Tuesday, March 22, 2005

THERE WILL BE A VERY MEANINGFUL PICTURE HERE

In the recurring caveman
Dream I wear my meat vest
And I love you, the whites

Of our eyes gleaming
Like cleanly-picked bones, we sit
Beside our fire, which allows us

To think outside
Predation and weather
And I wonder

If I would have the time
To love you otherwise, this thought
Unsteadies me horribly, like

Yesterday, in the hands
Of the pear-shaped Russian
Hairdresser, the way

Her sylphlike colleague steadily
Peered at me in the mirror
Over her steaming

Cup of tea, I felt like sleeping
In her eyes, the want to bed
Down in the space between her lips

And the mug, this is what haircuts
Mean to me, I am as a beast
Dressed in the guise of a boy, I wish

For a small, ardent thing
And am throttled by
It, by the lung-crushing collapse

Of my own desire as it comes
Into fruition, which
Is why I prefer my hallucinatory

Neanderthal life, days
Spent inching
Boulders from the ridge

Where below a pitching pack
Of mastodons tread trumpeting and nights
Where my dream

Within my dream is of riding
The mountainous
Eremotherium, a being

Whose yawning bellow fills
Forests where birds once ruled
The earth, luckily

We have no such ambition, our fire
Crumbling down to embers, your hand
Probing for morsels in my stiff

Knotted hair, I remove
My meat vest and I love
You, your bulbous

Nose warm against mine in the ash-filled night.

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