WAITING

The light goes out-- and in the darkness
The window fades in like a distant memory.
As in the clearlit night, the row of houses across the street...
If I close my eyes, I can almost see your doorstep.
...
Crickets beating the pulse of night,
And then a hush-- you've come,
After the bath,
Your skin tart as an apple.
---------------------------

THE LAKE

I sit back in the afternoon... the treetops sway in the soothing
radioactive wind... And lovers reclined by the lake on the summer lawns
tossing in beer cans between kisses, watching plastic bottles 
bob like swans.

The woods are full of midsummer night's dreams
and their accessories, the condoms, the Playboy magazines,
The empty bottles of beer bleeding into golds and greens.
You tired people of the cities,

You tired of getting up at seven every morning,
Tired of catching the bus, the taxi, the train,
Drink from the breast of nature! Only $200 for your pain.
This poem was sponsored by Meyer & Singh, travel associates.

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PARALYSIS.

In a death of the spirit
I began. In the midnight house I pace,
The mind swings, loathesome spider, from a face,
Any face... how otherwise can one sleep...

Leafing through the yellow papers of the past, I find the pages empty,
Looking in the mirror, I find my rubbery flesh dissolving, I stare through the holes
Of the vacant skull, and see the wasted mornings rot like mold
Over the edges of the wasted nights.

The room grows colder with the hour,
A stiffness that starts in the hands and feet,
Creeps up the spine until it is complete--
I am completely stiff.

--------------------

SEPTEMBER

They are drifting to the lake now,
Last summer's petals, pale silent flocks,
Homeless children at the mercy of the wind
Shivering, curling up in nasty water.

And i think of misery,
Of those who spill at night into the gutters,
Of those who lose the games we pretend to win,
Of those who clutch at a heart, a crucifix, at things
Even less buoyant than ourselves.

You i think of,
Running barefoot in the hostile nights of the cold, drafty castle,
Crazy hair, white petal loved at last by weedy waters,
Ophelia...