By Aleksey Calvin
With a wild cat's face
Summer shouts on the corner
You smile at the smell of her
Dirty socks.
You'd go out and give'er a kiss...
If you were a little older!
A poet is a warrior; Why not?!
The sky is black and blue -
A civil war -
But, really, playing with itself
Like two dogs fighting for a toy
Over a seated audience of homes
Awaiting a concerto.
But the dancing cloud-swirls merely shift:
A dada light-show coloring the world.
A poet is a warrior; Why not?!
The dreamy-drunkard crawls
Few feet away from bed
Then strikes another lonely pose:
His naked limbs'o'entrails neatly overgrown
With paisley patterns of fresh moss.
Rude tiny flowers sprout and wither, instantly,
From pores of every meowing bruise...
But from the mouth, timed to rhyme, flows time:
Sublime-most music screaming
That, as quickly, stops.
A poet is a warrior; Why not?!
Up on the wall the teenage cards of poets
Give way to a mosaic-ful of tiny HD screens,
All housing faces of a twin or else a lover,
So-quickly aging, then un-aging,
In the distance of inviting alien play,
And every mouth would speak a single secret word
That only you can understand....
It is a mirror, you would one night see,
And just as soon the sighing faces will melt into
One single death-mask fit for you alone,
With stranger features, all just yours,
Forever streaming, trading, youth and rot...
With weary fingers try and try to brush the mask away...
A poet is a warrior; Why not?!
But it is not yet time, you see?!
Here giggles timelessness in robes of green,
Just for a glimpse!
But days are scavenging, bewildered spiders.
Can't count their brilliant glassy eyes!
Can't count... When fleeting spiderlegs caress
The crusted yearning of your lilac thoughts,
That, growing ghostly limbs,
And then the beastly zen-face of a nun,
Would wrestle one more pretty face – a twin? -
Would wrestle just to lose,
To lose... Toulouse, you disappear, kindly!
And Bob Picasso's a sharp dandy,
Now in his basement modern colors flash and rot,
Another death mask's mirror for the world.
Who has the key? Who has the map?
I'll take them.
For I might sketch it one bright day
With happy blood of mystic tete'a'tetes, betrayals...
And thus I would re
-
spin the dreidel of the world.
A poet is a warrior: Why not?!
A lemon tree above phantasmal neon flowers
Painted on the fence...
A mournful hound who peers
Across the Gulf of Finland in my eyes
From out a battered copper bottlecap,
A monument to peace long left behind...
A dusty fire-extinguisher who sits so tall
Atop the bull-back of a garden table...
The fallen branches twined, wind-shivered leafs,
The hollow clover carton, end of world,
The rusted bike-racks, end of world,
An end, a world... and then one sees the soccer ball!
Oh, soccer ball!
One day I'll kick you madly
Through the fog! And you will soar,
Oh, yes, you'll soar, sly soccer ball!
Oh, wily harpy of my boyhood, through the fog!
A poet is a warrior; Why not?!
Lo, ancient gaslight lantern
O. gentle Mary-candle!
My shadow-twin and I shall carry you,
If you would have us,
Into the 22nd century's happy hades!
Into that world of metal fables
That will be misting darkly from the crying cave-rocks...
And every single step would let us...
Oh, at last! At last!
Forget the smug and witty mugs of Plato, Blake, Chateaubriand,
Of Gertrude Stein still crawling on four fingers
Through a battlefield of right and wrong...
Sweet plenty's massive spider,
How could we ever count your pretty glassy eyes
That make us yearn with wormy tips of
Our most sensuous and swarthy entrails
To find the nearest shopping block?!
So, who's to say that we, why, even we
With nearly inkless fountain pens
Won't, at the end of day,
Turn round and sever every useless snake-charmed stalk
Of ours... Of yours...
And end the world... And end the world...
A poet is a warrior; Why not?!