but shall we embrace hell for fleshly indiscretions?
as fingers search like water the well-known grooves
of rivers, like memory, its gallant kiss & promenade
retreating like spanked children from the scolding finger
or grasp the arch so like diving rods that quiver
at the faint idea of moisture
clasped to the tongues to succor in flushed rapture
cancer-vised in evil purity
II
your commonplace addiction to your skin’s epiphany
is at least a jig & thrust of rage, a
decade’s longing unrequited
words are easier to parlay than facts, themselves
unable to escape such allegories as reason
may invent
elegant doves of porcelain we seem
weaving psalms like hooded priests in
David’s Tower
all indiscretions are embraceable given
space to prosper, there are grooves like
well-worn rivers that defy man’s intervention
our tongues circumvent the rods that from
almighty fall, divining moisture in the arid
discourse, in the evil purity of rapture
flushed to clasp and succor still
our longing
₪
Love in the late 20th century
how much must I see before time is a sailor sailing to port on a smile or a prayer waiting in line for the choruses after a dream in a dream as you turn down the stairs
here’s looking atcha kid
should i just sit
ravished and aware
should i memorize for time’s
recounting the silhouette
framed by yellow light on the
bathroom door, as you stood
from the lukewarm distance of
the bed, for never so as you
were then
in a broken dream hotel
the perfect guitar in
a dime-novel book cover
₪
sometime lover, part time friend
if I were her sometime lover
bowls of fruit, cologne, champagne,
listless love, pregnant move & idle gesture
would mesh to make the perfect evening in a week
time, of course, would be a hurried pleasure
& then, if I were her part time friend,
confidant, the perennial tête-à-tête
soaked in wine & leisure, the fissures
of life would heal & the wounds
topics of conversation, such dissipation,
we then would revel in harnessed need
we would turn to each other like
whales courting in the north atlantic
a sometime frantic dance of fingers
where often lingers a peacock feather-spread
she is a queen past mourning the chorus
of her lovers, textured in laughter,
bathed in ornament, the clap of waves
on a shoreless sigh of birds, a most human earthling
with teeth so specific as a crackled morning sun
as it is now we share a homicide,
we kill off all the armies that could march into a room
we sweep the walls bare of song
& transgress the each of the other
like diplomats in zurich, or
unemployed actors in france, we
play with chance, hoping that it survives
the roar of circumstance, a prance,
a minuet in dark, a lark, and interchange
of flowers in Sunday promenades
because only she, the sole recipient of inkful musings,
could possibly understand such a phrase, as do I love
that much more, no less, than all the tea in china
₪
holiday
the rubble of a misused year
even as i listen to my tinkerings
even as the hounds misbehave under the moon,
the slight curve where waist and thigh
exchange curtsies
and ever so you turn to me
where the sun licks the wood
of dawn’s first insinuations
₪
punta aloe, 1 & 2
we left no imprint on the sand, this bed
that is no shore
the idle love in a house of wood
we clasped the shoals crustacean style
while sun danced whimsically disarrayed
in yellow disregard for sleep
₪
prism
as the moon burns slowly in our wake
the barren redness of the stars
outlines the sky’s elliptic changes
our skins stretch beneath the orange yawns
and violet whispers as yellow beams
stain the sleepful indigo of walls to lemon green
the watercolors of a tryst turned into day
₪
sodomite
at face value your eyes, beyond the confines,
the heretical treatises, the naughty lines,
your body glides saran-wrapped from iniquity
employing stratagems across the board
extracting juices from the straw’s remains,
and, as such, your eyelids crumble in my hands
your damask embered red above it
stares, open-mouthed slurping manhood from the groin
dazed and bemused, entranced and simply awed
₪
acolyte
your body has a certain smile nowadays
akin to sprouting wings, perchance
you wonder at my concern
no care, i’ve carved an image
where there were no gods,
raised psalms to the iconicity of your hair
invented new strategies for pain
₪
curses! foiled again!
