NOTHING DOING

http://www.honestpublishing.com/blog/loss-of-a-pet-willie-smith/#more-3502

RESISTING THE PAIN

Resisting the pain: http://www.facebook.com/MadSwirl/posts/163641143756647

SEATTLE SNOW

Four inches of the white stuff paralyze Jet City!

NAME FOR MYSELF

Go for a walk in the snow.

Find the bike trail. Crunch

my prints into the smooth glare.

Duck, after a mile or so,

behind a fir. Unzip three layers.

Sign, with the willie pen, my name.

Hear the hiss. Watch the steam. Smell

the coffee. Radio claimed,

thanks to coming rain,

all by tomorrow melted.

Zip back up.

Back on the trail.

Trudge another mile or so

through the driven snow. 

   

THE END OF JOY

FIRST OLD FLAME TO DIE

     I took her in the ass because she asked me to. And because I was curious, actually enjoyed the novelty. As did – or so it seemed – she. Her way of asking: “Ever put this in a woman’s ass?”

     I cleared my throat. Let a few seconds drift, as if reflecting… “Once or twice.”

     She shrugged, disappointment evident; she obviously eager to deflower. I should have lied. Given her the triumph.

     Today I learn she died six months ago. Cancer. Fifty-six. All those cigarettes. All that love. But now she has taken, at least in one sense, my virginity; as I take the news up the ass of my heart. 

JOY WAR

     Joy wore see-through – nipples visible as bulls in china rubble. Throughout the war, Joy wore see-through.

      True to an arrow. Honest with a sling. Ducks wholly in a row. She wore on her finger a lingering of the onions she kissed enough to mince in her sleep; as the war wore on.

     I round the point. The wind tears tears from the eye. So Joy sews sorrow  borrowed from the dead.

     Joy wails through the wind: Come inside, now you see through. Then whispers: The grass so greener on the suicide.

     Joy combats bats; daubs cheek to tongue. Claws till the flying mice dash echoes in a mirrored cell, to sell the flip of their flop. Joy goes to bat for going bats for the euphoria of the sheer hell of swing.

     Joy springs well-versed in universe. Because before, when justice on a tear tore, her heart ran just ice; for everywhere Joy’s heart wears in the blood war.

     The world was indeed done in a day; done in and done in a day. But like the drunk of Noah has no end, no point; only joy; and the war wore on; and on wore the war, when Joy wore see-through.

The Sex Of Joy

People tend to call this my "sailing" poem. Most of my poems sail straight into the waste can, sometimes making a brief stopover at the canary cage. But his one has stuck with me for almost half a century now. It's posted in various places on the net. First appeared in print in LOON magazine in 1978:

BACK HOME

We sit crosslegged in the tub.

We’ve been three days sailing on the Sound

and are pleasantly exhausted.

I soap my face

and Joy begins shaving me.

It takes all the concentration

I can muster to keep from smiling

so she can shave around my lip.

Remembering the low swift boat

rolling over the waves

I watch Joy’s brown eyes as

they focus on the small swipes

that leave my face clean and smooth.

I keep my lips even,

but her smile rises and fades

with every pass of the blade.

My alphabet sports three ex's. Joy was by far the most remarkable, as well as the live-with lover I spent the least time with. Let's put her in the fucklight here for a couple days. Fear not: the wench is dead, even though it was in this same country:

LETTER TO MY THIRD EX

     Sitting in this flop with a picture of you, a chicken pot pie, gallon of Gallo and little else; watching cracks on the wall; hoarse cough nextdoor, the oldfart damn near dead from WWI wounds, dead wives, Bugler and even cheaper wine than I drink; upstairs the nineteen year old Krishna freak without a dime and lacking a brain, chanting muffled through the floor, which is my ceiling, plaster praying to be left alone and let fall and goddamn skidroad god letting the ceiling/floor have its way through slow pain, I love you, but understand why I left.

     It’s hot here. One jammed window and it looks out five feet onto the brick of a sooty warehouse. Tattered oilcloth shade. Stink of gas now tinted with heating potpie. Steamheat permanently high. Landlady same.

     She offers me an extra blanket whenever I pass her shadowy desk in the lobby. She once had a wino freeze to death, she says, and is terrified of death and all its concomitant responsibilities. Fusty creature, sticky booze on her lips.

     No, I have not fucked her yet. Nor anything else. Still jack off to your picture, or sometimes simply jingle the change in my pocket.

     Here the ceiling is high and obscure. Lamp by my creaky bed the only light. Forty watts of consolation. Still, some previous pervert managed to get way up and scrawl with lipstick or blood or beetshit a poem concerning the necessity of leaving your jane to go to war when your country has gotten into hot water. Sonofabitch even rhymes: war/whore, jane/pain, water/ ought to.

     Soon the pot pie will be hot. I plan to eat it with a plastic fork. I am leaving you the silverware. I think it was yours anyway. All the rest is yours, too, and this letter. Send along another picture. I left because there was no longer any poetry to be found.