Professor at the Party

The music of your adolescence plays
As you step through their doorway.

It flatters and amuses you, although you know
It’s merely sport -- to dress the diorama:
Supposing smugly you’re still holding court,
You fail to see your placement's been arranged
To flaunt their sense of irony and drama,
Juxtaposing you with young and pretty things
Like dueling gallery curators.

Soaked in lust, suburban shame, and bourbon,
Toxic with regret and deference, failure burning
Through your rusting skin and brain cells.
At the speed of smell, these hardened young
Can tell a swelling sponge of desperate dying age,
Your graven masquerade among the garden-dwelling;
Selling only spite, you pour the stale, fermented rage
Of balding, private dictators.

They boast, “the play’s Our thing,” and mean to kill a king.
They Act; they need no words,
No words, No
Words to say:

You can’t take your class from us, not anymore --
With your coarse lectures spilled over your glasses,
Your acidic glances and your hovering, lecherous looks,
Your covering the same old books,

Your dark imagined romances,
One-too-many sour divorces, your 
Contrived and passive power gesture
Of referring our first-discovered lives 
And loves to "classic" sources,
Like some ancient-glory masturbator.

Yes, you used to roam here,
Grazing on the opportunities of youth
Allowing fattened fears like sows to root around,
But now, we, lions, pounce and choke them down
Then laze away tomorrow’s sun.

Yes, now, you’re just irrelevant in the room,
Unnoticed by the frail and waning moon
Illuminating cool and fading tombstones of long-slain gladiators.

Riptide

Float me up upon Her breath, never softer Her caresses
Gently bury me in the trough of Her presence.
Eyes above Her crest, the view to the beach so serene.

Hi, hi, hi!
Call the gulls/floats the moon/rolls Her tide
She is looming under me, unseen, to take me for a ride.

Scratch my surface, scuff my polish, rough and tumble me into the shore.
Salt on my tongue, sand in my teeth - I can’t get enough:
Will this memory keep as good as first this moment tasted?

I lose track of up and down, underneath, I’m wasted
But I beg her drag me out for more,
Burning lungs remind me I will drown to gasp this next so I snap free-

And I breathe air!
My eyes wide, I remember You are there:
I draw this desperate breath from You.

For now it seems that death was just a dream, the lustful wish of the Sandman's queen.

You have come for me and we are sealed together, under.
Do we hang enmeshed in this too dangerous embrace?
Or climb and claw the surface toward,

Will She wake, amused or jealous of your ruse to take her flesh reward?
One way or the other, welling up or choking down,
She will fight for what she owns,

You will hold my breath tonight,
Feel me splash against your skin;
And all the sound I hear will be your moans.

Wisdom

Parted on a promise to seek
The wisdom to be won from this world we've subdued
Not enough each other to keep
We who had once been one are now two

I climbed up to the top of the mountain and I waited
And waited and waited and waited
Till I weighted it down

Strange again to see you my friend
Many moons have lit my way since I saw the shadow in you
I have something on my mind
You've got something in your heart that I'm starting to want to unwind

I sank down to the bottom of the ocean and I waited
And waited and waited and waited
Till I waded on in

Shuttered your temple inside
Digging down into your breath you inhaled the emptiest blue
To the dark close your eyes
And wait for my light to come shining through

I wrote our names on the high cliff wall and waited
And I'm watchin' it watchin' it watchin' it
Washin' away

I've seen too many things in this world
Not to know that nothing I leave here
Is gonna stay