Love

To watch old
photographs
of hers
from when she was a baby

a round-cheeked girl
with large black eyes
that were
pure and curious

a healthy stubbornness
apparent between her brows

an innocence in her smile
that overwhelms you
with a feeling of melting

a woman now

a woman that
makes you proud

makes you want to try

a crooked smile,
a bigger curve
on one side
of her mouth

left dimple
deeper
than the right

soft, pale
thighs
half-covered
by your bed sheets

the warmth
of her ass
in winter

sleeping embraced
by each other

no such thing
as sadness
when she’s around

you cannot fail

anxiety—
a plague that plagues
others,
you’re not worried at all

sleeping embraced

her small hand
groping for yours
in the dark

her soft voice
in a whisper
saying
my love

your heart
could as well
be a frantic
bird singing
in the cage
of your chest

on the verge
at times
of proclaiming
absolute happiness

or immortality

sharing the intimate
darkness of each night

as the sun
comes up
each time

and goes
down again

as it will do

until the final day
they’ll dig that hole
for a body detached
by its soul

or whatever they call
this vessel
in you

that’s brimming over

with this feeling.




The mayhem of our youth


Sure it had its appeal—-
that time in life
you were so unbelievably young
you were almost
legitimately insane—-
and yes, looking back
at all that degeneration 
was a thing to behold—-
the nonchalant 
and mindless
booze consumption 
and drug intake and
the countless stumblings
from whore house
to whore house—-
and all those girls 
even wilder than you 
on your wildest—
naked, pale girls 
leaning over the plate
on the nightstand 
to take a good line
of Devils dandruff
as their breasts dangled
like firm but ripe fruits—
Yes, the frenzied
drug-fueled nights 
with the one on one fights 
that made you beat on your chest 
like a Gorilla
after it was done
or the group brawls
in slumping bars
under a shower of broken
beer shards—-
Yes, the dripping blood
on faces of people 
you had never meet before that night 
and the knife threats
the knife attacks 
the Molotov cocktails 
against riot police
because you’d read Bakunin 
back then 
and because you were angry 
and willing to hurt people—-
Yes, you were lucky to
get out of that youth 
scathed but very much alive
and truth be told and
because the older you get 
the less you bullshit yourself,
I never did have the stomach 
for all that 
and it never even came close
to filling that black hole 
at the front of my heart
that always remained and felt
infinitely empty
and there’s no more absolute
nothingness
than infinitely empty 
and no matter how many people
I pushed into that hole 
the love attempts 
the literature
the intoxication
the anger
the affection
it made no difference—-

But now,
much older than then,
I’ve stopped dropping 
things into that hole 

now I’ve learned to live with it.
Now, sometimes I’ll look 
deep into that hole—
and the deeper I look
the more probable it becomes
that it might not be so empty.

Now, I am much older.
The thought of that lost 
and misplaced youth 
sounds loud to my ears,
it sullies my peace of mind.

Now, I sit on my porch
and drink the first cold beer
in weeks 
because I promised myself I would
on the first day the temperature 
would reach thirty degrees
and I stare at the tree tops
swinging with the warm summer
breeze and notice the sound
of a particular twig 
that sounds like a creaky door 
with each mild gust 
and I think of my thirty three
days matured steaks 
marinating in my fridge
the whole day now 
and even though I’m hungry 
I light a cigarette and wait until
I’m famished 
and I look deep into that hole
at the front of my bloated heart
and realize 
I haven’t heard Edith Piaf
in a long time.

Garden Writing 

 
Hunger and whiskey drip from barren 
branches, become tangible textures of lost 
humanity.  I close my eyes and imagine 
myself a seedling, nubile and sun-washed, 
but I cannot complete the physical 
connection.  I remove my shoes,  
dig my toes deeper into mudding soil 
as I search for a magical conduit  
that might just cut a path to the past. 
Moments pass like pantomimed centuries. 
Still I am left empty and cold  
and clutching the extremities of solitude 
as if they were the last 
breadcrumbs falling from the hands of peace. 



A Mirror of Gold Against Your Soul 


proves that I am as good as you

that you are not master
of any self, including mine

shows a perfect portrait of emptiness

ripples with dark refractions of time
and loss
and a hatred that continues
to consume

shows that I have
outgrown the need to save
dying things

implies a life
beyond the suffocating embrace
of your eyes

To Those Who Are Perishing

A strange figure that has always been there but never seen appears just then, green bottle flies tangled in her long, witchy hair and patches of brown mold staining her forehead and chin. She knows our names, our secrets, knows our thoughts before we even think them. Those she has invisibly visited have perished miserably from Alzheimer’s and tumors and in shopper stampedes. The science of it can be debated later, when cold black stars pinwheel across the sky and the moon flies up like a clown shot out of a cannon. In the meantime, today’s rain falls on yesterday. We grow old surrounded by clocks.

