Tiselboa round her body forcing the flowers to open open overture possessed of a tune. One that’s so sweet, only the noise of the world noisy world drowns it out. of too many stories we shared and compared and now here we are knowing too much too soon. and one should never force flowers to open. If I seem distracted it is only because the moonlight has caught in your hair and struggles like a river of light in the darkness of you and I watch it untangle and I see the moon’s pale hand on your cheek does it comfort you, sister? To know your eyes have taken their place among the intelligences of heaven, among the myriad beauties of time? Does it satisfy you to know that I have seen everything and that they are beautiful every one? Would the servants creep quietly out of the scene leaving master and mistresses improperly close? turning blind eyes to the night and all her secrets ? right in the terrible month of September ? trumpet cry and I cry and it is the same and we sing September long into October as our scales are tipped ; our balance askew. Shall we jettison memories that keep us from sinking? jettison thoughts that murder 0 sleep and dreams and dreams and dreams. the hand goes round. tinselboa round and bodies held too tightly for comfort too tightly for breath and for space . a tight rosebud protecting its perfumed soul it is as a pearl as a girl as a world not for the taking and in that folly falls a long rain. so many swallows ; sweeping gesture to take you in and it is wrong from the start to force flowers to open or anything closed . some things shut beautifully and necessity is the mother of death . pause for breath and try to ignore the boa and the glitter of the soapshine. the eyes of whitewine. the stars in the river all of it ; all too much and too terrible. We will stumble upon eachother. This happens and the accident is beautiful and naked of significance for the first innocent moments before the mind and all her dreams begin to summon desire and her tearful minions to the table to taste and to complain that there should be more should be more! To satisfy would be a crime in the arena of lack, only the empty is beautiful only the empty bed waits for your form only the empty glass waits for its wine hold this then to your breath and whisper it to night-time or to sunrise when you are safely alone and you can feel the delights of that rich absence; that lovely sense of loss that bears truth in its wound, bears a melancholy song in its empty breast and makes a symphony of longing. sing it till your out of breath, then sing breathlessly again the hollow body of the guitar the hollow at the base of your neck what is it that forces itself into empty vacuums and asserts its thingness there? Is it I who have made like matter and invaded a quiet place? Making too-turbulent wind. “Over” she wanted to say just as he has said and known and the conclusions are never conclusive and the absence feels more like presence. the ghost of love is like white wine in the water the ghost of love is the moonlight mixing with the night, we will not do those things will we never do those things it is possible and so is the night possible and the road can possibly turn and possibly curve and take you to a place you never thought you’d possibly go; to an empty place that seemed to wait for you like a glass for a ghost of water or a hand for a hand that is promised too tightly held hand and withdrawn now hand and once here on me hand now gone . Wrap the boa round you, let the wandering light find your body thus wrapped and for a moment – let it caress you. it is the only feeling to feel in a moment such as that; with the light and the shadows and the absence so strong. And give to it what you would take from it and NEVER ASK IT TO GIVE WHAT IT CANNOT GIVE never force flowers open, stamen and stem; perfume and shadow, in that accident was almost instantly an intention unintended and a meaning guessed at then affixed to, then denied once trapped and too real; the recourse of error exhausted the resource of lies too complex the weight of the truth too oppressive and the river regardless flowing with the light of stars and of boats and of castles glinting like tinsel boas swimming in ink. FOLLY begins with a fearful question to seize upon solutions and tighten our grasps, to force them open and bleed them of answers which yield nothing but logic. Let logic be raindrops let logic be rain, let be be finale of seem. intimate errors are the most excellent kind, for you can wrap them in secrecy, seasoned with shame . Yet savour the foolishness of it and turn a pirouette in tinsel time;

What Our Attachments Meant

Attach too much meaning to the word
and it falls meaningless upon the world.

Flush a bird whose flight is meaningless.
Attach this feeling to the sun :
it rises. It shines and shatters.

In order to not lose small objects
we attach them to larger ones.
You : the subject of this poem.