how lately life has lost its password
its flight thru wood, the landscape of a room
where flesh transgressed must often bloom
indifferently
mouthed in the skin’s swelled hurt
₪
landscape of a room
last night your kitchen was the grotto
where you sought sweetbreads and cheeses
remember how the knife just hung
in glistened atrophy
unknowing and calm
before the plunge into the ripe tomato
and the crunch of the green peppers
lighted up the sky with thunderous steel sound
all is quiet now
as the peasants lie strewn
about the modern fixtures
of the late twentieth century
and you awake to rooms dappled
more morning than peach fuzz in winter
sweet as dawn’s first turning in bed
finding reasons for small corners,
acknowledging the majesty of doorknobs
and the prehistoric grandeur of
bathroom tiles
because to each man his castle
and to each queen her tower
from which to look upon the world
₪
thornrosed
let me wear you down with leaves
the countenance of bridled norms
exact from you a most useless evening,
monday perhaps
a most perfect animal to lie
in the bedsheets of hotel rooms
a tourist heart brochured and casino-happy
and as no history shall redeem me, then
I will paper-doll my universe in scissored flesh
but the street, what shall become of the street?
I, as I am, the merest cartographer
of a jeweled disparity
thornrosed as youth is among the prickled hearts
₪
the convict moon
love spread eagle-spread the curled finger
of you, last is the skin that weeps, for
everlasting, for teardrop tinkered of
the seemingly youngful and once again
i trip the year of ‘66
fingerprinted liféd the convict moon
the chill & stillness panicked by the window,
it scared what left of daylight words conjure
then it was that we decided
to intermingle, a relaxed gesture
of the heave & ho took place amid
the sheets, what is it made us sad?
the night so like the other, the songs not played,
the lack of food, and absence of wine
that shook the world?
₪
inventory
the rooms where one is a constant stranger
the shuffling photographs & a waft of numbered years
(two decades seems softer to say than twenty aprils)
the dust that finds its way into the brain
to form the splinters that chaff and grain
& a skin that smells of a dozen lovers
the rooms where one is the third party waiting,
making gruesome inventory among the half-filled boxes
in a bed where the flesh is a dream too overslept
& every corner a possible suicidal leap
one finds making friends with pillows a sport
for gentlemen in gamey afternoons
the rooms where more often than not one lies awake
without a cigarette
to muse on twenty aprils
to classify for the bureaucracy of love,
papers for censured streets
the rooms where one finds gentle seasonings of spring
or bones white rapture honed by sea
on the driftwoods of
in a passion of green, in a passion of green
₪
koan seeking absence
let it transgress the very flesh of you
with criminal intent
let it needle through you like
crossbars of light in sequestered rooms
let it abide beside you like prayers
or mistaken identities, let it be your
calling in the creeping aftermaths
let it thread through your laughing
with the lacelike filigrees of yearning
let it dismantle the symmetry of mornings
until there is nothing but the
rhythms of a nightmare to keep step to
let it be said that all days must end
in the evenings of your soul’s repenting
let it be the keening of your eyes the only answer
₪
love in the late 20th century
like hot water thru the coffee grinds
this life shot thru the sieve
onto the morning headlines
impending doom is everywhere
and the last stronghold is near collapse
the geopolitic scheme of things
is hard to bear, the surface of things
too, and the shifting spheres of influence
this not having you
near in times of crisis
is shooting through me like political speeches
it’s too late to sidestep this war
we have no memory of war
the early morning news is always
so ever slightly disconcerting
but no more so this space
you do not fill
that shoots thru me like thorn-filled roses
₪
my love takes leave in ceremonious leaps
as the green summers bow to the wind
so does my love take leave
in ceremonious leaps, the sand
bereaves the wood its stillness, and
the sea the shore rocks’ predictable tomorrows
and so shall I choose lesser raptures
and smaller rooms, and thinner nights
like rice paper
dawn’s first cloth of rain shall find
others clasped like mollusks
to your garden walls, with tendrils
winding through your well-contoured
thighs or throbbing on your tongue
green summers and the seascapes of
your belly adorn half-painted
walls like murals
to an everlasting need of sorts
or the nightmare of a shoreline
strewn with ankles
like broken bits of reef
after a storm
green summers bow like retreating
geishas after a feast
must I continue to enumerate
all I have lost?
that which always is beyond
our touching?
