Hart Crane Mon Amour
O Carib Crabs
I’ve got the crabs bad—
I must’ve have got them in Mexico
Or maybe down below deck with that
Handsome mulatto kid on the Orizaba.
Each little itchy crab—
A terribly unnerving tarantula scuttling
Around down there, zigzagging like
Fiddle crabs side-slipping in my shorts.
The leering drugstore pharmacist—
Narrows his mustard scansioning eyes,
Invariably when crabs breed themselves
They’re conscripting to shadowy pubes.
Then the glozening decanter dims—
The shiny crescents of their tiny bellies.
Slow applause flows into dead synosures
There but for the grace of God go I.
Eucalyptus Palsy
I don’t mourn my subversion—
There’s nothing down there in the white
Sands of the coral beach other than the
Anagrammatized names of everything.
I suppose I could count them all—
The nacreous frames of tropic deaths
Brutal necklaces of shells, lobster loves
Eucalyptus palsy in wrinkled shadows.
But I’m not into past names now—
Lovers' names, goodbye names, death’s
Little tombstone crypts for everything.
Sighing syllables coming and going.
But at least down here—
I’m Captain of the Doubloon Isle
Mildew takes care of everything above
The kid’s groin keeps me busy below.
The slow evisceration of my brain—
It’s a long-term lobotomy matinee
Even tho the kid wants to visit again
Brooklyn Bridge my former haunts.
Brooklyn Bridge
“whispers antiphonal
in azure swing”
—Hart Crane,
Brooklyn Bridge
How many hung-over dawns—
How many inviolate sailorboy curves
Filed away, never to be disclosed
But hastening again in other eyes?
Cinematic, panoramic scenes—
Fast as speeding skyscraper elevators
Dropping us from our day down
Into another sailorboy lay.
Speeding subway shuttlings—
Sailor dives down by the wharves
Under the shadowy piers I’ve waited
Submerged in cabled curveships.
Cipher-scripts of Crane’s lovers—
Young sailors legs bent in bed
Their cabled male cordage coiled in
Tight soft nutsacs full of jizz.
Blacked pubic tides flow—
Delirium of liquid fleshy pearls
On the half-shell, oyster-thick
Seaport sullen and moody.
How many seagulls dipping—
And pivoting their wings overhead
Immaculate dirty sailorboyz undone
Squirting their brains out for him?
Hart Crane
He’d just disappear sometimes—
He’d be gone for days, taking subways
To lonely Coney Island, doing what
Poets did, doing what Tennessee did.
Crane lost his sailor loverboy—
Williams took the same sordid path
After losing Kip in P-Town on the beach
So easy to be brutal, cruising after that.
Dark pungent streets—
Seamen’s dives along Brooklyn and
Hoboken waterfronts, it was all there,
Same roughtrade path to destruction.
Self, self, self—
How wearisome and ugly. Poisoning
His work, cruising compulsively, rudderless
Distracted, corroding his energy, loneliness.
Memoirs
“And of course
there is Hart Crane”
—Tennessee Williams,
Memoirs
Escaping from words—
Into sensations like Rimbaud
Turbulent with revolution, permitting
Articulation thru nights of absinthe.
Trading the fire that burns—
Destroying everything, even oneself
Such self-immolation, how does it
End-up so reasonable inside a book?
Depending on oneself is like—
Depending on a broken reed, inclined
To extravagance of speech, too much
Dependence on kindness of strangers.
Disarrangement
“his sister confined to an
asylum, never to be released,
a gnawing fear the same
mental disarrangement
may develop in him”
—Lyle Leverich, Tom: The
Unknown Tennessee Williams
Writing constantly—
Frantically, feeling like Hart Crane
Growing gradually demented like his
Sister, so that he had to write more
Than Crane did, before it was too late.
O Carib Crabs
I’ve got the crabs bad—
I must’ve have got them in Mexico
Or maybe down below deck with that
Handsome mulatto kid on the Orizaba.
Each little itchy crab—
A terribly unnerving tarantula scuttling
Around down there, zigzagging like
Fiddle crabs side-slipping in my shorts.
The leering drugstore pharmacist—
Narrows his mustard scansioning eyes,
Invariably when crabs breed themselves
They’re conscripting to shadowy pubes.
Then the glozening decanter dims—
The shiny crescents of their tiny bellies.
Slow applause flows into dead synosures
There but for the grace of God go I.
Eucalyptus Palsy
I don’t mourn my subversion—
There’s nothing down there in the white
Sands of the coral beach other than the
Anagrammatized names of everything.
I suppose I could count them all—
The nacreous frames of tropic deaths
Brutal necklaces of shells, lobster loves
Eucalyptus palsy in wrinkled shadows.
But I’m not into past names now—
Lovers' names, goodbye names, death’s
Little tombstone crypts for everything.
Sighing syllables coming and going.
But at least down here—
I’m Captain of the Doubloon Isle
Mildew takes care of everything above
The kid’s groin keeps me busy below.
The slow evisceration of my brain—
It’s a long-term lobotomy matinee
Even tho the kid wants to visit again
Brooklyn Bridge my former haunts.
Brooklyn Bridge
“whispers antiphonal
in azure swing”
—Hart Crane,
Brooklyn Bridge
How many hung-over dawns—
How many inviolate sailorboy curves
Filed away, never to be disclosed
But hastening again in other eyes?
Cinematic, panoramic scenes—
Fast as speeding skyscraper elevators
Dropping us from our day down
Into another sailorboy lay.
Speeding subway shuttlings—
Sailor dives down by the wharves
Under the shadowy piers I’ve waited
Submerged in cabled curveships.
Cipher-scripts of Crane’s lovers—
Young sailors legs bent in bed
Their cabled male cordage coiled in
Tight soft nutsacs full of jizz.
Blacked pubic tides flow—
Delirium of liquid fleshy pearls
On the half-shell, oyster-thick
Seaport sullen and moody.
How many seagulls dipping—
And pivoting their wings overhead
Immaculate dirty sailorboyz undone
Squirting their brains out for him?
Hart Crane
He’d just disappear sometimes—
He’d be gone for days, taking subways
To lonely Coney Island, doing what
Poets did, doing what Tennessee did.
Crane lost his sailor loverboy—
Williams took the same sordid path
After losing Kip in P-Town on the beach
So easy to be brutal, cruising after that.
Dark pungent streets—
Seamen’s dives along Brooklyn and
Hoboken waterfronts, it was all there,
Same roughtrade path to destruction.
Self, self, self—
How wearisome and ugly. Poisoning
His work, cruising compulsively, rudderless
Distracted, corroding his energy, loneliness.
Memoirs
“And of course
there is Hart Crane”
—Tennessee Williams,
Memoirs
Escaping from words—
Into sensations like Rimbaud
Turbulent with revolution, permitting
Articulation thru nights of absinthe.
Trading the fire that burns—
Destroying everything, even oneself
Such self-immolation, how does it
End-up so reasonable inside a book?
Depending on oneself is like—
Depending on a broken reed, inclined
To extravagance of speech, too much
Dependence on kindness of strangers.
Disarrangement
“his sister confined to an
asylum, never to be released,
a gnawing fear the same
mental disarrangement
may develop in him”
—Lyle Leverich, Tom: The
Unknown Tennessee Williams
Writing constantly—
Frantically, feeling like Hart Crane
Growing gradually demented like his
Sister, so that he had to write more
Than Crane did, before it was too late.
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