Poems about architecture

And if I built a building,
I'd build it out of bugs.
Spiders, bees, and scorpions,
And seeping, slimy slugs.
Its floors would crunch and splatter,
Its ceilings would drip down;
Floors that hide up in your pants
And buzzing all around.
My building would be creepy,
Decrepit, lacking health;
And though I do not care for bugs
I'd have it to myself.

Design it.
But refine it.
From drafting class
In junior high with the protractor
I have always
Longed for progress
In architecture.
A harking back to medieval styles
(along with an old fashioned look in big cars)
In the seventies depressed me
But how I know
That Frank Lloyd Wright Sr. is
Still respected
And the STate Farm Center
Is a marvel.
There has been progress
Just as much as individual success
So that the Parthenon
And the Colosseum
And the Agricole
And Agraharam
Deposit on us
A new found lust
For the glory that was Greece
And that grandeur that was Rome.

*Charles Sturies

This architecture of oppression, will begin to crumble
And will crush us all into pools of maroon, intestines spilled as leaves

I will make a fangle of mechanisms,
A creature with iron snouts
And concrete aortas.

Its fevered howl will wake the duplexes
Perched on sloped land,
Built from collected tins and bottle caps.

Boys sooted in grief will balk like ravens,
Chew sweet dip, and spit,
But never reach the foreman's gate.

They'll crave a tavern with antlers as chandeliers
Where a black flame burns
On the brim of a zinfandel.

But tonight they'll gristle through streets
To a stale room
Where fluorescent lights blanch a young widow's skin.

Basic cable ministries will flick and dim
In the homes of the wigged ladies who wait for them—
The howl keeps them

Breathless, each of them fearing
The slow swallow from a snake's mouth
To its furnace.

I rendered a home, for you and for me,
With juxtaposition and biomimicry,
And pillars using faith as configuration,
Your smile creating its articulation,
And a freehand forest foreground to recover
The boldness in you, my cantilever lover,
A minimalist made tranquility,
And bed to explore our plasticity,
Patience as datum to learn your complexion
And curvilinear textures and warm fenestration,
A place for your heart, with depth and intention,
A studio for thoughts and spatial perceptions,
A place you can wonder, wander, roam and be,
And be welcomed back, fully loved, fully free.

**PATRICK BRATHWAITE

Vienna in the snow
St. Stephensdom - me below
Hapsburgs gone - Freud overthrow
From faith to art - just traces show
Still I seek - but for what I don't know.

You had this many broken bones
Like that time i left for an hour (because
I was learning to work some never fractured fingers
Over black and white tabs) and came back
To find you in a chair, clutching your arm
Like it was some project of masking tape and tongue depressors,
Imitating architecture, as though it might fall apart at
Any second. and i wondered what it was
To have my calcium I-beams snap under my skin. was there
A feeling, a radiator that burned against bones
Comfortably, when the edges glued themselves back?

I feel the call from the oceans,
The voices whisper from its breeze.
Snow and satire can't label the mindfulness of
Memories slowly coming back to me.
My mountains have missed you so much,
My legs miss the warmth of your thermos,
I miss your gentleness and subtlety.

Priority one. If you don't think you will make it by Tuesday,
I'll travel back in time before we were forty degrees,
You can read the seraphs on my signature
If I can lay in your sheets for a week.

Chrysanthemums all over the hallways, Irises in azurean hues.
The charter won't take us all the way to the break wall,
I'm at the airport trying to reach you by phone.
I'd take the flavor of your spirit,
Over the sweet coolness of truth,
Slide my fingers into the holes in the jeans you always wear for me when I come home.

The only thing I write off are pages,
Tables marked with the ends of so many words.
Who are you to know what you can do without
The more I've learned, I realize I'm happier with the less I know.