I am mostly brown or black or reddish
An amalgamation
So when the May- sun magnifies off my sweat-beaded skin
It just makes my cheek- bones a bit pink

There are only so many ways one can be reminded they are still living
There are only so many phrases to let the audience (reader) know that I am wilting

To look to the future is more than just waiting on something speculative
If it is not a wasteland it is something so vague and sleek and mod that a person like me falls right off
Drifting between the fruitless present

And you walking down Nassau Street. The trees were blooming. I followed and snapped pictures with a camera.
Your hair was long and you were taller than most everyone else.

She Just didn't love the thought of hands felt on thoughts held old in time

And who knows the kind of feeling the heart wants

When the last words and last breath comes through heavy lungs

Eyes gathered up and to the left

They forget the world

But they are burning to talk and tell of what they saw
next

It's said if you get hit by a High -speed train
The body-bag needed to house your remains is no bigger than the one needed to fit your sandwich in at lunch

As I pass Brielle and South Amboy, Perth Amboy and Secaucus at 80 mph
I stare out into the swamps festering with industrial run-off
And the bombed- out buildings of once thriving towns
I get the feeling that I want to return to the earth

People tell me a lot of things
They don't ask much
They tell me I can be successful at anything I choose
They throw around words like charismatic and love and passionate
They tell me that I have the mark of Cain
They fail to realize
Charisma is for the talentless
Passion is blood on your hands at the end of the day
And love is blood and war and a dark place and feeling that keeps you in bed

Some call this depression
But to me it's  seeing my world as it is
Not as it might be

I tell anyone who will listen
I can't get over you
Guess I'm hoping for one final piece of sage advice
But the blind are the blind for some reason or other
And I can't look at myself in
The mirror these days

I've never made a habit of Walking on the tracks
It's not that I want to be in a zip-lock body-bag but I don't own a gun
I've smoked enough pot for five lifetimes
And I don't care that I have never seen the Pacific
Water is just water anyway Right?

Hope, at times for them
Is a once-great passenger ship
Breeched and sinking fast

This vessel is one that sees the Mississippi,
Floats on it for a brief period
But has no idea that it's being dominated
By the mighty, muddy beast

In these instances responsibility
Becomes government reports that are long,
Arduous and too thick to be stapled

"Many people will die." they say,
"200,000 people will be displaced."
This incites the mantra,
Home is where the water is not

The ship that was a home is made of steel
Neither black nor white
Its grey, so grey that it is without true color
It finds itself trapped in the womb of the dense, delta mud

The people;
The brave, the bold, the idiots, waiting for their ship to come
Sit on top of their roofs,
Now islands where they can soak up Indian Summer Sun
For the abandoned, perseverance is a suntan

"THE WATER IS RISING PLEAS…"

Words spray-painted white on black shingles
The rescuers, government, American people
Are suddenly illiterate

Federal law states:
Energy (money) cannot be created
Nor destroyed
But the ship is gone,
The people are in watery graves
The City is a large crescent with greedy bites taken out of it

6 years later the laws of the universe are disbanded
Ferrel dogs rule the day
And love is never having to say you care

I woke up to you buzzing about the flowers today
I guess I won't see you again till' April or even May

I hope you make it
I hope you'll know
To show up again
When the flowers start to grow

Maybe when the lilacs bloom again
You'll be working in the garden by the gate
Maybe not you,
Something like you, reincarnate

All this worry and indecision
Must show you that I don't know
up from down
Nor the changing of seasons

People tell me  
I came pretty close to dying

Now I just sit and think about why I'm
alive anyway

I can't think of a thing to do during the day
but then again maybe I'm not trying

I've been seeing time as
A strange, madras garment
Memories, strewn together in a sloppy, random, make-shift way

At their most detailed
They are incidents given a slot on the
nightly news
But we can never be there again
whether we are the ones falling from the burning building,
being interviewed about it
or glued to the couch watching

Everything, just snippets on the cutting- room floor,
Melting frost on a window
"I love you" written in the middle
Something overheard in a smokers' annex
A person you bump into on the L
That sweater you had to have but lost at the 92nd Street Y
A flash in a pan
A view from the top

Our lives are abridged versions of some greater path, that only those who walk truly upright are unlucky enough to perceive

She only calls because we are both night owls

S h e only calls when she's alone and feeling shallow

She never calls
Writes me every once in a while
"I'm gonna wander
I'm asking you to follow…"

One morning I'll wake and I won't feel it anymore

One morning
You'll wake early, 4am,
Rub the sleep out of your eyes
and see things a new way

You will then:
1. Shower
2. Make toast
3. Pack everything you can fit into your Mazda
4. Take the scenic route to 95 North
5. Head (anywhere)home?

