Arma virumque canō :

the blood still throbs in my writing hand


it has bits of marrow sticking to it


and beautiful bright-green flies


I feel my slippery self eluding me


the music drowning the rest


the men away ... the melody of children at play
 

sounds rising like vapours from a small mining town
 

I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing


was not his absence from my side


but the absence of his voice from that concord

 

This then is my story


the ingenious play staged for me


began with the crack of a bat


an almost articulate sport


in a sluggish, heavenlogged system


of vivid laughter from my foul mouth —


nothing could be nearer


the tactile sense becomes at critical moments


our main handle to reality

 

I was injecting spurts of energy into the poor fellow
 

as if the bullets had been capsules


wherein a heady elixir danced


double, triple kangaroo jump


still singing those impossible sonorities


plangent chords churn in : G3 F2 C

 

“never use herculanita (i.e. heroin) with rum”


he pleads, he bleats, he bleeds.


I bandaged him up with a rag


like a maimed spare limb

 

I can arrange for you to attend executions


(not many know that the chair is yellow)


are you curious ?


I have an absolutely unique collection of erotica
 

plotted with love under pleasant skies


I have not much in the bank right now


but I plan to borrow


all the royalties from my upcoming play


I suggest you move in


as a house pet


as a young lad with three testes


I have to nurse my impotence


from your inner essential innocence


 

offer me gratis gloam moulting moist
 

silent soft formless tussles 

or
 ox-stunning fisticuffs or goatish tender
 

hopping off the flying furniture

 

I am practically impotent, I’ll give you a splendid vacation
 

recall Kipling ?


une femme est une femme


mais un Caporal est une cigarette.


Now we need matches

 

stiff in the barroomette


my smudgy moustache twitched


lucidly insane, crazily calm


thin in a purple bath robe


incanting some selenian glow on a penele cigar


like a familiar and innocuous hallucination


up bum’s bloodshot eyes


no piano had plunged and plashed


like polka-dotted pinafores


or scintillas of diamond water


between the pines and cedars


of the ancestral home at 34 Grimm Road

 

Manchester revisited :


in an American suburban street a lone pedestrian


is more conspicuous than a lone motorist


and even the most miserable of family lives


was better than the parody of incest


which, in the long run, was the best I could offer the waif,
 

hung in his own remote flowered void

 

this scholastic rigmarole


like an iceberg in paradise


glistening in the neon light


recalls a pentapod monster —


my male vulnerability in trite brashness


not a boy friend


not a glamour man


not a pal


not even a person at all


but just two eyes and a foot of engorged brawn

 

foul lust provided me


fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp


a lithophanic eternity of genuflexion


an agenouillement for sweet mellow rotting Europe


my automaton knees going up and down


retreating in a mincing dance


 

glowing net rent on my damp retina :


“no, honey, no.”


I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind
 

I handed him an envelope with four hundred dollars
 

in cash and a check for three thousand


six hundred more


life is very short


but I have to say it


may be neither here nor there

voulez-vous venir avec moi ?


I mutely asked his blessing


in a world of total evil


we would become strangely embarrassing
 

smothered over unfolding memories


by the depths of calculated carnality


the existence of a Supreme Being


I had hoped to deduce from my sense of sin

 

He is as good as destroyed


let me dally a little :


The moral sense in mortals is the duty


We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty


a lovely young velvety delicate delta tainted and torn
 

on the brink of a russet ravine is revealed


by faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo


just as 2020 A.D. sings of folly and fate


an insouciance to souffler

 

Sade’s Joseph is all drink and drugs


smoking himself sure —


a fragment of cigarette paper on his underlip
 

guessing much and shaving little off


disdainful of hearing aids


as mauve almond trees bloom

 

I had an idle urge to squeeze out the blackheads


on the wings of his perspiring nose


with my long agate claws


like a bit of dry mud caking


waterproof like Botticelli’s russet Venus


cur, a mongrel curse


fragile, frileux, father me


in velvet and beige, maybe like a viscount


an aphonic whistle


from several smoking stacks leech


red mud and grey drizzle dribble


a wormy vegetable garden


dismal district all dump and ditch


 

 the taste of coarse corruption.


I have camouflaged everything, my love


everything dapper and bilious and execrable :


“why blue when it is white, why blue for heaven’s sake?”
 

why would a hunter need a pointer


more than a pew?

 

Mnemosyne, most mischievous of muses


the mother : purloined, amnesic, worthless


watches candy-striped drawers accept


languorous columbine kisses


from a mulberry mouth


(

my heart is a hysterical, unreliable organ pulsating


stark stiff lurid rhymes of a maniac masterpiece portending
 

possibilities of bliss with a little maid-men’s


shocking cure of pederosis


perdu in a Quebec sanatorium retching


the repulsive gagoon and his wife, a kiddoid gnomide


picker of cuticles at the office party


a cubicle of ads and fads, plenty of pleats


my frenetic lips vivisecting parties


flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer ball’s bladder


upon a settee whipping wind might call :


“Dolorès Disparue”

 

an ex-pugilist recapitulating


especially painful palpitations


from recondite Phineas Quimby, Lebanon, NH


in the slanted handwriting of a frail frame fountain pen


a repressed undinist in talcum light


versed in logomancy and logodaedaly


swaying and staggered, speaking of


betrayal fury desolation horror and hate :


“he is your brother”

 

this Guartiano Forbeson seems to waver


insulting verisimilitudinous pseudonyms


masking the frenzy of my grief with a trembling ingratiating smile
 

free to trace the fugitive, free to destroy my brother


freedom for the moment is everything.


who is neurotic ? I ask


)

 

the gin kept my heart alive but bemazed my brain


after some lapses and losses I found him


probably Polynesian, a painted cretonne chair


upon which an exquisitely folded tartan lap robe


lay like La gitanilla, humping


so rosy and exemplary, our fundament jigging


sparrow’s sperm or dugong’s dung


as millers around the neon contour of “No Vacancy”


criss cross in drowsy rectangular shadows


despite liberal libations or intercrural ague of the ancients
 

lightheaded with a casual chuckle

 

his brown rose tasted of blood


which at least made sense


I had it in a jotter : “Joe, il est ill”


he drank beer with milk to counteract his “sprees”
 

tottering and grunting, shamming to evade my caresses.


A change of environment is the traditional fallacy


upon which doomed loves and lungs rely —


Why did I hope we would be happy abroad?