Lady Lazarus Has Wheels

You should have known
the rough beast
would make you
turn on the gas;

and answered the ad
of an Anna Blume
(Cylinders Farm
is crowless:

no kunst
to bother you,
but a barn
full of Merz).

Turn blue spokes
red, go Deutsch
shelling yellow
phonemes

into the dusk.
What say the people?
Lady Lazarus
has wheels!

We wore (red)
 
lipstick (drop-dead) avec pendant cigarette;
diamanted, gin-martinied (olive-stillhettoed)—
all high-stem gilded; lush black fan-tailed
frocks, all cocktailed, jet-beaded, backlessed;
exhumed refuge, slash-sleeved, plunged
taffeta, drop-weighted at the hem; skirts fad-
ed, gold-spun, bias cut

found our fragment selves (collect-
ing here, now) lit red, showered lavender,
twisting in the twisting electric vector
our mirror ball lifting the Miro in us all,
our universal Picasso, our luminous piss-
translucent walls aglow with the barely
known mothers of us all (WoolfenStein)

and Money’s Too Tight (To Mention)
belts out—Valentine Brothers— and
lovers in the next room play Fever
at thirty-three revolutions per minute,
then 78,
spread rain-stained coats, red-lined.

Out-stretched arms, up-raised hands
cut at the cruel night—
jive-signing the peace.
Stand Down Margaret warred with Mack
the Knife—torn fish-netted scar-
lets kicked like sharks, birled in D
Ms (de rigeur); rude stars studded,
sickle moons embossed limp lapels
(enfolding black halter-necked crepe);
powder pinked cowboys tracked cactus across shirt
collars, rode high as if what we wore—dis-
avowing metaphor, worn dishabille,
the dead’s fretted retros—rode us.

Triptych

I
Fifty minutes to break.

My body, like the building, talks
to me in twinges, takes
twenty minutes to numb pressure
points. My foot is my clock.

Days dissected by silent weight
invisibly shifting,
parcels of hip-strain and knee-
lock.

Standing flesh weeps;
grinds from stasis a sweat.

Trickles chance from lip, pit, breast.

Hot springs cool along my spine.

II
Naked and nothing I live an hour
in my ribs and right thigh. I stand hip-

locked come break time, mustn’t move from here
before the chalking of the feet to the floor

anchors empty columns pinning air
down to ghost portals I’ll fall into ten

minutes later.
                  Shove out an old wall
for the feel of that catch in that hip

flex a blade then settle the ribs and load
my thigh. Naked I place my jar

III
a space to think in naked
anchored to the hourly rate

drift in absent taxi (space, heat, light)

no it’s not for the simulacra of has been
not the endlessness of vain

but a space we forge here in studio

is why the figurative is
for the model (always abstract)

You would probably prefer Mahler or Gershwin

driving into winter sun
you made me cry

you suddenly in the back seat,
blue felt hat over
one eye, just quietly watching –

the long shadow you liked to cast
in your last photographs of you;

the gold bars and black stripes
of November on the road.
 

Too Bad Aubade

Listen to the light pour on morning.
This is the blue brink of lavender.

Inky (chilli-forced) olives steal up stem
of warm matutinal martini, breach

the meniscus of vermouth that tops
your gin— slide to meet the tiptouch

of this tongue.

                Will it revive (the corn
after the cows)?  Delay the lost night’s

shoddy in new splendour? The day queens
blue dullness, just too bad for an aubade.

Listen to the light pour on morning.
Pale stains, half gone stones, a recce

of listless voices. Beyond the sunning
cupola glisten bloodshot corners.

This is lavender blue. What does it take,
dilly dilly, to wake you up?

In Admiration of the Maître

The willingness to listen for these words in the now;
Music on a wee, brass scaff.