Shifting Sound

At times I couldn't believe you were real, it was like you crawled out of the t.v. and set yourself free, I never wanted to turn you off.
If I sing you a song long enough,
will you notice my callouses and fall in love with my cow lick?
Will you move closer to hear my every breath tick in and out.
I rewind my mind:
park to parking
apartment to the carpet,
where I could see all the years you'd lived and everything you did.
And maybe I'm not thinking this all the way through but
it's nonsense how your eyes stay awake like parking lot lights like the do.
I'm listening to your favorite singer, imagining what you looked like the first time you heard it, lips pursed and heart pulsing.
All the times after that when you'd memorized the words and the beat,
folding your feet
holding your hands,
and the last time.
It's a past-time of mine.
We weren't passing time, we were throwing it back and forth, and when I had to let it go, I drove around in circles trying to steady my spinning head.

To The Whore Who Took My Poems

some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
twelve poems gone and I don't keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; its stifling:
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn't you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
next time take my left arm or a fifty
but not my poems:
I'm not Shakespeare
but sometime simply
there won't be any more, abstract or otherwise;
there'll always be mony and whores and drunkards
down to the last bomb,
but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.

Charles Bukowski

Mad Girl's Love Song-Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

SHE EXCEEDS HER INSTRUCTIONS

She exceeds her instructions
and winds up facing an assassin
amid elephants, which is perhaps
why she hears the ceiling
but is not thereby diverted to Namibia, land of secret
fantasies and rust
and phosphorescent beings and clocks hanging out.
Donning a makeshift phlox,
what a painter are we, she thinks
to pursue her unusual hobby:
the back of room of trees and hilarious thoughts.
This is what she's found out:
Companionship is killer.
Emily Polifax is a secret agent.
Leopards are hard to believe, so
normal, though not particularly attractive. Later, on the green
face of things, she's reflective--
almost considerably--the sirens
are ecstatic when the telephone rings
it's always a delightful romance
another set of instructions
to photograph her fellow tourists
or plant a poison dart
in the the of a fabulous widower.
All at once, she sees it, everything
is essential-the bus ticket, the safari
shift cork helmet, the red plastic
blanket. Suddenly, even the the cozy grand
piano has a chance of falling
fourteen stories to the concrete
in love. Perhaps looking after these
you can really learn a lot. Get going. There is work
on the horizon. These are her coordinates.
Her name is Tape Recorder. In shorthand
take the wallpaper. Good night xxxx
and good luck.