravo for the spaghetti
I forgot how it ends
whatever face I can’t
come back to at least
twice and try to save
is gone for good or
the last rendition.

Independent Valentine

OK let’s get on with it
if you want to know the time
look in the mirror
if you want to know the times
look at the cock
of Eros I speak
he has a cock bent like a bow
not Philoctetes his quiver
he was from another Troy
can poetry afford
to be practiced
like a 4^th of July
home furnishings sale
or was it mainly from sex
America was running
from church to church
mixing it all up with
glamour and money?

Lyrical Valentine (for R.A.)

Think about several things
the subject could be doing
during the riven moment
which would still qualify it
as lyrical not merely quizzical
as when we listen
to a poem in a language
we don’t understand we
still grasp the better half of it
a certain music of arranged  
vowels and consonants
before meaning something
intervenes with its stop and go
its worrisome come to me.

Newport Beach Valentine

Like a gathered sheet
and worn navy blanket
thrown up over a bed
several times until they
land perfectly in place
only to be smoothed or
straightened out a bit
so these waves roll in
until the largest curl
reaches up and falling
back withdraws
everything offered
takes it all back
then rests like at the end
of a long explanation
or dramatic hush
in an old movie
while other newer efforts
are being mounted
roaring and carefully
lowered into place.

Dancer's Valentine

Whatever’s in the mouth
isn’t words the words
were put there so
they would seem to
come from within
so they would build
the wind section
ears and larynx
until music becomes
whatever’s in the mouth
and pours out
as opera proves
but wouldn’t we all
be dancing like this
if we could
in a flood?

Prisoner's Valentine

Maybe we’re in prison
the bars are our bodies
but we don’t think of it
that way because we don’t
see them as bars with life
as the prisoner and so
are left to wonder how
can we live freely
in the body but not
be bound by the brain
or the blood or the body
as a whole mineralized
instrument or philosophy
that eventually turns
us against us,

Cloudy Valentine

Sneak through my life
subterranean lover
precious as a cloudy
day in the desert
though the report says
sunny it does not happen
as planned the end
I would have preferred
is overcast like this
and you can safely emerge
in the quieter world
of shadows and passages
like an envelope
tucked under an arm
warmed and held
wherever it arrives
it carries your scent.

List Valentine

Your mother called to

ask what you were up to
not how you’re doing but
‘I want to know
what you’re up to’
left that as a message
I really didn’t want
to talk about her
she was just the first
on my list of things
to tell you I did this
this morning and then
I sat and read for hours
someone’s descent into
hell which turned out
to be just a prison
you could be released from
could move to another town
resume your immortality.

Jew Boy's Valentine

If the Christ exists
the anointed one the healer
the Jew boy sent by his Father
Abraham’s Almighty _________
The Name of all the names
to save the Jews his favorites
even if from the beginning
he distrusted them his own
voice Moses he refused entrance
but if the Christ exists
to have begotten him
he can only be a seed
as small as a seed
in a world so full of itself
it will have to eliminate
everything material
before it would even consider
the possibility of some
spiritual reality or other
scaffolding all growth.

Nameless Valentine

As if I was enough
to take care of things
not have things
take care of me
three years ago I
turned the cactus
to its other side
would you believe
it’s just now
starting to notice
like that pause before
you look back
to take in what’s there
a slap for each cheek
or the nameless one
the he it she the second self
at the center of your life.

Overheard Valentine

Your heart is cold and empty
my heart is full of shit
but you do like to climb on things
that get high and go faster
all my life I’ve given people lip
as if I liked getting slapped
did you know the word ‘shame’
is spoken 346 times in all of
Shakespeare’s plays and that
only the word ‘love’
has a higher occurrence
more than any other emotion
which makes perfect sense to me
those two opposites fighting it out
the sun and the moon
of our secret lives
even though I know you think
I’m nothing I still want to get
dirty-clean with you sometime
your next door neighbor silence.

