Scarriet

Sex, for me, is the sea.
Love is not for dry land.
Once I step in the sea
There is little I understand.
Not that I understand much outside the sea, either.
But on land I don’t suffer from a watery fever.
The sea takes me, in a way the land doesn’t.
The sea drowns me. Why do I find this pleasant?
I feel lost at sea. I cannot walk.
I kick and squirm, too overwhelmed by waves to talk.
She has invited me to an island.  Why does she smile?
Why does she do that? Smiling all the while?
She wants me to bring history tracts and dry sticks.
On the island, she says, we will discuss politics.
I will move my things to the island now.
And keep dry. God knows how.

In my theories I swing
Between two extremes—-
Outwardly I sing—
Or retire softly into dreams.
Two extremes: say what everyone is thinking.
Don’t think about anything at all.
Tell everyone the ship is sinking.
Stare for a whole afternoon at shadows on the wall.
I don’t know which is better; you
Want me to be practical—theories, too,
Can be practical—you out-theorize me
By always being the same.
I say too much by saying your name.
Which is too little, in theory.

When the vague is vaguely preferred,
The reasonable saves us all.
Sometimes you will be loved—
And sometimes, not at all.
Morality keeps going until it kills;
The intractable nature of nature,
At the bottom of everything, is seen;
The wanted or the unwanted
Will both be equally mean.
You, child, shall be wanted,
Wanted for all kinds of things,
Unspeakable things, unspeakable things—
Your life which pleases kings.
Or, you’ll be unwanted
And now in the womb you’ll die,
But sometimes, only sometimes.
Do I love?  Am I reasonable?
I promise I will try.

The poem says what you don’t want to hear.

The core of every poem is fear.

The maze of language is in your reach—

A winding corridor is how the poets preach.

Enter the poem. I know you’ve been

In a maze before. Go in.

Fine literature doesn’t paint the walls

Of its maze. This is real. Hear the bird calls?

The only maze is the world. You

Must be lost—to find out what is true.

During the end, there will be a turn.

A poem’s learning is easy to learn.

Nothing is known, even as you do it.

All the maze needs is that you travel through it.

You’ve made it. This right here.

And over there. See? There is your fear.

Sex without beauty:
The vanity and pride of the inferior,
Transformed, in one sick moment, into the lazy
Rapaciousness of the superior—
Which has no pride.
Which is worse? You, inferior,
With your vanity, or you, with no pride
Capable of doing anything to anyone?
And then consciousness of crime
Invades, and vanity and superiority
Become a rage of inferiority
Aimed at virtue and modesty.
Ideas fade. You talk endlessly.
Modesty seems to you insanity;
You begin to laugh, and cannot stop;
You laugh with energy in the valley;
An echo mocks you at the top.

Beauty without sex:
No love, no envy,
No scent that arouses,
No desire, no pain,
Violets inviolate,
Memory’s roses,
A painted daisy that doesn’t need sun or rain.
No jealousy, no farewell, no setting sun,
No justice, no revenge,
No waiting, no hurry.
No child wondering if she is the one,
No river, no plunge,
No rumor, no particle, no worry.
Large clouds; large, large clouds,
The large outdoors,
Translation, music,
This poem, and sometimes you.
Large clouds. One minute. Never a minute, or two.

For summer and sleep to work,

There can’t be too much love.

When I loved you, I couldn’t sleep—

Hot was the vine and the radio wire—

And summer is fruition, not desire.

For summer to surround us with leaves,

The green trance of more hushed leaves,

And sleep bowed and matter-of-fact,

There must be curls dewy and defined,

Stretched out and resigned to the final act.

For summer and sleep to work,

All the work and thinking must be done;

No more love! No more love!

No enthusiasm for our meeting at midnight

When grass groped our ankles and gone was the sun.

She first punched the amaranth

When it got on her nerves.

Adolescent irritation killed the roses.

The nosegay was stomped by boots

She ordered, sarcastically,

During the indoctrination of her mother.

Irises were shredded into little pieces

By the artistic inclination

To overturn everything.

The lily and the lilac lie under the rage

Deserving to be heard

When flouncing for the underprivileged.

Her dad doesn’t understand; now he can just die.

The sunflower used to be little

But now adorns the entire dark sky.

Men forgive, women don’t—

You should hear them talk about their exes.

For women, one day follows another,

And this perplexes.

That day was in sunshine,

And this one was in shade.

All that suggested this

Was how this love for you was made.

But I’m called out by the child

Who says my philosophy has no clothes.

Nothing is true but what we want.

And nothing else knows.

There is only desire,

And desire is how we live.

If we desire, desire, desire,

We forgive.

What is the arm of the day?

These distant, somber, mountains?

Or these boats, held up by the green of the bay?

Or the round sunset that holds us?

What is the arm of the day?

Is it like the mind of the day,

And the thinking we do,

Which invisibly covers us,

During long, pleasant walks,

Walking here?  And far away?

Or perhaps it’s me,

Thinking what I would say,

If I saw you on a mountain trail,

Or sailing with a party of three,

A sprinkle of rain on the bay.

What holds me inside a typical day?

What holds me from no longer seeing you?

Inside the arm of the day?

My right eye is gay, and the left one is straight,

Both holy day and tryst, a very special date.

My skin is read, but my desire is not—

I’m a public fool in my private spot.

I look at myself and see someone

You and I could not rely on.

But you and I, we do not care

For the beautiful sirens on the top of Saint Clare.

You and I will gather this.

The noon painting. The somnambulant kiss.

“This is no revolution, but evil elites putting people in the streets.”

The true brahmin will always lose

For trying to be a true brahmin—

How can the true brahmin fight

Against the dalits who choose

To humiliate the whole idea of the true

Brahmin in the day and in the night?

Why does the whole truth suffer?

Because poor and rich dalits together hate

The true brahmin, when the sun fails,

Or when it’s very early, or when it’s late.

Nothing offends dalits, whether dalits are

Wealthy or poor, brutish or fancy,

More than the true musician; that is why,

For the sake of the non-dalit, and for all dalits,

This one, to prove no brahmin is, must

Sing a few songs before they die.

I hate change so much,

That I suffer change to happen

All around me,

Weeping when she leaves me,

While I do not change.

I am hated for being chaste,

Condemned for not discussing race,

Condemned for being good.

Some change to avoid change;

God, I wish I could.

“I want to die with you so we never go away,”

I heard Harry Crosby say.

“I wish you would kill me as I sleep

And then yourself, out of love.

Darling! Let the others weep.”

This is why, like Harry, I plan

To not change, even as change happens to Man,

Even as society changes, and no one finds it strange;

But I do.

I hate change.

Verbs, not adjectives,

Some coming right out of the computer screen,

Your friends texting you, bills arriving,

Family concerns and work appointments,

Your ambitious friends no longer friends

As photographed scenes come to life,

Mocking you, the stag, the ram, in each mirrored hall.

Some of the verbs too passive to seem like verbs at all.

You were the smart one, but as you think, in your room,

You notice something happening. No one wants you.

You try, you try every adjective, you cry.

Adjectives grow. You’re one of them.

They describe you in crude terms

Because once you showed up wearing the wrong thing.

The flat note, the low note, the utterance,

The key change. Alone, but not in front of them, you sing.

Now that I can almost touch you,

All of us sitting on a sea

Of electronic communication

In our lonely boats, I realize how we love

Is everything, not who we love.

The adulterer is tender

To his mistress, not because

Of who she is; he doesn’t love

His wife, and this is how he loves:

He hates his wife; how is this love?

His hate is what the mistress feels as love.

Two ideas came together at once;

The truth flashed upon me: how it is done,

Not her, not you, not the person.

The whole, sorry, truth of love could be a word

Electronically sent—do you think that’s absurd?

