Me! Me! - Muse's Advisory, Oct. 26 - Erato

No, you can't help but overhear.

No, you can't help noticing

we're talking more with him than you.

in line this long to hold your tongue!

promise equal opportunity?

Or in-flight entertainment?
Imagine Virgil,

Wyatt and Morgan Earp

at OK Corral.

No guns and no Doc Holliday.

Clantons and McLaurys run amok

in Tombstone,

terrorizing Cochise County,

murdering and rustling stock...

and you're there

with your little walnut heart

your pappy looted

from a newborn baboon.

You're waving your fist in the air.

You see?

not one of us would be here.

Ma'am, I'm a volunteer,

so kiss my ass

What you desire and deserve

are different things.
Downstairs in the saloon

are filthy men who need

their rocks off

and their pockets picked.

Deal blackjack, clean their whistles

and then tell them one by one

if they're flat broke

they're going to have to

suck their own dicks.

Islam - Muse's Advisory, Oct. 27 - Erato:
She looks up.
There he is again,
come in so silently
he might have been
a stork, a shrub

face lit
like polished jasper,

“Are you alright?”

She can't speak;

He says,
“It was a test.

She doesn't think,

strong nostrils flared,

Urania has lost her cool up front—

you're 20 minutes late!

Best get your skinny asteroid

back up there now

before she launches a McNaught

right up your you-know-what!
Now, who are these

two sorry specimens?

eating too-ripe cheese,

and she—

she might as well grow fins!

Call me a metro-homosexual

but if you smell this bad

you shouldn't smell at all,

not if you ever want

to meet someone

who isn't interested

in tapping carrion.
Oh yes. You're poets, I forgot!

You call that muscle tone?

Why couldn't I be fated

to inspire chiton models

and pentathloners?
Darling, no,

Urania's not going to

put hemlock in your cocoa.

Still, if I were you, I'd go.

You're lolling back here

lapping up this smut

while I'm up there

with ticket #106,

a double-glazed daouli nut

who thinks she's a Beatnik!

Vamoose! Scoot! Git!

This kind of thing's not

meant for gloomy ears like yours.

It's more my cup of tea.

Devilish - Muse's Advisory, Oct. 29 - Terpsichore to Tom:
You straight men!

You haven't even said

what the supposed Adonis

looks like yet.

sex rays straight

into the addled virgin's brain?

I don't care who he is—

that isn't how it works.

You'd ball a garbage bin.

A woman's more discerning.
And put that lame, dead

inspiration down.

What makes you think

the sow's ear

William Carol Williams

couldn't heat

is going to gild itself for you?

That man had sweet,

sweet breath—I've heard.

Your pants could

turn a bonefire cold.

to the matter at hand:

what Miriam saw and felt, and
how my father's fingers looked,

what he was wearing,

if there was a gap

between his two front teeth,

what sort of eyes,

what sort of style to his hair?

like Miriam

just doesn't melt

unless the heat

is searing.

Omnivorous - Muse's Advisory, Oct. 30 - Eavesdropping Woman:
I'll tell you what he looked like!

You wouldn't know it,

from who I am today,

but I once was that girl—

naive—

and when a handsome god

Hands are a piece of it

and so

are eyes and smiles and coaly curls

but no,

there lived an exiled Sufi

on my home isle Lemnos—

candlemaker from Malatya,

Niyazi Misri.

He could write too,

no stranger in our town remained to him.

He fucked them all,

the fishwives, melipasto makers, children, goats, and mules.

Husbands say he whispered in their ears,

Children say he whispered in their ears,

In the ears of four-hoofed animals he cooed,

good, thick eyebrows maybe,

nothing else.
But narrow tastes constrict response.

If god or man

has appetites omnivorous,

his prey respond unhesitant,

assured of a response.
The lover in your tale—

promiscuous,

untruthful

and remorseless—

we know well.

He's who we ask to play with us

in bed alone.

Muse's Advisory, Sun., Oct. 31 – Euterpe/Eavesdropping Woman:
My father was a lot of things

and was accused of being many more,

but Sufi donkey-fucker, no!

He was a sexual adventurer

who took on bestial forms himself—
Dear Muse, your father

was a god like any other god

and did exactly as he pleased.

Nobody judges him—and honestly

he didn't judge us either.

When he got angry, he got angry

but there weren't all these rules,

no 'Oh, you brought it on yourself.'

