A COLLECTION OF EARLY SHORT POEMS ON LUST & LONGING

for Charlene...



MEMORY

Instead, I’ll feel your breath on my chest
And like a blindman
Memorize every line.

-- Ocean Beach, 1979



ACCOMPLICE

Love your neck, nipples, mouth on rising.
Roaming inclines suspended.

-- La Mesa, 1980



FLEETING GLIMPSE

Wounded wheels
Cut the night long.

Dilapidated taxi’s mirrored eyes –
I fantasize you there
My fingers warm
Exciting you.

$19 this side of poor
I touch myself
Dreaming of your skin in my mouth
And I pull my hair
The way that you do.

--San Diego, 1980



OPEN WINDOW

I dampen her
sleeping body, watching it dry
and the blood flows on beneath her skin.

-- Ocean Beach, late 70s

AFTERGLOW

Not the whirrrr of leaves and branches
But the kind of sound kids make with their lips
To overdramatize wind.
Sounds like people rolling over and over
On clean sheets.

-- San Diego 1979

ONCE IN A BLUE MOON SPECIALS AT EVERYDAY LOW PRICES

Glistening leaves fall from her
Snowflakes my beard. Some not-so-mirage
Trembles under her skin. The taste of her pleasure
Brings us together. I dress hurridly to stand in line
Behind 3 pre-law students trying to beat the bar.
(in the aisles I felt her stickiness, her breath, her quivering
on my face. Standing in front of the bread I wanted to rip open
a loaf of “Regular Wonder”, sponge my face
gulp it down, sending her deep into me...)
a woman glides in for yogurt
dressed to kill, long legs and fine form
slipped into a dress that turns the eyes of shoppers,
boxboys, needles, potatoes and hurricanes
trapped in Drano bottles. I smile at the hour-old sweat
drying on my legs and the lacy sounds of movements echoing on my tongue.
(a block away sits a warmth that beats this walking pulse to death,
a touch that withers this flowered breast, a smile that screams, “More”)

-- Ocean Beach, 1979

THE RACK

Her pink nipples an inquisition to bear
harsh light of her porcelain flesh blinding
Soft underbelly midriff terror
Rosebud Pavlovian lie detector
Nightmare vision of never again, there against my beating heart
Waking, sweat drenched fear of not seeing her eyes smile into mine…
Sheer torture.

~ for Charlene, s. rockfield, sometime 2000

SMELL THE COFFEE

night's cloudy veil falls away in slow motion
the silent, gentle rocking wakes me from a dash of fitful sleep
my starchy eyes find myself alone
with the sound of filtered air
the checkered past of yesterday
miles behind us
the glorious hopes of today
not yet jaded by the reality of tomorrow.

it's now when the world decides
to catch its breath.
(man lights cigarette on dim empty platform
awaiting the 5:40 to Penn Station;
boy bicycles in BIG circles
in the middle of the wide street
testing the fragile balance in this morning's bag of newspapers)
and I wake up dizzy with dream :
your nakedness astride me on this train
my hands on the ellipsis of your familiar
ass, pumping the electricity, the fear,
the kinetic, frenetic jazz energy
of New York City into your anxious body
and the world's eyes are slits
aching with the Jesus beams of dawn's mumbled joke.
I can almost see alarm clocks shaking off their night stands
as lights go on in the upstairs windows
up and down these racing blocks
of empty streets...
...smell the coffee.

II.

people dressed for the day
smelling of shampoo and make-up;
the zip/pout snore emanating from 2 rows behind
another reveler fearlessly trying to make up for last night's excesses.
my eyes snap shut and open and shut
my neck does the Zapruder dance
my instant dreaming of your eyes
perpetuates my last waking thought:
that I should pull out my warm self
tracing a smile upon your imaginary lips with my essence
as the sun splashes the air with morning
pulling itself kicking and scratching
through the blanket of New Jersey fog
a high beam in a white-out blizzard
somewhere between Trenton and home.

- written at dawn for Charlene, new jersey on the train
July 2, 1996

GAME PLAN #2

You wait for my call. I say one word. "NOW." You run to the shower hose yourself down wash your ass especially well because tonight it is mine. Make sure you lube it up your well before you leave the house. You might even want to toss a couple of fingers in there in the shower to get used to the idea. You will drink a bottle of water while you are getting ready and one en route to my house. I want you to feel full. I want you in an expendable wife-beater or old button up shirt. No fucking bra this time unless you plan on having it cut off of you.  In fact, I want you in a plaid schoolgirl skirt. Dog collar. Drive to my house dressed this way. Do not be late but do not speed. I don’t want the police to get their hands on you like last time. Pull your car into the neighborhood and park up the street. Come to my front door. Knock three times. Wait 60 seconds and knock again. Open the front door. I will not answer. Slowly come inside. Call out, “Hello...anyone home? I’m lost...Can I use your phone?” Ask for directions. You got off at the wrong bus stop and don't know where you are. I will grab you from behind and take you then and there as I wish. You will definitely be at my beck and call. While you are still dressed and freshly fucked, you will crawl into the bathroom where I will piss on you in the bathtub and then you on my cock. You will then be led upstairs, punished and fucked heartily. Then I will order you to lick my ass and fuck me slowly with my strap-on, first on my stomach, whispering into my ear what an asshole I was and how you love fucking my ass...then you roll me on my back so I can stare into your eyes and slap your tits while you slide that hard cock in and out of me... Nice start for an evening you think? Perhaps a bit of ESPN or Matlock and a bite to eat instead? Don't fucking push it. You are mine and I am yours.

