The Full Spectrum Reviewed in The Huntsville Times

The Huntsville Times:
"I picked up the book only to pass along to a friend who's interested in these issues. I was not going to read it. I thought I had nothing more to learn on the subject. I was wrong..."

"... it is not a book about sex, but about defining yourself in a hostile world."

Come To You: Another Carina Round Track

Another killer track. "Come To You" is allegedly the first single from her new album SLOW MOTION ADDICT, to be released next week! Visit her myspace for more info and samples.

Provincetown*

At four months, we walked an hour through March
Across the jetty as the wind drew across us.
Each stone unlike the next, each step shorter
Or longer—so that the walk seemed like a journey,
Though the point of our futures was fixed.

Looking down between the rocks, we had to stop
Looking ahead, saw the calm spaces hidden there
Where the birds would reach for fish and crabs
Before leaving their shells to dry in the light
On the next rough, uneven surface. Jetty of death,
The reaper says, setting his case to air in the sun.

But there was none: life was brimming and wet,
And the wind filled my eyes with water
As I looked sweetly back to see where you were,
How far or near your careful steps had carried you.

We didn’t hurry to get there. Each day was easy
Under our feet; each step more and more sure
Until four years had passed beneath our feet
And there we stood on solid ground again
More than a little shaken from all that care.

The land opened and I felt free, our bodies able
To step side by side after so much walking
Through which only one of us could follow.
And the light was good and the wind had thinned
As we climbed the first dune, looking down.

This is the long road down into winter, this
The gleaming spring already behind you. We sat
And heard the water all around us and talked there
For a moment as the gulls came to learn our game.
On a beach, alone, nobody for miles,
We sat and talked and perhaps looked lonely

To a bird high up in the air, having passed us by.
We knew what it was for, this moment,
Saw the condoms swollen in the sand, the plastic debris
Fading and brittle in the wind and winter sun.

But the light was good and the wind had burned us
And whatever rituals we were meant to arrive through
Seemed foreign and sad and hardly ours. We are not
The men you want us to be. We like our peace
But savor it differently. We arrive and sit and talk a while.
And loved our lovely bodies, distinctly, before crossing back.

*Written as a dare to rewrite the event of the previous poem more accessibly.

Places Series: Provincetown

Island beyond the jetty—have we sand,
have we the courage to make love on top of sand,
have we August—no. Have we man to man
in heat? I’m
              Nothing. Not even fire—we understand
that our bodies age, that we age with them and die
with them. Our bodies. We age and die—and the funeral
aches. Bodies ache unto it. Shard for shard
of sand blown against us.       By and by,
how it aches—that curtain, how—How’s that tune go?
Under the boardwalk. Boardwalk—out of the sun?
No, it’s March, Love. Hour of
                                         to dodge the cold.
Has love outlasted our it? Has time begun
again? Not yet. Let the fever burn—behold
the garlic sweetened in the ground, condom
and horn—have we sand? Have we the means to stop them?

Easier, yes, to live for only love,
to write of it, responding to its myths—
as someone would, a myth himself (the trouble
of the psalmist charming Saul, or Orpheus
content to string a lyric line for this)—
but what of how it fails us when we fail
to last as long as love? We have no Christ
to wait for, no remorse to fill the sails
of daily life. Just trust—and so the sea
around us churns, concerned we’ll drown: what now?
What, now that art must steer us, will it be?
And such a flimsy thing to steer—the prow
much heavier than sheer amazement is—
and lessened by true intentions, mild at rest.

A Staged Awakening

Which mystery in sleep cannot compete
with heaven? Tableaux of ornaments and ice—

       (No wonder why the poem begins
       with a dream, when so many dreams
       speak to us in waking: remember
       that paradise is this and only.
       Cobblestones wet with sun at the sides.
       Fields uncut, an emptied street.
       There is no pleasure as ripe as one
       warm hand against the fur—still living.)

And the long road down into winter:
and those bastions, wrens. The wood lice.
And the multitudes pressed into shale.
And the amber dawn to redress the scape,
the firmament drowned far down the cape—
and how, knowing the answers in each of us,
they will look up toward spring, our bodies
high up, smiling from the top of the hill.

