Pleasure Dome. Yusef Komunyakaa

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СКАЧАТЬ of children will stone you

      till your clothes are rags.

      Mr. Ditch Commissioner

      of La Acequia Del Llano,

      did you know a gopher hole

      can swallow a man?

A Different Story

      Teenyboppers crowd No Exit.

      Lep Zeppelin & illegal

      shadows. I hate words

      burning twist lemon menthol 100s.

      No, nothing I say can stop them

      from splitting themselves open

      like those honeydew melons

      I saw last summer

      driving the midwest.

      They clap hands & laugh

      like Sam River’s sax,

      dancing the rose’s perfect vernacular

      as they push their lives into streets

      on the tongues of men.

One-Breath Song

      you are the third term

      carried to the fourth power of numbers

      two steps overlooked inbetween

      colors of night-burning sky

      a priori light blue of your dress

      our faces everything except

      against odds of self-discovery

      we find our bodies locked

      together in a room of breath

      threefold at the rotting threshold

      divided into ontogenetic questions

      a fluke of radio waves in the storm

      the song that uses up our lives.

Frontal Lobe Postscript

      God’s love is busy with the trees.

      Arch-mechanic of electrical sky,

      blood-red tree of knowledge, ichnology,

      witch hazel, mid-May. I think of Bob,

      with his “little piece of string & sharp

      stone,” over at Minnie’s Can-Do Club,

      as if the go-go dancer in her cage cares

      who knows injustice’s oblique cape.

Sagittarius Approaching Thirty-Five

      Yes, you’re still a little eccentric

      around the velvet edges of your voice.

      Your martini eyes say you wish you could

      stop Cherokee Creek behind the unpainted house

      you were born in. Boards drop off like slabs

      of digital ice. The mortar of the doorsteps

      cracks with green flames. You’re crouched

      in a corner, crying because your face plays

      the girl who returns summers to watch the yard

      swell with wildflowers. The iron signpost,

      an arm holding the nameplate

      almost corroded away.

Cubism

      Deep-eyed painter through black windows

      Across night

      Mountain rain

      Drips blue

      Cezanne thinking Six triangles of sun

Insinuations

      Around from Kentucky Fried Chicken

      at Liberty Belle, I met someone

      who looked like somebody’s dream.

      We talked about the obsequy

      behind John Berryman’s eyes,

      about how we loved

      reading The Voice in bed

      while sipping Southern Comfort.

      She showed me where some bastard

      kicked his baby out of her.

      We said we didn’t know why

      we loved walking in the rain

      till everything disappeared,

      but knew why Eric Dolphy

      pried the lids off skulls.

Loneliness

      New Mexico peels off

      plum skin.

      A night-blooming cereus

      leans against an adjacent building

      like the town’s drunk.

      Morning swells in my brain

      till my fingers retrace a woman

      on the air. We all use our hands

      for something, against something.

      The Orange Pekoe taste of her

      stays, even after a brown bottle

      wraps my voice in cerecloth.

      Again, I find myself

      watching the old silversmith

      work plains of buffalo

      from his head. I return

      to my rented room,

      put a bullet into the chamber

      & СКАЧАТЬ