Free Poems 1959-2009 by Frederick Seidel

mother,
    Help the paleface ask me for my colored hand in marriage!
    And the great chief liked his odor,
    And he offered him his daughter,
    Redskin jewel from a giant, legend waiting for an answer,
    And the frightened white man could not answer.
    Mother Nature went to China,
    China the vagina.
    Wet dreams conceive there,
    Where no one wants a daughter.
    I pin the throttle on the straight
    Toward China all night,
    With the moon out and the stars,
    And reach Kabul.
    The nightclub bombing in Bali
    Shattered Baghdad.
    The hotel temple dancers hold the sky up.
    The elephant lifts his friend the tiger to safety.
    The satellite picks up a faint signal
    From the Arabian Peninsula
    From long before Islam
    Of the immortal Imru’ al-Qays declaiming his ode.
    Whalesong surfaces in the desert and spouts.
    The Arab Pindar pinpricks the emptiness.
    A nanosecond of moisture
    Irrigates ancient Arabia.
    His she-camel is a Ferrari with a saddle
    Who knows the desert by heart and is unafraid.
    He praises her in his monorhymes of tribal twaddle
    About this and that and the brevity of life.
    The Prophet Muhammad
    Acknowledged his fame
    As the finest poet in hell
    Where the pre-Islamic poets dwell.
    Let shuttered windows shatter
    To let the bomb-blast in.
    Everyone is screaming.
    The exits have been padlocked.
    Everyone is screaming.
    Muhammad took away their silliness.
    Muhammad is the firestorm.
    Everyone converts.
    Her breast is bigger than I am.
    Her nipple is bigger than my mouth.
    Let me masturbate to death.
    Let my hand fall off.
    Islam is submission.
    Behead the man
    Who will not listen!
    My head and hand are coming to an end.
    I am coming in Manhattan
    By the shining Big-Sea-Water.
    I am coming to the end. I am coming to.
    The predawn streets are empty.
    This is what it feels like.
    Everyone is screaming.
    I am coming, Mother Nature.
    I am coming, Mannahatta.
    I am coming in Manhattan.
    This is what it comes to.
    Everyone is screaming. All the planes are grounded.
    The exits have been padlocked.
    The asteroid is really coming.
    The president in Washington is speaking to the world.
    The sea tilts up and down
    Next to the silent dawn.
    Â 
BROADWAY MELODY
    A naked woman my age is a total nightmare.
    A woman my age naked is a nightmare.
    It doesn’t matter. One doesn’t care.
    One doesn’t say it out loud because it’s rare
    For anyone to be willing to say it,
    Because it’s the equivalent of buying billboard space to display it,
    Display how horrible life after death is,
    How horrible to draw your last breath is,
    When you go on living.
    I hate the old couples on their walkers giving
    Off odors of love, and in City Diner eating a ray
    Of hope, and then paying and trembling back out on Broadway,
    Drumming and dancing, chanting something nearly unbearable,
    Spreading their wings in order to be more beautiful and more terrible.
    Â 
LOVE SONG
    I shaved my legs a second time,
    Lagoon approaching the sublime,
    To cast a moonlight spell on you.
    TriBeCa was Tahiti, too.
    I know I never was on time.
    I was downloading the sublime
    To cast a moonlight spell on you.
    TriBeCa was Tahiti, too.
    The melanoma on my skin
    Resumes what’s wrong with me within.
    My outside is my active twin.
    Disease I’m repetitious in.
    The sun gives life but it destroys.
    It burns the skin of girls and boys.
    I cover up to block the day.
    I also do so when it’s gray.
    The sunlight doesn’t go away.
    It causes cancer while they play.
    Precancerous will turn out bad.
    I had an ice pick for a dad.
    A womanizing father, he’s
    The first life-threatening disease.
    His narcissistic daughter tried
    To be his daughter but he died.
    The richest man in Delaware
    Died steeplechasing, debonair.
    One company of ours made napalm.
    That womanizing ice pick’s gray calm
    Died steeplechasing in a chair,
    The jockey underneath the mare.
    She posted and she posted and
    Quite suddenly he tried to stand
    And had a heart attack and died,
    The