Such moods come upon one lost to
love. Such supplications are made
aimlessly at best.

what sequence of gestures ? I
think it should begin this way :

something there that is neither dead nor eternal in the grip of a song that won’t end the rain falls against the wind in Paris but it could be anywhere mournful music of existence coming out of yesterday and making new sounds new sounds always, there’s the beat. I sit in my room and type, in blue beret for the joke of it, jazz on the box, rush of words to swoop me into BIGMIND if i can just keep off the delete key long enough to enjoy a moment of enlightenment. delete the delete key in the mind , the devils and angels; hesitations, errors, accidents; it all comes to one or so it is said and what we believe what we believe if black and white movie kisses aren’t poetry then I’m in the wrong game on the wrong planet AT THE WRONG TIME and six of spades creeper vine snow falling on Florence my mother is out of a job. Beauty, i have courted you in the guise of several women. Each time you proved to be more beautiful than i ‘d thought possible. and did you find me so too, in the smoke-filled rooms of my youth, the music, the heavenly faces ; underfed dope fiending comedians, the sexy girl with an shining innocence from the praries, Deena, the fairest girl I’d ever seen, out in the forests of British Columbia, used me for a few weeks and left for South Africa, her parents raised peacocks in Winnepeg. “What will happen?” ponders Kerouac through the stereo to me in 1999 Paris, Jack, long dead and in his grave, Burroughs dead, Ginsberg Dead, the poetry making a splash with hiphophipsters looking for jazz looking for poetry looking for the beat, I suppose. No one knows what’s gonna happen to anyone, Jack. you knew that and I know it too. Pick up the guitar and play a song from 1969, meet David down the block and jam on it. go see the new Asterix flick, with Depardieu (“he went with god?”) or I don’t know what, being an alienfaux frenchman from bastardquebec, with the wrong accent and an Irish name that ended up looking like some Hindu guru and I don’t know what anybody means when they say anything at all and NEITHER DO THEY, my friends NEITHER DO THEY.. realizing that people talk a lot of shit in
life and that’s what passes for politics and love and anything else you can think of and I trust pictures more than i do sentences. the jingle of keys and the click of locks and the tap of heels outside my door. a woman named Veronique is going out at 2:30 on a Monday and its raining ..... raining phrases in a stevension vision of blazoned horizons and winds that don’t whisper ANYTHING (mary...) the clock flicks the seconds past AND THE CAFFINE TIGHTENS IN MY BELLY AND THE LOVERS COUPLE ON THE POSTCARD – IN A DRAWING BY PICASSO- I type and the music hasn’t stopped just changed into a quiet hum of wind and traffic without horns for the moment the paragon of animals types the beauty of the world, fresh bread in the basket AND hot coffee in the pot and jazz mingus dizzie bird train to go with my blue beret on a Monday rain day paris day with white sky and distant roar and terrible of those horns wARNS Lorca who dreams a white unicorn to lay down in tapestries and die amongst the millesfleurs so that the dream may find its way to Paterson and into the VERY REAL dream of Doctor Williams. berrigan ,shakespeare and gloria and I today converge on a song that wants singing and lacks music for too many words... that we may not die of old age or broken hearts or even a microbe war in the kidneys or a thousand milligrams of latenight walking to ease the poet to his grave but not the poems ... envoy, envoy go forth and multiply thy meanings in a song of stolen phrases and echoes of beatnikblahblah that neverstops

The Shadow of my Soul - after Lorca

The shadow of my soul
came like a rain of alphabets
clouds of books
and words

The shadow of my soul !

Traces a long line
through my nostalgia,
my teardrops turn themselves
into a ghostly albatross

The shadow of my soul !

The cup of my suffering is brimming
but with reason, and with substance
Oh my old and melancholic lips
murmur old and melancholy melodies ...

a turbulent labyrinth
of raining stars
enriches my illusion
that I am hard at work

(the shadow of my soul !)

it is my hallucination,
the order of my music
like the word 'love'
evaporates

Remember me !

Remember
my music ?