I Am Your Golem

Apple me: make me red with grief

and longing, make me green and orange

and golden. I want to bloom

from a flower, stem from your roots

I want you to sway and drop me

until I split open with want.

Bake me, porous and earthenware, put

your everything in me, make me

what you will, bury me

and with one word let me know what heaven

is the ground I walk on before

you un-earth me like a strewn piece of clay.

A Recipe Box

This papyrus is thickened by the roots

of cedars and Lebanese cyprus trees,

granted they travel underground and

papyrus walks in the hands of messengers

but when treating both in this concotion

we must note the irrevoable sameness

of the two: columns and lines like azaleas that

could have blossomed at night,

arctic whispers of solidity, how

smooth they both are upward into the sun--

to make the concoction harden, then,

pull these two elements together with a soluble chemical

and whisper three times like southerly winds.

Curtal Sonnet (revised)

My eyes closed and my shoulder hunched

like bejewled solitude,

a pen run out of ink and the cold slip of a missed-placed s,

hard as lust, a violin tremolo,

a clicking wound round my ear the massive growl

tight against my jaw--how the undead

measure God, stackable as glass,

know what it is to crave

a clicking, roaming thirst--

how in a room both whisper and hiss

search.

At Night, Owl's Eyes Reflect Most Everything, While Moons Pass Over (before this was "Concentration Camp")

Lately, I feel uninhabited--waking from dreams

in which I have been blinded by chemicals

pitted against stranger-adversaries

while a faceless, bloodied, ravenous onslaught powers toward me, a sudden wave

rushing, then, through my body

pushing it all back--waking dizzy--

waking later than I wanted to--slugging my hands through

the day--tea and lemon miracle,

ginger and quiet noises of fires,

the shifting of autumn, to walk and see reddened

oaks, then to fall away from the world

at night. When am I ever awake?