Naked

 Naked

My first act of graduate education

Was getting naked with Allen Ginsberg

In a bathhouse on Toulouse Street

Deep in the French Quarter jazz

Down in New Orleans

There was no end to the skin I shed

After the clothes after the masks

Down with the wine high with the herb

Altered states  one sure way to deconstruct

Nixon's Dixie damnation

We sat centered on a circular waterbed

All around us whirling like an ascension

William Blake inspired copulating bodies

Naked like us red lit and happy

Maybe mindless but fucking bliss

How many dark empty predawn streets

Did I amble intoxicated with Zen

Nothingness when Allen left when

The poets departed and I slept again

With Aristotle faithful and rational

Allen's rhythm enlightened me

Chanted me through Lisa Jan Roger Al

Who loved my showered hands

Past Humpty Dumpty's fatal fall

Until a sublime finger reached up into my hip

Heart

Jack 10/28/11

October

October

This month is gold and black
Houses porches lawns revel

In death's ghouls and broken skeletons

A joke for most just as death is

Witches on broomsticks

For me it is genuine

October's death is mine

With those who made it

What it is

A Leonard Cohen plaint of

surrender

October murdered one love gave another

To another on the Day of the Dead

Halloween expired with

A funeral dirge and a wedding march

Followed by a solitude that is

My dogged companion

How can I look love

In the eye and not see death

How not think of the erotic joy of

Bodies embracing without a skeleton

Bone

Yet neither grave nor vow has taken

My naivete my song my romance

This ever chilling October
So I commit to love again

Bury myself deep yield
To intimacy to touch

Accepting the gold of leaves

Falling with the autumn

October is my tomb my dark

Look back though grounded well in

You