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You Asked Me To Tell You What's Going on Here So I'll Tell You:

dedicated to Heather Merrill

The streets of my city are filled with bright orange gourds.
Far off, in the splendid flaming corn-leafed fringes,
girls with dreadlocks and peaceful hippie smiles
walk in the outskirts of my manly heart.
The children are smiling with the same consistency
as the carved pumpkins.  Even the policemen are smiling
like helpless toddlers, pleased with the bright marvelous bounty
that Our Lord has granted us this holiday season.
Last night I made love to a redhead & a blonde,
almost at the same time.  As I walk on the seed-splattered streets,
ripe with the sounds and smells of carving,
I can still feel the lips of their pudendas draping my shaven chin.
There is nothing evil enough in the world
to triumph over the teeming goodness
in these streets tonight.
My city is filled with orange gourds, smiling policemen,
keepers and breakers of the law veering toward
each other's spirits and irresistibly blending
as the candles are lit inside the garishly smiling jack-O' lanterns.
Today is a day to laugh at the stormclouds
that gather above humanity's fate.
Today is a day to plunge pale hands shivering
with cold into steaming, pleasantly slimy caverns
of vegetable bellies as they steam,
opened to the frosty afternoon that forecasts winter.
The ocean laps at the East Coast and reaches its cold
and cleansing hands into each one of us as we wait at crosswalks,
eager to lap up the pies, dried seeds, 
and stalk-wine provided by the god of pumpkins.
Last night I sat in a smoky bar while a friend played trumpet,
scratched my lonely voice into a solitary notebook,
my one remaining idea a bare branch
stretching into the night, and stared
into the flashing eyes of a girl named Partridge,
every now and then lapping the air in front of her face
lasciviously with my tongue.  She laughed at my antics
with the strength and valor of a naked Greek athlete.
There was not a soul anywhere who wished me harm
or who had the power to enact it if they did.
The Lord was a smiling pumpkin,
His faces stacked up on thin scaffoldings
at the borders of my nation.  Then God was a woman
extending a fragrant pumpkin pie to me in her naked arms.
Candles were lit within Her face,
and Her teeth glittered with eternal hunger
to take me home to her mouth.
Candlelight sputtered on the farthest reaches.
In my body was the rhythm of inimitable prose,
the knowledge of my death a surfboard
skimming the rhythm of endless waves of exploration
into solar systems expanding and collapsing
more rapidly than our own.  The ocean reaches its hands
into us from a great distance and the knifed pumpkins smile.
It is hard, when finding oneself on the sidewalk
in the midst of such orange-tinted commotion,
not to smile like a tickled baby and wail HALLELUJAH.
Here's hoping your life supernovas soon, Heather.
It took me two decades just to learn how to have fun and now I'm having it.

I'm sorry that I haven't been giving you the letters that you deserve.
Sometimes I feel that a poem is all I can give, especially from a distance.
I would like to lick your soul like the vanilla ice-cream cone that it is,
but sometimes prose gets stuck in my teeth on its way out.
I have had a breakthrough, however, that has eased my painful prosodic progression
and allowed me to write real letters again.
I miss you whenever I think of you, which is as often as I urinate.
I would love to plunge my hands into your sparklingly original essence
as a young child fearlessly plunges their hand into the slimy belly
of a freshly disemboweled pumpkin, but sometimes my reach
falls short of your heart.  For that I am sorry.  But I am not sorry for the poems,
or the streams of humanistic advertisements, that usually land in your mailbox
like cabbages filled with dynamite.  I hope that you visit this Saturday
so that we may breath the breath of life upon each other.
I can see your face glowing like a rice-paper lampshade
in my memory, calling me home to one who walks with Love Herself,
barely concealing the divine, and not out of any modesty.
I would love for you to curl up in my platonic arms
and sleep like an infant after a shot of bourbon.
I have been writing a series of bleak, wounded poems
called Photographing Earthly Eternities
and I would love for you to be one of it's subjects;
Because you are like a pomegranate, who, after being bitten
deliriously open and staining one's teeth, reveal,
after the first sweet burst, nugget upon nugget of crisp,
delicious fruits-within-fruits, an opened womb of kernels,
each idiosyncratic, each revealing the uniqueness of its bittersweet bud
only to the sensitivity of the most refined and cultured tongue.
I want to taste of your mind as one peels the leaves of an artichoke,
dipping each portion into the italian (or ranch, if you prefer) salad dressing
that is t! he taste -enhancing depths of my own essence meeting
the layers of your essence.  I want to spelunk in the deepest caverns
of your memory and find the crystal caves that reside there,
rearing my mining-helmeted head to show you
that even in your darkest shadows I have found a jewel.

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