The self-extolled Enlightenment

pulled far more wool

over the reading public's eyes

than any other bull

since the Mosaic Law.
I'm sorry for the way

Terpsichore complained about your smell.

Who cares? You're wise.
She lacks her father's stomach.

When did you see him last?
You're wise to grasp

that learning who our father is

and where

is half

Nobody knows for sure:

some say he simply disappeared;

some say he changed,

the woman Miriam made him monogamist,

then celibate, then old;

some even say he helps his son

spread Christianity,

condemn the bull and swan

for wooing virgin girls,

and then repackage him as myth.

Still, thousands every year

around the world

insist some beast seduced them.

If, these days, they're judged insane,

and Zeus's name is wiped

from everybody's lips—

well, that's just politics.

The world has turned on him,

and he's a fugitive

who works on cargo ships

and plies whatever's left

of the Olympic trade

in ports-of-call where everything except

cast-iron bollards

where the tramps tie up,

and the sagaciousness of hookers,

has decayed.

"The saint or poet might have caught a glimpse."

The rest of us toothpick our minds by day,

by night apply the Trismegistus Dictum—

"To hear truth you have to close your lids

And fit your ear to the dead witch's rictus!

Pinch your nose and squint the moonlight

Through the ruined housing of your rectum!"

Why do you stand in line

with all these blind gulls

mewling after fame?

and she has generous time

to take note of his features,

bull and drake,

the faint blue-gray of skin

once smeared with grime

but dutifully scrubbed clean,
eyes dim, lips softly chapped,

uneven scar across the chin

where she imagines

someone's husband scored

him with their embers rake.
He looks familiar.

She knows that gods

will sometimes borrow forms

of other men or beasts,

whose limbs and faces yield

to wild unnatural storms

arising from within,
and knows that common men,

by ordinary passion stirred,

don't dare to slip inside the door

of young girls given to the Lord,

in them fever,

frenzy, greed.
She knows that humble olives

don't beget great cedars,

nor wood-cutter's caresses

unstraighten lofty poplars.

Pacing like a wolf, gesticulating,

raving, raging.

Feel insane.

Do I believe God sent His Son?

    J ehovah

    E ventually

    S ends

    U s

    S alvation omething, anyway—

if not an apology.

My acronym is

    JIBTN,

    He and the coming

have so far seen to it

I haven't lain my neck,

an ape among the apes,

inside the teardrop of a rope.

Bad Seed - Muse's Advisory, Nov. 3 – Euterpe:
I'm back, and bearing better gifts

than Sinon, earless, noseless:

bushel-baskets of rejected inspirations

all for you, ambitious poet-friend;

plucked from sun-balmed Moudros Bay

within which, if you listen close,

you hear the sea god moan;

here: a cellphone snapshot of a guy

back at 1,700,009

who sports a Greek-house

drenched in yellow holm-oak honey.

All three of you:

nutritious misery can take a break

and sink your teeth into my wizardry.
Now, yes—:

back to the lovebirds...

and Miriam gets pregnant once again—

exactly what Zeus wanted from the start,

another brat to pine for him, to fantasize,

What kid imagines that?

she has no choice but to admit;

but this new fruit inside her womb—

why, she'd devote herself to him,

that clamor in her head,

who builds the market stalls,

who lost a wife

in childbirth years ago:

he'll take the baby and madonna both—

if Miriam only consents

to be a faithful spouse.
She pledges, Yes.
She bears the baby

prematurely, in a roadside shed,

but then she raises so much hell,

poor Yusuf calls the Wise Men

and faith-healers in

to try their bag of tricks—

then finally has no choice

except to lash her to a mule

in dead of night

and schlep her and the infant

south to Egypt to his aunt,

a Thothic witch who'll try

the old-school cure:

scold, starve and beat

some self-control

into the crazy bitch!

The purse that Joachim gave him

came with strings,

the thickest one of which

was that Joaquin and Hanna

now were off the hook:

had left town, left

no forwarding address,

and last were seen outside Kirkuk

on the main road to Tehran.

So Yusuf has no choice

but tell his wayward wife

to shut her whining trap

and get on with her life.

Good Lord, almost from birth

Yeshua made his mom

seem quiet as Penelope—

one day, he cast a playmate from the roof

(or else he stumbled in the thatch)

and angrily demanded he arise,

despite a broken neck.

The last straw: the delinquent

burst into the Temple,

and latched into the horrified High Priest.

