Scarriet

The local is poetical,

Not the distant, or the far flung.

I don’t remember—and who cares—what I did when I was young.

That’s for the mawkish and the fictional to pretend—

The built up beginning for the manufactured end.

As if details from one’s youth

Were truly remembered. Childhood isn’t truth.

Ask the child. Oh you can’t. Tragedy, then? Or spoof?

Humpty Dumpty is daddy’s?  And who fell from the roof?

The local is poetical. No use traveling distant seas

To where “dagger” is called something else, and there’s a different word for “please.”

Someone has already done that, and brought the sultan to his knees.

Tennyson was in love with “far away.”

Cliffs were foggy and many domains were gray.

But the Empire isn’t relevant today.

The local is poetical. I’m writing this to her

Who loves me, and lives a few inlets over,

And if she doesn’t love me—I will show her how.

The local is poetical. The one I’m in love with now.

Since spring is back,

Maybe you will think of me,

In your burning lack;

Maybe you will think how ambitious love

Once made you and I

The slippery duck and the misty dove,

When love happened and we didn’t know why.

Each green morning was warm

And for three springs you leaned on my arm.

The weird warm February when it all began

Was as warm as spring. It was love’s plan.

You loved gardening. Both new

And the leaving appealed to you.

This was a situation which frightened me.

I was attached to you, sad and greedy.

Did I love? Yes. Did I learn?

I wonder if you will ever burn

As you once burned

For me, even when it was wintry.

But anyone will do.

Life is trillions. It doesn’t need to be you.

Spring has returned.

Is it the buying and selling, then,

Which creates the gulf between left wing women and right wing men?

The government radio station and the king

Are mighty, and bring a misty calm to everything.

Remember the coddled dreams of the perfect prince?

The left wing woman knows what she wants at once.

No argument in the market place of ideas will sway

The left wing woman. She carefully plans her moral day

Based on the latest acts of compassion, and every expert approves

How she cares for the unlucky and the sick and everyone she loves.

She will make a place for you among her donations

Flowing from good to good; if you understand poor tyrannical nations

Improve each day, and do not disturb her, she will find an afternoon

To give you. Check your calendar. She might have a nervous breakdown soon.

Meanwhile the impious, wearing lots of makeup, quick as a fly,

Hunts for bargains. A strange object, almost sacred, nearly attracts her eye.

Is the understandable more true?

Is the desire to boil things down and understand, a need

Which only serves itself? What is the highest creed?

What, exactly, do I want from you?

Is my love real? Or a bundle of envy and hate and doubt

And petulance and desire

Which needs affirmation, when this thing I feel as love, comes out?

Even as it lurks and trembles within, an earthy, watery, airy, fire

Unable to know what it looks like to you—

And you fail to know the storms lurking inside of you, too.

And when we call this bundle of intense feelings, love,

Are we deluded, and would we laugh at ourselves

Observing ourselves as ourselves from above?

Or is this to put too much of an objective burden on the feelings we feel as love?

If we examine the parts of love and separate out the selfish and the confused,

Would we finally say love does not exist—or will love we call love not be so abused?

Do we know love is only a part

Of jealousy or hate, which burns to the ground even the most poetic heart?

And is the effort to understand this

Ugly, and should the philosopher, instead, take off his glasses, and kiss?

Couples, for practical, mundane reasons, exist.

Why did I think it could happen to us—just because we kissed?

Is it really impossible to understand?

Is inquiry criminal? Is science not planning, but planned?

Is all we think we know

Continually fading, but since the torture of living is imperceptible and slow,

We are blessed, as things larger than ourselves musically come and darkly go?

You, who tortured me, grow fat and old,

Imperceptibly; a lovely gift, if the truth be told.

Oh I am bitter, it is true—

But I was so in love with you.

Why shouldn’t love be satisfied,

Which still would love, if love hadn’t died?

Why shouldn’t love be able to transform

After the cruel and hateful storm

Of recriminations? It is not love which is to blame.

If you hadn’t stopped loving me, I would be loving you the same.

I grant it might be my fault, that you went away;

You never told me why—who knows what came into your head one day?

When we took our walks beneath the sun,

Maybe you thought of clouds, or thought of a different one,

And under that skinny tree, when I kissed you twice,

Maybe you thought on a fat hill a single kiss would have been far more nice.

When I discussed an idea, a movie, or a song,

A humming bird, a bumble bee, maybe you thought I had discussed it wrong.

When I read you a gentle poem and let out a sigh,

Maybe you resented a gentle poem, then, and preferred I had looked you sweetly in the eye

And held you, and brought you low

With an animal embrace—or maybe that’s not what you wanted, I don’t know.

