Pygmalion Barbie

Over lunch Barbie is telling me all her plans,
How she is trading Boise Ken for Honolulu Ken,
Still lives at home Ken for metrosexual Ken,
Fed Ex Ken for minor league baseball player Ken.
She tells me how they are going to live at the beach,
Surf every day, party,
Thursday through Saturday nights for the next three years
And then they are going to make babies.
A gypsy fortune teller told her this would happen.
I listen to her with my faux bionic ear.
I watch her like a pirate with my un-patched eye,
With patched hair
And other sundry body damage.
There's not a sweater around my neck,
Only my nappy prehistoric pelt.
With my kung-fu grip
I could take hold of the gypsy's crystal ball
And crush it into a diamond for her,
Yet in its multi-faceted reflections
She would still only see beach and babies,
Because she is Barbie
And I am not Ken.
I'm just plain ol' Joe
With a kung-fu grip.

Resistance is Futile

I cannot resist dark hair
          The kind that tastes
          Licorice.
I cannot resist green eyes
          The kind that smell
          Rye (I surely will die) Whiskey.
I cannot resist long fingers
          The kind that sigh
          Tiramisu.
I cannot resist olive skin
          The kind that hallucinates
          Dips (In the moonlight).
I cannot resist golden ventricles
          The kind that nuzzle
          Fealty.
She has none of these
          Yet I cannot resist her
          Futile.

The tail of the day
Wrapped around me, split tongue
Flickering for dawn.

Concordia

I wish I had an Italian woman to cheat on.
Knowing me, I wouldn't actually cheat on her,
But I would wish I could convince her
It was so.
I would do it just so she would
Rage and curse me in Italian,
So she would throw family heirlooms at me
And sink her bright red fingernails into my neck.
It would be worth it.
Oh, it would be clarion.
To meet Invidia,
Let her see me hear the venom dripping from her tongue,
Let her hear me see she is not as blithe as the breeze
Nor as casual and carefree as the currents,
Finally, I would have my proof of her passion,
Her self-devouring bitterness,
That she would so easily and quickly mangle
All she claims to cherish
And against which she measures me.
She would not be able to spurn my proof,
My rused rut nailed,
Not with the ruts in my nape
Dripping her Chanel rouge.

Glow

You have a sun in your smile,
It makes you glow,
Like a star burning a thousand degrees of joy,
Outing the flowers to shake off their dew.
I think I'll bask in it a while,
As it draws me near from thoughts afar
And warm myself to a healthy bronze.
It brings out the everything in you,
A humble, ivory headdress.
If only some device I could employ,
To capture your smile in my heart like a jar
Full of fireflies, a living glow ensconced,
To be a lamp post, my beacon of home in the wilderness.

I was given a name
A name I was to honor,
To have for all time,
But that name rejected me.
So I chose a name,
A name I couldn't live without,
To hold for all time,
But I was driven to cut off my hand
And could not hold on.
I was given a gift, a child,
But it was taken before
I could give it a name
And I live without the name
It would have given me.
Even this poem has no name,
Like the grinning goose fish
That love does not seem to understand.
Ancient, grey and grinning,
We are a couple of rigid optimists,
Admiring the tomb of the unknowns.

Beaming

I stepped off the curb, lifted my chin and there she was...
A little girl with dark curly locks drawn up in a beehive almost as altitudinous as she,
A princess crowned with a pink bow,
Her carriage of conveyance, the cart her mother was trudging up the inclined parking lot to their car.
Big brown eyes pensively peered at me, first on one side of her mother and then the other.
She inclined towards me, body and mind, wayward to the route of her mother's plod.
I held her ruminating regard without expression as long as I dared,
Then slightly raised the corners of my chops and softened my countenance.
At once she smiled, a sweeping showing simper.
As the faun, Mr. Tumnus, I nodded at my Lucy.
Reaching their destination, her mother asked her, "What are you looking at?"  and turned...
But I was already past, appearing as the lamp post,
An expected part of the landscape in one world,
Peculiar and out of place in the other...
Beaming.

Instinctual

Does the hyena ever quip
He never laughs with her anymore?
Is the viper vexed
He didn't slide over and hiss?
Does the owl wonder why
He no longer seems to pay attention to who...who?
You must forgive me if
I laugh, hiss or who around you
Or simply silently sway like
An anemone instinctually communicating
With the currents
In your cosmic tidal pool.
I am merely rebooting,
After being humbled to my BIOS.

Married to a Xylophage

Does it still grow?
How wood you know, the dodo tempo and rhythm of mortis?
Still it stands a wooden ghoul.
How many times euthanized and resuscitated?
Yet still it stands,
Committed to that spot long ago.
In youth, jading every spring,
Now arthritic limbs blossom to leisurely
Winter's petrification blooms perpetually,
God scarcely smiling underneath it anymore.
She has driven off or vanquished all it could cling to for support,
Tree, mammal, rock.
Even chummy kudzu dares not advocate an acquaintance.
What senescent memory remains, retained in those reapered rings
Not yet eaten by dementia?
What suspended consciousness silently screams for autonomy
Inside that broken, dripping frame
Passed over by the aphid angels?
Is it an introspective contortion or the tenacious termite's tiny, tickling torture
Twisting the bark into its gnarled grim grin?

Sunday Dinner

My mother showed me a picture once
Of what it was like on those holy days
When mere men
Dressed in dark ties and starched white shirt-sleeves
Sat together in the banquet hall
And were served the bounty of the earth
Made divine by glowing
Immortals wearing flowers in their hair.

To the poem, in vogue...

So terrifyingly conversational are you
Yet so flat and one sided
Not like any conversation I'd enjoy
Speak your common tongue in the language of a tree
Then it might be living to me
Speak it in the dialect of a willow
Or the slang of snow
Call out a coyote canticle
Dapple a chorus dribbled in Daspletosaurus
Speak to me in nouns
Of the highest naturalnanimous numerator
For I care not
For the perversity
Of the lowest primatetitive denominator

See me sprawled, still,
Fluxing through fates of felt.  Who
Will hear my silence?