I know how disregarded women seethe.

Your Miriam, she had Medea's heart.

Making the absent deity

who was her son's begetter

squirm

Don't get yourself

all lathered up.

Go take a walk.

I'll hold your place in line.

A little solitude and mountain air

will clear your mind.
Geysers who

who whisper in our ears

not inspiration but diversion

while you pick our pockets!

Poetry, “free thought”?

It's free, alright, for you,

who char dried sap

to waft its incense

to your ghoulish snouts!
Why shouldn't I enjoy

the holocaust of fancy?

It's unprincipled to help

design a product I disdain.

If you're afraid this molehill

in your mind's too steep,

you're free to walk.

I'm not by any stretch

of the imagination

Greece's only source

of gilt-tongued talk.

That soup-line there

beyond the cypresses

is also a popular haunt.

I've no dog in this race.

Your tale of Miriam

will wag its way

to a conclusion

without help.

It's pretty obvious

she's thrown her lot in

with the whelp

she hatched with Zeus.

Then resurrected on the third day

and eventually ascended into shangri-la?

If you find that stirring, good,

then walk that way yourself.

Go bite injustice and iniquity!

If you're as lucky-starred as he was,

somebody who knows their way

around a pen

will bark your story to posterity.

the ethics of your swollen heads of state:

greater than yourself

produce just inkstain after inkstain?

You can't pen ambition in a corner of your brain.

What would you promise a maiden, and with what

rationale condone it, to be your age's leading poet?

You'd gouge out your dying father's eyes

for just the shortlist of the Pushcart Prize.

Senza Vincoli (Unfettered) - Muse's Advisory, Nov. 6 – Polimnia:
His babbo nowhere to be found;

his patrigno having given up

after his hopes were briefly fanned

one day by the Jordan River: sackclothed,

full-time eating locusts in the desert—

Yeshua by the ear back home—

with what they had at their disposal—

wedding catering,

if sometimes watering the wine;

this time flogging vendors

with a cat-o'-nine

while henchmen rifled cash drawers

and corralled the lambs and heifers

he drove off;

some dabbling with prostitutes;

then segni e prodigi, faith cures,

spoken word performances

at farms and mountainsides,

apostles circulating

through the audience

and filling basket after basket up

brigands, Galilean merry men

one step ahead of the authorities,

free as i passeri dell'aria,

wild as i gigli del campo,

spiriti liberi more than ruffians,

bones in law-and-order's craw

until the High Priest flipped

one of the inside Twelve

and got the tip that brought

the end—
to the brook of Cedron

Yeshua crept

and prayed,

It all came down so suddenly,

dismaying everyone except

the Son of Man himself,

with good grace;

he was bored, had other fish to fry;

would miss them all;

was unafraid;

goodbye.

her son's was

no exception

though disciples

say he slipped

the noose of death

and found a way

to his inheritance

after the pentecost.
The youngest,

fondest of the twelve

whisked her to Sidon

and a northbound

dhow to Telmossos
thence overland

to mount Koressos

above Ephesus
and settled

the stricken woman

in a roundstone hut

atop a fragrant spring

mid olive groves

patrolled by cats

with watchful olive eyes.
He vows to care

for her until she dies

but as she kisses him

goodbye

he's more ripped up inside

than she

and it will rather fall to her

to try to nourish him

with grace.

to Zeus's cave

Panoptos smiles.

His lodestone stirs;

some quarter

of his heart remains hers.

A Fine Meal - Muse's Advisory, Nov. 8 – Zeus to Miriam:
So much has changed,

your boy stole everybody's

thunder, didn't he?

It's nice, retirement,

love's lava cool as snow,

the silence comforting:

my joint gets swollen only

every other Wednesday

when I take my Erbitux

for cancer of the colon,

and my ego bloats but

once or twice a month

when clerics puff me up

with some new brucha!

The climate's paradise,

this olive-oil an elixir.
Now, your rare roast

lamb with figs

so savory it makes the fare

they offered on Olympos

seem...well, charred;

no disrespect to Hestia,

but most of what we ate

could not have been

much nastier.

The icing on the cake—

the cake itself, in fact—

is you, taking me back,

my getting to spend time

here now with you.

My only unfulfilled wish

is that one day soon

Yeshua will forgive me too.

I'm a classic absentee dad

but have hope.

They say he is as merciful as

Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu.