Chris Stroffolino
USA

Chris Stroffolino is the author of four full-length books of poetry: Speculative Primitive (2005); Stealer's Wheel (1999), Light As A Fetter (1997), Oops (1994). He has also published a book-length study of Shakespeare's 12th Night (IDG, 2001), as well as a collection of essays on late 20th century experimental poetry. Recipient of a NYFA and Fund-For-Poetry Grant, Stroffolino was Poet-In-Residence at Saint Mary's College from 2001 to 2006.  He currently teaches writing at Laney College in Oakland, CA.
 
Dark Bed Talk

 
You’ve turned off
the light, your voice,
leaving desire 
nowhere to go but touch.

 
It’s said when fingers
run along a thigh
they feel more touched
than touching. 
It’s said the mind
is in the head.

 
You turn on the lights
of your voice in the dark.
Now touch and words
side against sight.
You need eyes & hands
to take away words
from the voice.

 
We touch 
slow enough to talk,
talk slow enough 
to give the eyes
that made the tongue 
their servant
a much needed vacation
whose sign language
the real sees through
until lost in material.

 
I’d rather you talk
in bed dark touching
than touch you 
silent in the light
but even that I prefer
to untouched seeing talk.
It’s not touching
though sometimes
it’s said it’s singing.

 
Credit: Open City and in a chapbook by the author Scratch Vocals

 

Break Up Make Up

You read somewhere that people need at least 4 hugs a day
So I guess we owe each other 68
I know it’s bad to just want touch
But maybe we both want too much
Like good is wrong if it’s not always great
Some friends tell me a drama queen ain’t worth it
But come to think of it we’re all drama men
And the mountains we are climbing might be molehills
If we break up just to make up once again

I told myself Chris keep it in, I’ll cheapen love if I begin
To try to put in words its mystery
But you called me back I’m giddy now though later it might seem a brag
That’s too naïve to space out tragedy
Methinks the deepest dramas need their comics
Coz angels fear to tread where fools rush in
And there’s more to life than happy or sad endings
That play break up just to make up once again

I can’t say what happens next I hope it ain’t the kind of sex
That leaves us colder than no sex at all
You still feel broken up, and maybe I have woken up
Too late to take you to Viagra Falls
Neitzsche wrote of eternal recurrence
But he couldn’t make it in the den
And you might drop your clothes like they’re your standards
If we break up just to make up once again

You were all the world to me and maybe soon again you’ll  be
But you need some time alone or we’ll explode
And I need some kind of ritual that isn’t pharmaceutical
To find out what I owe and am not owed
Ain’t gonna cling and claw in this suspension
And ask Was I too GI Joe or Ken?
I’ll hang up now and wait for you tell me
If we hit another bump or a dead end  
That wore make up just to break up once again?

 
Goldilocks Sits In
For The Middle Class

 
When some people speak
Or sing of manic depression
Or bipolar disorder, you know,
“the higher you fly 
is the deeper you go,”
a frustrating mess or
the sublime mode of
heightened ambivalences
in romantic poetry

 
they probably mean
exactly the same thing
others say or sing about
income disparity, the wealth
gap. The excluded middle
class, not just Goldilocks,
that little imperialist, looking

 
for something “just right”
on her own, like some mean
Aristotle found, after long
deliberation---a think tank’s
invasive procedure—available
for that brief moment 
before the bears—out looking
for jobs—come back home to roost. 

 

 
To Be Performed With Music
(from Enlightenment Coffee)

 
Socrates spoke of the soul.
Plato wrote it down
Descartes & Hegel
Wrote it up
James Brown sang it
Danced it, played and worked it
Out and in and out again
A deeper duality than dualism!

 
The flesh becoming word
and the mangoes 
from the tree planted
on the coffin-less graves
ripen as the rhythm
& the blues express soul,
body and soul
body as soul

 
a larger whole, 
spirit that need not
spear it, the bass
melodic as a meeting
the drums no longer
forced in the back
of the bus, or the mix
behind the sensitive
singer-songwriter
in his little trickle down
think-tank 
disguised as a heart
from Jamestown…

 
but the famous flames
of soul brother number many
on the stage in the audience
bring democracy to
whatever America will be called
when the land is liberated
from the neo-cons and their prose
like when sex gets better
when you flip from the missionary position

 

 

 
A Change In The Weather

 
It’s not “the earth” being destroyed 
by the corporate policies that lead 
to “global climate change”
It’s just its capacity to sustain us. Just.

 
Earth will survive us, and the floods and famines--
the rich can do without New Orleans
or even New York City and start again from
the newly liberated, habitable, 
sunny vacation spots
of Greenland and Antarctica

 
even while the googly-eyed water bottles
from the plastic ocean
come alive 
with paramecia, paramecium,
to inhabit the rest of the world
with their social democracy
until the Greenlanders figure out 
ways to enslave them too.
                                    Whose fantasy is that?

 
In the meantime, they poison us for profit
and some have even been quoted
in joyous anticipation
that the arctic icecaps melt
to open shipping lanes
and make it easier to get 
the oil from the North Pole

 

 

© Copyright, 2014, Chris Stroffolino.
All rights reserved.