General all over Ireland
 
dirty as bedsheets
torn tattered to corners.
and wrapped around lamp posts
and cracked garden walls:
 
the snow dropped three
days ago; now
nothing's left but the cold
and an all over ashiness
of aged granite architecture
and dusty wrought iron.
there's a moment in falling –
a beauty and the silence –
the muting of palm-
down guitar strings.
 
but here it falls thick
for perhaps just
a day or two;
then weeks
of wet pavements
which ring like a bell
against traffic.
 
I walk to the shop
for a bottle of wine,
a carton of milk
and some chocolate.
the pavement is brittle,
the evening air
teeth. my hands
in my pockets
curl like crows
under wings against rain.

IT WAS ALL I EVER LIVED FOR

Back in the wilds of March 2019 I somehow
Thought a week without getting shit-faced in
A pub deserved a poem of its own but now,
Some five years later, I can’t even think about
The waste of all those years, hell it was more
Like decades, now without getting sick &
Most certainly not the hungover kind but
Then it was all I ever seemed to live for.

Stop

 
Elise always knows when I am drinking
because of redness in my cheeks,

the glaze in my eyes. After a New
Year’s party, I sleep on a rough

cotton couch a couple
hours before leaving. I do not lie

to the cop when he asks
if I have been drinking. He tells me to stop

at the next gas station to buy coffee.
How lucky I am to have this warning,

to not be tested. My life’s trajectory
at the mercy  of a strange man’s fingertips,

his tongue, the kind of night he is having.
I drive into the darkness, to the next

exit, where I wait for that same darkness
to pass, to turn the key into the ignition.


---

June, 2020


Standing in heat in the protest
masks preceding vax
      followed the chalk outline
to the school bell
ringing     I didn’t touch
the concrete     (fear)  
rough scrapes      toothaches    
edges of social  
-ization    of June   in June
whatever  time we made
work in the throngs
of a fervent following–
spit in the air
everywhere it
glistens in the grass


---

After High School, Ian Got Ripped

 
Soon after, he was arrested for fraud–
both surprises, though every day

he lugged a tuba down the long
green halls of high school. Ian,

who had no friends, lived in
the gym after graduation, smoking

weed to heavy metal tunes, tatting
up, bulking. Before that, though,

I was in the restroom with him
once when he picked up a rock

on the top of a urinal cake and–
to show that he could– swallowed it.

Rain Birds

Rain birds current
the heartline of your palms,
we tread with the river
to sleep in anointing oil,
the vial infuses perfume
into red linen flowers,
maidenhair ferns obscure
the glass surface you inspire,
we net across the water,
we read the undertow.

Suburban Outlaw (Mildly) Terrorizes the Block 

 
Suburban Outlaw occasionally toys
with the rules and conventionality
of civic life. Every few months or so, 
he employs a subtle sense of malice
and trickery, much like wily pistol-packing
highwaymen might have done years ago.  

Here is how his domestic desperado routine
works. Residents on the townhouse block know
gray trash bins get picked up every Wednesday, 
while blue recycle bins are restricted
to every other week. The schedule
is clearly spelled out on the City website.

No matter – busy, obedient, hardworking folk
remain so distracted by life’s uncertainties, 
they easily ignore the easy and undeniable. 

So, as dark approaches the night preceding
a non-recycle pick-up day, Suburban Outlaw
periodically rolls both gray and blue bins 
out to the curb in preparation. Everyone
up and down the street observes and responds
by doing the same, unable to remember
what occurred the previous week, unwilling
to tolerate the risk of being wrong, of being left
out, of missing an opportunity to discard soda
cans and a mounting inventory of Amazon boxes.  

Then, before sunrise the following day
he sneakily rolls his blue recycle bin back
into the garage, abandoning his neighbors,
who by afternoon’s end feel foolish upon
discovering their blue bin lids left untouched. 