Objective Valentine

If your body continues to be
for me an erotic object as
apart from the self I know
as you an objet d’art concerned
only with itself the closure
on itself as a condition of
the art it took up afterwards
elaborate result of lifetimes
of hard work laughter bad teeth
wine jealousy and fear
now it comes like sun’s descent
through trees spotlighting
a few leaves and flowers
to unfold inside me here.

Hotel Wentley Valentine

Who has not always seen
his life as drama John or doom
being taken away from him
by the roaring winter wind
deeply damaged by those
themselves deeply damaged
or deranged by disappointed
love and drugged dreams
spent their lessons for a late
supper and champagne
writing and waiting
for the proper moment
or waking alone in bed
one pill too many
while you poets dream on?

Solstice Valentine

Stop debauching yourself
we say but caro we can’t
fail to understand nor stop
what we’re doing pre-disaster
when it’s disaster we’re after
isn’t love a disaster
isn’t love the disaster
I don’t blame our minor
personal romance which is
tragic in a lyrical sort of way
or lyrical in a tragic sort of
I mean its more universally
applied dimensions in respect
of caring for actual things
simple non-attached affection
for this living world.

Summery Valentine

If you lived with me among
the roots of summer
you would see how abashed
the empty fields become
at two of a torrid afternoon
and watch a thousand tiny workers
carrying pails of water
everywhere or hammering
loose small clumps
of changes carted off
for storage or re-burial
if you traveled with me among
the dreams of summer
you wouldn’t want
to come back at all
but we would we would

Up North Valentine

Living from image to image
from paycheck to catch-up
the problem of all the problems
of the future is the forest
problem whether or not
there will be any after our
robber economy fails
to care for the very
leaves that breath it
and the forests become
deserts like where we live
watching all this sunlight
go to waste all this warmth
you could really use up north
just pile in drifts around us.

Curriculum Vitae Valentine

If I do know this is

going to sound like
an excuse because
anything less than
performance in this
world is an excuse
except our pictures
always include a future
we still weren’t ready
to enact we fall short
of what we love if by love
you count in human days
it would be centuries
and several weekends.

Enemy's Valentine

Having recently attended a closed
door meeting in your mind I can quickly
tell you how you mean to dismantle
any legal authority to continue
military operations in your prayers
or in your plans for all the people
because let’s face it in freedom it’s either
all the people or just some of the people
which is tyranny and doublespeak
anyone who attacks the poor is the enemy
anyone who undermines children
anyone who harms animals
anyone who pollutes the water or air or the earth
anyone hoarding wealth or power
what the mother could be simpler?

Alien Valentine

A man was barking at the restaurant

at the next table a seriously mentally
ill older man with cigarette hair every
few minutes he’d bark once or twice
a sound I found so grating I had to stop
eating he was like a human dog looking
around in that helpless dreamy way
humans have and then barking at nothing
at no one and scanning around to see
who heard it who was paying attention
until he landed on me his eyes sucked
me right in went right down my throat
just the opposite alien I could feel my
whole brain tighten and begin to blink
all I could think was I could not think.

Well Valentine

Happiness is always nostalgic
always creates a slight
disturbance in the second
half of the surprise when
it returns to ask for your assistance
don’t hesitate to feel irreplaceable
that’s how I think of you
rest first when you can’t most
save yourself for me
to drown you later
to come right up to the edge
of that deep well of happiness
and stare right in or jump
maybe jump right in.

Morning Edition Valentine

Still ahead the heartbreaking
story of how I started
to put some clothes on
to go outside carrying on
a small brass platter
a cup of coffee and
the first and last words
of a beautifully evocative
embryo of a line
(weren’t those parentheses
on the sides of its head)
when a hot desert breeze
like the tongue of a dragon
licked me from head to foot
lifting me right off the ground
only to end me up in bed
with you again.

