Performance of "Lubbock Elegy"

Captured reading "Lubbock Elegy (For Billy Boy)" from Sojourner, at the Meykadeh LibreriaCafé in Florence, Italy on April 18th 2013. 

The Neapolitan Befana

Florence

A Dream

A Valentine

 

“Her body is the shape of my hands.” –Paul Eluard

My Galatea, smooth and warm

as sandstone in her palms

and firm fingers caressing,

sculpts me each and every

day with her curved and slender

presence. Venus has no auguries

,neither pearl nor rose, to prove

if I were worthy of her chisel

against my stony heart

not yet come to the apex

of the wheel.

2/14/2011

Florence

Disquiet Memory-Suggestion

Asleep, a child
I wrestled her
once, for you --
I wrestled with you once
for what? Love?
no more wrestling
for her. No more
wrestling for me.


2/13/2013
Lisbon

After the Law

I do not see you, for I am not allowed to look at your differentiated, individual faces. Looking you in the eye is not necessary to my address and would be superfluous to my sense of decorum. By speaking, which is all that I ever do, I am making the rules. Therefore I am blindly addressing an audience of phantoms, an imaginary, undelimited mass denying the presence of any rarefied individual. In this, however, you escape me and flee; you get into trouble and you refuse to conform to my preemptive norms. For better or for worse. You escape your destiny and my mediation of your place in the crowd.