Three Poems

A Crooks Entry into Jerusalem


Assassins, you have a double ass.

Children climb on trees to make you better out.

Clothing unwinds to lie on the field. Its colors are gules and purpure, its stains are murrey and sanguine.

You chill. Somewhere on earth it’s already Facepalm Sunday.

Alien


Alien. What is the alias of the alien.

Ali. Alimentary, my dear Watson.

Is the alien alimentary with Sigourney Weaver. The alien has an alibi, and is elsewhere.

What is the difference between the alien and the predator. One of them is legal.

The predator has been made legal by voting.

First there was vetting and then there was voting.

The voting was carried out by the people. Who will carry out the people.

The vetting was carried out by the veterinarians. Not just any veterinarians, veteran veterinarians. The ones who are alienists.

The alienists deliver a homily to their votaries. They home in on the alien.

The alien is subject to alienation. It is bound for binding.

It is an alien bound among Egyptians. Everyone experiences a low relief.

Yes, a lien has been placed on the alien. It is a charge or encumbrance upon property for the satisfaction of debt.

Alienation, the voluntary act of an owner of some property to dispose of the property.

Dispose of that property. It is proper to dispose of that property. Properly.

How are you going to dispose of it, in a tote bag?

Teaching Nezami


Nezami writes to us of true love.

The proponents of true love renounce the body.

For the object of true love is immutable but the body is mutable.

At the prospect of union with the beloved the lover flees for the wilderness.

We do not know what the beloved or the lover look like. The beloved is compared to roses, cypresses, deer, ravens, and the full moon.

She is called an unpierced pearl. A pheasant is perched in her face.

As for the lover, he lives in the desert and neither eats nor sleeps out of love, from which we may infer that he is more bony than bonny.

Love is the reason why he writhes on rocks, which must bruise and scrape his torso and limbs.

Thereby the lover displays his distrust of consummation, for anything that comes after consummation is a letdown.

Love made him a lunatic and lunacy made him a poet.

The beloved is only a pretext for the things the lover does to himself, which, in turn, lead to the production of poetry.

I look at myself in Zoom as I teach and I see the bags under my eyes, the saggy skin on my neck, and the sparse hair rising over my forehead.

I worry about Una’s spine and that puberty has made her lock herself in the room and take to bed.

I go with Eva to the zoo and we watch baby mountain goats bound up precipitous cliffs.