I’d think your eyelids would blister

from so many tears,

your wet cheeks unwalked-on

rainy sidewalks

in a sea-side city. They’re natural;

no need for cement

mixers.

You look intoxicating when you cry,

love.

No deadpan jokes can alleviate

that pressure. Just kiddy-chalk,

in pastel measures. Your sigh

devastates a world within me,

hurls twirling stars across my selfish

sadness,

my nervous twitch.

It’s because you’re it baby,

you’re it.

for sleep

You were so close to death that you prayed

for heaven to come down:

but you wanted sleep, to be buried

under a thousand grains of sand,

quieted by the falling-away of time.

(Real irony is always clever

but seldom sweet.)

You'd never be the same,

praying that prayer

for sleep, for

endless closed eyelids;

you were really waiting for winter

to end, for the sounds

in the walls to cease.

telling you telling myself

With so much brine

to swim through,

why would you

pursue this salt-cured

body? I've been pickled

for years before

you found me. Relax,

I tell myself.

I'm not the Dead Sea.

Just a tired young man

who smokes too much

chasing a lighter

state of being,

a young man from

far away who loves you,

and is fucked up anyway.

There's a line

for both of us,

we can do more than float.

tea for one

Put it in twelve/eight and

Jimmy leave it there, howl

a bit, black yankee lover you are

just show me, show me that lick

you keep licking, put it in

twelve/eight, keep it easy,

keep those blues howling all

night, the blues', blues, Jimmy

howl, howl, howl that swift-fingered

heart of yours, till it's just you,

the guitar, drums, and bass.

rent is due

Papers lie in little (fuck-off) piles

waiting on me ambivalently,

like old people playing chess

(or something else mind-using

that can be done dispassionately);

no. No. No. I won't look at them today:

not the doctor's bill for my summer's strep throat,

not the notice for the internet, electricity or other invisible things

I seem to need, or the dishes, greasy red,

bowls filled with grey bits of rancid rice and meat.

This is the loveliness my roommate keeps leaving for me -

and only me - to clean.

reductionist

I was thinking (not feeling)

all the ways iron

is cast and wrought,

bought and bound;

oh . . .

how

the Age of Industry

must've

glittered with its

cutting cold sounds . . .

maybe how

that Bit in paul d's mouth

must've been

more poisonous

than any green

moccasin's sting

or any whiteman's

naturally

cocksure fist

even mine . . . oh . . . oh.

we defy augury

"Not a whit, we defy augury. There is special providence in
the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to
come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the
readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is't
to leave betimes, let be."

- Shakespeare, from Hamlet 5.2.217-224