Impulse

No, I don't regret
biting your ear. I regret
your not washing it.

Ode To Despair

Whence, heart, the journey into the black pit?
The night stretches before me, dark and wild
and flecked with the iron pyrite of futile hope.

My blackbird died tonight.

June swallowed the last shards of me,
now they cut with the dead and frozen sunlight of Oncewas.
I learned solitude at the iron hand of error.
The blue wind blows at the cracked windows
of my garret... the smell of whiskey
drifts up to sting me
from my fingernails.
The blood in my wrists burns to be free.
The heart in my bosom breaks with the weight
of cursed and lonely brilliance.
Tonight, another prostitute.


(This poem was also posted on my LJ.)

Vivamus, mea Lesbia!

Let us live, my Catullus, and love!
Love is something centuries can't halt.
You'll never meet my parents
and I'll never know your faults.
I won't get fat, you won't get old,
because you're dead. We'll drink wine,
and then some more (you know the rest).
We're matched! In face of that, fuck "time."
Your dirty Latin poetry
makes my thighs convulse.
You provide a knowledge transcending the weight of countless centuries stretching infinitely,
I'll provide the pulse.

Haiku and Not Haiku

You Too

Demons and swans
have white necks ending
in a sharp sharp gape.


Tennis Without a Net

Two potatoes
in a cellar corner
sprout naked toes.


Latin

I learnt you for your own
sake. Only a few
of the words
have stayed, and the change
in endings after sine:
without.

Greek and Latin

The cat the (male) black being-to-us cat
having on-this-occasion-only killed
the small the (female) rodent, the one in the couch,
played
effects of action continuing into the present
with (rodent implied)
under the winedark the (couch implied).

Having killed rodent,
without assistance of definite article,
cat black our
Gaul subjugated.

Blues Song About Cigarettes

Friendship, darling, is just a word,
and love is just an act.
Gin gets bitchy the morning after,
marriage is just a legal pact.
When you want a friend who doesn't betray,
a kiss that isn't empty,
give in to the truth of the poisonous love
which comes in packs of twenty.
Now love is a toxin, and trust an expense,
so cling to a light in a world of dark.
The rock of mathematics will be your guide:
you've got two lungs and only one heart.