Al Young

CONNECTED AT 44666 BPS

Getting up off the potty of email
and back onto the runway of real life,
you find yourself amazed that rain
still fills to wet the world with what
we need and crave and steal yet cannot call.
Such digital distraction sings its praise
songs to willing global villagers alone.

Alone, the information lake tides
hide in surf sand down your eardrums,
send subtle solos jazzing through your veins.
Does blood know its buzz logs in at 98.6?
Does light at night reflect upon the speed
it needs to sharply tune the contours of a dream?
"I sting, therefore I bee," Sam Pickering says.

To places where all subtle forces hang
is where we're headeQn this dancing beam
of logarithms, codes and ciphered fuzz.
To look straight at your lover, to feel her
breathing in real-time, exhaling all the time
there ever was or ever needs to be-hits close.
Now you can email heaven that you're home

AIRBORNE

Your beauty, soft Seattle, wasn't subtle;
it turned on light, and seemed at times so cracked,
Rainier could hold her head above your rubble
of cloud and sky alike; erased, snowpacked.

To places where the world once disappeared
we fly. Wild water helps; big clearings don't.
The turns your thighs and belly took are smeared
and jammed with journeys you still say you want
to end. But that's the catch: You like it wet.

You like life darkened, muted; islands, space
and breathing room. From up here all you get
is what I see: You've lost your quiet race
to come in last. Your subtleties are growing.
But night light slows, you know. So how's it going?

SEX AND THE COMMON COLD

The way men start feeling sorry for themselves
at first sign of a cold -- my Ph.D thesis
in a coconut shell.

Hell leaves off where Heaven
begins. Those old movies they used to show
in grade school about germs and viruses invading,
the body, politic and perm, pay off in knowledge
dollars right here in the College of Costly
21 st Century "ahh-chooo!" And the relatively un-
academic "The Story of Jute" never benefitted me
as much as "Sex and the Common Cold." Of course
they never let the narrator of such animamated action
say anything much, say anything real we kids could
connect with. They never showed us boogers or snot

never showed us pool water dripping off of half-
and full moons int he lockerroom, or the way
language splays and splits like a melon cupped
not once but twice upon a Chaucer. So that when
you come right back down to basics, to the Body
(Part) Electric as salty old Walt might have put it,
then here men go feeling sorry for themselves again.
And for no reason. Not even a magazine ad's worth
of digitized computer - graphed, glamourized mini-blues
hits the artic spot where cold-germs live; the tinkly
of little squared ice-cubes equals the square root
of sneeze. And who hasn't squeezed their lover,
cold or no cold, deep into the night, trying to suck
from their lips the fever of 42nd St, Tienemin Square?

MORE MOON

We've known each other far to long to lean
agaianst some wall, to brood or sulk Let's talk
again the way we did when trees were green

and you were all the distance I could stalk
before your pull, you magnetizing tug
unearthed me; threw me off and laid calm claim.
to all the orbits I would ever hug,
I'm calling you again, moaning your name
Moon, speak, and let your luscious light be known.
Let light. a a match-head, a scratch our backs in flame.
We've fired each other up, we've thrown our own
and others voices clean across black skies
We've bopped and bathed together, bungled deals,
survived. So now let's do what no one tries--
let's roll our chariots out, see how that feels.

©2000-2006 by Al Young