Total Lunar Eclipse Valentine

You might be able
to sit there with a bottle
of water in your hand
in the shade of the umbrella
I don’t know you enough to say
will I ever know you enough
sitting there in the real world
at least in one of them where
in this desert of love
water is served
cold artesian water
in poison bottles
it turns out
so do you drink it
or do you sit there
in the shade of the umbrella
alone with my never knowing
enough about you to say.

Gemini Valentine

I must cane my ass
for all I was not able
to complete of my assignment
my portfolio of griefs and fishes
still stacked there by the door
but I just went out into the night air
for a few minutes then drove
to the store it doesn’t matter
what else I got these ripe
red raspberries for us
I wish someone had told me
when I was seventeen
there’s so much more joy
your body will be having
no matter how soft and
sweet they are at least
some things stay hard.

Sagittarian Valentine

Every biography footnotes
every other biography
for which its fame
is constantly expanding
slowly shrinking the text
down to the final gratitude
of five words hating irony
is hating love which
really we all do secretly
most of the time it’s about
how I’m feeling and whether
or not I’ll go with that or
do something else altogether
however vain the effort.

Pure Valentine

What is my plan for pleasure
while there is still enough time
to actually make it happen
experience it in a sustained pure
way when the energy picks up
later in the day when the sun
has incinerated the last flowers
with the shiver of miles of empty
houses empty hours my plan
will come home like a boy
in a story about the search for
and actual finding of pleasure
not at all what you thought
or even I imagined it to be.

Andean Valentine

A local resident
cycles through the ash
as it settles across the town
a cycling volcano
resides in the town
with the local ash
the town recycles
the local residents through
volcanic re-settlements
a cycle resides in ash
if not in the local towns
settled by volcanoes
ash residents re-localize
the cycles in the town.

Pentecostal Valentine

There is a maker
or was nothing made
there was a virgin
or was no one laid
on no bed of thorns
whose butterflies beg
memories whose bats
dream our desires
our thoughts are all
we’ve left to
heal and us
so do get out of bed and see
the mystery of the trinity
a foot a hand a kiss.

Foolish Valentine

Why do I need you lord
only to want the devil more
has he so much left to teach me
even if it’s all in service
to the good in the end you represent
in the equation much to his chagrin
these are just words pathetic place-
holders pin-holes in time
yet I feel you specifically loved me
in that completely childish way
I felt as a child
even if now as a growing old man
I feel appalled at my
poor record of return
and your fool’s heart.

Obedient Valentine

Your overall impulse
is to get better I feel
a goofy sense of how
to handle being agreeable
read: busted! but forget
la-la-land don’t say
anything in the year ahead
about a particular discipline
working fast and loose with
the right words making more
promises than deliveries
dream big but try not to
trot out something important
whatever you do today
can only result in little from
all you expected wait till
the moon moves her fat
aspect don’t be trivial
don’t agree to anything
but sleep and me.

Summer Valentine

These are philosophical flowers
not my brilliant inadequacies
these wings muttering among leaves
these porn star clouds lounging
in their mind-like sky
je m’appelle summer
surrounding the reality-whisperer
you are still dreaming me
the backs of your Jesus eyes
follow me everywhere
you didn’t have to say
a thing like him all
you had to do
was show up.

Seven Valentine

When I was seven
I fell in love with birds
when one landed on my shoulder
and then with bees and flowers
and their strange life together
and being a bird myself
for brief eons of time I could
understand things better
not being either a boy or a girl
but hovering and bumbling
above the cupped hand
of a flower suddenly withdrawn
and then re-offered
like a lover toying with you
toying and then gone.

Strange Valentine

Instead of understandable thorns
it has these little water pouches
hanging all over it
like the hundred breasts of Artemis
shocking at first
how fire and water have worked
on such formulations
all the dead ends
that culminate in human skin
on human flesh
the strange beauty
of having been broken
into separate things
as if we were against love
literally and ecstatically.

Allegorical Valentine

To have gotten no further
than the tree from which
I fell and died at least a
week ago from the starchiness
of your desiccation your beck
open just enough to identify
your song’s source in echo
and refrain all call
and vague response
I say come and you arise
and ride now astride my spade
this heap of leaves and wine-
red pomegranate flowers
your brief grave.

