adrienmundi

The sun sits back, watches the street
like an informant for the junta.
By now, I understand each motive
in the sky, and it's shadow on earth.

I am helpless nonetheless. It's tough
when an immense power cannot be terrorized.
When it is invulnerable to a slip of madness.

I acknowledge its brilliance, as I was left, by choice
to shadows. And in that shelter, I dreamt.
I spent my youth's desires like a peculiar currency.
It was a running joke between myselves,
the one I believed in, and each of the others.

It confessed to its innocence to me
through Mayakovsky's poem. Once
It poisoned my skin in the Rockaways
to get my attention. I took it for granted.

That was a magnificent mistake.

I never learned to trust it. I wore dark
glasses, disguised my skin in hats with wide brims.
It knew too much, its vantage points always
too well chosen. Where did it go at night?
thought the child, and who did it meet and what, exactly,
did it have to report? So they grew, these suspicions,
as one. And I chose, instead, the dark dance of the moon.
In the face of two, I have always sought the lesser majesty.

"A Child Growing Up with the Sun"

Your hands are like two mirrors which press
dry the flowers so many young daughters have
chosen for the blind and the grave.

Beneath the halves of walnut shells
my eyes are switched, back and forth,
in the slight fingers of the confidence man.
So for all these years I have had to cheat to see.

The red and softly frozen sky
is transformed by night on these streets
To tears without faces. Without reason.

Where are the noble tears,
tears which, fallen, from thorns
beneath the rose, the tears which convert
the frail peasant girl to a saint of roses?

Remember this: The past draws blood.
Its fingernails are cut off
on the edges of old winter skies,
forgotten and forgiven. They fall, stiff and black
Like dead hornets into the soft treetops.

"Winter's Age"

I took the blue pill this morning

I got new angles on the trees across the driveway

Timmie the bear
does his little roll on the rug

and at night
a sound gathers the tiny ambulances
from their homes

it is distant and hollow

a little like the sound
of a perfectly tuned ocarina

"The Blue Pill"
(that one still makes me cry; thanks, K, for bringing it home to me)

We are very much a part of the boredom
of early Spring of planning the days shopping
of riding down Fifth on a bus terrified by easter

but here we are anyway, surviving the wet street in August
and keeping our eye on each other as we "do it", well,
you go west on 8th St. and buy something mystical to wear
and I'll simply tuck my hands into my corduroy pockets
and whistle over to Carter's for the poster he promised me.

I like the idea of leaving you for a while
knowing I'll see you again while boring books
W. H. Auden, and movie schedules sustain my isolation
and all the while my mind's leaning on you like my body
would like to lean on you below some statue in Central Park
in the lion house at the Bronx Zoo on a bed in Forest Hills on a bus

I reach 3rd avenue, its blue traffic, I knew I would sooner
or later and there you are in the wind of Astor Place reading
a book and breathing in the air every few seconds
you're so consistent

Isn't the day so confetti-like? pieces of warm flesh tickling
my face on St. Mark's Place and my heart pounding like a negro youth
while depth is approaching everywhere in the sky and in your touch

"Poem"

Jim Carroll
1949-2009

It’s sad this vision required such height.
I’d have preferred to be down with the others, in the stadium.
They know the terror of birds.
I am left, instead, with the deep drone…
The urgency to deliver light, as if it
were some news from the far galaxies.

Untitled

Died of a heart attack; that seems fitting for the one who used to be my Favorite Living Poet.

Let me know how sainthood feels, if you get a chance to drop us a line.