To Love a Genius: Etiquette
Ira scampered away today
jackrabbit in a dust storm
Water bearer with the well run dry
Lots of cordial bow-outs
From the Book of Acceptable Reasons
A cookbook of family recipes
Passed down by those who would bear the surname Genius.
Those who descend from Kailash, Katandin, or Koyasan
Hydrating the ever-thirsty from the blood that runs
Through their veins.
Dear Man. Go. Replenish.
Do your strange and mysterious rituals
Love-making or mantra
Comfort foods or mountain walks
I know well the dear soul of those heroic—
Always feed with an open hand
Or, stay, Joseph stay
In your sweet room, the one you never imagined
You’d inhabit, so long in the cellar
With the huge too-big cross over the bed
That one the great poet of you
Must climb between bouts of brilliance
I will not take you down from from the shelf
And force you into my mouth like 99 cent chips
Even in your absence
The radiant words
Remain—beatitudes in the canyon—
Of these profane streets and weeping walls
This world trades in cardboard
Miss Manners for mediocre-minds
The plait in RSVP
Reduced:
Get over here you! Now!
I read of Jung that when the other’s genius faded
He then faded from sight
There was no draw
No raison d’etre
No reason to be.
Something is asked of us that would keep our grabby hands
By our sides, or, god forbid
Held in prayer
Why bother with three knocks when there are batting rams
The veins of the world, jacked up on adrenaline
Say with great sanctimony
To Edward who feeds the world a great plate of emptiness;
One that opens the traffic jam mind to vast open space
He put the deflector laugh at the gate
The heavy-handed scurry away in irritation
They don’t have time for this crap
Love-bombing my ass
That’s what they call it you know
When those who hydrated themselves back to plump
From the source from where it issues
Have sucked the source dry
They complain in its absence, “I’ve been bombed!”
Rather than offering sweet knees in the mud
For the mid-summer downpour
That must return every now and again
to the clouds
if it is to rain again.