   You almost hit him as you back out of your parking space
    He tells you that you are a light in the dark  
    It's taken 24 years but you finally let your guard down

By 10am he's in the midst of most of the unpacking while you play with his dog, Ringo

            One morning I'll know your not leaving the Sunshine State
             I'll wake a bit too early that morning and the feeling will be gone

Fear and Loathing in Ocean City

Everyday that goes by
Our bond becomes little more than a time of day,
Dust on a window sill,
A lightning bug in a mason jar

I know that nothing can be permanent
Change cannot scare a man that has no constant
But recently the thought occurred to me that you keep going about your business
When the clock strikes that hour,
That you brush the thought of me aside as if cleaning me out,
That you are glad that light in the jar has gone dim

So I find myself waiting on you like a train that will never come
And I ask about you now and again
How are you? Are you happy? Do you have a new light?
At this point I've realized I could say anything and you'd pay me no mind
People tell me that perhaps you can't deal with the thought of me emotionally
That I hurt you
Cut you and whenever I open my mouth I'm pouring salt into to a cavernous wound

The other day a close friend told me something different
She doesn't respond to you because she doesn't care about you. Move on

You've gone from crutch
to love
to desire
to memory

She doesn't care. Move on

That's a change that would put fear into even the most roving of nomads

If I never were to see you again
You'd join an ever- growing line of women
Who tell themselves they never heard my name before

Women I gave a piece of myself to
A kiss on the forehead and spine
A squeeze of the hand
A look that says "I only feel safe in my own skin, when yours is touching mine."

Maybe those looks are the problem
Maybe the kisses are smothering
I might be throwing up red flags to everyone

   Swap spit with him and he will be upside down in love with you
   Swap any other body-fluid and you might have to change your Locks
                            Phone number
                                    Point of view
But it's not that
I never set out to ruin anyone's day
Or scare them into thinking i'm Patrick Bateman

It's just when I share these looks, kisses, fluids
More often than not, even if it was some kind of
Mistake amongst random strangers/lovers
I'm giving a piece of me to have
Marked FRAGILE: THIS END UP

Label me transparent and then see right through me
When I find myself giving away chunks of my person
I can't seem to tell where love and blood
Begins
and
Ends.

Casey and I look out over water
Clear and black as oil

The beach is narrow and flooded
On one side by high- tide
On the other with happy people

The sky is alive with a swollen, blood-orange- for- a- moon
Ready to burst over the ocean
There are fireworks anywhere you turn
To the South, over the water, rogue firecrackers on beach
and bursts of them above Atlantic City
Which meld with the casinos to form a near- solid pulse of light

"How can things be any better than this?"  Casey asks

My memory wanders out onto the sable, rolling  surf



I Think of the taste of salt on your skin


The wave your hair would get
When dried in the sun after you swam



How you woke in a sweat, rambling about collecting sea shells
That night you came to care for me a year ago




A cherry bomb nearly explodes at my feet
A few snickers from some small kids wearing stars and stripes
I look at Casey's face
Contorted and animated
By the flashes of the fireworks

"It couldn't get better. You're right."

I strip down piece by piece to my shorts
I ask Alex to hold my valuables (gold watch, cellular matrix, gum)
                 Run in the water and think about the concept of value
                                                And about mistakes

I don't have it in me to be your friend
because losing a friend is worse than just someone in the back seat of a cab or sprawled out on a towel on the beach at night

besides, why wouldn't you leave? Go to London with her, with him, with her, with them

You and him and her and they and they tell me to have goals. You ask about dreams.
I seldom get asked questions
"Im paralyzed by everything that I touch or that touches me."
I tell everyone else I want to be in the "non-profit sector"

I think about renting  a small room.
Working a night shift or not working.
Watching sun pour in the window with a saffron glow
Watering the plants on my small sill(s) to help them grow.

I rarely think much at all

I wasn't wrong the other night, to say, that you always fuck me over.

You weren't off-base to say I'll never be happy

"We work with the substantial,
but the emptiness is what we use."


If all things were equal it plays out like this:

A rainy day and we're at the Rose Garden
Your father bought the seats. He enjoys that I like sports so much,
Takes him back to a simpler time when he played in a gym similar to this
Where he met your mother
You're in black and it has nothing
to do with the team colors
You say it's a phase and I believe it

We scale Nanda Devi and you look the part of the mountain's name
You look the way you did on the afternoon I met you.
I wonder where the levee is this time
Above the clouds we are naked to the sun and the sky,
naked and raw to each other
and it feels whole and honest

Feverish night in a dive bar in La Paz
there are skulls on the wall
I think to what end
Men and women crowd the floor
The band is hitting its stride after a marathon set  
We dance until we are both in many different places
Some of which involve the person we are dancing with
Sometimes we are alone in front of a mirror
I've never had to help you stand at the end of the night
You never have to ask me to go outside

Intertwined tightly on a twin bed, maybe for the night
A train eats up track in the distance.
We remember now when we shared a room.
(Tops of two bunk-beds, as if lying on two different shores)
Arms around you and I forget the concept of possession

Steady rains come down today
It will make everything grow
They say
Inside I'm feeling shrunken and with thirst
Who is they anyway?