Your moods changed fast;

In the middle of a kiss, your desire to kiss hid in a mysterious past;

And when I talked incessantly, hopefully, philosophically, respectfully,

You would cry out, “I had wanted you to kiss me!”

This was all my fault, perhaps, I know.

But love saw you arrive. And love will see you go.

Love is the cause of all—if love sees you lose your looks,

Let love have that small joy; love deserves to be happy, says history, and the history books.

If history ages, anyway, then why shouldn’t helpless love be somewhat glad

As you—who left me—turn ugly and fat and sad?

It’s strange to think that we are taught

Thinking is hidden from view,

Unlike visible feelings. But even your own feelings are hidden from you—

And nothing can hide the mathematical steps of thought.

Two plus two cannot hide four. Four is two plus two.

All thought belongs to steps which are discrete

And inescapable. Thought cannot be hidden. We think we can defeat

Conclusions we don’t like with emotions—which hide emotions.

Emotions can convince us two by two is not four.

Emotions hide. You did not hate me anymore

When love, a safer emotion, broke through.

Anger, you said, first made you realize you had feelings for me—

And when my friendship made your anger disappear, I fell in love with you.

Or, I thought I was in love. I let myself feel it was so.

The cessation of anger was as close as you ever came to love.

I did not need anger to teach me what to know.

You hurt me, as my love hid troubled feelings about you I had.

Your anger found love; that was strange—in the end my anger greeted what I found out was bad.

Love is when want eclipses need.

Look my cats position themselves around the dish to feed—

Much fighting occurs. We need to be fed.

We don’t need to take the prettiest person to bed.

All the cats will eat, though the bold may get to the bowl first.

Say what you will about love, not eating is far worse.

I am not food. You will not eat me.

If you love me, I return, completely.

I will always be here, making other choices

Look bad. The harmonizing voices

Of a choir surpass need and want;

They sing of me, the beautiful,

Which you don’t need, but oh you want.

I always want to be with somebody else.

Imagine then, my shock and surprise,

When somebody else was you,

Your face, your smile, your eyes,

Your body, your breathing, just you,

Which was unusual, and you made me happy, too.

From early on, I was like this—

The prettiest, unreachable, introvert is the one I wanted to kiss—

Blame my artistic nature; I judged with my eye—

I loved the pretty who silently walked by.

And conversation with friends had to be about love

Or art, or the philosophy of desire for the highest things above.

But there were terrible drawbacks. I was nothing special.

I was healthy, but I was not beautiful, to love those who were beautiful,

And I understood that being like I was, was close to being a jerk.

A snob with a wandering eye,

Yet ordinary and shy.

How, I thought, could I make that work?

I chose aesthetics. Or, aesthetics chose me.

I understood that, too.

I didn’t blame myself for who I was, I knew

I was fated to be an artist, and to long

For unreachable beauty—I knew this wasn’t easy, but I knew it wasn’t wrong.

So I always wanted to be with somebody else,

And felt uneasy socially

And pursued poetry madly and sadly, willingly and chillingly,

Cold in my hot pursuit

For what was coldly beautiful—burning in ice—oh, wasn’t I astute?

I longed for the beautiful, and at times came close to the cute,

But life was not easy, because life was not enough,

And my life was a dream, because I was guided by ideals,

And it was a miracle I survived; I worked, I loved, I ate meals.

I won’t bother you with the details of my bookstore life,

My urban dreams and pleasures, children, wife.

I always wanted to be with somebody else,

Until you—but you were a punishment, the somebody else who finally came,

Because you left me, and broke my heart, so you were more of the same—

But you revealed to me who that somebody else was: it was me.

I was the one I wanted—pursuing artistic fame.

Hypnosis is far more common than we suppose.

Who understands what is good for them? All are led by the nose.

The secrect techniques the seductive masters keep

Are tricks of no purpose. Everyone’s drunk or asleep.

Poetry is failed hypnosis. We like when we see

Speech that cannot seduce; speech that can only be.

The poets are boring, since they don’t hypnotize.

But that’s the point. The poem says, look, when I look into your eyes

You might be awake. You might be asleep.

No seduction will occur, superficial, or deep.

Implanted commands will make you think

Not that you are thirsty; only that wine is a beautiful drink.

Poetry’s favorite theme (after love) is intoxication

Which you don’t need, and if the ups and downs of fractionation

Are used, the poet has no intention of seducing you—

When I tell you quietly about my tragedy,

And then you; and me, again; then tell me what makes you happy?

