Last Turn of the Morning Carousel Forever Turn the Midnight Carousel Birthday Poem For Merry
Am I just another antiquity
An artist who finds a natural home
Among the paupers whose graves are marked with serial numbers
Instead of headstones?
I hate gimmicks and dismiss them
Like any other moment of mediocrity.
The truth is
that I have no problem
With standing among broken things
(Which have lost their lacquer
Along with most of the pigment
Born of memory.)
Memories
And the past are bombed out cities
With many blind allies
And dead ends
Along with the hustlers of our wishful thinking
Who makes everything we recall as unreliable as the New York Post.
So why do we rely on this memory
Or anything else which is expedient with its answers?
You should know
I live
Just on the outskirts of any post war city of memory.
For that’s the last place I can find you
Still smiling in rare moments of being among
Friends without pretense
And those who you feel no need to hide the fits
And fury which you breath
has the recoil of a gun.
And you use that wind to start another
Devastating inner storm,
Fragile as a little girl on moment
Then
Fierce as the wards the next.
I would like to take the gun that has been pressed against your heart
since you were 16
and turn it onto the demons that you hunted to escape
with pills
and boy finds
and expedited answers from Long Island gurus
so perhaps we can live ordinary lives
with ordinary fears of everyday things.
Perhaps we can write letters of discontent to the New York Times
Or find a home in banality.
You should have known that I’ve
Grown tired of keeping company with artists.
Their conversations
And their letters have become fatally urgent
Crying about the end of this long running party
We know as civilization.
Oh how I would love to spend one more afternoon in bed with you
Watching TV or listening to music.
I could hold you again
And you could think of my arms as a beach
Emptied of all the people
So you could skinny dip the in welcoming waters freely.
And the waves could wash away
South Oaks
and Pilgrim
into a feverish dream of
straps on the bed
and clocks that announce med time.
Kept you around I’d always keep a pot on for you.
I’d love to have taken a candle
To burn away that mark
That no x ray would ever find.
Who knew that its roots
Could reach so far beyond your years
Keeping your most vile anxieties
Alive
And well.
Or intertwine
Your words
Your phrases
which
you have sculpted into tiny ships
To sail you
Away from here.
Did those roots
Drag you into those
Mornings which came too soon
While waiting for the promises of a midnight
Which never came at all.
If only you didn’t follow those demons to the rope’s end
Then perhaps the candle I’ll light for you tomorrow wouldn’t burn all night
Your breath could have taken care of that.
But what remains guaranteed the last turn of the morning carousel
And forever turns the midnight carousel.
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