"Extras On The Yacht" (poem)

Extras On The Yacht

If love and you are the city and language

But its greater metropolitan area, why do I feel

You present an opportunity and challenge

To speak as if from the center of the lowest crater,

The highest megaphone of itches comedy sketches

And mine them, perhaps,

As cookies dig for asparagus on the way to avocados

When the fly buzzes above the great chain of being

And worship is a warship made into a restaurant

That lets you on deck only if you drink

Desalinized water for free and sing for your tip?

So the love poem will take some time.

It seems to poke its head from the sand

Of an interest in vocabularies and their sexless sects.

It’s thirsty from being so lonely in the sand.

But thirst is good for it, good as water, safer than milk

And not just because machines can be played with

More erotically than mountains,

And not just because the self is like a donut

With a hole in it big enough for

What would be called a munchkin

Even were it not a celery stalk

Around which several horseshoe souls could be thrown

If the Lord be willing, and of course she has to take off

Her dress of the city to find love in the sex

Manhattan pretends to be when we’re on deck

Circling it, like vultures made tame by their status as extras.

(Originally Published in Open City Magazine, 2003; and the limited edition Chapbook SCRATCH VOCALS (Potato Clock, Boulder, CO, 2003)