WALK AROUND OUTSIDE NAKED
Would you like to?
Have you done it once or twice, in dreams?
Something about freedom...
Something about shedding pretense...
Did you like to climb trees when you were a kid?
Was there a special one -- a dream tree?
Something about being above it all...
Something about hiding...
Did you ever kill somebody
While taking a shower or doing the dishes?
Something about getting things straight...
Something about rage...
FLIRTING
for Sylvia Plath
I know that coquetry --
That solitary, exhausting dance
Along the shore of his black, icy lake.
I know the harrowed cleverness,
Hasty strategems, feigned deliriums,
With which you fended off his drowsy calling.
I know your demand of yourself
That the very breath of your body
Vomit you into freefall
So that out of the turbulence
Of your daring
Some incandescent moment might explode.
The world is so worn and commonplace.
It takes a fierce sickness of the soul
To want to rescue it again and again.
It, too, flirts with sleep in the black lake.
LUCIFER
Piss elegant on a throne in hell.
Gilded dropout. Sullen and lost
To the light --
The first in a distinguished line.
You're the crack in the mirror, sir.
You're that rude shout in the street
That drove Baudelaire around the bend.
Oh, nobody asked you to be good.
Denied entry to the Garden Party,
You slung a boa around your neck
And slithered under the fence.
Your audacity charmed us
When you climbed the tree
And shook golden fruit into our hands.
But what thanks do you get now,
You there in your moldy pit --
You, who served us
Death?
SHALLOW GRAVE
A few inches of sand on top, please, for now.
I may wish to rise again,
Shuddering up out of that dreamless sleep --
And speak to you of the subtleties of nothingness,
The vast intrigue of nowhere.
I, who had no thought for tomorrow,
May demand to rehearse all possible tomorrows, then,
Drunken with imaginings,
Piling detail on detail of what could be,
And how and where...
You may wonder who I am, then,
As my flesh billows like smoke,
And my eyes liquefy and boil into steam --
And a choir of exulting voices, none my own,
Shouts incomprehensibly in splendid chaos.