Ode to Joy

We shall have everything we want and there’ll be no more dying

            on the pretty plains or in the supper clubs

for our symbol we’ll acknowledge vulgar materialistic laughter

            over an insatiable ual appetite

and the streets will be filled with racing forms

and the photographs of murderers and narcissists and movie stars

            will swell from the walls and books alive in steaming rooms

            to press against our burning flesh not once but interminably

as water flows down hill into the full-lipped basin

and the adder dives for the ultimate ostrich egg

and the feather cushion preens beneath a reclining monolith

            that’s sweating with post-exertion visibility and sweetness

            near the grave of love

                                                No more dying

 

We shall see the grave of love as a lovely sight and temporary

            near the elm that spells the lovers’ names in roots

and there’ll be no more music but the ears in lips and no more wit

            but tongues in ears and no more [bad word] but ears to thighs

as evening signals nudities unknown to ancestors’ imaginations

and the imagination itself will stagger like a tired paramour of ivory

            under the sculptural necessities of lust that never falters

            like a [bad word] from Sweden or Liberia covered with gold

as lava flows up and over the far-down somnolent city’s abdication

and the hermit always wanting to be lone is lone at last

and the weight of external heat [bad word] the heat-hating Puritan

            whose self-defeating vice [bad word] a proper sepulcher at last

            that love may live

 

Buildings will go up into the dizzy air as love itself goes in

            and up the reeling life that it has chosen for once or all

while in the sky a feeling of intemperate fondness will excite the birds

            to swoop and veer like flies crawling across absorbed limbs

that weep a pearly perspiration on the sheets of brief attention

and the hairs dry out that summon anxious declaration of the organs

            as they rise like buildings to the needs of temporary neighbors

            pouring hunger through the heart to feed desire in intravenous ways

like the ways of gods with humans in the [bad word] of light

and flesh or as the legends ride their heroes through the dark to found

great cities where all life is possible to maintain as long as time

            which wants us to remain for [bad word] in a bar and after dinner

            lets us live with it

                                                No more dying