1. After Pablo Neruda
His heart of peach, murderous
nailed feet, driven, wobbling
narcotic, a fog running along
spectacular walnut coffins, inside
the deserts with their mountainous
gleaming, white rush of salt, lips
red with flecked gold, fever of skullcap,
a knight queen’s swimming upstream,
the green spring air, tight in the throat
with the sudden appearance of the cold,
satin scarved snowflakes, faint
arrivals of improbable bells, you gave
us a welcome fondness for tombstones,
illuminated the richest ores in the eyes of a girl,
oceanic swells inside the candy, startled
brows of innocent flowering courtyards,
scented spears of lilies, the hot flow
inside blue veins that fall like paint into
the etched sky of morning, breaking
open cracked pots of roses, outside the fire,
the endless rattle of fixed wars, wreckage
just starting, or too tattered and blunt
to sharpen again except upon the teeth
of those yet dead. Dear Pablo, Statesman,
Poet, friend! Let’s share again that walk
down upon the twilight, to movies together,
drunk beneath bronze cones, harsh winds
thrust down like lightning by lemon
spotlights, still, broken apart only now
by booze cobbled alleyways, splattered
yellow with apples and black oily birds
caught in a strange, minty saddle of night
below the pollen of cities, staring beyond

2. the sound of crumbling staircases,
the song of the horsemen of death, glass
marbled stars, feeding upon the gasps of
breath thrust from mottled copper teapots,
a glow of anvils upturned from bursting stones
inside the sterile angels, feeling along broken
forgotten passages as the doomed paddle by,
lost inside the bleeding fingers of these
struggling people who sob like tigers,
show us the endless purple dreams
of the magnificent poisons of life.
Drink them all up, write them all down.