not an actual poemHow long can I sit politely on their couch?
He gets me a drink. I get myself
slowly ruined by the shifting of her thighs
and the way she gently touches
what is hers - 
coffee table, fridge door,
her phone,
her walls,
his arm.
Broad-mouthed, slim-throated queen,
I miss the days
when neither of us
owned a thing
at all.    
architecturethere are poor draftsmen who distill sound
in forty-two proof and forty-nine hundred decibels
that will always sound like wingbeats – maybe heartbeats too
whirring around the scaffolding at three hundred feet
where the men hurl their lunchmeat over the steel beams
far beneath where the airplane will land one day
and they all chant together "THESE ARE THE DAYS
OH YES – THESE ARE THE DAYS" in a trembling baritone
fit through the skeleton of the city that shudders
like a violin shudders – all night long
if it has to – like one of the lonely women
shuddering in the pale light of her living room
cuddled up with her lung disease and the dog
that wanted to be in the circus but settled
for the couch like she settled into her armchair
one day and tried not to get up ever again
even when the ice cream man wanted to love her
and the mail man wanted to buy her a drink
or two when all she wanted was a forty-five
playing in the background like baptism water
or strawberry ice crea  lightrub your eyes,
find morning
in your hands
in the sugar
in your coffee, sprinkled,
missing
ego torn and locked in your hair
do not feed it,
it is already
obese, on the verge of dying
sleeping. I never closed my eyes,
wrapped in vertigo,
I fell towards you
not for.
our foreheads touched,
our minds opened and then it was just.
bright, orange,
sunrise <da:thumb id="468240150"/>

 

Mature Content

 
    is my verse alive in amherst?solitude bred ingenuity while safeguarding innocence

 <da:thumb id="487846226"/>  Bird's eyeAn orange cat
elegant and frank
with a slim Egyptian face
and pose
dabs at a wounded bird
in the grass.
I bend low
and wave him off.
With a gentle shove
he relents
showing me the crook
of his tail,
the Nile
in his walk.
The bird has
tiny beads of blood
between its wings
and under its beak
but the damage appears
to be minor.
Its eyes are wide and gleaming,
wild and deep and black.
They pitch something
inside me
off balance when I
look at them.  
Their blankness
is alive and unknowable,
as if the original darkness
of things lay in there,
the ancient darkness
for which the first light
was phenomenon.
I pick up the bird
and carry it off.
The cat licks
its paw
as if nothing
had happened.
     
 <da:thumb id="488845402"/>  the observant curator will notice...the observant curator will notice...
fertilizer falls
softly, mocking the rain, and
horses shuffle, shy
of what could kill
or sustain them
fertilizer rests
slowly dissolving, diffusing
into the earth
reminiscent
of how people curate
their lawns instead
of their families 
 <da:thumb id="482014058"/> <da:thumb id="457327081"/>
Heidelberg, 2011Heidelberg, in rosewater sun
your castle stones shimmer
sunburn, the pink kind
that wrinkles with time 
and turns to sepia.
I see autumn's shadow collide
past and present, when summer leaves
brown in fainter sunshine, curl and whisk away
to dust the crimson rooftops, the pebbled paths
that once inspired scholarly thoughts.
Under my feet they promise of snow
sleeting from the peaks
of gingerbread mountains, white
and sugary, clumped
and rolled by human hands.
I stumble,
and the earth crumbles
riverside down, the sunrise breathes
orange into dim sky 
and soft, I feel like a child
discovering how to walk
the first time, cleaving air and light
and stone below.     <da:thumb id="475382179"/>    

004.a flannel shirt
a cigarette
those downcast eyes
your damn regrets;
your skinny frame
the moleskin book
i really miss
your classic look.    
tuesday nightsthe full moon aches.
tuesday nights are always full of statues.
i wonder what it is to be dead. do you remember
the mother? the comedown from the other, write
as an animal, as a breathing piece of fabric--
the fabric felt in the lines.
you are the main event. hold still.
disengage. you are no mercury flower.
imagine imagine imagine. the airplane
coating of skin to bone. all flesh is concentrated
on your ankles.
so much has happened and will happen
before we can respond to this as an end. epicenter.
the spider-work of lines.
the gas station attendant wondering
if he did the right thing.
the sky holding its breath, beware, beware.
there are no other answers.
there is never anything but light,
and light on light never told us anything about what
we needed to know or be or wear or be wary of.
catch the clouds in your hands.
call me miracle, though i am not
a thing of wonder, i am still
miraculous.
i am still a being made of sticks.
watch me fall apart.
exhaustion makes the most beautiful s     
snippetsi. your hands are maps i wanna memorize inside and out
so i'll always know the way home.
ii. you're dead to me but i keep you alive
on paper and black text.
iii. i will weave stories out of the lines on your skin.
iv. joke's on you: i made my heart out of nothing but brittle plastic,
good luck finding a home in there.
v. empty like a hollowed out pumpkin.
except not as scary,
just more pathetic.
vi. i have secrets that no one knows that i'm scared i will end up
taking to the grave.
i don't know if my soul can handle all that baggage.
vii. i want to hold fire in the palm of my hand <da:thumb id="356347568"/>   


Basically I went through the first twenty-something pages of my favorites and sought out things I feel deserve more recognition.

Have fun.