Baku

I sense you are arriving,
ready to eat my dreams
and leave me blank and drooling
at tomorrow’s breakfast table.
The clicks of your claws
are not as subtle as your euphoric sister
in how she rides inside
the pores of whisky and wine
to float along the narrowed
capillaries of my brain,
making mush of grey matter.
No, you I can almost hear
climbing the ladders of my soul
on such nights when the moon
stumbles up and down the sky
and dreams offer hope
of escapes, new meetings and secrets worth keeping.
This is typically when you arrive on your tiny toes,
tapping along the Formica hallways of my memory,
past where my spent muses scream
from their paper cages
and into my vast factory of intimations.

I know you need no keys to move
through the doors; you simply chew
them off their hinges, leaving no fantasy
undigested, just this dust
and the splinters of disreality’s sweet visions
piled as traces of what could maybe be
forgotten.

Only this vague unknowing remains
present for my glazed, rewoken stare.
This vacant taste of what I’d thought I’d chewed.

Your sloppiness is your one concession,
the way you depart quick enough to leave
your footprints and turdlets behind. A gift
as I reconstruct the world
against the sun’s speedy particles. I find something
mysterious but not quite monstrous
has torn up my garden, the marks
of your destruction alluding to evidence erased.
And, this at times gives me hints
to reconstruct your crimes, to imagine you
with your snout and tusks and dinky tail
rutting through my multi-winged flights,
epics of mayhem and under-ocean sex:
the sort of stuff that dreams are made of.



by jerry gordon
6.9.6

Spoken at the Window

At the start of this
most recent eternity,
I looked into the evil
in your eyes
to promise I would not
let your hand fall from mine.

I got close enough
to see each fear
that scars your face
and to see myself
floating in your eye
like in a bath.
Into that depthless window
into the house of your soul,
I spoke these words:

"I cannot hear the distance
from where my words echo back.
They may roll here
returning from some long ago
life before man imagined suicides
and rebirths. They may be
here at my ear from
no farther than my teeth.
But, their words are clear.
Not of any language,
but carrying the meaning I have
always sought and fled. They say
I must resume from go
again building the road
by molding each pebble on the path
from atoms I must collect in dreams.
They say you will not help me,
because your job is merely
to make my work possible
rather than easier. They say,
they are not sorry and will laugh
at my eventual destruction and repetition.
They say they are not angels
because I would not want angels.
They are not devils or princes of wisdom.
They say they are merely
echoes of my fabulous ghosts."



by jerry gordon
3.24.10

Sobs of the Mute

for James Barrett

Upon such nights
when the soul can climb the spine
and the air's a conductive pulse,
each eye is longing to meet each eye
and the hand carries so much pain to the touch,
the trumpet is here
to guide the sorrow,
to take it from table to table
like a flower of fire
wobbling in the sobs of the mute.



by jerry gordon

Puddle Wonder

Does the puddle wonder
if the wind is from
a passing train or the season?

Each sweep of breeze
shrinks what
wasn't here this morning.

The reflection ripples.

And, who is here
to see the
sky as a
reflection?



by jerry gordon