When this, my verse, turns, and comes to its end,

You will be in my arms again.

I wish I could be as simple and as dear

As this verse you are reading here.

If any man could be something else, and still be

Himself, I wish it were this poetry,

Which touches you subtly.

What goes into someone as deeply as light into the eye?

Yet the writer of this is distant and shy.

I would be conveniently everything to you,

Even as I am nothing. Passionate, yet cold,

As young as this moment, but like verse, old;

This, and I, knowing just what to do—

So when this poem turns, and comes to its end,

See? You are in my arms again.

I think the rock song as a song died in Germany in 1966
But most musicologists disagree.
The lead singer sang, “You can’t love ’em all.”
But what I heard was “you can’t love alone.”
Error is the best thing for creativity.
The Germans were warming up for the Beatles, who were clowning backstage,
At the center of the world. Getting ready for the big fall.
The audience was familiar with Brahms.
Some looked a little bored at the hitting of the toms.
You can’t love alone.
I took a long walk yesterday,
Under an endless sky,
Certain I was in love.

Spending money she doesn’t have helps the economy.

Infidelity helps poetry and song.

The economy is getting better.

There has to be something wrong.

I learned to write by myself—

So I’m the economy’s enemy.

I stay at home, murdering the economy—

As I write how the economy

Is helped by everything.

She is off somewhere, helping the economy.

This is why I weep and sing.

Always forgive. Always revise.

We told you: she has two Mr. Hydes.

She will let you love one;

One is slightly smarter than the other—

And that is the one she loves.

The vaccine has Dr. Jekyll in it.

For years, plagues ravaged places

Either too filthy or too clean.

You are always Mr. Hyde

When you witness the clean surfaces in porn.

Mr. Hydes can turn up anywhere.

Beware Mr. Hydes who are intelligent.

Beware enlightened, kind souls who say

The Jekyll-Hyde distinction is a false one;

Beware ones who say Hyde

Is misunderstood. There is no false

Distinction without one.

I’m sorry, my sensitive friend,

The hushed receding of the tide

In the gray morning always reveals Mr. Hyde.

More free floating interchangeable connectiveness

Than is possible to perceive

Is the reason for this mess,

The debates on conscience and God,

The significance of aesthetic melancholy,

The laughter when the sheriff attempted to bless

This town which, since he arrived, is exactly the same,

The unfairness of beauty and Wall Street wealth,

The component parts, the poetry, anything you can name,

Defensiveness accelerating

Despite the error involved in every practice;

Kindness can be avoided, but nothing else,

And sure, there’s nothing else to do but blame;

That’s how thought works, that’s God;

You saw the headline didn’t you?

Half the sex, say the experts, and twice the shame.

She tried to be romantic for awhile.

She did. I received her smile.

But she was a ghosting, gaslighting cockroach

At heart. She was never clear with me.

In the furry forest she spoke rapidly.

The romantic cannot be cowardly and sly.

She practiced confusion.

The romantic needs a beautiful inward seeing eye.

She wasn’t able to dream in dreams.

She couldn’t be romantic for long.

She retired into darkness, afraid of the sunbeams.

Poor angry devil. The love was mine. And the song.

Life is mostly slow. It was slow
When we went to the store. That was because
We had to obey the traffic laws
At intersections and parking lots where everything we know
Is back there, or was back there, and we didn’t know
Everything, so we had to drive slow,
And in the store the shopping list had a tendency to grow
Against the bank account we didn’t know
Was there, as much as it was last week,
When I was arguing with you and then I couldn’t speak.
It all happened so fast
After life was slow,
The fast fast at last.

The poem that rhymes sometimes

First made its appearance in Rome

Centuries ago,

And surprised everyone because everyone

Thought: why had no one thought of this before?

It usually involves what is less, or more,

What is predicted and therefore not ridiculous,

Or explained, and therefore ridiculous,

Because how to explain how it all began?

Asking who created God insults God,

And this is where the question of obedience began.

