for Helen
When the storms come railing and thrumming like a woman
made
Crazy and laughing by the sea, divulging a cruelly
seductive attitude
Toward the idiocies of this world, kissing Darkness with
lips
Belonging to her dreams, dissolving to utter nonsense,
Torrents overwhelming grown-up logic, fascinating
To her fears and her eyes, her cries slender
And arching over the little waves, and those fears,
becoming even more slender,
Slip away, so as the breeze touches your hair, I realize
you’re made
Of calming,
fulfilling dreams, woven together like strands fascinating
To the eyes and the fingers, sliding together like hair,
fluent as an attitude
Changing moment by moment and filled full of Love’s
Nonsense
As the waves of storm waters come free falling down upon
our lips
And I touch the phenomenal wet world as it touches your
lips,
Wow, and you touch the future with your denim-defined
body shapely slender,
Casting its spell on the logic of adulthood, the sheer
nonsense
Of your laugh upturned to the kaleidoscopic thrumming
drizzle made
Up of the wild laughs of angels, leprechauns, banshees,
and the girls whose attitudes
Comprise the lightness of your breaking smile so
fascinating
To my soul, for your soul fascinates,
Phenomenal as the moon peeking between storm clouds,
kissing your lips
With Light as you light up a fag and toss off a grin full
of attitude
Toward those whose chance of surviving your happy, owlish
wit is too slender, baby,
Though you are also, of course, a fair and tender loving
maid
And the wry chick who will stand for no damned nonsense
Except perhaps the nonsense that’s the absolute shit,
crazy nonsense
Of the Irish woman you are, alluring, deliberate,
whimsical, did I say fascinating,
Yes, even to the freaks on the street, as you dance an
arcane dance made
Visible only by phenomenal love opening its sunlit lips
On a bench in Tompkins Square Park, where leaves of grass
so slender
Burst toward the sky, mocking Nature’s stern attitudes
Of whatever, and so, finally, clasped together in a world
where whole attitudes
Are suddenly fraught with fear, this love is really not
at all nonsense
Since nothing’s so purely sweet as you to me, nothing
slight or spiritually slender
About you, in fact there’s light on us now, sharp as an
owl’s eye, fascinating
As I turn to you on the bench and graze your phenomenal
lips
To find that there’s really something there, something
truly, utterly made!
And later the overriding attitude of the storms of
cruelly fascinating
Clouds of love’s nonsense thrumming on the windowpanes,
fascinated by your lips
I draw your slender phenomenal body close – ha, damn if
the maidenly bed don’t get all
unmade again.