sitting, two years later,
in the james center starbucks, i
am distracted by the business
which parades in suit, by
the slow, slow sound
of winter dying, its feeble thuds
keeping time with my own unarmed
chest. there is a meek half-light
outside the windowed-walls,
the sun un-warm & indecisive.
i am afforded a first-class view
of the parking garage,
the crimson-awninged atm,
the bundled cafe umbrellas.
i am waiting, brokenly:
for a car crash, for a lightning strike,
to see someone i recognize.
for you to catch hold
of my cheek and say, come,
let me take you home.
it is more limbo than
purgatory, the waiting;
there is no redemption at its end,
only the promise of a flatter
mattress and yellowed teeth.
as the poet said: there
is evening, there is morning,
and i think i loved you better
when we were
desperate. besides i
quit being a good catholic
years ago, now only
remember my rosary
when digging through
the jewelbox for a gold
chain you also didn’t give me,
also years ago.
This is kinda a re-make of a poem i did about two years ago, posted wayyy back here.
current
canal-edged bourbon
bar on a Tuesday closeted
in dark corners & acous-
tic dampened brick; i
sit by the windows & smile,
sip at the purple-black of un-
returning water, of dis-
inhibited bitterness.
exercise in Southern Gothic
train comes, its wrack
the undisguisably pickled
dregs of hope de-
composing, dreaming acidly
in blue glass, mason. so
much for bloated beginnings,
point-of-departure daggered
summer afternoons in the market
where souls are at auction as
they were lifetimes ago
and charlatans lien awned
forevers under skies that
darken and gradually un-
remember. she presses
thin dress over pale thigh, fights
wind-made wrack in torn fabric,
holds her voice white-knuckled:
what price would you pay
to drain the vinegar,
slough history, begin again?
When every bird cometh
For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.
–Geoffrey Chaucer, Parlement of Foules
This is not
a love poem.
Sirens
sound outside
my downtown window:
another broken
heart.
Street lights burn
into mid-February
dark, remember Indian
summer afternoons.
The sirens stop.
In the silence leftover,
your pulse, slowed.
Hope hides
breathing low & fast between
the river and the
dying with its secrets
freckled
into the skin
of bare city shoulders.
A soldier
makes his way
uphill from Main
Street station, red
blossoms
stark
against desert camo.
There is no
snow, today.
A good day
for wing-ed
homecomings,
if one hungers
for such things.
still, life
the city sleeps wrapped
in gray dawns and dreaming
of snow, a different place
from what it was
this time last month,
last week. we pretend
the rain falls only
for the soft echoes
on bedroom rooftops, and i
am reminded
of how slippery
januaries can be,
their hunger
that seeps
through exhaust-
stained glass and
seeds my fingertips
with a dark need
for some sort of
acceptance
in warm flesh
or willing words.
quarter past two
An owl-
eyed moon hangs
low like overripe fruit,
menacing the hot
horizon with her glowy
berth. Sweat
beads on the skin
of rooftops, perspiring
night-dreams of a dirt-nailed
city bent on creating
itself. The river drowses uneasily.
It smells
like jungle, and sex.
There is good mud here, and this
is no time for sleeping indoors.
Wild things
etch their names into wet
downtown cement, pile
old bricks into hillforts
from which they fling love
songs at one another
and think slyly of revolution.
Laughing, we
shake the moondust
out of wind-blown hair
and run to catch
the current,
kiss the river
goodnight.
in heat
sleepless.
stroke-handed. velvet.
to fall in love,
stickily.
lamplight drownings;
yellow fever dances.
proto-summer paints
sweat pearls down pinked
fore-heads, nascent
incandescence.
a River District swimming in
haze, dreaming in Decembers.
August-heavy; lethargic
swarm. enchantment.
nights with no fire-
works, only stars.
Shockoe
My world
is the sinuous
curve of freeway
that flies under
glowering heavens
while herons wade
in cold waters;
the sound and
the peril
of stiletto on
stone
and the scented rhythm
of catcalls from yellow doorways.
Graffitied desperation
and the thunder of trains that run
beside old brick
under new construction
in a city that when
pressed clings
to its past as to a mother’s loving hand
but with the next
breath
dismisses her like
dog piss
on the master’s second-
best rug….
[My words
smell
of rust
and river-
rot
imbibed
not through the pores
of cortex
where
moments
become
memories but
through the primordial
pocketwatch
in the back of my
skull
telling me
when
to
breathe.]
In this land
of frozen locks
and thawed oblivions
where treachery and tolerance
sidle arm-in-arm
down cobblestoned alleys,
My voice
whistles a freedom song
to the same soundtrack
you fucked your girlfriend to last night;
rising broken-winged through the
dead smokestacks
as you haunt the canals
searching for loose virtue
or lost inspiration,
it will find you
undone.
Needle-pushers and nutmeg-peddlers,
you have been warned.
Sitting
close-legged in the James Center Starbucks i
channel my inner alchemist writing
molecules into dreams
and posing painfully
as another drip in the puddle
of humankind, my best sad delusions
melting into visible air breathed
over a single blade of grass
crowned with a frozen halo,
a
yearning or a universe trapped
there in the mud beside a stream
that flows where herons stalk
lost summer and only the
indigent and the inspired
tread the river-paths. The truth is i
love this place not two skips
from hell’s half-acre but
sometimes, lost in the ebb and curve
between railroad tracks and
monogrammed yesterdays i
wonder if the whisper
of the Devil can still be heard
above the hum of the wi-fi;
if those who sojourn in the
Burnt District of this
numbed century still
feel its scars and its sunderings
although
some things it seems haven’t
changed at all: men
are still shaped
by the subjects they should have learned
in grammar school and poets
still prefer windows and the
real truth of it is, i guess,
that here where the trains slow
and the James flows on uncomplaining,
herons have always stalked
lost summers, and ice,
like mankind’s worst
delusions, will always
melt
one sad drop
at a time.
observed
herons stalk the edge of
civilization; the river
sings a marbled song
of fire and forgotten glory while
the sun casts about the rapids; geese
fish from the shallows, men
from the bridge. stones bake;
clouds come and go
like the old women searching
the banks for change and lost
youth while a train slows
with its mourner’s whistle and i
lean in on the verge of
wildness, watching.
Hollywood
We hike through a gray Indian
January scratched by skeleton
branches looking down
over the rocks where
a train tangles its way
between the river and the
dead.