The atheist, in spite of himself,

Brings himself to ask God questions

To prove God doesn’t exist,

And almost triumphs in the interview,

Only to find, in despair, that God is a lawyer.

The long argument of God triumphs before a jury of our peers, at last.

No one said proof.

There was dying.

There was love

Deep in the recent past.

I hate the interior of this poem,

A wretched copy, a trick of words

Lying on the floor like old records,

The prostitute listening to Johnny Mathis

Before she gets dressed and leaves her boyfriend

Smoking, and longing for her.

I hate the old interior

Of poems, a thousand poems,

Stealing down steps of lights tonight,

A thousand episodes

You suspect are not original,

But you consume them anyway.

Once you start, you can’t stop.

Let’s stay inside all day,

Hoping by the Grand Canal.

The involuntary is always preferred,

So that ignorance is not just bliss, but life.

In the involuntary we rest,

And sleep, and do not worry about our breathing,

Do everything without effort,

Live without our heart beat

Ever becoming a distraction.

Or, when our heart does grow loud,

We welcome it

And its sudden excitement.

Everything is as it should be,

(I’ve always wanted to say that in a poem)

Even this rhyme sweetly

Involuntary.

Even on those days of rough fortune,

We would yet be smooth,

Watching our poem write itself.

It might tell us to do something

And we would not do it.

Or, we would do it,

As I did once, when you

Came to me, I don’t know why,

Full of purpose and trepidation.

The fantasy is always better than the reality

Except in those cases, extremely rare,

Where reality is a happy accident.

That’s why hardly anything happens and we don’t care.

The lazy stealing of money online is the trend these days.

Theives and comics who confront you in person

Are becoming a thing of the past.

Trust us. Mail in your vote.

The bureaucrats who live in blue-state ghost towns

Want you to know that red states,

Gathering without masks at beaches

And shooting guns? “You work for us now.”

Poetry is winning.

We all saw it coming. Robbery with a six shooter

Replaced by robbing with a fountain pen.

A mind, a password, and a few rules

Now rules you. Muscles are useless.

Trump Tower contains Obama spies.

This is real. Fantasy has won.

The lighter it is the faster it flies.

Why should I be with you, or even speak your name?

I feel hot and pleasant

Thinking of whatever I want.

Once my lover told me she wanted to know

The precise date she would die—

No. This is too much courage and foresight for me.

Too much planning would be involved.

Your whole life would become a poem,

And you, its calendar.

I could not do it,

Although there is nothing to do,

But too much to see—

Although how much would we see, really?

The days remaining,

Like phrases of this poem not yet written,

As future days, would still be abstract

Even as we gradually lived them,

The same as before.

I couldn’t do it for me, or for you.

Time moving would be everything,

But isn’t this everything already,

Whether or not we know precisely

When we are going to die?

And yet—the precision

Of knowing when—I need more flattery than that.

To see our death ahead of us

Would replace a general fact

With a specific one.

Why sharpen what is already a sharp knife?

If I knew, I couldn’t love her

So much as mourn for her.

But guess what. I’m doing that now anyway.

She is gone. Yeah, she left me.

I thought too much. And saw too much.

I thought I saw wrong in her.

My attempt at foresight—

Which I never, never wanted—

Betrayed me, anyway.

It removed me from her calendar.

I am gone from her poem.

It’s curious that foresight

Sends us weeping over mountains of the past,

Just as ghosts of whole poems haunt passages.

Don’t they?