The worst hypnosis is mass hypnosis and poetry avoids that, too.

Emotional openness can get you over any hump.

Everyone who voted for Hillary will sue everyone who voted for Trump.

You’re not crazy. Not like them. Maybe you’re asleep.

A poet’s indifferent. If not, he’s a creep.

My mind is sick, and these poems and rhymes

Are symptoms—of journeys through Keatsian climes

And hills, haunted, worthy of Poe—

That no one needs to read or know.

I should be on the phone with friends

Rather than traveling this landscape which never ends.

Give respect to art, and yet we can tell

These painted figures can’t talk, and their artist isn’t doing well.

People go to the hospital to visit the sick

And suffer from love which murders the will

And suffer because of some stupid prick.

Sure, poets charm—the way we are sometimes charmed by the ill,

Or the very young, and the song

Is beautiful, of course it is beautiful,

Yet we know secretly something is wrong.

All respect to art, but these poems are bad;

Smile at the patient; tell him his poems make you glad,

Because of course they do.

You think: if this is art, your life hasn’t been that bad to you.

Your cute little dog gets more attention than you.

Cute is mathematical. But how it affects me, I haven’t a clue.

Our response to cute is hardwired.

The warmth of a body might be desired,

But the ratio of cuteness is a mystery.

Why do I love you? It’s uncanny.

If science and measurement could tell

Why I love you, would I love you this well?

With deepest feeling, I respond

To your face; a frog jumps into a pond,

A child bends down to pet a dog;

Yet why this pond? Any pond will do.

A thousand dogs bark and yelp.

But you—only you hurt me. And there isn’t any help,

And I don’t think there is meant to be.

It’s crazy—-as if poems using “thee,”

Old romantic poems by those now dead,

Afflicted my youth—but deep in my heart, I love “you” instead,

Though, in truth, it is a love for “thee,”

In the fantastic dreams of my poetry.

There are no cute dogs there.

You wear a white dress. You care.

You care, and love me beneath a tree,

And you cry. I cry. Oh God, I cry. I cry—for thee.

Since life is theater, and love is defined as actors expressing love,

I move in cautious secrecy for the sake of my love.

Since my humble love will be mocked as too serious,

And become food for the humorous,

Should my humility ever become known,

I walk in the shadows, humbly, secretly, and alone.

I have seen actors naked on screen and stage,

Marching to love’s music, aching and graphic,

Cleopatra, Romeo, or a shy porn star, dying in a cage,

Or free to walk among us, the healthy, the dying, the sick,

In schools and conferences, the professional setting,

The rich, the poor, lousy poets, having creepy affairs,

The touristy street, the apartment building missing lights,

Climbing, drunk, the seedy last bit of stairs.

Introvert! Don’t obsess on the extrovert’s laughing and forgetting.

I’ve been there; I’ve hurried to fly in the middle of the morning,

Flown all night, arrived in the next incomplete middle of the night, without warning.

Since you put our love in your poetry, I walked away,

So that I could wake up in the morning to a plain day

Dropping into the lake; the vivid frogs

Calling back and forth a green comfort to me

In a quiet, final reminder of nature, no drama, or poetry,

Just green; green lakes, green streams flowing into green bogs.

All seek comfort: half-sacred, purely profane,

Love in various best sellers and guises, difficult, insane;

The more we write or talk about it, the worse it gets.

The public proclaims news, principles, God, the New York Mets.

I reject every advantage, comparison, thought, weight,

In my frail solitude. Call it loneliness, love, indifference, hate.

I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you, or let you know.

It’s my fault. I know this better than anyone. Please go.

I’m doing a little thinking. I’m thinking how

I can express how much I love you. I may.  But not now.

Who seduced you? The lean wolf, who warned you the fat wolf

Would say to you, “Defy instruction, for pleasure is enough?”

Who seduced you? The philosopher? Did you call his bluff:

“Scholars say, read a poem for learning! But learning’s a curse.

The end of life is happiness, but scholars teach the reverse.”

Who seduced you? Was it wine, which poured over you: “Pleasure

Is here; thought merely stops, delays and toils for measure?

Why dig for a hundred days? A moment holds a treasure?”

Who seduced you? Your own beauty? Which quickly you used,

Cynically, in fake pleasure, to make someone else confused?

Who seduced you? The riot of the hungry world,

Which made you love the dull quiet of the world?

Who seduced you? The director of the actor in the film which made you cry?

The soldier, who never watches films, who said, “today, I die?”

Who seduced you?  Christ, who said, “The sweet, soft lamb

Will save you from the reasoning of a sly and tedious man?