Luciferous Logolepsy

It is a collection of over 9,000 words in English that are archaic, evocative, and are an experience to invite onto the tongue.

cynosure
n. - guiding star; object of common interest. cynosural, adj.

faveolate
adj. - honey-combed. faviform, adj. honeycomb-like.

keddah
n. - elephant trap.

nullibist
n. - person denying soul's existence in space.

rinderpest
n. - cattle plague.

ruderal
adj. - Botany, growing in refuse or waste ground.

uxorious
n. - submissive to one's wife

zeugma
n. - literary device of using a word to modify two other words with only one of which it is correctly used. zeugmatic, adj.


Luciferous Logolepsy: Dragging obscure words into the light of day.

Nico Painting (Acrylic)*

*My first Nico Painting (Sans Photoshop)

(THE POET wakes to sounds of gathering rain
and turns in bed to touch THE LOVER’s arm.
The dog wakes, on the floor. She acts the same
as always—maybe calmer. Not alarmed.
THE POET lays awake for several beats
before he turns to take THE LOVER’s hand.
THE LOVER wakes and asks what’s wrong. The sheets
are up around them, an oscillating fan
masking the noise outside. THE POET answers,
and kisses THE LOVER softly by the ear.
THE COUPLE turn and groan, and, practiced dancers,
begin their work of moving as a pair:
THE POET moves his hang along THE LOVER,
who smiles a sleepy smile. The two men hover

between the bed and the ceiling, losing clothes
with gentle motions, not like men awake.
THE LOVER moves more lucidly: he blows
some hair from his forehead, starts to laugh. If they break
from character, it’s only for effect—
the way that people change, their bodies bent
for lust, the mask of love irrelevant, reflected
only in open eyes. Emotions are spent
on aftermath’s strange bliss—not now, not here.
This part of them is theirs, not tamed by life
or any of its sister tenants: fear
of falling, fear of failing, fear of flight.
Of sudden endings: THE POET wakes again,
this time he knows the noise—it isn’t rain.)

Tin Man

Or, as Nico says, Billy as Stewie Griffin as the Tin Man:

Places Series 1: Florida

THE LOVER: It isn't working...
THE POET: Well close your eyes; your eyes aren't even closed.

Imagine green: the shape of several hands
raised to the moon—electric, yet reposed.
Imagine soil, its clumping blacks and bands
of coppered loam. Moth-wet moss and marsh-
animal heft—its breath upon you still.
Imagine dawn gone yellow in the wash.
Cactus grass, fire ants, humid windowsills.
Those phantom centipedes with polished sheaths
shifting through rooms of fallen burgundy,
their armor dampened by battle—or was it me
who breathed so lightly at your back? To see
the hairs go limp, to see the weight of it
beading like air on glass, on wood, on paint.

12 Angry Men

from My Boyfriend Refuses to Speak in Iambic Pentameter

I want the gesture—cometary hand
                                             stroke
of hand in mine—
I want to see the pulleys and the cords,
that lavishly wild machine of love, bespoke,
mined
made mine by longing. And you: severely bored.
How can you say you love me—do you really?—
when you can’t shoulder
                        show her, wholly, who I am?
Unbridled scope or scale, unbroken trellis
                                       the kind of feeling
you can’t just say
                     write without disturbing the calm
of a blank page
of sense.
You think I speak like this because I can?!
Because without the beat there is no heart?
My form is not my structure, it’s my mode:
it’s how I handle love
                          truth; it’s how I find it
                                                     land
squarely inside the self,
                        my         honestly wrote
                                                       wrought
                                                        written
                                                         found!
It isn’t that I long for you to sing,
it’s that I long for care in everything.

 
Because without the beat, there is no heart.
And sentiments seem strung along on lines
of half-felt courtesies—when what I want
is romance strung upon a blooming vine—
not for the flowers, but for their opening.
In love, any truth is kind because it’s true
                                                            real.
And any lie is worse because it’s not.
                                  I do hope you sing—
but not because you think I want you to.
Because you can’t hold back, so much unsaid,
because you’ve looked so deeply in my eyes
that you can’t see much else. Because instead
of wanting your life the same, always, you realize
(answer unlikely, answer made to bend)
that maybe it can never be again—
And that’s okay.