I want to get outside
Passed the school-girls playing footy
I wish I was knocking it around
In a driving rain somewhere

I don't leave because I'm afraid of the world
Afraid to see me this way

I'm no longer a cog
I'm a plant
I watch and I wait  
For what?
How can we ever know?
I take in just enough. I give out just as much.
When people I live with come back into our space
They are met with a hot meal

This much I can do

When I View myself
I'm not sure if I've changed  more in the fact that I'm like a child inside now
or that I'm starting to look like an older man
or both

I feel different but not quiet enough
Like dough not fully baked
Perhaps I've been in the oven too long though

I feel scared and scarred in a way I never thought possible even in dreams

And then I think of the tree in Brooklyn and how it stands
but stands alone

I know all of this is nothing
All of it esoteric and dramatic because
I breath air and eat,
Bask in the glow of the sun
And pollinate sometimes

Steady rains come down today
It will make everything grow they say

Aloft a Country Hill II


If I should meet you aloft a country hill
I'll build a barn
The field you can till

If you'd care to stay
There will be a place on the porch
Next to mine

We can walk to the pond
Through the brier
Past the pines

To the west, hike the mountains with me
and enjoy the view from the peaks
I know you
You know me
Though at this point, we hardly speak

Explore with me our shared land
We can do it together
Clasping our Earth -soiled hands

I look at pictures of you now living thegoodlife
It's not beyond me to say "I remember when we…"
But specifics, like the eroding shores of my home- town have been muddled
to bits and pieces of a kiss, a park, a cut on the palm

I guess I want to check in to know that I can still be 19
and love-sick to the point of death again

I want you to be a voice in the onyx night
When I'm drunk beyond belief and I need something, anything
On the other end of the fiber-optic cable
In that sense you could be any number of people
Saying any number of things
In that sense we are all too detached

In my head though you'd cross whatever rogue obstacle  
of nature or nurture, time and space
That I dream up
I'd awake to you in a nondescript white room
You'd be holding orchids and all the cards
Ripples that could hardly be called waves would be lapping up on the
Beaches outside the window
I'd laugh out of feeling overwhelmed
You and I would go about making love and memories that we'd both forget

We must stand firm as rock in the sea
We must bend like winds through grass
In this way we are strong and weak to last

Inevitably, the winds blow stronger still
And greater waves will crash
In this way all things must pass

Antares,
Mirra,
Octans
Sun

Form into
shapes
so very beautiful
that it makes me stare in a way that I know I am star

Parts of me burning hot and bright
Parts of me fading away





⁃ QΩ

I.      I had once thought and so there for told you
that action is more important
than thought
So here I am writing my heart

II.    You say you like
My words
I say that everything I want
I turn into phantoms

        At days end for you, I am striving to be a rock, one that you
        Might hold onto in rough waters
and yet,
I am floating
in my own great, salty sea

III. I'll dream that we take
a long weekend in the city
it's raining
and it seems as though
the whole East Side
May float away
We order room service
and we intertwine
and it feels like the bond of
root in earth
of tide to beach
as atom to atom
as eve to adam
and we fall asleep
Things are quiet
You no longer bare that weight
on your narrow shoulders
My passed has passed
We fall in love and into sleep
and we do not
sleep to dream
any longer
We are living one

I see you from across the room.
It’s impossible not to,
I have to look through you,
To see out the window
You don’t look as good tonight,
As his words might lead us to believe.
Good enough for him.
Good enough to write about.

He salivates over you,
Like I might over a steak.
Like you are over the poem he reads.

I may have lost you over this one.
Because he is tender.
Because he wrote one good poem.
Because he might kiss the same way he fucks.
Fuck the same way he would,

Put his thinly pursed lips,
On the curve of your neck.
But he wouldn’t appreciate your neck.
Like
I do.

He might not be spitty
Chapped from years of rejection.
I stare at your neck
I’m sorry if I stare.
I need to see out the window,
During this three hour class,
To know the world is still there.

He doesn’t know your feet.
And if he did fuck you,
With your socks on or off.
He never felt the abrasion,
Of your well-earned calluses.
You always feel the scruff of my chin,
On your neck.
The neck he will never know.

Fuck me on my bed.
Bleed on my hard-wood floor.
Let’s get out of this place,
This three-room mansion.
We’re either better than this, or,
I am delusional.