Word-free Zone Valentine

This language which can take
any form can enter any body
this beautiful evening
easing into the room
I try to hear your words
moving toward me again
hidden in all these gestures
I did not say treasures
a post-literate world
could only have pictures
the horses in the caves
now faces in the waves
I could take your hand
and put it on my face
it would tell you all
I think of you.

Unforgiveable Valentine

Seeing I’m wrong
I’m not dissonant
I’m shocked
I’m in denial dancing
as fast as I can
grieving but you’re already
laughing humiliatingly
I can either hang
myself now or nationalize
my denial into
a whole new religion
the mysteries in ruins
my status as an acolyte
my fear I’ll be left behind
never forgiven.

Stern Valentine

Anyway how many
would go if offered
an intergalactic love
when the cosmos if not
the earth is flat or so your
conversation falls off from
which amuses and confuses me
in my spare time while listening
I check you out I hope not too
unobtrusively your physiology
and anatomical inclinations
your young feet and older hands
a tenderness that’s conscientious
to the point of consternation
you who taught me stern
is German for star.

Useless Valentine

Under the ceiling mural
of the peach-blossom Madonna
in the room filled with carmine light
on the red enormous cushions
of the purple leather sofa
have you just connected
that the apple in the story
is their app for sex
which once lightly entered into
cannot be deleted
and that sex like poetry is useless
or you have a child or a swan
lifts you momentarily
back to heaven
out of hell?

Autobahn Valentine

My mind has started speaking in German
softly to me or English in a German accent
I understand only the mood of a few words
as they whizz by in tight flocks
Ich liebe dich I say and notice how
their ‘you’ is just the addition of a ‘d’
to Ich making ‘you’ a larger ‘I’ duh
but right now I’m on the autobahn
in one of those cars that drives itself
annotating the museum-like scenery
or you catch up on your Schubert
the one composer I would love to meet
like the first person in a play to sense
the danger the whole cast and plot are in
Ich liebe dich amazing how you
could learn to say it that way.

Nobody's Valentine

All my themes are lovers
shut-up and write it
our seed spills on the bricks
a person flowers
weed-like in the current
why must I put my foot
in every wound and word
if not to claim you for my own
far heirs and forebears
like a phrase from
the other world for which
the words are approximations
literal translations
to be worked on
in further dreams.

Momentary Valentine

That is our life of which
we have often spoken
between catastrophes
during violent wipe-outs
in one way flourishing
later in another knowing
all we do now builds on
what our idea of I is
not as trees are in a forest
standing up to go nowhere
though there are pros & cons
and everyone gets one moment
of radiance around which
his whole life can wobble.

Memorial Valentine

There should be a whole lot more
crying going on one would think
though the tears are already terrible
in the world given the drinks we drink
or are they hiding most of it from me
and I agree refusing to look
going home for my hour’s cry
missing your scent and sinking
into the calm perfection of complaint
falling asleep to dream you kiss me
in my sleep in my video dream
of post-romantic stress disorder
for which I have sought the therapy
of flat stones thrown at certain angles
the pond torn and trembling.

Epitaphic Valentine

A ‘smound’ may result
where a sound kisses
a smell and mixes juices

A tiny blue flower
picked up off the floor
what a blue life

Yes you keep coming back
to it again and again but
who is this I you speak of

To be your complimentary
epitaph and hard greeting
the poem insists on staying

The world mirrors reflection
because it’s nowhere to be found
a pond jumps in

Even a tiny blue flower
is too much power
for one floor

Still way back in the queue
of my thoughts are you
yes and right up front.

Driven Valentine

Ninety-nine buddhas on the wall
in the stucco’s swirls
ninety-eight buddhas on the wall
moonlight unfurls
ninety-seven buddhas on the wall
another goes under
ninety-six buddhas on the wall
the sound of thunder
ninety-five buddhas on the lawn
the atheism of shadows begins
ninety-four buddhas on the street
foundations are laid for the modern age
ninety-three buddhas in one face
you too must erase
ninety-two buddhas on the bridge….