Habitual

 
The hawk of my heart
Is on the hunt—
For hunger is my habit.
And love once sharp
Can soon grow blunt,
You silly, sexy rabbit.

Safe to Reason                                                                             

 

You emerge from a hole,
and your parents’ act of sex
will remain to be forgotten—

or shivered at in shame—
if you should happen
to consider your dark

creation, which is quotidian
for every creature, so shudder
not at previous passion,

in your year zero, of those
precedent genes that, twining,
sent you on your unchosen way

from that moist warm hollow
of meeting that offered egress,
a chance at light air, so accept

the inception while you wander
with their doubly helical strands
aware until you are drawn back

into the recess not for the squeamish.

 

The Beatnik Cowboy

 
vortices of spiraling memories
disperse within the time tunnels
of his mind, echoing back to him
as if his heart were an empty cavern
stretching from hell to eternity
more of his life ahead of him than behind
He goes amongst the throng of humanity
unseen...
his youthful face and age make him invisible
alone and craving the fuel of cognizant exchange
the fire of spirited conversation
alone...
his mind bleeds with the need of the human touch,
youth intoxicatingly dynamic
a parade of thorn-winged emotion
which plagues it's tortured flight
the fusion of inhibitions newly freed
with a stream of loveless anonymity
perpetually hollow within the wanting
ablaze with desires soon flown...
Oh proud display this fallen cause!

Update

Working in the background
like software downloading:
You look like a sack tied in
the middle, she sneers.
Your ass is as big as a barn.
Did her mother speak to her
this way? She seems to think
it’s useful, these relentless
corrections. She seems to
think it’s her duty, in case
you slipped for a minute,
caught someone pretty in
the mirror. She seems to think
it’s funny, because her eyes
twinkle, and she smiles, and
when your face crumples she
chides, I’m just kidding! Gaw!
As if it’s your moral failing that
you can’t take a joke. As if you
don’t understand what it means
to be a good mother, as you make
the mental note to never do this
to yours. She may think it’s ribbing,
but you’ve got the antidote. You won’t be
cribbing from her notes. Cycle broken.


frozen

we were barely in our double digits
that hot summer visiting our cousins
in what my mother derisively called
“the sticks,” everywhere dust and
parched grass, we kids chained
for an icy drink in a perspiring glass,
sweat a rivulet between my newly
mounded breasts, the adults forget
the painful awareness of our teen
bodies (“nothing I haven’t seen”
declares my dad), or they just don’t
care, when they insist we combat
the triple digits in the above-ground
pool, when of course no one has
thought ahead and had us bring
our suits, so topless, and all I see is
baby fat and nippled hills captured
by the callous photographer in stills,
embarrassment a different sort of chill

Journey to the Center of the Earth

She looked
like she
thought this
was her last
journey to
the center of
the earth
That nothing
was going
to move her
once she sat
down not even
a bomb
She hadn't
counted on
the floor
leaping up
to catch her
when she
fell

good things to own

 
a rust bucket flathead Ford and a well-honed block plane
a brass slide trombone in a case that smells like the jazz clubs used to smell

and four or five acres that don’t carry a mortgage
and a “free-to-a-good-home” sway back donkey
and a garage sale Stetson they let go for a dime

sometimes you know when something fits in your life
sometimes you don’t and it slips away before you do
like twenty-two months of sobriety

like the trench art cannon shell your granddad brought home from WWI
or the book of Walt Whitman poems he read and then read again
while the tremors of Parkinson’s ravaged his life

and then there’s the one thing you will never own but you wish you could
the thing Walt Whitman wove into those poems before he sent them into the world
the thing your granddad tried to give you, but you turned your back

Or Gram Parsons


The quickest way to lose me
is to write about
a finch, a wren, or a snowy egret.

I mean, for fuck’s sake.

Don’t write about a sparrow
and expect me to be happy.

If it has to be about a bird,
make it about a penguin
or a chicken
or David Crosby
with his variant spelling.
Vultures are sometimes fine,
but for the love of God,
read the room.

The quickest way to wither
is to write about flowers, any sort.

Clouds,
sunshine,
dewy grass.

Shoot the flowers
out of a cannon, maybe.

Let them knock a bird
right out of the sky.

Let a cat be waiting.

That’s the show.
That’s how it’s done.

Bye bye, birdie.

That’s when I’ll
be back.