StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XI, No. IX

two lips
   parted met
  
  
   [          ]
  

soft breast

... touched gently ...

   [         ]
  
  
night fell swiftly

... remember [ we, you ] ...

... my bitter-sweet imp ...

when morning woke us

He just don't grasp
The death bit, does he,
All living, all powerful,
God of all and everything;

And why should he care
About a single scrawny ape
Scratching out its existence
On a dull average world

When there is a universe
Most infinitely varied,
Filled with brave peoples
More talented and worthy;

Was Earth the only world
Willing to bend its knee,
Or were all the other planets
Already occupied by their dieties?

Kerouac hurled himself across country,
More image than a writer,
An idea that caught then becomes cliché.

Hemingway captured a time and place,
Then wasted slowly while on safari
For some mystical, grace-filled  manhood.

Fitzgerald was a pure moment of America,
All glitter and gilded and blind celebration,
And crashed with his countrymen into depression.

All earned points off the back end of immortality
Unlike poor J. D., darling of academic poo-bahs
And the hero of adolescent boys..

Someday we will be laid out
Among the beautiful lettuces,
Joining the whore of Mytilene
Who sold her handiwork
To the highest Goddess,
Then vanished in quick oblivion
When she was finished.
The great Goddess favor us
No less than dear Sappho:
Adorned by the breathless earth,
We all are soon gone,
White caps upon the beach.

If I were an African American,
My skin would be several shades darker;
If I were a true caucasian white girl,
My flesh would be bleached for hours.
My cheekbones crossed the Bering Straights
A hundred centuries before my birth;
My Mediterranean olive reflects the lust
Of Romans, Greeks, and North Africans.
My droopy eyelid slips in from Britain
To frame my Sicilian brown eye;
The British Isles provide written history,
America, my home and birthplace.

Someday I will be as ancient
As the Coliseum and the Pyramids,
As little read as Catullus
Or Homer's lengthy Illiad.

I have no precious papyrus
To transport myself through time,
No desert caves to hid in
Until the moment is right.

All there is are these electrons
And volumes of fading pens
Stacked on shelves in my closet,
Waiting for my death.

Thousands of lines, blotted and crossed,
Lie ready for scholarly exegesis,
But my blood will have dried as decades pass
And my heart not beaten in a century.

My wit will be hidden unbantered,
My dimples never more be seen,
Neither word nor kiss will pass my lips,
Only these ashen ruins will remain.

When we met
I took delight in your desire

Hungry for a lover
Who longed only for me
 
My blood stirred at your touch
And I was yours

   Years before
I admitted it to myself

Pale red clouds above the sunrise,
Dark blue sky to the west,
Rain moving slowly down from the north
As February winds into March.

In another three months
I will work on my tan
And you can go from
White to red to white again.

In our exuberance,
Full of our youth
And sure of our genius,
We rolled through the sixties
Unfettered by rules or history.

What did we have to fear?
Antibiotics would cure us
And The Pill made us free;
All the world seemed ladies' choice
Even as the war raged on.

Life was a rude awakening
Cluttering our careful philosophies;
Children were a complication
That cared less how many degrees
Might paper our walls and bathrooms.

Some of us were quick learners,
Our working class families and schools
Ensuring we would not drift far;
As for the others, they still people
Their politics with the sureness of privilege:

The necessity of competitive pre-schools
To headstart their precious progeny,
The intrinsic wrongness of capitalism
And their necessity the central government
Provide them everything they rebelled against.

If Tiger had dallied with Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary,
Or cheated on his wife with the Presidential First Lady,
Perhaps we would have a skeleton on which to hang
A great Shakespearean Tragedy,

But he chose to drive his ball on a public course populated with
Reality show bimbos and minimum wage waitresses
Who would no more say no to him than refuse to serve him.
There is no great arc, no fifth act self-realization,
No emotional catharsis worthy of our attention,

He would still sit at our table, chairman of the board,
And ask the closest woman if she would like to bring him
His morning coffee and cue up his latest media clips,
Adding "please" only if he thought the camera's were still on.