Poem(s) for Sunday

[highlyeccentric]

Enlightenment
Vijay Seshadri

“It’s all empty, empty,”
he said to himself.
“The sex and drugs. The violence, especially.”
So he went down into the world to exercise his virtue,

thinking maybe that would help.
He taught a little kid to build a kite.
He found a cure,
and then he found a cure

for his cure.
He gave a woman at the mercy of the weather
his umbrella, even though
icy rain fell and he had pneumonia.
He settled a revolution in Spain.

Nothing worked.
The world happens, the world changes,
the world, it is written here,
in the next line,
is only its own membrane—

and, oh yes, your compassionate nature,
your compassion for our kind.

I find
Kit Fryatt

I'm on my way to you, tutelar
shabby and locked, if there's single malt
in your nostrils you don't need it
in your mouth
           last time I got laid
someone else's bacon was frying
up the stair combined
with spermicide it smelled like olives
steeping in brine
           I would say Turkey
but others would say Greece
and be no less wrong. One day this whole
mentor/pupil thing will have to end
in the sack
           or throwing delft
but not yet, my good sweet
honey lord, not yet. I want to be
your rawboned hauflin loon
so we can be
           Davy and Alan
staging a bit of hurt/comfort to cadge
a boat, I want to shuck you like an eel,
box you like a hare, put you in my mouth
like a Jew's harp
           I can turn meat to fruit
call it a superpower. You've been
my Hays Code through most of Twentieth
Century, one boat-long foot
on the floor at all times
           but in the middle of the bed
the river runs deep, you've managed to
raincheck joy compleat once again forever
I am a narroweyed freightjumping
Appalachian urchin
           with tattooed knuckles
a knackered paperback of A Good Man
Is Hard To Find And Other Stories
splayed open on my shoulder
bleeding
           into my panties
as kids have done since before
there were panties and I am riding riding
riding riding riding this boxcar away
from you, tutelar.