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.