Who seduced you? The sacred tradition of the docile, sacred cow?

This poem?—Me?—Or your mother, who said, “watch where you’re going now.”

Give me what I want. There is enough

For me. I want to simply love.

But all of us are puritans. We deny

The one who wants to simply love.

Is there such a pitiful supply

Of lovers? Who need love? Why?

And tell me, why did I

Love the unlettered Alpha,

And make the lettered Omega cry?

Omega loved, and wrote

Poems, weeping over a quickly written love note.

God! Every Alpha epistle was pissy,

In brief emails she rebuked me,

Meanly and selfishly.

Selfish Alpha was the world to me,

Because the world doesn’t give

To the world what the world wants. Wanting is how we live.

Alpha had it all: youth, beauty; she didn’t need

The love which those who want love need.

But that was OK. She gave me what I wanted.

Her body was a passive house I haunted

With my desire. Oh my desire

Had nothing to do but burn.

And her house never caught on fire.

But Alpha, as all eventually do,

Came to puritanism, too.

These old trees have seen it all.

Love in the spring, grief in the fall.

What is it the poets need to say?

What we want we can’t have right away.

Alpha turned proud and strove to write.

Her ink became my darkest night.

Alpha! You are still my sun.

Though Omega the poet should have been the one.

The man is the poet, the woman is the poem.

Men and women do not quite meet, like the earth and the moon.

The man is the telescope and the woman is the moon,

An orb circling, half-dark, and alone.

The woman wants the intangible, the man just wants sex.

The woman wants to run, the man wants his ex.

The man is never what the woman expects.

The man is the poet, the woman is the moon,

Who writes poems, too, to a different moon.

What can you say to the woman, or say to the man,

Which you cannot, but they already can,

In the outdoor restaurant, dusky blossoms for a mile,

In the shades of the earth, arguing for a while?

They cannot hear you, but if they could,

They would live in this poem. Which isn’t very good.

I want to be with you, completely bored.
Bored is the only way to be with someone you love.

Activities exist for those not in love.
When you are not in love, you plan activities like mad,
You think of songs to play, and perfume to put on,
Hoping songs and perfume will make you fall in love.

You think of food and movies to make you fall in love,
You think of taking off your bra to make you fall in love.
You think of marrying to make you fall in love.
You are madly thinking of being in love because you are not in love.
You are terrified of loving someone you do not love
And smile because you think perhaps this terror will make you fall in love.

Because you try everything to fall in love, even terror and despair,
You do not fall in love.

To fall in love, you planned activities
And sometimes you would ask me
To plan the activities.

You were confused because I was bored.
You were confused because I was the one
Who was in love
With one who could not fall in love.

My life is finally safe from sorrow.

All my dreams are ripe,

The smoke pours from my philosophical pipe.

The fields will be less ripe tomorrow.

The roads of mud where the cannons were dragged,

To fire on the enemy from the hill

Are dry paths.

The landscape is still.

My debts. What are debts?

Someone else will pay.

Isn’t that what we always meant by one fine day?

I always had what it takes.

A little soil and sun,

Wheat. The grinder grinds and shakes.

My sons and daughters

Have read enough.

That creative stuff,

Despite what I said, has gone by.

My children are filled by other containers.

I gave. They are giving.

I died in them.

Now I’m living,

A small light fading in pastel skies,

Looking for stimulation and song.

Is it ripe? Is it ripe?

The paintings? The golden fields?

Everything is ripe. And still it is wrong.

People think the world is ghostly.

It is not ghostly in the least.

People think there are ghosts.

No. Physical is the beast.

The wealthiest man longs to be tall.

She twists her neck to parallel park.

You want to play, but you’re too small.

She cannot see in the dark.

Inspiration didn’t make her sing.

There is a physical reason for everything.

The physical is strong

Enough to write, sing, and condemn the song.

A dress code is a dream of law.

The handsomest soldier you ever saw

Wore the blue—and then the gray

After speeches, and dinner’s delay.

This poem will mock what you heard

Because it’s rhythmically absurd.

There isn’t one ghost

Who will not admit it loves this poem the most.

I

Still softer. Your kiss will kill me.

Don’t send me out into the murdering cold.

Still softer. Don’t let this love grow old,

Which now breathes too fast,

Which pursues pleasure too quickly,

So neither the walls, nor the air between, will last.

Wanting makes wanting end.

Your love burns me. Be my friend.

Still softer. Be deliberate with every kiss,

So every pause saddens what every pause will miss.

