Late-Blooming Shyku

Love,
........love
...love

...........I will live you
as my increase
..................and come back through you.

What This, All This, Gives

is space
and time, finally
I've got my pulse on
its finger

So that
sitting meeting
hearing
this or that
complaint
you know
doing my job
I can collage (collapse?)
scene and setting
-reality-
into the collage

and suddenly
more space
better time
easier breathing

What friendship
lives
imagined here

I want to say
thank you now
even though
it's the season
where
just that repetition
also deadens

I can't help
spontaneity
happening
incliche
and
don't measure
things like I used to
anyway

The Direct Address

Dear Adam ,
...Dear Steve,
Dear Alen

Dear Nikky
...Dear Anna
Dear Nicole

Dear Darcy
...Dear Nieem
Dear Dearest

See? Even graciousness
..can be defeated
...............by repetition.

It's like what that
...other old once said,
........forgetfulness is a
...............wonder

of elaboration.

Sickness in the Geisha Region

Sickness in the Geisha Region, it's
.......the title.
E-mailed from splitsecond
Osaka to clap tricksilent
in Amy's inbox. From total brainstem
blooming lotus-belt
........fantasy, New York City.

Myung wants to know
Bad or good, reply

only if you're ambivalent.
She's been studying

outside Shanghai, laterally
here in the land of her

enemy tradition. And already
has decided, unswerving

through whimsy, even
traffic here is more neutral.

............ Oppressively so.
.........Over the past
.....three hugless weeks
she's noted a

....growing tan-need
..........for the pale of the computer.
..............Studying Japanese

by fearing to speak it.

Amy's response is in poem-form.
A ladylush sestina. "Memoirs
..............on the
..... Tether", a snark-drop
...............to herself in the title.

Over her sixth month, her left shoulder
on the lapscreen's zit sheen

she sees little mentions through the words.
The words are tenuous. In Georgia font. But

their friend they've dissolved in a dorm room
to recombine, like the digitized gun geek

shredded in Willy Wonka, inside-outside
is populous and affectionate, like air.

She sits humbling it. And in the guest here
over the shrunk not there, a trickle

in the doubled second story window, she swears
.........no seeming trees out near. Where?

Down the artesian hole of the inbox, where
...................her feeling stares--

one flick she controls, by surprise, while she shares.

The Immature Person

Wimp with mask, don't
I pity me, careless

byproduct of the you.
Great chief frisk,

confabulous and stupid
with weightless

observations--each
a gangplank walk

from forgive to forget.
What made me so afraid?

I was insecure. As in,
so little ground

was mine. And what
much there was

was almost bellyup
too wanted, so dizziness

felt me rough. Discovered
self-criticisms and

hand-cuffs. The law
of pleasurable exchanges

was sheep-like, but
eventually, I should admit

without the embarrassment
that pretends to be

real shoes, my constant
life's pride finally

overcame its longdrawn
cresting. Crashed me

upside down. To tousle
air as the secret,

always what I tricked
were depths. Shows

what I knew was
defeated, in bad need of

age to grow into.
So I did. And it fit.

At The Gatlin House

In Boone, North Carolina,
a bed and breakfast (name conked
............void)
and timetraveling glass
fused as a conscious window.
Stirring my oatmeal......... Nikky sat across.
Comforting her Stroop............. over tea.
I billowed in synch with......... the steam trapped.

...............On top
of a mountain among
a hundred years--not a century, yet--of homemade furniture.
........Dreadlocks
trickled Nikky's
shoulder and where she had gone
without me, turned, she was
....................feeling
a little of the meeting place. The one
she had described
over chutney and rice, at dinner.
Being in love with a woman, and not another woman, and not just,
and having to be allowed to do these,

...................stamp imaginary
............snow from
.........................a boot that won't
..........................................quit, complaining. Shoe.
Those trees doing their night
along the viral twist gravel,

path that maps vertigo to
prize a hill. At the top

by the stone wall, size
lapped relevance. A

minor treeline had to
topple to fill the eyes'

share: gargantuan anti-god
sleepknees beneath wreathsheet,

the hypothetical rolling
while I'm watching them mountain.

(her facial real, her reflection
already drained on roadtrip--)
................Wherever
..........................you walk,
................................wife, you
.........................................help it stare.

Amen.

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