Love Isn't Enough

Love Isn't Enough

Cor Cordium

The look in his eyes—
Saying goodbye to Harlem
And the Renaissance

Not sad like Thurmond—
Not chic & gay like Nugent
Not brave like Langston

Not sophisticated like—
Carl Van Vechten with his
Coterie of friends

What happened to him—
Countee Cullen the Poet
The Man of the Hour?

The New Harlem Voice—
Niggeratti Ariel
The Movement’s John Keats?

Some say he faded—
Suffering a sea change back
Into his boyhood

Uranian Heart—
Teaching junior high young boyz
What only he knew

And one of them felt—
The same Uranian ache
The young James Baldwin

Love Isn’t Enough

“Love is enough,”
I read somewhere
—Countee Cullen,
“To An Unknown Poet,”
The Black Christ

1

“Love isn’t enough”—
I read it late at night
On a Tea-room wall

There in Allen Hall—
Where Robert Penn Warren
Once taught poetry

2

“Love isn’t enough”—
Where Andre Cordrescue posed
As Exquisite Corpse

Teaching young zombies—
How to come back to life one
More hopeless lifetime

3

“Love isn’t enough”—
John Hazard Wildman told me
Late one humid night

As we strolled thru the—
Quad past the library to
His Highland Road home

4

“Love isn’t enough”—
Allen Ginsberg told me once
City Lights Attic

Up where poetry—
Books of the San Francisco
Beat Movement were dear

5

“Love isn’t enough”—
The kid in Japantown said
Naked sushi smile

As I sucked a long—
Tart octopus tentacle
Outta his coiled loins

6

“Love isn’t enough”—
I said as I jumped off the
Cruel Golden Gate Bridge

Down into the shark—
Infested waters only
To be pulled out safe

7

“Love isn’t enough”—
The young Coast Guard kid
Said to me on deck

How I clung to him—
For a whole year after that
He was my Sea Wolf

8

“Love isn’t enough”—
The whole world keeps telling me
Over and over

And yet love evades me—
He saves my life & then some
Isn’t that enough?

9

“Love isn’t enough”—
I read it between the lines
Countee Cullen wept

The Harlem boy who—
Really never quite grew up
Baldwin his lover

10

“Love isn’t enough”—
James Baldwin says the same thing
Ran away to France

Paris embraced him—
Like young Arthur Rimbaud and
Poor sad Paul Verlaine

11

“Love isn’t enough”—
Armando tells me in bed
My lazy lawn boy

I end up doing—
All the work around the joint
He gets stoned instead

12

“Love isn’t enough”—
The seagulls high above and
The crows down below

The lake has whitecaps—
Mt. Rainier finally blows
While Armando cums

13

“Love isn’t enough”—
Whispers the secret jet-stream
Off the Pacific

The Fukushima winds—
Cesium bouquets of death
Descend from the sky

14

“Love isn’t enough”—
Pelicans, turtles & shrimp
Gulf of Mexico

And now it’s my turn—
Dead Redneck Riviera
Pacific Northwest

15

“Love isn’t enough”—
It’s never enough for the
Voodoo Boardroom Creeps

Bring in the Baron—
The Floating Fat Man Ruler
New Giedi Prime Lord