TO MUSIC

Start! Halt! it's all the same to music meant to go through us “if you hold it it’s gone” like the lips     of the kissed

FROM NORTH BEACH TO CASTRO

Man hear this I wouldn't be caught dead wearing a red herring   glintsparksunstretch   ah, so! lambs folding lambs with nary a crook among us

POEM: SUPPOSING A ROSE

once called the tragic sense of life now melancholy (name it ‘sweet’) is the close springing to the wording, a source so intimate the spurt of the gush tug’s the eye’s edges with the same nail it plucks heartstrings with   faces fill up bodies bear out this stranger radiating uplifting the very streets with the here and yet there of ecstasy   a little red wheelbarrow up to its lips with it trundles right up to my heart and dumps its fill   how the guises of the rose rise this way and that above the spill over   to strum for the heart’s melissa   a home for its hum

FUCKING

    the toe-touching earth welcomes the well-worn pass- el of well-wearing lips     between us we peel toward the well- known leap     bearing it well enough to read in air after     it is all over     the well is not over     it is     flowing

PREGNANCY

the only difficulty ties itself into spread lands whose ends loop and pool about our tinned bewildered fingertips below the earth a smile meanwhile ends and ends its ends

EINSTEIN & ROLL POEM

E = mc² everywhere all over up & down in & out back & forth near & far around the corner through & through to & again straight or not curved to fit more & less normal & veered chances are being there & not there

FRANCO GRECO

is more than just a ‘here & now’ man he hangs ten in the all around us

LANGUAGE DRIVING MEN MAD ENOUGH (TO EAT ONE ANOTHER) #10 BASIC MECHANISM OF AN OPEN SYSTEM

Welcome! Your coming is such fresh ginger squirting through holes of the garlic press splattering onto the almost palpating redness of this cut-up beef heart on my hands where redolent garlic already squiggles in salutation meeting just enough wine to uncover the kitchen jar

WHEW! SEE HOW WE ARE!

It’s a beautiful day here today, after many of semi-grim grayness. As I’m sitting in the kitchen the sun all at once finds its way down the lightwell to spank the walls and my eyeballs with light—I can almost hear the colors singing—the orange slate on the painted chairs sound out altos, the rubbed brown of tansu is the chests of the baritones reverberating, the bright tangling of light among the broad-leaved fern reveals a clear green soprano, and my own ribcage quivers with a low rumbling repeating its part of this tuned scene

MARKET STREET

see a Lady is it ambling within the walk of wobbling wisdom so acutely she gathers hymns about her lackadaisical knights to shimmy the night’s long all all night long the street’s sodium stratum replaces a misty riband of mercury’s mellow sha- wabbling loon light

LENGTHS AND WIDTHS

There’s this lady always coming up putting things on my back, ‘kimonos’ she calls them various as weight and color but always close to my own body size (each of us walks a round like crows about corn)   Here’s a horse pillowed in clothes here’s a nest of standing lances keeping the windows out here’s something watchful licking the feathers of the unseen here’s a grand folding of swans about the neck of an icy canal and don’t forget the bright bush babies with churly curls falling falling             to a straight hem Some burden Some beer All seem to hear my being slip into them Hist & Psst! Adorn your selves and your elves Time’s delicate handleman drives so-sweetly-washed cars over the princess’s shoulder onto shivering gravel whose soft and squushy silence rings with a ping firm as imagination’s quince

TIME & SPACE

I love every moment & each moment’s an inch I get off at Kathmandu I get off for Redwood City I go home with you I pad about the swaying pond waving my lilies I’m over my head

RIVERS: ROCKS AND STONES

nothing is proved all is assumed like ‘pages’ turn pages like oars in a Hokusai ocean lift, ally, allay and charge a new churning whose trumps rewind old bricks’ crevices into new parturitions pink turnips of the hand sheer heart’s easement enherbs the call of heaven’s ouzel to test the bub of the nesting foam