Comparison Disc Poems, Spring 2008
Short Skirt, Long
Cake is easy as rising,
yeasty as soda, long
as the jacket covers,
a barely-skirted bum,
as sweet as sweat in fluid
neon light-curves of rave.
Sweet Jane
Your smile, purled by one
tiny stitch—older, you’d regret
the lines left, traces of joy,
traces of pain.
Ice
Cheese, even then, poof-cake, but
despite all that cool in the white-kid-from-the-suburbs
kind of way that perpetual adolescence reinvents
adolescence as perpetually cool.
Under Pressure
For your pleasure the street, the pressure
of the yes but squished into a baseline, a trans-
Atlantic fright, stretched from London to the sparkling
New York sidewalk mica—humanity, finally, is geology.
What “U” Can’t Touch
Hammer hit harder than we recall, but slammed,
mostly, his own fingers, and, lamed now, preaches
what perhaps all along should have been: the Gospel
according to Hammer, M.C.
Superfreak
An unlikely subject for the soul: the girl you don’t
take home to mother, but the one you most want
to be with when you’re with the one you will.
Even her toenails make a scene. But such is obsession: the most
interest is, after all, the prurient.
Spanish Harlem
No love is innocent, not even that rose, picked
so to grow: in my garden is possession, the “special,”
one of dreams, the stem of a blossom from the deepest
place imaginable, Spanish Harlem, the exotic within;
the depth of dreams is the bloom of sex, the blush
of id in broad day.
Blues for Johann
The writer of the Coffee Cantata must have been blue,
the organist who fathered a nation
of notes and played into perpetuity, who, dutifully,
fulfilled every Sabbath’s obligation for music
for a measure of grain and a casket of beer.
Melancholia and introspection are intertwined,
the epigenetics of existence, the essence
of worship, a dedication that is meditation,
a tonic for the unworthy, the blessed grazing
safe in the fields of the great masses,
the unwashed.