I.
            Adam's web bathes vain neglect in prayer.
            Apple in his left hand,
            Open to Exodus
            Crimson shoes hacking,
            hacking at the asp.

            I'm sorry I can't help leaping
            from William Carlos
            Williams to Whitman
            As if he never wore white in the river, parrots

            gyrating, a comforter undulating over you green,
            coming down.
            Like Ginsburg's mother he's pretty,
            his blood: bright enough to be spilled.

            II.
            Red blood drops, a second birth
            out into the womb of world.

            Alabaster and daft
            moths whiz by

            Insofar as is recognized
            in their wings our ironic mobility.

            III.
            You, right now, are scared to admit
            Innocence, civility, and pride
            Let yourself go unchosen,

            Be a nail, a crown of laurels, wool.
            The unpreserved, expectorant word.
            A certain freedom, in the end

            Is undoubtedly not
            Unlike my simplicity that singlehandedly
            does not let me exist. Versus technology

            on these holidays of song and use
            Resurrection hails hell in small things
            like slivers, a coin, a crowd.

            IV.
            Your world creates you, lonely in the hay.
            Strutting forth, spurting old lyres:
            You could draw horsehair across them

            and invent symphony. Ignore Dad's warning
            Dry leaves won't burn at night, however dense
            the chest of the white grand. But it tickles

            In the hot wind of random verse
            Let your amateurish effort be a mountaintop.
            Your word gun: cocked, catastrophic

            Trills sirocco in your blond selves
            Your boy, your girl,
            Your superstar dessert hot and squirming.

            V.
            What is the meaning of dill pickles or a kewpie doll?
            I tingle into him while he forgets
            his dull roots drying with the dread snow
            of April. It's hard to November your own will,

            Mary as spiritual, poetic and sensual.
            Remember her as black.
            Aquarius versus Scorpio, it's hard to remember
            the child versus the unbred, unabashed woman

            Because they are air, hot, fire.
            In my eye is an image in women, indifferently
            waving their faces without a scent
            of material connection. These flags of discovery

            all pale, uncovering why we should love them
            Don't they all have a hole
            we lie in,
            regardless of effects?

            VI.
            Rote friars, too long too learned
            speak for the other that is her
            However brusque, however brief
            Her burial lacks a period,
            without a contour to flesh them out.

            Word, you are her confessor
            Errant shrapnel against a white wall
            In cervicide: the slaughtering of dears
            The university of letters is the key
            A bandage only innocents wear.

            "You've cut out the flute from the throat
            of the loon": Plunge it and find
            two uteri beating, one underground
            one brightly venal in the heated sky.

            VII.
            Droll daughter, hello at midnight -
            Do you feel the bard's East stalking you,
            drowning laughter? Never fear the draught;
            it will pass, dafter than peaches.

            Sensemayá who reads and writes
            from one book to the next. Haply llorona,
            Marschallin, soprano to the stars.
            Your façade faces north without the moon.

            If you don't mind, my Medea,
            we'll face away this miasma of calm
            in a needle eye communion to evening
            The electroshock monkey is in wane.

            Might I say - for your shoulder men cry
            In your eyes, eternally
            Might I say women die for your lies?
            Or your truths better yet, they remind me

            For your dagger I watch
            while the bard's east encroaches
            on lonely feet, while I smile
            and for a lock of his hair I betray you.

            VIII.
            Quaint the ambience here:
            Good evening. How many of the servers
            have been raped, do you think, or humiliated?
            Eavesdroppers all hear a familiar voice:
            youth robbing the grave's old pall.

            The quiet sleeper's mind wanders head stone and still plots.
            Does a cornice in the ground resemble a serving cover?
            You may pick a pig, an apple, a myth
            and plot for its pantheon of perfomers.

            I love it all, I live with it.

            But still, does your ear open as long as this presentation reigns?
            Not in my mouth the fruit, where you seek it neither:
            slicing ribs and eye holes, now you've slipped.
            Good world: lacks not fools, scapegoats, royalty,
            but I wonder what happened to Bambi, and what will become of you?

            What happens to pugilists' brains?


            Nice finale: passionate, red-hot food,
            come crashing when we want them to,
            to us, with wine,
            with stone heads and kid gloves, to us
            with sentences in our red-lipped mouths.

            IX.
            Does reflected flame burn the mirror? Summon spirits?
            My glass chinked at the opera,
            refracted bluehairs in row one,
            stoooped dinosaurs for whom Strauss:
            was foliage without meat, peaceful;
            the juice of Der Rosenkavalier
            we brontosaurs craned for,
            rain from even above the clouds.

            X.
            On Sunday it is okay to use
            banal words in sweetly musical mosaic,
            myriad rhythms.
            Their color has wealth in time,
            tears on granite, jingles on pigskin,
            skirts, whatever.
            When we speak to each other I hum a hymn
            to know you,
            a little like war, and don't find the difference.
            The Jews got the hell out of Egypt.
            Our plagues are merciless, economic, romantic -
            I won't bore you with shades
            of black
            unless you'd listen,
            the sun too, fierce and firm bely
            with a short sweet admission of guilt
            in your invinscible armor, angelic face,
            long brown legs and round breasts...

            XI.
            Not all fools are gold, plaiting prejudice with politeness.
            Hard to tell. Open up your white grand Chopin.
            Perhaps treasure in black and white keys.

            Like Manila or a broken coffin,
            curiously, it hurts, extends a hand
            laden with middle-class insurance:
            business, middle-age, not autumn but what rests
            as you slow down, learn to mete out later moments,
            dismay to disillusion, like Eberhard, travel:
            porcelain, furniture - cumbersome,
            men's clothing - fantastic.

            Your grandfather clock doesn't know yet
            your underwear's silk.


Copyright © Juli A.Kroll, 2002.  All Rights Reserved.