At that time Suburban Outlaw will stand on
the balcony wearing a crooked, villainous grin,
a cold one in hand, and as the sun sets in the west,
cooly survey the colorful consequence
of his brigand ways, wistfully regretting
that in ancient days he may have shot up
a saloon or chased a sheriff out of town. 

Carpeting

“You didn’t you put the food away?”

Six bottles of Bud Light stand, empty soldiers, by the sink.

Don’t you hate that solider reference?

She’s laughing on the phone.

Sloppy Joes and creamed corn crusty on the stove.

Down the hallway it’s very smelly carpet time.

I turn on the lamp and

collapse in bed with a People magazine.

After reading about a woman who made it big designing strange hats

I watch her enter, bend over, and kiss me with Scope breath.

I’m going over there for a while, she says, I’m having fun.

We wave as she bumps into the doorjamb.

I stretch the muscles in each leg

and wonder about the carpet and just what that odor could be.

My Grief 

I never cared to die
while blue skies taunted
my grief while reading 
a book in spring about 
autumn leaves. It is not 
true. I did not house such
thoughts. In this city
it makes no sense. Maybe
in the mountains or near 
the sea. But never in this 
place I call home. If it 
pleases you, I could die 
in a dream. If you must 
know, I want to live, and 
I want to be loved; even 
if this love only lasts till 
spring, the mother of all 
seasons. I want to live. 
I want to scream. I want 
my grief to end in spring. 
For the first time in my life, 
I want to see the light. 
I want to make it mine.

Chronicle of a Dead Planet

a chronicle of Mars
baked into the dark side
of a crater
the size of Texas

statue of a centurion
guarding a dead
planet after millions
of years; nobody
told him the war
was over

listen to the news
and you soon
realize it’s easier
to sell doom
than hope and light

and Raquel Welch only shows
up in a fur
bikini once upon
the good
old days

--------------------------------------
Mars Is the New Mars

we can see by the light
of a setting sun
that point where the crater
meets the glare,
far end of a one point
perspective, a past
history that doesn’t end well

in some cinematic universe far,
far away a land exists
of destinies fulfilled without effort
or hardship or consequences,
and every flesh wound
heals before it began, every body
blow lands like a marshmallow,
every dead hero is resurrected
by a plot twist
at the end of the movie

here on dry land
we have handguns that shoot
real bullets to your brain
and sometimes they don’t kill
you but maybe worse you wake
up brain damaged and blind;

goodies and syringes and
hotties popping bottles
seem so good until
they go in the wrong way,
where rebates and refunds
and re-dos
lay far out of reach in
space
and time

“the grass was Lao and the road a disaster.” Tim Page

as when the doctor shined a penlight
in her, nobody’s-home-eyes, missing
the room inside, tripped out on acid,
paper peeling from the walls, melting
paisleys dissolving into blood puddles
stitched into a rug, a black hole dead
center taking it all in, the poster of
Vanessa Redgrave from Blow Up among
the last images to go, along with the mixed
doubles tennis playing mimes, made up
for a game of murder and clay court passion
like the suicide drivers in the open car
headed for a Mulholland Drive of the mind
where the dead wake up and go on living
lip synching Roy Orbison duende,
a senseless sudade in foreign tongues,
never quite right, everything funneling
deeper into the worst kind of darkness,
night driving blind, all the rules of the road
suspended except the ones that say, “Go
further into the tunnel that has no light at the end.”

DISTINCTIONS

I don’t know which paintings hanging in the halls
Of the museum in the park are priceless and which are
Worthless copies.
Oil on canvas, acrylic on wood.
I don’t know what keeps the driving rain from christening the
Valleys
Of a thirsty San Diego fall.
The dry land cracks beneath the flawless azure sky.
I don’t know the difference between the clock counting the
Seconds
In the armoire of your heart and the timer that ticks at the end of
The fuse.
Gunpowder on the secondhand.
Blood on the rope.