Love at a Reasonable Price

What?
What is Love?
Who?
Who are we?
When?
When do we begin?
How?
How can we sing
Together?
Aren’t we?
Aren’t we all bound
By ties of dancing light
In this fantasy
Built for practice,
A training ground
Where hearts:
They become real.

What is Love?
Who are we?
How shall we
Live together
happily?
I’m wondering
I’m fading.

…..

What is Love?
Long time gone, long time lost.
Long legs tossing beast across
Cityscapes, meadowlands
Seascapades, desert dunes.
Giant drumleg thighs churn,
Throwing eggy body far
Spinning razor fingertips
Scuttle library dome
Blender rolling park:
Tree limbs split human limbs.
All creation buckle-bends
Time and space and reason too.

….

What is Love?

Can you tell me, or do you know?
What is Love, and where’s it go
With arm tense and heart closed,
When famine squeezes soul.

What is Love?

Can you show me, or do you care
When I falter, stop and stare
At the carcass on the road
Shrivelled small, dried up toad.

What is Love?

Can you help me, or do you hear
That I’m screaming shook in fear
Even though the sunshine lights
Redbrick row and seagull flight.

What is Love, anyway?

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

[Sung to “What is Love?” by Haddaway]

Stumble on, something fierce.
Come along, take a talk.
Whistle low, cut the sluice
Out it flows, splashing off
Yon flat-topped stone.

Give us fleshtufts that last.
Gift us heartclops that hold
Tight, cinching down sure.
Move the frenzy, shake it twice.
No one sees; it’s the dark
Where we shake it nice.
No one cares anyway
Anyhow.

The hairy brute with jagged jaw
Of overbiting yeller fangs,
Shoulders like tombstones,
Fingers concrete blocks.
Lurching crooked.
Sewn up sloppy.
Poor old fiend.
Poor thing.

What is right?
What is wrong?
How to know?
What to do?
Where’s the source?
What’s the twist?

Row a sinner through the glands,
Hoist a sinner up the gallows.
Guide a sinner to the mists
Where chaos splits and Jesus sits,
Clear in mind, steady hand
Flat-palmed snaking back and fore
‘Cross radiant haloed whitebread face.

Shape it, Jesus!
Show it, Jesus!
Flow rivers of passion and ideation,
Ease sumptuous human rivers
Easy, gentle, towards the Good.
Work it, Jesus!
Ah, ah, ah, we came down with the punched-up rowboat rocking, sloshing, sinking, leaving us to float like starved orphans, like victims of another unjust famine, like small skeletons of taut flesh and bucked-out teeth.

It is OK now.
Now we’re baptized.
Now we’re friends.
It’s not weird anymore, not awkward or anything.
It’s cool now.
Basically; pretty much cool.
I’d say; I mean, you’d have to ask

AMW/BW

[Chapters of Diary of an Adamant Seducer]

I live within the bosom
Of a squirrel in the tree
I watch from inside a hole
In the hickory barks
Lining asphalt street

Can you hear me?
I am talking to you.
It is cold in this park
In a red windjacket
Soft Hair finger-
blown by a wet wind

Don’t you forget me
Don’t you leave me
Here alone in the rain.
I know you won’t
I know you can’t
I know your name.

Pretty flowers plucked
Petals tossed
White slippers
On glassy rolling creek
Baby don’t worry
Don’t scurry away

AMW/BW

All along, through the fire, long fingers blazing. Calls me out, cuts me down, turns me round. Who will stay.

It’s OK. Anyway.

I love you like when we’re just kids
running atop the badlands,
along the borders,
across the moor.

Stone walls picked from the fields.
Tall grasses fold over.
Dew-wet leather sneaks.
Pretty girl in stripes-on-white
Cotton dress.
Jack-knifed at the knee,
To while placid
By the stream.
Let her be,
Let it go,
As if!
With straw in mouth
Wide-brimmed hat
Shirtless tan
Denim overs overall
A handful of dandelions
Hang their heads
Out the huge
Iron-shaped
Central pouch.

AMW/BW