lustgefuhl

[lustgefuhl]

l o v e i n t h e t i m e o f V A P O U R W A V E

so sunny the sand turned gold to glass bird watchers with runny egos eyeballed the gulls playing with the pterodactyls in a baby-blue sky ideology dissolved & rose again salty from the seaskin into new tropical heights sat cooling and brooding on the summit for ten million years then came back down on the dinos in a molten-plastic AVALANCHE

[lustgefuhl]

Summer nights

Today I saw you once again (glimpsed you) through the glass — the frosted glass, the frozen pane — you swam there like a swannish flame.

It’s brighter out than bright in there — else, how could I see you? You, who were such blinding light to me when all my petty poems were

just fairy lights on string, and frost upon a window pane was flowers by the field. Swim, then, in the tracks of summer showers! January’s tasteless taste is lost.

[lustgefuhl]

One of those days when the cat doesn’t help.

Dusted the bin & took out the bags of compost & unwritten theses. If I could take out the bags under my eyes too I would do that & all this stuff inside . . . I mean, all I want in me is you baby spit in my eyes & rub the grease & dust away so I can see the stars again doubled in the sea! I’ll give birth to a new world from what’s left of our gold, our

UNION FOREVER

if you only say the word . . .

And though we are fungous & mouldy like conservatives, we won’t grow old; we got the right preservatives.

Fresh plastic bags in the bin . . .

[lustgefuhl]

Your place, or: Since we are still human

Judge me very harshly when we stand before the tall thin gates, copper pouring everywhere. Judge severely when the once-gold patchwork of the fields is wet again like cat’s hair. Trample my cowardice into the cow-crapped soil. (into worm food!) (into crow food!) Run it over and over again and again with the old tractor as you sow fresh seeds and gently hum that beautiful Einheitsfrontlied!

[lustgefuhl]

Hoffmann’s two-toed sloth

Hoffmann’s two-toed — holding on; hanging in though Hoffmann’s gone.

(Hear the hungry board rooms cry: Let the fires lead our way! Nothing lives that will not pay! Make the fertile canopies bend to our golden fields! Nothing lives that cannot die!)

(But nothing dead is soon forgotten. Ye haulers of the rot & cotton: Phoenix like a psychopath hatches from the seeds of wrath if greed and gluttony should both contrive to wipe out Hoffmann’s sloth.)

Hoffmann’s two-toed — hanging on; doesn’t care that Hoffmann’s gone.

[lustgefuhl]

Together between

We were looking down the tunnel but the stars lined up behind in spear formation. And the train is coming. And the stars are coming. And we are in between: you, me, the silent heartbeat of our silent freight and the drumbeat silence of the dead world that we made.

[lustgefuhl]

lay me down the lore again: the right red thread the true blue line.

teach me how to bore again, through my head down, down the spine. let me start my brain once more. the colours fled I saw before.

[lustgefuhl]

My cat in January

Perched on his tower of felt framed by lilac-lacquered snow — the flowers of frost he breathed last night have melted.

[lustgefuhl]

Where was I?

As my eyes looked down on my body which was not my soul & wondered: waiting for life to stop? to start?

Oh — dust-choked days locked away beneath old weather vanes; oh, my paradise of painless pains.

[lustgefuhl]

Boy

I have crusted, cumbered (though I smoothened after all) —

my bones filled with lead — my watercolour eyes engemmed, slotted into a marbled death mask.

It (push) comes (to shove) quickly, wherever (midstep up the ladder in a breeze or an intercepting freeze, scouring spring) — you are — no longer here.

[lustgefuhl]

Quarter century

In the cinders of another December snippets of lines of greater things have come & gone, fled & flown.

The ice, forming, melting, and reforming cracked the roads.

The tree dreams a dying fever dream. My father sleeps, my mother drowns.

Another year, another hope burnt into the once-white hearth to heat the place (my father’s place, my mother’s place) & light us through another January as the planet twirls in the grip of the moon & spring comes & comes again & comes again until nothing comes again again.