WILD AT HEART, INDEED

It’s extremely odd
That in the fastest passing of a month
That one can remember
When all that is really recalled
Is your name
And the ever changing
Glorious look of you across the room
In her arms
Or her arms
In my arms
In your chair
In your element
Surrounded by your things
Your glow
Tarnished light all soft and asking
You being loved
Soft
Hard
Fast
Slowly
All eyes on you, baby
All hands on deck
It being “let’s Please Mary Week”
It being 6 a.m. in the morning
Half-way through
A marathon of six hands playing tootsie
Three hearts playing tag
Across one furry white carpet
An old wobbly cat perched on her back
As she strokes warm, hard meat with one hand
Fingers, again, your wet shivering gash with the other
Open and beckoning her in
The three of us piled neatly
Enveloping the objects of our desires
The shadows of our smiles
The sources of our panting breath
Our slavishly pounding hearts.
Surrounded
Smothered by the love
You can’t utter
But can’t but help to see
Can’t help to feel
Coming at you from all sides
Arms entwined
Palms on breasts
Foreheads
Thighs
Cunts and cock
Asses and bellies and lips and tongues
Dimples all smiles we all are
Sly, ravenous, rapturous smiles akimbo
What next?
What next?
No one dare ask allowed for to break the spell
The flow
The certainty that all rises at its own pace
Its own level of comfort
And comfort
Ease of deliberation
Simplicity of emotive
Synchronous
Drive
The elemental coming together of three
Count ‘em
Three adventurous souls
Passionate care
For each others sweet spots
Soft spots
Smoldering hot spots
Just part of the glimmering dew,
Embrace of the goodness
The sharing
The skin-on-skin
Jealousy breakdown
Jettisoned
Along with the angst and the time
That passes clandestinely behind the curtains
Separating all of this heat
From the dawning of the outside world.

JNREAJKGALKJRBDV

I am so fucking exhilarated, frustrated, discombobulated I can’t tell you. I feel like I keep walking into walls that bend when my face hits them and I look at the imprint and the face staring back is yours. I want to touch, kiss, caress, spank, whip, suck, eat, bite, watch, smell, wax, hold, lick, fuck, rim, rape, cum on, piss on, tie up, fondle, surprise, kidnap, pinch, worship, spoil…YOU and be touched, kissed, caressed, spanked, whipped, sucked, eaten, bitten, waxed, held, licked, fucked, rimmed, raped, cum’d upon, pissed on, tied up, fondled, surprised, kidnapped, pinched, worshipped, spoiled…BY YOU. I want to sit across from you naked and not say a word until we both jump out of our skin and into a bucket next to the bed where our genetic slipstream coagulates into something not even I could resist on a tortilla.

It is like having the best Halloween outfit EVER and it pours rain, you have a cold, there’s a crime wave in your neighborhood and you aren’t allowed to trick OR treat or even go outside until next year when your outfit probably won’t fit you anymore.

BUT…I’m being calm…I’m accepting…meditating on my current moment…patient…enjoying the view from here…trying ever so hard not to stare at you, drooling like the dawg-boy I am…but when I do, I see me, but with better tits and much less hair…trying so incredibly hard to keep these enamored fantasies at bay, so close I can taste them but as distant as lightning flashing over the desert 30 miles away...trying to figure that it could be worse…I could be 3000 miles away sitting, cock in hand, wondering and dreaming…but perhaps that’s easier…trying to ignore the clock that ticks louder with each passing moment and thinking…'was life always this fucking ridiculous?'

Anyone ever put a piece of chocolate under your nose, touched it to your lips and then popped it into their mouth with a sly snicker…maybe even gave you a little kiss after slowly swirling that melting, heavenly ooze across their tongue and swallowing it down? And though you smell it, taste it, you want more...you wish you could’ve swallowed it whole when you had the chance.

Not envy, or jealousy of that piece of chocolate or that tongue…no, sheer unadulterated desire. And me, I luxuriate in the idea that each moment and conversation and thought of you is part of the process of discovery…your tongue in my ear, trying to break thru and suck on some succulent piece my mind; my fingers inside you, trying to reach up into your heart and feel its pulse racing in time with my own; our skin damp together trying to find out what makes these so like-minded souls, so fucking connected and unreachable at the same time. Just like our own selves are to us, touchable but just out of reach. We, who think we are closer than most in knowing ourselves, knowing who we really are and then, reflected in each other, we see radiant, sometimes enlightening, sometimes jarring bits, shards, and mirrored reflections of ourselves and want to know more.

