Sometimes dinner becomes a love poem

Pineapple

There is a ripeness on the brink of rot
Beneath the rugged skin a hint of gray
softness that tells us in another day
flesh will be bitter. I would rather not

be ashes on a younger lover's tongue
and in her mouth decay to bitterness.
Some love affairs so obviously a mess
even to have that first screw would be wrong

far better savour what will never be
the scent, and elegant geometries
of skin, than see sharp anger in your eyes
that I've betrayed you, worse, that you've tricked me

and hate me because guilty. Rather flirt
and kiss, than fuck our friendship into dirt.

A panegyric

Ryman

Almost apologizing, he looks down
on a harsh world of folly shedding blood
as if it were his fault, as if he should
have found some better way, written it down

so words could heal. He tells us what we need.
Sometimes we listen. He portrays the links
of sex and death, language and crime. He thinks
bad metaphor can incite angry deed

and he'll go carefully. His conscience writes
these moral fictions. Women and gay men
breathe, fuck, make art. Are born and die again
And life is as it is. Full of delights

and misery. He makes art that consoles
instructs, amuses, stitches tattered souls.