Riding the Subway in Seoul

Each toenail a different color,
painted perfectly, some with sparkle,
her feet stand awkwardly on cork platforms,
rocking at stops: Seolleung, Yeoksam, Gangnam.
If those aren't hose, her legs are made of milk.
Except in crossing, the thighs will never meet;
they disappear behind a pleated skirt, beige and short,
into which she's tucked a crisp, white blouse
(there are insufficient adjectives for this),
the waist at best, twenty inches...nineteen?
Up the blouse's buttons, she stares into a phone;
Samsung, of course, as black and shiny as her hair.
Her other hand holds a subway strap, and...uh, oh.
Our eyes meet,
hers without a K-pop smile.


August 2014

Biker's Balls

For all those literary bikers,
airbrush artists, Rimbaud trikers,
who hop their hogs cross rolling hills
and drop them to save daffodils,
who have such scars across the belly,
on which they rest Wordsworth and Shelly,
and O that nose, that broken nose,
to suck in sent of yellow rose, it blows,

because some match the biker's yen
to have their art tattooed on them.
Jackson Pollock splashed his paint,
and Pablo painted cubes,
but once no bitch except their own
had spiders on her boobs.

Still, those fucking Harvard masters,
those gay prancing pre-meds,
those prissy Princeton pussies,
and M.I.T. shitheads,
could not but hold a pubic hair
of one dear biker's balls:
Their fathers cannot buy into
the highway's hallowed halls.


(1987, updated 2013)