"Love and Death by the Sea"

When Bobby moved in with Melindra again
she kept her job and he began to wonder
why he loved her if he couldn’t help her
pay for med school at the very least,
though she said he could make her happier
becoming famous. He liked that now no better
than then. Then he learned his original work
in poetry and prose was no compensation for
his lackluster class attendance. And he quit
and got a job washing dishes four hours a day
in the New Congress, eight hours if he wanted.
Now that  was how being famous on clarinet
and singing and writing songs was achieved.
That way he could keep paying for his room,
La Iglesia de La Puta, where he kept writing
nights or days, whenever Melindra worked.
Nights rain fell he never saw Henrietta again
now that he knew where she lived in La Jolla.
But he wrote. He had read Keats. He could not
get out of his mind that phrase “until my pen
has gleaned my teeming brain.” Or the letters
about the poet looking out a window to become
the sparrow pecking in the gravel, “camelion
Poet” home from a Christmas mummers play
realizing his reading of Shakespeare revealed
“Negative Capability,” being able to function
“without any irritable reaching after fact
& reason,” insatiable need to be right or wrong,
and what was that if not a “vale of soul making”
where the word “genial” turned into “genius,”
as Katya had once said piecing them together
quicker than the Oxford English Dictionary.
Christina wanted him to sleep with her
and he tried but he was devoted to Melindra.
She could make a baby with some other stud.
He wrote a story about a guy who murdered
his beloved without killing her. She became
a more devoted addict than he. She never
died but lived and found a man about to die,
the greatest sax man and it wasn’t his music
so much as his love of her she fell in love
and married him for, only to find her love
of yesterday roaming the streets and so far
away he didn’t even remember her name.
That was how it ended. Like that. Murder
or suicide, he couldn’t decide on either.
He called it “Love and Death by the Sea.”

(12 December 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

After the Lull

How do I know she means me ill?
She enters always once night falls.
Nothing is there she cannot fill
of me. I slake my lust and thrill
in the doing, empty then full
each night another banshee wails.

Bobby dropped out of school,
got a job washing dishes while
he wrote about the way men kill
short of murder, acting the fool
to talk himself through his own wiles,
taking to bed one more good girl.

floycealexander worked his tool
like magic for the good of all
ladies who thought he was a child
and needed a mama to feel
his need to be warm where he’s cold,
occupied with lovers, not scolds.

I have been lying here for hours
believing my fictions: towers
that fall and I’m always below
watching, as though nothing were real,
only a conspiracy style
of plummeting to what we know.

(11 December 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

The Future Is Embodied in the Past

At the balls the old men and women dance
in tuxedos and gowns next to the boys
and girls guiding each other off the floor,
where they will gaze at age with masks over
their eyes. This is New York, not New Orleans.
The storm’s fury is late a hundred years.

Dee Ann is a ghost, her wraith full of wrath.
She still dreams those years of Asian war,
hell her people took to the people there.
Hell’s here. She knows that then we hid the truth,
as we do now.  She takes pictures with eyes
that are still her own but have learned to fly.

One little girl stands in the cloudy dark
emulating Dee Ann’s concentration–
is this girl the future of her nation?–
and finding focus hears the shutter click.
How can she know pictures she sees have names
chiseled into their invisible frames?

(10 December 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Home

An apartment is not a home, no matter how huge
or expensive, how high you are above the rabble.
Nor does it become a home because it is a house.
How many women sell themselves to dally there?
Mother smokes incessantly. Father whores.
He can do what he wants, her father was in furs,
and you, my sire, worked your way to taking over.
And I, what do I or my brother, my sister do,
why would we sacrifice our youth, all that we own
our supple, resilient, demanding minds, always on
the edge of falling back, spilling into oblivion,
their empty riches. There is another world I find
whenever I go there and each time my first time.
Stay here, shadows swarm for the green honey.

(9 December 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

They Can't Afford Veils

Wandering pariah hallways
with nothing in the camera,
I see no one who does not stare,
I look back and they stare some more.
I invite myself in, they say,
Sit here. They are each courteous, 
but none desire to be quiet.
I tell them who I am and they
reciprocate. The bare bulbs blink,
no one’s paid the bill. I pay it,
they agree to sit for me when
I think to bring film. I can help
myself. I’m a brave little girl
when I want to be a grown-up.
I go where there is to be born.
They settle into their dying,
but then they like to kiss and fuck.
They urge each woman and each man,
Do what you want to all your selves.
I can record nothing. Love is
a privacy. Lust makes money.
When the hour is over, is that
how long love takes when it can’t last?
What if I need to be someone
I’m not? Someone who can’t afford
to wear a veil and needs to talk
more than listen. They hear me out.
They reply. A night can go by
before I realize I’m lost.
It’s far better than staying home
among all my well-off shadows.

(to Dee Anne’s specter)

(8 December 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Nothing More?

He could write himself off.
That’s what kulchur is for.
Get in, get out, get a life,
as the wisdom of the day
has it, in hearts and spades.
Once you live in a machine,
you are the machine.
Call it life. There’s air
to stir, a change of weather
beats biblical prophecy.

I’d stop talking anywhere
else. The home is where
you stay so long you love
the way it feels around you.
You can shoot pheasant,
your hook can catch gills
by the fish, and there’s deer
menacing population,
treehouses and the like,
any home you climb into.

He is me. Who guessed it
gets to tell me why I was
that. I loved more women
than my wife, who loves
back, like they say,
the lepidopterists
of etymology, not the root
but the tree before falling
prey to the old disease
of age. Roots that remain.

(7 December 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

The Hell He Travels (4)

  4.

He has seen the seas enclosing three borders of the nation.

The slate gray Atlantic, the worn blue Pacific

with brown waves, and the Gulf of Mexico,

whose water is warm and without pity

for the dying. He knows death when he feels it approaching,

his only hope to make the resurrection, or so he thinks.

His ears are listening to their own tongue,

riding in a car east, through the desert;

then farther, to a country dwarfed by memory . . .

Only to return under a sky of lightning and thunder

ignited and reverbed where he expected harps, not guitars.

Back then to confront knives and brass knuckles, 

refusing a fight, walking away, cries of shame following.

And lives, returns the car, pays, retrieves his collateral,

checks in with George who proclaims him lucky to be alive.

Go home, Flowers. Read poetry to the doomed of Soledad.

Warden says his craw is full up with poets, he needs guards.

On home then. The fire at the court house smolders still, the Afro

allegedly concealing a gun unravels in the grave,

the Doors’ When the Music’s Over playing over and over.

(II: 6 December 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander