This is where everyone goes and scrounges up every Bernadette Mayer poem they can find...

Sonnet

You jerk you didn't call me up

I haven't seen you in so long

You probably have a fucking tan

& besides that instead of making love tonight

You're drinking your parents to the airport

I'm through with you bourgeois boys

All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts

Only money can get--even Catullus was rich but

Nowadays you guys settle for a couch

By a soporific color cable t.v. set

Instead of any arc of love, no wonder

The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time

Wake up! It's the middle of the night

You can either make love or die at the hands of

the Cobra Commander

-----------

to make love, turn to page 121.

to die, turn to page 72.

excerpt from "On the road to what we're tempted to call heaven"

...

heaven I must tell you

at least from what I know

is an abandoned camp

named by white people

after Indian words

there's nobody living in it

it's overgrown

with raspberries

on the road to it

the road becomes disused

the trees are bigger

the light is both brighter

& less bright

& in the space between tire tracks

where cars used to drive

tiny strawberries have sprouted up

the road becomes progressively

more & more lined with

wild berries growing

till you get to a field

overwhelmed with things to eat

if you know what they are

& in spaces there are buildings

low & in disuse

if you dare walk into

the sunny parts of heaven

you will hear a buzz so loud

as to make you think

knee-deep in unknown flowers already

you'll die right away

of the juices & bites

of other things living

but if you advance without fear

& look up often

not at the sky but at the milkweeds

& tamest elderberries

against the view of

the equally ardent thorns & bees

you might wind up

falling in the delicious hole

which speaks to you then

& ever after: it says

go home

and let it rain on the roofs

because you have a home

or house, cabin or apartment

or tent, cave, dwelling or shelter

...

((it should go without saying that these poems were written by bernadette mayer--certainly not by me. but, for those less inclined to know this a priori: more on bernadette mayer))