Two Recent Poems
Posted: September 8th, 2005, 10:03 am
(Performance notes:
Kevin was a real person, both a poet and a scientist of sorts. He read poems alongside me at the San Francisco Poetry Center with Stan Rice, put an invisible filling between my two front teeth, worked pro bono in Folsom Prison on the inmates' teeth, and ran for public office and won. His life was tragically short, as you can see.
"Dirty Romance" ( the title of my latest collection of poems) is about a compound of persons, and a shameful incident from my youth. Lady Jane was nice enough to put me up for the night. Later, she died of cancer at an alarmingly young age.)
KEVIN
( dentist and poet 1948-1990)
You carry cheap victory
like a mexican smuggler
carries heroin in his tires,
loose around, loose around.
A mad stream of Bull Durham
is papered under your
one remaining thumb.
Sunset burns vespers on the hill,
and you, a prison dentist,
pack silver into
a lifer’s molars.
Sex is a fire drill in your poems.
Under the whore-spangled
Las Vegas sky
you scat desert verses
at a yellowtooth princess.
Yet when we wash you,
put you in the grave,
you are pure, pure.
DIRTY ROMANCE
I forced the door for love
held her up, owl-hooted the night.
Behind her secret door
I owned the golden slippers, the elbow dance,
my wine and smoke
jittering a black compost drivel.
Where shoeless Jane was captured
no woman knows that she wants
a rug to dance on and
night-devilled cigarette throats
until she eases to candlelight drumming,
thick whizzes of finger-torqued
magic whiskey.
Water under a few years later,
Jane went down with cancer.
What a long wet wait for
some dry time outside the
backyard teepee.
Nowadays, I
talk like a cop inside a hospital.
But it was different when, that first time,
wine was the only frontier marshall
of my outlaw lust.
8/05
Kevin was a real person, both a poet and a scientist of sorts. He read poems alongside me at the San Francisco Poetry Center with Stan Rice, put an invisible filling between my two front teeth, worked pro bono in Folsom Prison on the inmates' teeth, and ran for public office and won. His life was tragically short, as you can see.
"Dirty Romance" ( the title of my latest collection of poems) is about a compound of persons, and a shameful incident from my youth. Lady Jane was nice enough to put me up for the night. Later, she died of cancer at an alarmingly young age.)
KEVIN
( dentist and poet 1948-1990)
You carry cheap victory
like a mexican smuggler
carries heroin in his tires,
loose around, loose around.
A mad stream of Bull Durham
is papered under your
one remaining thumb.
Sunset burns vespers on the hill,
and you, a prison dentist,
pack silver into
a lifer’s molars.
Sex is a fire drill in your poems.
Under the whore-spangled
Las Vegas sky
you scat desert verses
at a yellowtooth princess.
Yet when we wash you,
put you in the grave,
you are pure, pure.
DIRTY ROMANCE
I forced the door for love
held her up, owl-hooted the night.
Behind her secret door
I owned the golden slippers, the elbow dance,
my wine and smoke
jittering a black compost drivel.
Where shoeless Jane was captured
no woman knows that she wants
a rug to dance on and
night-devilled cigarette throats
until she eases to candlelight drumming,
thick whizzes of finger-torqued
magic whiskey.
Water under a few years later,
Jane went down with cancer.
What a long wet wait for
some dry time outside the
backyard teepee.
Nowadays, I
talk like a cop inside a hospital.
But it was different when, that first time,
wine was the only frontier marshall
of my outlaw lust.
8/05