₪
parlor games
i do not know anything about anything
anything about anything do not know i
but anything suffices the syllable’s jig in time
anything but love seeps thru the shadow
of the thing like the essential breakfast
or morning newspaper, anything really
can become the guiding star of your hand’s
surrender and your eyes’ complicity, try it
and see the voluptuous line emerge, throw in
the hunt and her skin’s debuting air, like
returning to the primer of the game
the coin’s first flip in sky is ever the same:
the lacéd bodice and the lurking breasts
in memory’s ear, and how it never came to be
(our skin’s détente) our procrastinations
and our parlor games
and how everything, like anything i know about,
should cease so sudden-like, but this always
still remains: the word’s tryst with words
and her unknowing grace on dimpled time
as it jogs in place in reason’s sistered rhyme
₪
the sometime scar
the futile body of a strange ellipsis
embodies tearing down old dreams
and particles of want witherings
escape to your flesh as
pomegranate seedless evening comes
to play your eyelid fugue
all those before the fleeting years shall answer
no more your useless ears
your errant knees, your style
and circumstance
like never before shall dance death
you are, after all, the last reminder
the lingering wound, the
sometime scar
₪
LOOSE ENDS
I loosed the grip oh, it was so a lovely trip my ladies
₪
comment upon the fractured times we live in
o poem written in nineteen sixty seven
were you all that we thought we were
are you all that we think we are
are we all that we think we are
are we all that you thought we were
the unzippered calmness of the bay
the gurgly sound, the nickel-less reality i’ve become
is there no constant beyond the page’s hunger
for the word
are these the time we live in
₪
songs for the late 20th century I
I let my light shine under me grafted to the line where I shall grasp unyieldingly the words that intertwine
the life that screams from off the bed
the little corner pains
the lightning-fast soliloquy of death
that whispered lullaby
the little-to-lateness of my orations
a pitter-patter panic soft-shoeing in the
dawn’s first early light
and so proudly we fail
love’s oblivion like a snapshot on the run
like a sniper filled with bullet-words
or sand-pictures on the ground
the imagery! the imagery! gang-raped
before the stars or in suburban rooms
where is the center that will not hold
in the confused geography of man
where are the chorused greeks of my return
why no singing on the tight-drawn savage lips of men
why no rapture in our groping thus
towards the millennium’s end
₪
songs for the late 20th century II
if i perforce must articulate
so many words are strewn in the history of rhyme
the reasons for my present state
like blind locusts taken to the wind at night
i shall then dare to enunciate
among the many fathers who lay claim to my bespeckled flesh
that life’s a jig on the pinhead of fate
there is an everlasting one of everlasting grace
fate’s dance has left me with a coward’s heart
time’s the cure, the grand inquisitor
and more fears have i that freud would name
through the bedlam and the pain
and the crimes of love misspent
i’ve often ended at the start of the circuitous game
that s.o.s. of laughable light in a sea’s dark bosom
is the everlasting one of everlasting grace
₪
AGAINST MEMORY
₪
In a time long past remembering itself all things danced in my head. The joy of the word was in the word itself, whichever word arose on the page was followed for its promise of others. Now these words seen in another light seem wisps that if not anchored to the page would of themselves drift off, crumble into nothing but useless letters, seen from afar a smudge, a smear. Yet their silent living in the rooms I’ve lived in is also a silent death of sorts. They hardly mean anything anymore to me, esthetically speaking. Lessons to be learned no doubt for future reckonings. Yet something must be salvaged from that time, the origins, the beginnings, not workshop pleasant, but street-lived. A somewhat abstract journal in verse of my first writing years. And so I chose a few at random from a collection of poems, "Cobblestones", written from the mid-60’s to 1970. Chose a few at random, not even for their worth, poetically or as representative of a time and place that I hold dear, but for certain lines tied to me still. Gathered them, like souvenirs, and took a few steps back from them also and wrote improvisations on them in sonnet form, from which I first broke to write free verse. As homage to myself then, to sing a bit about it all then from where I sit now "to my most secret heart." The poems left out must then content themselves with the escape of a few of their brothers from the secret closets to which they shall return. Thus some will escape the hunter’s arrow, appear herein in cameo, displaying their best feathers, poor darlings. Alone on the page to strut their charms. Others like blind widows
escorted to the ball by sonnets brazenly. To stand and perhaps to die as they wished on the cruel landscape of publication
Puerto Nuevo,1989.
