Caveat: Poem #1729 “And”

Un-Rhymed Sonnet.
A rotated rose is nothing more than
Some reconsidered kiss, intractable;
Love creeps like cats, like lawn-mowers across
The green summery suburbs of my heartbeat,
Who tug mercifully passive, all alone
To evoke the blood of reptiles beneath
The scattered rocks of over-civilized spirit
To drain into the corners of my room.
Lovelost.  Your face as if beyond recall,
Memoriam:  As if black / cupric seas
Did separate two serpent-blue-green isles.
Lovelost.  Lost love which clings to my conscience
While I wait like zoo-monkeys in a cage
A hop and step distant from my desire.
And Rhymed Sonnet.
What's lost?  I may die tomorrow-matins
While metamorphic metaphors fly blind
Through the lonesome corridors of my mind
To leap 'gainst these fearsome, scaley satins
Which clothe a cowering lust.  Somehow your smile
Can drag old bears from under winter oaks
To shed carelessly their black hair cloaks
On the floor:  rests a love note all the while
Discarded by love-green-romantic fool;
With the ruby guts of a lizard-king
Spattered on my innards by silver knife,
Parabolic precursor to blood-pool,
Inward-facing stone, little pebble-thing.
The fool must be fool;  I must try at life.
And prose-poem.
Dream:  A rose is your cliché – an expression
of horizontal love that's no love at all
but just like some simple multicolored
leaf – pretty but irrelevant to the soul
which is more like some dead leaf.
A rotated rose is the essence of cut
summer grass – moribund like the subjunctive,
lovelost.  Trees throw leaves down in angry
disgust, "you're too beautiful, and look:
winter comes!"  I want you more than any
silly rose because, somewhat as the cupric
seas of mythic green, you trace magic on
the retina;  a residue fluttering downward
from your eyes like rusting spring
leaves – caught in a late winter drizzling.
I guess it's more your face, traceries of
sea-foam on the somber, pensive rocks, which
danse irreverent of the genius of mother
earth.  Which, of course, evokes further
souls, more, more, than silly, shy, mine.
Suppose it's best you ignore this, as an
angel properly should, but remember to
dream at night about the saintless ocean,
glycerine panic, and that muddy path
along leaf-strewn, yellow-pink, cavernous
cliffs – your name has become my most
sacred prayer, and I don't even know you.
Calm the injunction now, the heartfelt
fool, under post-priori cobalt skies,
romancing a ghost within his own imagined
kingdom.  But you're real, aren't you?
Paragraph.
Nevermind.  Néanmoins.  Maybe it's just
that you're Parisian in spirit:
kind-of-inconclusive.  But even dark satan
brightens when you blink.  Your smile
brings only bleeding, ecstatic lesions of
joy; romantics turn away and laugh, but
only at myself.  So what's funnier, this
poem or this man-boy?  A nasty wasp of
something cupid hath stung me.  Unsting
me or not;  ice cream at the beach in
July and now the leaves fly, now thinking
thoughts about you – because now I've
seen more in the wine-blue waves than
just cold Aphrodite.
And.
If in some further time removed, fate
could act as sea waves to wash, for one
brief mote of singular time, your lips
nigh mine, I would fall within that mote
as someone from a bridge towards…

– a pair of sonnets and an accompanying prose-poem, written originally in November, 1984, and posted on that date but now also added to these daily poems.
picture

One comment

  1. David

    My apologies, but your commentary to this poem seems very strange to me since I was not aware of your existence before, what, the fall of 1986?
    In contrast, blue unicorns are still something I think of on a regular basis.
    Silly me. How I sometimes forget that, in these days of modern technology, I need not rely on my memory when I wish to hear such things.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkcNqXy9yfo

Comments are closed.

Back to Top