64 on this side

shadows are the toys
in the subconscious mind
I'm sifting through mine
looking for a wooden souvenir

all the lost kisses
those fiery young tongues
wrapping wet around this
64 Gb memory stick

there are many shades
to the darkness many versions
of the fuck one's tastes
change a little over time

the shadows hide the actual
features which is which don't you
remember her breasts her flesh
in your hands

its hard to replay the reasons
so often nothing more than opportunity
so often a mistake no matter the
secret orgasms in the fetal night

its hard to simply reduce
the gift to zygotic survival
even though I've dismissed
all meaning from these tropes

surely being is more than this
or am I just a slackjawed romantic
bartering old pleasures for one
more round on the Lady

Will She raise her skirts for me
this time? She wears white as in
the coda of Bob Fosse's onscreen
life the playful veil Her tease

I have chopped down the tree
a thousand times and still I grasp
the axe and eye the leaves beginning
another season of stems and seeds

is it memory or are there notions
of value playing backgammon in
the next room the other player
offering me the doubling cube

and in these shadows
I no longer see fortunes acquired
the play of light and darkness
becomes a sort of casual beauty

novel writing

shattered armor lying on the ground
here in the next chapter the baby was
lost the song was unfinished he grasped
the wooden sword thinking it a working
model the chapter is a draft the candor
of the major female character just an
illusion somewhere in me the voice
calls wake up the night time is just
another method of avoiding your memory

he said no one finishes a poem
and there was that guy who hadn't
had an orgasm in 95 days one day
for every complaint in Luther's
list and a couple to flaunt a moral
superiority I understand the way
such abstinence breeds a contempt
for nature I am so above the biological
self that must mean I am like the deity
yeah right you da man

but the poem is unfinished and
my orgasm has eluded me again
still in my mind's eye the memory
can be tracked the naked girl
assenting to her desire and my
dark needs I still think its
those days in catholic grade school
with all that talk of virgin martyrs
crying their sweet eyes out refusing
the advances of the wicked and
offering up the pains the tortures
to a perfect white lit fellow himself
a masochist no doubt

in the last chapter there was
a bell rung for each brave act
it rang twice in its loneliness
he did the right thing but the
maiden preferred the dragon and
his wooden sword shattered in
his grip at least it didn't
suddenly incandesce the helix
fleeting its four desires
unsynthesized in the light

no child created
no poem finished
no song repeated