₪
dear me the ocean
dear me the ocean, if I could tell
aboard some apartment, see if you can
come down
in some time so in lovely future waiting
this is not a poem, intentionally or
otherwise simulated, one must
keep it simple yesterday night
being on the beach some
tranquil fellini-type shore
no horizons with only cigarettes &
one towel to share
fighting with joyous sand & imagine
monsters & simple things from
ear to ear construed Dear
my, ‘twas beyond analysis or lines
in scribbling frantic
in some time so in lovely future waiting
see if you can come down,
aboard some apartment;
if I could tell, dear me the ocean.
₪
I no longer smiled at eternity even telephone books thinned everyone’s name in smaller print
wheels of tragedy spun cobwebs of lassitude leery eyes bending down among the trash heaps
possess life and giggle objectively at those who seek it yet as useless as untinted sunglasses
they’ll burn your brain to a brittle piece of
social bric-a-brac
Cobwebs
The marginalia of my younger years
When death appeared in smaller print encased
Eternity instilled in me the fears
Born of the word and by the word erased.
So like the cobwebs of a spider’s womb
A patch of air to snare the errant line,
The word became its own incessant tomb
Caught in the threads that syllables entwine.
And thus the words wove symmetries of light
And hung them on the promises of sound
And waited for the image to alight,
Spring like a sapling from the virgin ground.
The vigil enticed nothing in its snare,
Leaving me weaving cobwebs in the air.
₪
the sun distant was bleating incoherently a rumpled line of soup cans lay absurdly still on a wall to dawn’s misty assessment filtering throughout houses lay damp on both sides of a streetly dormant came the morning tide whispering a symphonic diurnal
The sun distant was bleating incoherently,
A line of soup cans lay still on the wall,
Dawn’s icy kiss bestirred my reverie,
From darkness into light I fell in thrall.
Awakened from my sleep I walked along
A streetly dormant town where houses lay
Like vestiges of dreams, or was I wrong?
Dawn masquerades as night well into day.
The morning tide came whispering so low,
No clash of waves on rock, just symphony
Of water churning silently below
The seeming calm of surface symmetry.
Quickly prayed that it last forever so,
Enraptured by the ocean’s afterglow.
₪
the city has warped me into a fish without scales
the soul dew slowly evaporating on stained pillows
A whirligig of words
A city warps a man in its gray vise
No matter how he flips or spins in space,
Just like a fish left to its own device,
No matter how he pulls, the hook’s in place.
With thin knives slowly scaled and packed in ice
A man is left to ponder thus too late
That words themselves enclose their own demise
And confect for a man his own dim fate.
So as I lay beneath me on my bed
In a most tiny room by time misplaced,
Words lie strewn about inside my head
Like fish caught in the fervor of their chase.
It is then that death is just a death,
A whirligig of words left on one’s breath.
₪
the night came as an old man begging for a nickel with the threat that it would
eat you up whole
Unbearded and unsickled, night begged alms
And with a toothless giggle death proposed,
And looking quite uncouth with upturned palms
Solicited a nickel unopposed.
