Four sonnets

For those who think these sonnets are an inferior expression of a venerated form, I sympathize with you. Formal poetry is not my strength. They do have their appeal, though, in as much as they force me to constrain my signature turn of mind ; let us use a musical analogy and say that I like these because they amount to me performing my old sicks over a new set of chords. Sonnet 1 You turn your head, you cough  and recover,  hand at your throat, the mike buzzes but not before you shuffle your poems and read yet again, you go on in a room where everyone has a first line, I would read about your eyes, wide as they are as saucers cups that are deep as pans of bread that come from the oven and into my heart, and that’s a start, I think, you fold your hands as you read; you’ve got this memorized, yet it all seems extemporized from the bottom of your heart  which hasn’t a bottom at all, now some one else reads, a guy with tattoo of his tongue across his left cheek, he  screeches to hip hop clicks of the tongue but he’s young and not far from done as long as his homies thrown their signs with fingers that cross a language of quieting the flutters of the immature heart, I will read you later, on the phone, with every court and hand gesture, you wave goodnight, I know the line, you’ll see me in the funny papers.   Sonnet 2 Not this day nor that one but the one after all these, rather,  when we come into town  with pockets full of matches and cigarettes in a sock, we rock the nation with big beats  in hock to no groove other than the tire tracks that criss -cross the oceans on trade winds that carry notes   like saints carrying a crucifix to the next thorny hill under a sky that opens only for any spirit that slides  up the ladder like plumes of smoke, we toke in gasps  and get out of the car, unload, set up  amps, take up a collection  for a room to split five ways, give or take the extra guitarist,  a girl friend who snores, a nice place, we say, this world is ours,  while over the bridge, in the other life where phone lines connect, there are meals to eat before the meat gets cold, moms to kiss on the cheek,   girl friends to lie to because we love them too much to be ourselves on a dare.   Sonnet 3 Extra candles at the table mean that there will be more bread to butter, more sin to absorb even as we see a motorcade and a pope in a unbreakable box on the screen when the first spoonful of hope is served from bowls that a heat that escapes logic and cold fingers, bless everything that gets in your way, says Dad, do the sign of the cross and make the world tremble? work your voodoo somewhere else, he hisses, hand me a roll and turn off the set. The screen goes dark, millions of button-down faces in crowds that line streets and make the stadiums sag under the human pounds are gone in a small white dot against a dark green field, and Dad smiles again, snapping his fingers, and chews his bread with his eyes closed, face framed with kitchen lights and lacy steam. Sonnet 4 A fevered dream gives up its dark corridors and invites me to stare at the ceiling instead,  with music of laughs and grunting keyboards filling the dim sleepless niches that make up the sky  that is now filled with circling birds, black and crying, hypnotized by advertising about home loans and  travel clubs to the farthest end of a Pacific Island where there are no dull, all-night parties and robot music that  grinds away at  unsmoothed nerves, I pick myself from the bed, kiss your forehead, slip on my open toe sandals  and sit at the edge of the bed, the edge of my wits, the end of what feels like the earth Columbus  must have feared all three of his ships would drift over in a delirium born on a black, sleepless sea.