by Greg Baysans

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"For years I have had a recurring
dream of finding, as it were in an attic,
poems of my own that were as lyrically
formal, but as limpid and essentially
unliterary as those of Villon."
			-W.S. Merwin

   
Linger longer, lovers, under slender wonder.
Wake up, take up, shake up, make up stories
for night delight, day fright, might not make it,
shake it up, take it easy, lazy slumber
Sunday evening unto blazing, phasing down.
Draw on it, sign it, stamp it, cramp it into
eternity, hurl it like an obscenity fucking
forward, hold it high, cry with it until it writhes
in bizarre paranoias and twisted cataclysms,
pour oil on it, sweat drops, more bitter theatrics,
make replicas of it in wax and relax as they melt
in the swelter of bright light above and, below,
slow to fester, blistering, glistening, sweet skin.

At the abyss of abuse with blurry edges
about to stand and, dizzy, slip and fall impossibly
forward and beyond the purging fire into
the next chasm of surcease and the absence
of sex and music made the times of day.

Start again: your attitude toward love?
Just because I think of love as a panacea
fantasy like radio songs coming true each day
is no reason the real thing shouldn't come along
and I don't, fists pounding, understand what is
piled in the way, lost in the climb, deserts, years.

Slide a hand on my back and
all I can think of are choruses.
Turn around. Turn aside.
And so on and more so. I think
this has become compelling.