For Crying Out Loud

[RICHARD ROMEO]

something I had laying around...



her cry comes from above
a replicating camouflaged love
processing thrills of entropic awakening
mating mundane replacements with sophistiate high-societies stuff.

Rear-ended and shit-faced, with re-heated ignorance
she gambles with debating these pre-set particulars
extracting all that passes to an athletic controlled purity.

We, her numerous suitors, within our cracked magnums of soul,
fragmented and lost among the weeping larks, our tongues
splayed with higher-edication and passing time--
how very strange

the advisor underneath that fallow soil
approaches and barely avoids
which does she want it to be?

She lying by quiet cemeteries
populated by insincere secretaries

alights from our pit
brushing aside laughter
the threes she possesses
an inscrutable horn

crying from the terrible beauty
her returning children hear no sound

dead matter, homeless, disinclined to leave this place
ravenous hunger and known comedy
we snag our brains, our groins swollen at each sullen border
wandered and worried, rejoiced and replotting
drawn as always to the nearest alehouse of lore
never once recommended or conceived
rerouting the vintage lineages
if there ever existed such a thing

confused by storage retrieval
information strangely a natural attraction
yet only in translation.

Yet her names become familiar
gravity steeple peyote
but never death.

Her veils anchor roads of light
raining vanity on the ascetic king,
the squalored, the stunned
the briefly cling.

She, the iron  woman, structures spontaniety
embraces talmud, innocence, insanity

our mission?  her flowing vision,
her hair, propigating corn fields, her thighs of
steel dinosaurs, moans and misinformation
bottles of white belly wine.

We, her lambs, layeth low
the perverse madonna, we naked
she fully clothed
this mary mack all dressed in black.

Two souled under her natural music
a mordant traffic of lust and pain
sirens skirmishing below that fearsome ridge
Is that why we hide within her little sister?
she who veils herself in green veld and white terror.

The pillowed breasts obscure the elder's phantom trace
yet never cures her angry face,
hovering over our lonely positions
within her land of sourceless grace.

When she blows her horn, demanding final transit
will we leave this grid of woe and ecstasy

  her languid thigh-bound throne
embracing dream-like mirrors
terror's bone.

To continue will spoil the nightmare
sunlight skants askew upon the western wall
spilling spiked rainbows upon this dusty womb.

Upon her descent
madmen, rejoice in lament.

Post-horn script:

We are homeless, foax
treading thru the stacks
old & young, weary with the world,
our arms empty, brows brooding,
bending, lifting, reaching,
our eyes, blending with the titles, 
bone white like a shark's belly
feast on the colors the words bring.

We will linger for hours
we have no home
charting mysteries beneath our combs.


Richard Romeo
Coordinator of Cooperating Collections
The Foundation Center-NYC
212-807-2417
rromeo at fdncenter.org