Thought turns back and repeats a thought from the past

When love is desperate. Love can have no now—

Unless we know how only a soft kiss knows how

One long kiss will never know

There are others. You’ve killed me. I must go.

II

Prevent my erotica. I want to think, instead,

Of the sweetest melody, sweetly falling dead.

The uncompromising shadow surrounds your head

And frames, as in high art, your cheekbones,

Leaving half the forehead and your eyes

Beautiful and sad; too sad for truth, and all truth implies,

The rest of you in darkness. You are not what this owns,

You are the faint scents and musical tones

Falling by your feet, unseen—half-sights, half-sounds, half-sighs;

From the whole mystery, a partial mystery you took;

Your eyes open, too sad for truth; and closed, too sad for lies.

Prevent my erotica. I look

For an hour into your face. Never read another book.

What if another sun burns the low, burning, skies,

A sundown wrapped in pink and fiery sighs,

And this alternate, hungry for grey?

Your sunny eyes.

III

This disgusts me:

Come trembling into my fuck.

I like to say the word, “fuck,”

Because fucking is what I like to do.

After I am tired from fucking her,

Can I say the word “fuck” to you?

I would rather this were out of the way.

To heaven. And let Leda in the arms of Zeus play,

As a swan; the myth of a glad white swan

Was the grey one trying the bright one on.

I will be cogent and fraught. I will sing of God.

I sinned, spoke, repented, felt better. Is that odd?

Is a carnation a religion?  Is a rose religion only a clod?

IV

Moan against me, so that your smile

Will be more memorable after a while.

Or take your smile and put it away

While heavy erotica calls to us all day

In the groan of love and touch.

After I love you, in a way even love will say is too much,

Your smile can come out, please! after a brief time—

Love brief, compared to the sun,

Making its fiery, lengthy run—

The sun that feeds forever on sunny streams

Will place itself on furniture and climb.

V

I remember the direction of that religion

Telling me I was more,

Because I was humble and small—

To love, to fit in, is what I was for.

I remember that Greek religion.

I remember almost all.

I don’t remember the wishes,

The desires, the talk, so much.

I remember your body

And the sweet touch.

I went into the temple

And never came out.

All the scents of heaven?

When the heaven came about?

When the heaven, yellow,

Came next to me, with its eyes?

You dissolved, didn’t you?

Into the sweetest sighs.

To those who take my poetry seriously,

Don’t.  Unity is the soul

Of poetry. Unity is just out of reach

Of life’s incomplete, enduring reality

Of accidents, memories and slurred speech—

A poem is a part, that for a moment,

Is greater than the whole,

And because it is a moment, dies In a beautiful way.

A life just cannot be neat and tidy that way.

Should I think, for a moment, that my poem is life,

And you must take it seriously, I fail

At everything—the two opposites, poetry and life,

Must live apart—the head never knows its tail,

The body never knows the soul;

You taking this seriously is a part

Which never knows the whole.

Poetry and life will always be at odds,

Life, the clamor of friends and foes

Who change places; life comes and goes.

Poetry is consistent behavior by lovely gods.

They splash, their limbs always near,

Bathing in summer streams moving not,

The very movement of the air—the silent parts of the intricate plot—

Is never moving.

Choose. A love poem. Or me. Who tried to be loving.              

Totally sexy is not love.

This is why your lover isn’t nice.

She has urges. She doesn’t want advice.

She doesn’t need excuses. She needs

Fat frog legs eaten whole in the weeds.

Love is just a word to her. She hates

Waiting. She’s not waiting. She waits

For three, two, one and she’s gone

And you running after her turns her on.

Now adore what she really hates.

Herself. And then she hates you, too.

Totally sexy has undressed and murdered you.

Hatred fed sex with its specialized needs.

Where is beautiful now? Oh somewhere in the weeds.

Never tell your lover she is stupid.

But don’t tell her she is smart.

Let her figure it out.

Don’t brag. Then she’ll nag.

Make your mind a vast, neutral, space she can fill with her heart.

If you want her to care,

When you go here, or there,

Don’t tell her where.

Let her decide who you are

By your calm, understated, demeanor. Let news come from afar

That you might tell her something soon

About a certain feeling you had, earlier, under the misty moon.

Always meet her at fifteen minutes to six, never at six on the dot.

Don’t allow her to love what you are—

She never will. Let her try and love what you could be tomorrow, but are not.

She is kind. She may fall in love with someone weaker than you,

Someone incapable of sex.

In this case, there is nothing you can do.

Love, when it turns kind, will always perplex.

Ah romance. This is the worst part;

When a loving mind is killed by a more loving heart.