THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT DREAMDATE
1
Dreamdate showers and shaves
and dries between toes.
Dreamdate cries over film reviews.
2
The way Dreamdate swings
outside a cinema in the wind.
3
Apprehended in kaleidoscopic
bounty, like the Empire State
Building, hot coffee, Billie
Holiday, and In Cold Blood by
Truman Capote, Dreamdate
draws your breath away.
4
You can see Dreamdate
nightly in another age,
finely singing torches.
5
Tossing peanuts to the sea
gulls; Dreamdate’s fingernails.
6
Surefooted, trenchcoated, long
and lithe, Dreamdate with an
arm in the air.
7
A permanent fixture here, sea
urchin become metaphor, glowing
iconic against forbidding backdrop.
8
Black clouds straddling
Dreamdate’s eyes: the scene
opens wide on Fellini Beach.
9
You’ve made this
picture. You’ve got them
jumping, as you are jumping,
through Dreamdate’s
buttonholes.
10
Dreamdate is missing you onto a mattress.
Kissing you into enormous pores.
Wishing you off the planet.
Teasing cheek and buttock
into predators with a common foe.
Loving you like putty in gardening gloves.
11
And dreaming kills your too true loves.
Dreaming takes god from your eyes,
pincers adrip with ambrosia, manna, whatever.
Dreaming saves you from your self,
for another, and makes your life
an endless unveiling.
12
To choreograph your tired asides,
to make gray rain of your lips
and lashes Dreamdate lives.
13
Dreamdate slowly disrobes, in even
unraveling strips, thin slithering
lengths of past, shed personas
descending in damp peels.
You pick up one sad sheath and
place said scab over your
head...
Looking in you
find the meaning, an array
of damaged stars across
Dreamdate’s skull.