Blows against my soul.
What are you to me, boy,
That I, who have passed so many lights,
Should carry your eyes
Like swinging lanterns?

CACTUS SEED

Radiant notes
piercing my narrow-chested room,
beating down through my ceiling--
smeared with unshapen
belly-prints of dreams
drifted out of old smokes--
trillions of icily
peltering notes
out of just one canary,
all grown to song
as a plant to its stalk,
from too long craning at a sky-light
and a square of second-hand blue.

Silvery-strident throat--
so assiduously serenading my brain,
flinching under
the glittering hail of your notes--
were you not safe behind... rats know what thickness of... plastered wall...
I might fathom
your golden delirium
with throttle of finger and thumb