To Be With You To be with you I melted doubloons And baby booties of bronze I de-dinged chrome, bought bolts at cheap And hawked them hiked. To be with you I block tackled a smuggled MIG 15 and Shammied the nose cone to lard-potash gleam. I book kept creative with Thai cockfight bets, Skidded one Buddha shy of the pink landing lights, Conked thugee dreadlocks with scimitars steamed In the tonic karst geysers of Uzbekistan. I donned the frilly flayed gowns of novice nightclub Aztecs, And chaperoned Mormons on locust blind dates. I wore Oppenheim peepers behind X-Ray Specs, And silent-serviced the subs and saucers Beneath the polar ice caps To be with you. I dived for the glowing jellyfish of Crete, mason-jarred to preserves Of phosphoring jam. I fugged the lost tangoes of Gurdijieff And bluffed through miniature golf courses based Upon the works of H.P. Lovecraft, all to be with you. For you I brailed out the phrenologic-like bumps Written in rivets across classified fuselage, Learned passwords of ellipses, stole Into the beehive arsenals With balsa wood models Of secret weapons Never made. To be with you I fall guyed the the spy dive, made The algae hiss, made the roses bloom, learned disguises That would not fool for a second the impaired Of sight, sound or mind, Impersonations quality-checked In your own bed, through a night of storms. To be with you was the x-spot On my human maps, A handstand of faith in the invisible world, hopeful In an upside down kind of way, history Written in lipstick, on mirrors that rush To the corners of rooms Whenever I open the door. To spend my life with you To spend my life with you Assorted chocolates were thumbed and squished; Signs were crossed and crosses were signed; Semper Fi’s defiled; Inked spilled to do that. 2 To spend my life with you my arm was uncled, Tattooed Moloch, Tattooed Mom. Songs were shrieked by Pink kids in motel pools, lit at night to a lurking Green, like shivering mint custard Pie atop the pre -digital set. All to be with you: Flicks iterated, Virginia Reels gattlinged, Mothras scumbled, And squeezed, And letter -boxed to fit Your TV screen: the director’s cut In thin sliced Technique, from CNN to the Burden of Proof. To be with you in au gratin detail, under neon, Under symbols, under whispers and chimes Under clothes, under skin, the devil In the condiments of nails and tacks. To be with you braised, and clamped, stewed and spent On each layer’s solstice of heart you cast Shadows fat as waterbeds of India ink. Through eras of coleslaw, disco, ozone, jaundice Like a face full of school bus, to be with you. Pin cushioned with deadly accurate punctuation, pockmarked Bar -coded Ed Norton to Brooklyn, sewage sluiced Pipes primed for you. Boot soles worn Lunch meat thin on a Bishop’s worth Dickinson slant. Through curses In Latin, syllogisms taking stairs With a slinky’s analgesic gait, to you. How I costelloed 3rd base for you! And clocked 3 rd stooge sink holes to house the house. We live there still. To be with you I stayed with you And kept looking for me Being with you.

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