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The Light On Us Now

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.

 

                                                                                             

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