Love Songs

I Spawn of fantasies Sifting the appraisable Pig Cupid his rosy snout Rooting erotic garbage "Once upon a time" Pulls a weed white star-topped Among wild oats sown in mucous membrane I would an eye in a Bengal light Eternity in a sky-rocket Constellations in an ocean Whose rivers run no fresher Than a trickle of saliva These are suspect places I must live in my lantern Trimming subliminal flicker Virginal to the bellows Of experience Colored glass. II At your mercy Our Universe Is only A colorless onion You derobe Sheath by sheath Remaining A disheartening odour About your nervy hands III Night Heavy with shut-flower's nightmares --------------------------------------------- Noon Curled to the solitaire Core of the Sun IV Evolution fall foul of Sexual equality Prettily miscalculate Similitude Unnatural selection Breed such sons and daughters As shall jibber at each other Uninterpretable cryptonyms Under the moon Give them some way of braying brassily For caressive calling Or to homophonous hiccoughs Transpose the laugh Let them suppose that tears Are snowdrops or molasses Or anything Than human insufficiences Begging dorsal vertebrae Let meeting be the turning To the antipodean And Form a blur Anything Than to seduce them To the one As simple satisfaction For the other V Shuttle-cock and battle-door A little pink-love And feathers are strewn VI Let Joy go solace-winged To flutter whom she may concern VII Once in a mezzanino The starry ceiling Vaulted an unimaginable family Bird-like abortions With human throats And Wisdom's eyes Who wore lamp-shade red dresses And woolen hair One bore a baby In a padded porte-enfant Tied with a sarsenet ribbon To her goose's wings But for the abominable shadows I would have lived Among their fearful furniture To teach them to tell me their secrets Before I guessed -- Sweeping the brood clean out VIII Midnight empties the street --- --- --- To the left a boy --- One wing has been washed in rain The other will never be clean any more --- Pulling door-bells to remind Those that are snug To the right a haloed ascetic Threading houses Probes wounds for souls --- The poor can't wash in hot water --- And I don't know which turning to take --- IX We might have coupled In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment Or broken flesh with one another At the profane communion table Where wine is spill't on promiscuous lips We might have given birth to a butterfly With the daily-news Printed in blood on its wings X In some Prenatal plagiarism Foetal buffoons Caught tricks --- --- --- --- --- From archetypal pantomime Stringing emotions Looped aloft --- --- --- --- For the blind eyes That Nature knows us with And most of Nature is green --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- XI Green things grow Salads For the cerebral Forager's revival And flowered flummery Upon bossed bellies Of mountains Rolling in the sun XII Shedding our petty pruderies From slit eyes We sidle up To Nature --- --- --- that irate pornographist XIII The wind stuffs the scum of the white street Into my lungs and my nostrils Exhilarated birds Prolonging flight into the night Never reaching --- --- --- --- ------ --- ---