The threat that it proposed to eat me whole,
Put bravery reluctantly to flight.
It was no time to bare unblush’d my soul
Nor rage against the plying of the night.
It begged me for a nickel, that was plain,
And for it would have even slit my throat,
And being I not enamored of such pain
Coughed up a silv’ry nickel from my coat.
Anyone that walks ‘neath the darken’d skies
Should know that death stalks oft times in disguise.
₪
in the night a glaze of gasoline looks like a wrinkled mass of tin foil wrapper
old drunks unzip their pants and long streaks of piss flow down into the water interrupting the silence with its pleasant gurgly sound
Old drunks unzip their pantaloons,
Let long and golden streaks of piss unfurl,
They do this every half or quarter moon
From off the pier down to the water’s swirl.
Old drunks are chosen poets of the night,
Their golden stanzas liquid and precise
Arc the cold air in lyrical delight;
It is an art of surfeit and surmise.
Their art’s an art that’s often misconstrued
By those who think that verse is metered sound
And only see a drunk behaving rude
And not matter from which to wax profound.
But sometimes poems are no more than this,
As drunks do know, a bliss that comes with piss.
₪
suppose an albatross should set its wings
upon the flight of sky
lap up the wave’s lost sea
with falling hair within the sand
or embrace the limbs of a songless tree
with the leaves laughing apart
between the eyes and earth
and all the meaningful lips that smile
I could retrieve the sadness of poems
dead and gone that seek expression
but die in a languid space of time
and a sleep that stretched betwixt two days
as the yawns preceded the words
that murmured through the air
like stifled oboe cries
to an elevated knowing sense that
the womb will not give birth to new
but old will cease in stance.
₪
Names and places, fools and other sinners
−in media res−
I
Braided blond to the bed as I imagine her to be
smellful and urgent in her needs, no
secret Helga this, precisioned wants in a claustrophobic
island room, palpable dough for even absent hands
to knead
it was always like fire in the hand, a
clasped anxiety among disheveled sheets, red bulblight
evenings of scarred mouths and cries of skin undone
a desperate dance of sinners reconciled, the
undernourished guilt of minds beset on happiness
bold plans reduced to mating teeth, gorging
on flesh ‘til pain begged a retreat
and televisions blinked from anthem to incessant fuzz
as we leapt thru the night half-drunk on hope
the boogieman sat beside our reverie
you’ll pay for this, you’ll pay for this, he cried
we listened half believing scare tactics in the dark
it was all a welcomed loss conjured
to flip saints over in their graves
and we did a turn or two ourselves
on the brink of a seductive fall from grace
we fell and through it all we spiked our hearts
with injurious betrayals, trite words like ashes
from a cigarette left unattended, diversionary
tactics as certain armies play, we played
and often in anger loved again, like crippled
discarded crabs trying to make it back to water
we only knew one quest, our infamy’s survival
II
Let’s name the places in our hearts we’d
like to postcard for posterity:
intangible streets and corners under trees,
frenzied overpasses, bridges too old to weep,
simulated leather couches beneath the
plastic ferns, ménage à trois at beachheads
or in private dancing clubs, a wooden house
in a wooden time and place
III
Ah the rooms the places and the songs
churned in the womb spun like
cotton candy skimmed off the top
frothing at the rim licking the sweet-scented
virgule (like two birds that mate in flight?)
