Aegean Blues: Tangent on an Homage

Charlie, draped in cool, loose linens,
leaned on his elbow,
solitary, smoking dreamily
on the port poop deck-
contemplating the Ancients, the Aegean-
riffling through a catalog of colours
in ‘is well worn mental microfiche.

Long ago New York’s
Lake Minnewaska had impressed,
but that wert vastly more violet
than what presently his
much amazed eyes caressed.

Cerulean, he thought, but
quick-rejected it in a logic
most non-Boolean.
Simply, it’d been used to death,
become modish, hip and
like “eclectic” years ago,
such terms he avoided
with every step and breath.

Profligate with what few
shekels he could cobble together,
he laughed to think that
he’d himself strongly chided for
a pilgrimage to a poet’s home
on the ozone-poor Chilean coast,
felt ridiculous viewing the shoes
of that noble Nobel Laureate’s
long dead mistress-cum-wife.
Now he’d extended himself to
an homage once removed-
to sail seas voyaged by a vagrant
Cypriot central character in Alvaro Mutis’
adventurous and mad imagination.

Gulls wheeled overhead and screeched,
Charlie lifted a sweating glass
of iced and milky ouzo,
toasted Maqroll the Gaviero,
his own crazed, peculiar life,
then moseyed on over to where
a crowd had gathered round
a boisterous group playing tavli.

The rowdy enthusiasm,
once near, he noted, contained
a strange, quite ragged edge.
The soldiers’ whoops
betrayed a banal brand
of male dismay/alarm,
as, in their sweaty midst,
an intriguing interloper was
hand’ly defeating them,
all deft, swift decisions,
her hands floating fine and fem’nine
amid the dice, their derision
and the odd forest of
their hairy forearms.

Charlie stayed on
while they played on
and, one after another,
like lemming leapers
they fell before her
bright, British laughter,
her elvin, dev’lish reveling
in their brute, brotherly squirming,
fixed in absurd and ancient sexism.

Turning then, cabin-bound,
to read, reflect, surmise and write,
a common closure to many
a past and future night,
when, sudden as a sneeze,
glimpsed he her green, green eyes.

Away he wobbled,
a jolted clown on jellied knees,
his so-susceptible mind awhirl-
peepers the exquisite emerald
of warm, remembered tropic seas-
a mermaid, unhobbled and wholly free
in the form of a tan-brown
shining, English girl.

Insomniac Imaginings

A week without sleep
and twitch-eyed Charlie
teetered on the brink
of construing Oblivion
a black boat-unsinkable-
keel carving out beyond
the roiling, infinite width
of all cosmic confluence-
therefore actually unthinkable.

Ode to Ye Ol' Olfactory

Cassius, lead-hearted and leery,
left a thread of tobacco smoke
wound among the sidewalk jasmine
where a mature couple kissed quietly,
mostly shadowed by oaks all
aloof and large, a hush in their canopies.

Passing, Cassius squirmed,
for as their shoulders shrugged sexily
felt he an interloper impotent
next to their exchange so sighingly
and obviously mutually munificent.

And so, through the over-hot April,
twilit with entropies and couplings colored,
with recollections plenty o' previous
fucked-up failures, like an exhaust
behind him, blending their bitterness
with the hot, honey-hung air
did Cassius up and quell by
smartly whistling William Tell.

Capacity

Cassius hunched slightly,

unwound his thought,

months bundled up,

where it had hibernated,

burbling, dark-brightly brooding.

Cummings was right,

imagining for his mom

“a garden of blackred roses.”

Judy Garland, broken,

jittery with amphetamine dreams

was righteous too,

or at least our man so supposes.

The delicate bones

of her inner ear a mere

a heart to hear, to hurt and heal.

Whose songstress lips

did part to bare her spirit in a kiss.

‘S not just San Franciscan fags

who lament the demise of a starlet

in the end-

certain tuneless songs, dirges,

sharp with laced regret

and lamentation depend as well

upon the empathetic descent

into such precise, bathetic

forms of lovelorn hell.