In Taming the Wild, We Lose Ourselves

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.