it was a commonplace occurrence, the names
and places, we chose a bed, a room
that had a window that opened onto a silver sea
that was a roof, but who were we to question
our eyes’ delirious truths, Forsooth! said we,
beneath the sleep there is a dream, tearing
our flesh, combing our hair, the animals
we stir each time we kissed, O virgin of Babylon
scourge of the locust years, the room ravaged white
as bones honed to ivory by the sea
names? there were no names, though fools abounded
thrived like kernels of the most explosive corn,
crackled like the skin of witches in medieval towns,
oozed like scabs that bubble in hot oil, and
through such exiles we loved the pulsing need
imprinted in our touch, glow worms the eyes i found
your breath still yielding earth to rush of seed,
curdled in your orifice’s embrace, figurehead of my
thrust thru an unknown sea
IV
And thus it came to pass, or should we
say to naught the eclipse of the rush onto the sea
but what made me so enamored of ankles
was the whir of words when famine rules
the fermenting need,
when the body apparent is no longer the enticing wand
and queens must be betrothed from
the neighboring wood to fuel the hand’s
addictive urge to map a silhouette in dark
inspire the fumes arisen from fresh-tilled earth
sink the nostrils ‘til the tendrils flare below
her two young roes always affixed my stare
I, so sick of love that the songs dispersed
like doves alighted from her hair, but
the buzz and stir of words claim no
biblical embrace but spout forth of their own
religion like psalms gone mad from the flutist’s breath
V
But the surge of blood still rushes
through the stones of emptiness
and my words still scatter to her
flesh like moths still believing in the stars
like unschooled hoards the repetitive slaughter
of the lamb, the ritual holds all my
separate parts in awe and quickens my limbs
to folly, to where my eyes stray over magazines
in cluttered rooms while she disenfranchises the
myth, and creates anew the situation comedy hour
of our tryst
where are the breasts that should
dance between the fires of the wood?
why does she not adorn her loins with the heads
of vanquished armies slain for her bemusement,
why do not burnished thighs leap over
ashtrays in abandon, where are the eyes or
searching fingers to regale the moon?
no mortal walks over the ocean sober,
bold imaginings spumed forth from the cheapest wines,
the testament to this is a millennium of words
strung like ribbons from the harvest pole
where dance the passions of the field reaped clean
and teeth are sharpened lovingly for feast,
where are the lovers of the tale i boast?
I asked so many times as we tumbled over
yesterday’s wash left drying on the bed
VI
In all truthfulness we must say
the winds blew in the wrong direction
in this isle of hateful gnashings
and discarded corpses in impromptu cemetery roadsides
But we did not succumb to the brandished gun
that supplants conversation in this demented landscape,
our bones did not protrude blood-lovingly
on the morning headlines, our names were
not broadcast in five minute capsules along with
catastrophes and weather forecasts, spared of
momentary notoriety we wallowed in our arms
among the cat-leaps of our mornings
garlanded in our beatific eyeless pace
to unseat the moorings of our laughter
And thus we had to count the dead while
eating supper, hear the crash of skulls
and the screams of women left bleeding
on our doorstep, the entire madness of the world
outside our window came tumultuously like
flotsam from the shipwrecks to the shores
echoing the distant rumblings of last whispers
the solemn dead that stained our pillows with their sorrow
We could hardly breathe or move among the carcasses,
the bodies twitching in the dark
made curious music to our longing
And thus we loved intermittently forever after
panicked wordless in the bloodfest of an island
VII
And now the aftermath, the cameos etched
and hung from the ramparts of our despairing limbs
walking among the shards of embered dreams, we
sit blank-faced to the wall;
there is no private left to which we can recoil
to repair the necessary wounds that
names and places, fools and other sinners
tattoo upon our skins,
nor time or space to make amends for what we
inflict upon the earth
just the underlying rush that disturbs the spider’s web,
unhinges the last leaves left on the trees
We sit with the useless language of the aftermath,
sweeping up the words like shavings off the floor
absentmindedly toss them in the flame
that once was in the hand
off to a corner that we wished to salvage from
archeological pursuits
Tomorrow we shall don new clothes, comb our
hair another way, make different jokes
to different people, laugh two octaves lower
even, for the sake of change
and in new continents where we will have to name
all things anew
a fire will alight from the thinnest air onto our hand,
jorge morales-santo domingo, poesía puertoriqueña, 1970-2000, Alicia la Roja, Puerto Nuevo, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Puerto Rican poet, generación del setenta.