Disinformation Experts played with their kitty cats last night
Before they snuggled into a good night’s sleep.
They woke up with sunny smiles, looking forward to another day
Twittering against disinformation.
A Disinformation Conference sponsored by the Wilson Center
And the Stanford Internet Observatory agreed some top-down protections
Against disinformation were becoming increasingly necessary
Since malign disinformation sources were using free speech laws
To peddle various forms of disinformation to their kitty cats.
We must protect our kitty cats, the Disinformation Experts said.
BuzzFeedNews was preparing more interviews for the sunny day.
Experts and scientists were expected to speak in the beautiful evening
As well, not only about Russian disinformation, but disinformation
Flowing down from White House officials, and disinformation
Continued to mount, according to the kitty cats
Owned and bred by these same officials.
Restrictions on misinformation, disinformation, and even propaganda
From all sources, were being considered, even as some thought about
Their kitty cats. People need to practice safe distancing
As they make up their minds, especially during the crisis.
We’re facing a glut of disinformation, and some controls are necessary,
Said the experts, as they left with their kitty cats.

The wise know

Emotions need to be kept low,

Or we will spoil

All the excellence and toil.

Let slow emotions be so small

We will not think jealous thoughts at all.

Let the fast emotions die

Which kill in the blink of an eye.

Let’s put all our emotions on the page

To make harmless every kind of rage.

Come, let me read this poem to you

About the wise, and what they knew.

Soldier, you didn’t want to die,

But you died. The country you saved

Hasn’t the luxury to perish as you did,

Young, the light blinding in your photo,

Handsome forever.

We are now dying a different way.

Yawning, not wanting to get up;

Some will linger by a ceremony,

Cancelled, because a country is dying,

Or turned into

A small celebration contained by a screen,

Libraries, containing the word “soldier,”

Paused for now.

Hollywood took over gradually.

Now we all exist that way.

Someone is producing this,

Someone who knows better

Why it must happen.

We can see now

Why you died,

Completely helpless, the green sky

Made that way from trees.

Your heart goes zing zing zing
With your arm in a sling.

Love is dancing right there
With you in a wheelchair.

She has a kind surprise to tell.
You’re not feeling very well.

Ecstatic, you start to get off
When you feel a cough.

She is climbing in your bed
As you hear voices in your head.

You’ve never seen anyone more beautiful
As you go under at the hospital.

You are feeling sweet, joyful, and vague
During instructions on how to fight the plague.

You see her naked in the rain
As they operate on your brain.

You love her, and persist
In the gas and the mist.

You say, darling I’ll see you later
Hooked up to a ventilator.

You smell a lovely, familiar perfume
In the tomb. In the tomb.

No you don’t understand;

The horror is not what I describe

In this poem; there’s nothing to fear

In what I describe. We are the horror. The horror is here.

The flames are not coming for us;

We are the flames. What you are reading is burning.

There is smoke. There isn’t any learning.

There is heat, which you cannot escape.

It is burning burning burning.

Pack your bags. They are on fire.

This poem and your eyes are the combined flame

Of everything. Nothing is the same.

This is your desire.

The summing up is never far behind.

The math of it all preys on us.

The fear of it lives one hair below the mind.

This implies more sadness, this less.

Because their suffering is not our suffering,

Our pride can tolerate them.

Similar suffering is unbearable.

There are truths of conscience which come too close;

Much of the world we simply can’t abide.

Some we love, others make us hide,

But not one can read our thoughts;

Not one knows who we are

Or why we love or don’t love them.

And we cannot explain it.

No philosophy can.

And for all the lamps and halls of learning here,

No matter how full of understanding we are, how polite,

All we do is obfuscate and fear.

Life is not an “is” but a “should.”

Some souls are glittering illusion,

Some souls are smoky, comforting confusion.

Some souls remain in the young, green wood

Never to face what we have to face, that life

Is more terrible than good.

This is the truth we run from every night

To the bored lover in the temporary day

Who tells us everything is going to be alright.

Sometimes at night

When we flip on the light

We think a shadow is a thing.

In the daytime, it’s called hearsay—

Or certainty, when it’s lecturing.

Only trust your eyes,

The master, da Vinci, said,

And today I looked

At his masterpiece of shadows

Lately risen from its shadowy bed.

It tells the ancient story

Of a shadow, once a shadow, and reviled.

A scientist is a shadow,

Clarifying the shadows to the shadows.

But this shadow, I swear, it smiled.