by Peter Grieco

[1101 – 1200]
for Peggy

We watched as sad proud ships spread opposite
to where sin lies aside twelve forgotten
mountains, knowing fancy clothes promised vast
hearts, possessed curious importance. You
judge, rate, taste, marry the gentleman, trade
greatly for decided, search ordinary
for glory.  Ideas?  Yes!  Serve ’em up Captain!
Working anxious powers into feelings
of iron, altogether distant, altogether
pure.  When liberty sides with building
progress to prove what’s accepted, I’m marked
for finished!  Foreign weeks besides, & a dry
neck of evidence.  Interesting advantage.
The bill finally came, pieces clearly priced.
Jesus, Peter, isn’t the wine excellent?


[14201 – 14300]

Devious, impervious, laughable,
without inkling or concepts, benighted,
ephemeral, ungainly, Gillian &
her execrable menagerie scuffle along
snorting their quota of moonshine,
hic, & turpentine.  While stallion cantor,
they agitate.  While subaltern Eskimo
caterpillar across symbolical
Madagascar, they inflame themselves,
the very personification of
potency, stoned & outgrown, on disbelief
& the gist of delusive unemployment,
skating a spherical quadrangle of
retrospect & papyrus.


[14301 – 14400]

After the russet lamplight of hysteria
& freckled love-making, after
the diluted hemlock & vomiting,
after Leah advises Bianca about
her bodice & Bianca’s perfunctory “hi,”
after the valueless surveillance of Pollux
& Gretchen’s nuclear ultimatum,
after you overhear Singapore whoop
it up past creamy dawn & the able
bodied spinster intercede, mightn’t you
prattle? mightn’t you swagger a bit?
mightn’t you wreck the enormity
of Josh’s virile Ionian cassock
with shears of illimitable hearsay?


[14401—14500]
for Leila

I grope every botanical wrinkle
of your greenhouse versification, besiege
every unyielding insinuation of your
haphazard façade, peruse the plaza
of your fibrous pup from boulevard to
boulevard, a philanthropist of the
changeable, a trustee of  profanity
& bile, of transparency that loops
otter-like each craven athlete, a harlot
to rove outwards, ever outwards, a bandit
to rebuild Delphi.  So ordain me, roofed
within your irreverent mirage, & the
juicy anomaly of this, my unsound
ejaculation.

Peter J. Grieco studies Mathematics and French, and writes poetry in Buffalo, NY, his native city.