David McLean-

like life starts

life starts when it wants to,
a kitten in a fat stomach and death is an old man
in some abyss, his cavern full of missing
and all the needful things, a gray cloak
thrown over his cold and bony shoulders,
a serpent and its insane gratifications,
cold cheeseburgers and zombie skateboards;

but what matters sometimes is kittens who cost nothing:
cancer like a soldier is standing sentry
in front of all the skeletons and memories
where school was, before all the several empty
sexual heavens, like daytime soaps
you can watch because you have to,
because the girls' gym teacher turned into
a panther too, and not everything you need
can be scribbled on a convenient card

because life starts whenever it wants to
like a party in a graveyard,
corpses and telephones and absences:
a kitten in her mother's fat stomach
is life and time to touch it;
and words are the dead
with all our nothingness

the leaves fall

the leaves fall like nothing does,
like tiny drops of distributive justice
wherever that lives

not in the loveless mulch where worms grow fat
corporate bodies, all the absences incorporated
like the impossible possibility of courtly love
actually getting to mean anything in particular

beyond the bizarre evils of medieval history,
beyond Kurt and Courtney dissected again
on television, moving pictures
on the still scream, screening again today,
timeless suicide and tiny bits of night
in every immature body not yet milked
for the utile blood;

some leaves fall too often, just like tears do,
injustice is nothing in particular,
nothing meaning much

blue and gray

and what is happening should be shown
blue and gray, sound just supple static
saying nothing

and tiny lights are firefly nighttime
centuries away in other countries
where nothing was once;

what is happening should be blue and gray
and aesthetic, happening once
like something to love

all that summer

all that summer things must have happened
though i do not remember them
like the flesh would remember every uncharted
cancer.

and the meat in the shambles all this is
might give birth to centuries of flies
like bees born inside dead lions
just to be a fatuous jar of treacle,

a dream to gross out all the maybe
angels. and a gay man in a velvet suit
did say we made a lovely couple
in 1987, though i do not know

if he pouted altruistically
like he did in your poem when he said that;
all that summer things might
have happened, maybe they did

carving smiles

they carve smiles in modern morons
with an apparent ax;

it has been said that the rain is given
like love is.

(most things mean nothing)