You once said, “I think with you and I it would always just be about sex.” If that’s true, then I’ve fallen through some other kind of dream where words are colors and sounds taste blue and in that parallel universe all is explainable and all answers are mine to give. Oops. No deal. And at times I think, "Did I come 3000 miles to know less than I did before? To find freedom and temptation and impatience are all just the saw blade carving pieces out of the same jigsaw puzzle of daily existence or did I come out here just to get kinky or are they both slippery funhouse mirror versions of the same thing? Is the tenuous nature of our every waking moment just that simply defined? And perhaps the crapshoot of life is just that--a pre-destined, random slideshow over which there is no control, no rhyme, reason or rational, experiential explanation and an exceedingly incongruous but teasingly seductive soundtrack. “It ain’t why, why, why…it just is” or is it?

I see you on a high dive on the verge of a back flip into a BIG new pool of life and I see that the pool is indeed deep enough, enticing and warm enough and shimmering enough to seduce your desire for the unknown, for the challenge, for the adventure and I just hope you are a strong swimmer for the pool is an impetuous and tempting dream with a strong current. And as you spring up, soar into the air, suspended momentarily in the space between upward motion and downward plunge I want nothing so much as to be that water that envelopes you, that you pierce with your flailing sense of direction, but perhaps I am only destined to be the hot, bronzed lifeguard, package hanging left with one eye on the life preserver and the other on the edge of the pool just beyond which the wavering image of the arrow of your body flashes by…

Goodnight, my sweet muse.

~for Miss Mary, late night letter, written and sent 3:57am. July 11, 2008

DREAM #33470

I’m sitting in a favorite restaurant in Philadelphia waiting for Teena. She is late to work and the staff is worried about her. Suddenly I get a text mail from her. It says, “I have been tied to a tree in the park close by. You only have an hour to find me then they take me away back to Singapore. Help.”

I run out the door without paying for my food. Shannon follows and says, “Are you going to a movie? Can I go?”

“You’re boyfriend will be mad,” I say.

She says, “Teena has a boyfriend too, you know.”

“I know, she finally told me. I have an hour to find her,” and I run off across the street. I am worried because the park is big and there are so many trees. I ask people if they’ve seen a beautiful girl tied to a tree and they just laugh at me. I keep looking at my bracelet to tell time, like a sundial since I have no watch. I worry that I’m in the wrong park. A guy is playing bagpipes and it sounds horrible but I notice he is playing a song by Dave Matthews.

It is starting to rain lightly and I worry that time is going quickly. I think, “I barely got to know her now she will be in Indonesia.” I am very sad but running from tree to tree looking for her. I ask a park ranger who is wearing a tie-dye shirt and top hat and big, clown shoes if he has seen her. He says, “Maybe she’s in line to see the Liberty Bell.”

I scream, “No, you idiot, she’s tied to a tree.”

Suddenly, I hear a little kid say to his mom while the pass by, “Why is she naked, mom?” and I know he’s talking about Teena so I run in the direction they came from. I see yellow ropes in a BIG bowknot like a huge shoestring on a giant tree and when I run around to the other side, there she is. She is naked and I stop for a moment and just stare at her. I’ve never seen anything this sexy in my life. I walk up to her slowly and she has tears coming down her face but is smiling her incredible smile. “I knew you would find me Renaissance man. I knew it.”

“I need a knife to cut these ropes.” I look around but there is nothing and no one around. I look at my watch and there is only fifteen minutes left.

“Wait,” she says. “Now you can kiss me.”

“We don’t have much time,” I am looking under a bush for something sharp to cut the rope.

“But if they take me and we never kiss I will forever regret it,” she says softly.

I walk to the tree and put my hands on her hips. Her skin is so very soft. Leaning in, I whisper in her ear, feeling her sweet-smelling, silky hair against my lips for the first time. “I have waited so long for this…I am so nervous.”

“Kiss me,” she sighs softly and I look in to her eyes and my heart just races. I slowly find my lips moving toward her open mouth and she is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. A press my wet lips slowly against hers and she tastes so sweet, deliciously soft, and she leans into me against the ropes as I press my body to hers and suddenly I notice the ropes have fallen to the ground and her arms are over my shoulders as I wrap mine around her.

We are not in the park any more and I am carrying her in my arms up the stairs at her restaurant. She is wrapped in one of my big, soft shirts. There is a hidden room behind a curtain that I somehow know about and I walk through there.

I sit her down in a big bathtub full of warm water and silky bath oils that smell of springtime flowers. Only candles light the room and I feel someone sitting in a dark corner watching us. I slowly wash Teena’s face and arms, back and chest in the candlelight, watching the water slide down her body and shoulders, hearing her breathing quietly as if she is very content. I lean in and softly kiss her neck. She stands and I sponge bubbly warm water all over her. She balances with her hand on my shoulder. “My turn,” she says and I climb into the tub with all of my clothes on and she cracks up. So does Shannon whose laugh I recognize from her seat in the dark corner watching us. Teena begins to unbutton my now soaked shirt and over her shoulder I see Shannon stand and slowly walk towards us and then I wake up!!!”