Love Lights

San Francisco's Erotic Art Newspaper, 1976

He Rose

Sexual bliss is torment with traction,
but I had lost a lot of traction
wandering around the frontyard
of my lady's cottage under the moon,
too tormented to enter too drunk
too soon since she laid my last pal
to rest
as I lay dying
through a jones in hospital…
Yeah, I was pitiful,
self pitifully drunk as the fool,
not a lord
with a kicking hard on
but no traction…
Drunken headlong
I fell into a bramble
whose active ingredients were:
roses, thorns, & dew.
Ice cold dew,
thorns like the last thoughts of Christ,
petals like lips of my lady.
I rose myself again
out of the bush in front of my lady's house
chilled & dignified,
sprinkled with stinging rubies,
crowned,
almost drowned,
I walked in carefully
so as not to lose
the kisses stuck to me,
the jewels the beauty marks
the tiny cherries & garnets of blood
the drops & rivulets of dew.

* * *

Shame

by Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud
translated by Judith & David Bearden

So long as the razor has
Not amputated that brain,
That packet of white & green fat,
Whose vapors are never fresh,

(Ah, He ought to cut loose from his
Nose, his lips, his ears,
His paunch! & fairly abandon
His laigs! O marvel!)

But no; really, I guess as long
As the blade to his head,
The stones to his side,
& the fire to his guts,

Haven't executed him, the baby
So wearisome, the so stupid beast,
Mustn't cease for an instant
To pull ruse & betray,

& like some Rockies' wildcat
Stink up all spheres!
But still, when he dies, O my God!
May some prayer rise up!

* * *

See The Elephant

“with fragments of the great unwonderable thrown in”
— Alan Russo

See eidetic poikilothermism
through a fused stained rock candy window,
see a buggy rose bush with a burning turk inside,
see his fingers of rose marble
fret the blue axe,
see milklines in the kid
seeing potato love in delirious professions,
see what a baby sees,
see a new love letter in the shetter,
see the beast's one-sided push
wear out hot miscreants,
see a creature on the cusp
of the big pink man & the thin blue partisans
struggle his human wings,
see the demons with human tendencies,
see the cards, & how one bets it all,
see blanched silverbacks, in clouds of buzzing flies,
sacrifice pigeons & calves,
see the incendiary gnash his teeth
famished for calm sleep,
see Mom thrilled, eager for details,
see a walker disappear through the door & burn,
see the burnt not doing well on the circuit,
see the giddy line midway
where currents of the sea pull hair,
see long pale feet of Jesus Christ
walking in whitecaps on the spatial void,
see the Weird of the Wanderer,
see a fever we deem thieves' delight,
see who can See, & who can Not,
see Christ only alive in the walking still,
finally see Hölderlin's carpenter
in each & every friend,
see the Love, see the Hate,
see the fire from within,
see the fatally crushable rose,
see mandala centers vaporize
that seemed harder than the hubs of Hell,
see St. George & the word tape worm,
come, & see
deadpan A#1, he's seen the elephant,
see old impossibly mundane karma
involving doughnut waitresses,
see, through the rosace in a star chamber,
the baby's breath taken over
by the spreading dog bane,
the rank arrow-weeds,
the flowering judas,
the charred white apocatastatic rose
beneath a sky of bright demento blue,
see a Hell whole of a lot in Heaven,
see a clear round silvering wheel
dart, hover, & leave up sky,
see the great unwonderable…

Where is it now?
Out in the glowing winds.
What left it out there?
My lord of karma, & my family…
What hurt it so?
My sister's sorrow was the worst to bear…
Where will it go?
It will disappear in air…

* * *