TO MY VENUS AND HERA IN ONE  

                                   for D.C.A/Doria

Each dawn I feel like Hephaestus crashing
into Lemnos, my Venus and Hera
in one. Who wouldn't want to lay her head
on Pectus Excavatum? I'm smashing!
Our pact bound me together; but, here, three
Lilies for your grave, and I almost jumped
where you'd jumped, today -- we-ee-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e.
My recurring dreams: I fumblingly hip
your languor into laughter dancing
in tighty whities my first time ever;
your ghost soars my spirit on wings of wounds;
we're strolling through the daybreak's rain and beams --
I wake: my heart drops
and drops and drops and drops and drops till dreams.

* * * * *

HAIKU

twilight --
as I strike my match the fireflies
scatter

awakened by that nightmare –
the closet-moth out knocking my
firefly jar
  
ice-bound waters in the floes --
gliding my memory
blue-winged butterflies

returning from the bar --
also bumbling and desolate
a late October wasp

April Fools' --
an ant       breaks from the web
dragging   a blossom
  
charity snowball fight --
the winner throws a white        dove

light snow and firewood scent --
who else here looks less
over the shoulder, tonight?

scent of a flower whose name I forget --
I lick a dewy worm to see
what it tastes like.

solar eclipse --
under the Bridge of Sighs I
sigh

in slight light breeze moonlit milkweed seeds float by

the night nurse
pretends to check if we're breathing --
the dawn of spring

boxing day --
campy kids kick slush on
a man in a box

She blows a hash-ring
through another, then another over both --
the first bush party

* * * * *

CHRIST ON THE CROSS

A translation of Emile Nelligans Christ en Croix

I'd always gaze into this plaster Jesus
pitched like a pardon at the old abbey-door --
a black-gestured solemn scaffold
with saintly idolatry I'd bow before.

Now as I sat around, at the hour of cricket's play,
in funereal fields, blue-viewedly musing
one near-past night with wind-blown hair, reciting
Eloa, in that swelled esthetic ephebic way,

I noticed near the debris of a wall
the heavy old cross heaped up tall
and crumbled plaster among primroses

and I froze, doleful, with pensive eyes,
and heard spasmodic hammers strike, in me,
the black spikes of my own Calvary.

* * * * *

TO HIMSELF

a translation of Giacomo Leopardi's A Se Stesso

Now always be at ease, beaten heart of mine;
the tricks are finished, which I thought infinite.
finished -- but I feel fine
because, in us, both hope of and desire 
for deception have died.
Be at ease forever, you in breakless labour --
you whose stirrings are worthless to this
world unworthy of your sighs.
Life is only bitter and boring.
The world is dirt.
Now be calm my heart;
sink your last time. Fate can only afford to confer
an end to our kind.  Now, hate that ugly Mother
Nature, the brutal power which, while it hides, is governing
the world-wide wound and endless vanity of everything.

* * * * *

TO LEOPARDI

O great shiver-giver, with your ink-tipped
wand, on the knoll amid supernatural
silence or sublime song, I listen
to the supertruth and I am now equipped
for stepmother Nature's sneering-lipped
gaze and cold brutal craze. Hunchbacked
in overstudy, boiling with virginity,
I wish you could have stripped Her and whipped
Her until She choked on Her laughter.
I wish you could have raped Her and draped
Her in the raiment of a whore, and after,
gnawed Her nimble lips and nibbled Her scraped
knees. Giacomo, prince of poets, stand!
O great shiver-giver, with your ink-tipped wand!

* * * * *

MANIC PSYCHOSIS

While epiphanies street-fight over me
I bet the sun my eye-lights for its rays
that these will be my most visionary
days and my vortex of utopia will craze
all humans attempting to see
beyond what they can see through their malaise
who wish to have oases in their eyes
not desert wastelands and barren skies.

I wear my visions on my sleeve and heart-
beat Suicide to death, and seduce
the tyrants with my hung tongue, and reduce
the religions. A tilt of my head
eclipses the sun
whose ring I propose to everyone.

Marc Di Saverio is here to find out how much there is left to say.


Published On: February 14, 2013
Permanent Location: http://www.forgetmagazine.com/130214d.htm