THE WORLD

rests on 8 tectonic plates
You don’t want to know more.

Their geographic names approximate greeed, envy, look-at-me,
aNGer, sloth-dou?t, rust, glut, and don’t-much-care.

In common with Spanish peasants, I believe
that this earth moves when love is made.

Which could explain the stability of NY.
From the severity of earthquakes in California

one has to know there is much faux focussing, as in
"Love ya, I really mean it."

Say, for example, you have a character trait,
you know, what your wife calls a major deficit.

Seismic evidence proves that if you exhibit envy, and you are
directly over the envy tectonic plate, you sin in spades.

At the juncture of don’t-much-care, and any one
of the other 7, emotional floods are likely

to wash away generic good. It’s happened twice this century:
involving a Boise couple, and a menage-a-trois mille

in an ashram (where So. Philly used to be).
Have I got your ear?

SUMTUARY, VERY WARY

If I can eat off
your kitchen floor,
How much higher
up the food table
Can I venture
Before taboo?

Presume I’m a poet
Given over
to presumption,
Claimant to no art
Save fibbing,
Fake at that.

Mayn’t I still
Presume
Your good will,
Assume your tolerance
Or is it resumption of war
Between us?
I wonder, weary even.

MY DADDY LEFT ME

However, my daddy left me
a wrist pincushion, a 14" decorator’s scissors.
and 4 rolls of flag-strength crepe paper
in lieu of anything of mortal value.

An itinerant window dresser,
he acted in that shining arcade of contemplation
- Buy me, See me, Buy me-
open to all elements
shielded vitreous to the glassy-eyed

He’d put together for the prop
and the prospective a cornucopia:
for me, echoed for me, pride is right.
a window dressed to the nines.

I’ve got all 3 still
I’m thinking- with consummate acumen-
of cutting, shaping a pattern for a crepe costume.
Pinning it on the altogether

And this Halloween , I will break into
his cemetery, rush to his grave in fool’s view.
and cut down
all the daisies he’s pushing up.