Early Morning Valentine

When now his three kids
have flown anonymously away
he resumes his position
as choirless choir-master
another missionary mockingbird
in the Congo or Manhattan
or Istanbul his song may not
yet be heard or when he says
Show me the way as in a hundred
years when he’s extinct no one
looks up no one will listen
as when I touch your face
you sleep deeper
it’s me who wakes.

Remembered Valentine

Aren’t all photographs sentimental
and poignant somehow the way
they reveal and conceal
the secrets of an earlier time
though first we had to separate out
the light from the darkness
to see the colors rising up
between them
but the miracle of memory
is something else altogether
I don’t mean the insistence
on memorization but the
power of an inner seeing
the force of a fresh recollection
in which what's dead
awakens in me now.

Timely Valentine

Fight or flight
seizes the trees
some reconnoiter
in their underwear
Orion tightens
his belt his knife
of light shortcuts
through Stonehenge
straight to our door
time shaves every
hair to get here
to lie down
smooth and naked
beside us now.

Unwise Valentine

Is a man or woman unwise
who dyes their hair
to hide their rage
at aging does reveal
a girlish mannish
inclination to avoid
and fundamentally misread
where beauty leads
the thin garment of light
the wide span of the heart
living and dying
at every moment
being reborn and
falling apart.

Having To Admit The Existence Of The Other Valentine

Dear divine demon still
explaining the world
as your love for us
I have noticed how you
always come in duplicate
the one more that divides
and separates this from this
me from you
except the eyes
can't hear very well
nor the nose see
so each angel is a sense
intense but limited
to itself and lacking
that completeness
a human body brings
to the whole enterprise
having stopped in
the middle of the stream
of existence while
considering crossing or
following the current
to the sea.

Forecast Valentine

Let’s think of the weather
as the earth’s emotional life
in a schematic presentation
yet connected to an inner stream
of vulnerabilities and terrors
interpreted as earthquakes
and volcanoes
but all the result of the necessarily
extreme loneliness of his position
in the larger darkness of the drawing
the way he’s hobbled
by his demented sister moon
how even the sun his mother
keeps pushing him away.

Punked Valentine

This morning I woke up
finding this is someone
else’s life I’ve merely been
stitched up inside of
now what do I do and who
is this guy I try looking
around munching on the
furniture books and plants
someone’s made coffee
I wander outside there’s
a yellow umbrella and
a padded chair squatter’s
rights I’ll change the locks
and little by little steal back
my own identity with a series
of repos and free credit checks
realigned so lightly and brightly
no one will ever notice he’s gone.

Credit Risky Valentine

At the Bank of Disaster & Disorder
I deposited three hurricanes
but they said it wasn’t near enough
the penalty rates shown
in the table below will
be applied to your account
but I said I’ve already
paid off three earthquakes
ten suicides fourteen abortions
a hundred divorces one water-boarding
some things need to be precise
a bullet where you put it
valuable intelligence
to get the pain to stop.

Western Valentine

All day whenever I tried
to go outside I was immediately
dive-bombed by a bully
of a mockingbird who
impulsively assumed
her nest of blabber-mouths
in my underline my orange tree
was in some immediate danger
from me that soon I realized
how vulnerable I’ve become
to just this kind of slippery
slope with nature which
despite Darwin Van Gogh
and Gershwin never did
make it into post-modernism
except as the laughing god
and his horse goddesses.

Imaginary Valentine

I imagine for the dead
finding us again
after swimming through
endless darkness
would seem like spring
a light a landfall
for their starving souls
so they know they haven’t
entirely lost their minds
just their helpless bodies
and now are free to enter any body
to visit the unspeakable
the hilarious the baffling
all those things at the very center
of our unrepeatable lives.