01-05-2026, 04:42 AM
They're not the kind of thing you tend to find interest in. I have them in a Draft for the Sewer. I even have a few paragraphs of prose in connection with them. But I'll show some of them.
I'm an EVERYMAN
amongst this hassle;
guaranteed, like a search in the mail.
Some onearmed guard brings me provisions,
as though after math is more number.
I soil each left sock
like a woman over 30.
Print oysters on the undergarments I don't wear.
Not like, but the finest wine, seven years stomped,
at the local supermarket, I hide with
greetings from leggy jewelry merchant sales representatives,
under the gift of a new mattress.
***
Tomboy,
your red fox nose clowns me:
like you had it out for me
since the beginning
of time and time and time . . .
Holding each phrase, a jibe and a half, to my throat.
O princess,
take your own time, and make a man.
Don't let the WNBA distract you.
Don't let the Black Lives Matter matter more than
the darkness in your heart.
Lil Shadows, come back to the cave of Humor,
and laugh at local commercials.
Idiotic and politic:
patched together like a deadgirl in a creek:
weary as your dresses to clubs and church;
you have your own feelings about things.
Thoughts are synthetic rhythms, drugs.
I don't care about these things, but you,
an Ideal and a half —I only wear
an overcoat of spleen. Dainty pretty,
you're a fleshsea-like Jabba the Hutt;
the freckles of a hayseed
match your champagne back.
Open-back, silver tassle, hooftoed-heels:
your sex is an understatement.
You absorb, a ring
wrapped around a finger.
Tough enough: young girls kill
each other with silliness.
A man, I must be a dieu
to withstand an earth, O Sandalphon.
My own pirate, my destiny, I AM:
lay down your armchair pundit
and streetfighting college daddies,
glib professors of the night (even fun)
and steal away. I'm that thief of time.
***
We lost an eye in a sack of marbles;
there's a fence around the heat,
even the smoke, of a winter night.
Pain and children no longer
crutch unbandaged and soldiered
in the street nor on backroads:
but adult diapers of humans
cry as cats spade upon that fence,
choked by the very venom in their dis-
trusted loins. There's a fair
that comes to town each year:
Energy in the air a September
Friday, and the routs and talents
huddle in summer's pit:
Wrangling attachments in roadside gardens.
***
The Capital Landscape
A museum and a Dollar General
have all the magic we need.
Friends are liminal in the 40s,
post signs of depression:
a kind of eel, sparingly at ease
with an absent host, still lights
all men's rooms A-Go-Go:
Walls breathing kerosene.
A lesson not to laugh, in cramped
rooms, sows gardens of evil.
The majoring marathon man of crime,
scat on ghetto breezes,
uniforms several truths: stashing
mystery in vials and alleys.
The cash register twins,
how they change-in accents
and candy bullets. Jokes
that rip off the tongue:
hunger just that missing match
some urchin stuck in a urinal
as though life doesn't depend
on each another's breath:
though a toy is as much
a saving token.
***
Living is enough—though if we can't accept
and must entitle nudity with heritage,
it may be grasping beyond wind
that mills our satanic heartaches,
long since uncensored
in birdseed for brains.
I held a God's hand when this
was a sky with loins that twinkle
in rain and hot cheeks.
Red like death, red as clay;
our feelings. No allegiance.
Demarcations mock now.
Men hang themselves from their own
gallows.
Loneliness, no long riddle;
people feel, but, digitally,
understanding is enhanced
—unlike the heart.
***
Lucy Carlyle poem 6
[unfinished, will be inserted later]
***
Looking at a man, past familiarity,
to the simple son he is past who he is,
the simple meat past the words and even
wounded smile of being seen,
the simple skin beyond the local celebrity:
That is what I am in all my poems,
the sound that doesn't come from my face
nor enter you by eye and ear,
but at once and for once,
no record of a reconciling machine;
as you, simple ape, are sense and sense
and sense and sense and sense and not that
processing sixth.
***
I'm an EVERYMAN
amongst this hassle;
guaranteed, like a search in the mail.
Some onearmed guard brings me provisions,
as though after math is more number.
I soil each left sock
like a woman over 30.
Print oysters on the undergarments I don't wear.
Not like, but the finest wine, seven years stomped,
at the local supermarket, I hide with
greetings from leggy jewelry merchant sales representatives,
under the gift of a new mattress.
***
Tomboy,
your red fox nose clowns me:
like you had it out for me
since the beginning
of time and time and time . . .
Holding each phrase, a jibe and a half, to my throat.
O princess,
take your own time, and make a man.
Don't let the WNBA distract you.
Don't let the Black Lives Matter matter more than
the darkness in your heart.
Lil Shadows, come back to the cave of Humor,
and laugh at local commercials.
Idiotic and politic:
patched together like a deadgirl in a creek:
weary as your dresses to clubs and church;
you have your own feelings about things.
Thoughts are synthetic rhythms, drugs.
I don't care about these things, but you,
an Ideal and a half —I only wear
an overcoat of spleen. Dainty pretty,
you're a fleshsea-like Jabba the Hutt;
the freckles of a hayseed
match your champagne back.
Open-back, silver tassle, hooftoed-heels:
your sex is an understatement.
You absorb, a ring
wrapped around a finger.
Tough enough: young girls kill
each other with silliness.
A man, I must be a dieu
to withstand an earth, O Sandalphon.
My own pirate, my destiny, I AM:
lay down your armchair pundit
and streetfighting college daddies,
glib professors of the night (even fun)
and steal away. I'm that thief of time.
***
We lost an eye in a sack of marbles;
there's a fence around the heat,
even the smoke, of a winter night.
Pain and children no longer
crutch unbandaged and soldiered
in the street nor on backroads:
but adult diapers of humans
cry as cats spade upon that fence,
choked by the very venom in their dis-
trusted loins. There's a fair
that comes to town each year:
Energy in the air a September
Friday, and the routs and talents
huddle in summer's pit:
Wrangling attachments in roadside gardens.
***
The Capital Landscape
A museum and a Dollar General
have all the magic we need.
Friends are liminal in the 40s,
post signs of depression:
a kind of eel, sparingly at ease
with an absent host, still lights
all men's rooms A-Go-Go:
Walls breathing kerosene.
A lesson not to laugh, in cramped
rooms, sows gardens of evil.
The majoring marathon man of crime,
scat on ghetto breezes,
uniforms several truths: stashing
mystery in vials and alleys.
The cash register twins,
how they change-in accents
and candy bullets. Jokes
that rip off the tongue:
hunger just that missing match
some urchin stuck in a urinal
as though life doesn't depend
on each another's breath:
though a toy is as much
a saving token.
***
Living is enough—though if we can't accept
and must entitle nudity with heritage,
it may be grasping beyond wind
that mills our satanic heartaches,
long since uncensored
in birdseed for brains.
I held a God's hand when this
was a sky with loins that twinkle
in rain and hot cheeks.
Red like death, red as clay;
our feelings. No allegiance.
Demarcations mock now.
Men hang themselves from their own
gallows.
Loneliness, no long riddle;
people feel, but, digitally,
understanding is enhanced
—unlike the heart.
***
Lucy Carlyle poem 6
[unfinished, will be inserted later]
***
Looking at a man, past familiarity,
to the simple son he is past who he is,
the simple meat past the words and even
wounded smile of being seen,
the simple skin beyond the local celebrity:
That is what I am in all my poems,
the sound that doesn't come from my face
nor enter you by eye and ear,
but at once and for once,
no record of a reconciling machine;
as you, simple ape, are sense and sense
and sense and sense and sense and not that
processing sixth.
***