11/15/2015

it has been a while since
i've been to the wetland coppice
teetering close to the neck of
a somerset sourland hummock

soft rushes and pickerel ****,
wild lavender and marsh elder
a Canadian goose choking on a

birch branch
it died.
it has been a time since I've been there

timber rattler and weasel
playing in the grounsel
September,

like Wallace Stevens: lonely in
Jersey city.
November dead
cold bright annihilating days

i sometimes walk a mile
cutting across dead garden snakes
they sit in the living room, playing

the Nile is full of waste and bile
i wait alone by this little grove,
hoping that my fickleness of

Conversation topics
can help me now
but my mind, it raced

like a dead horse at a betting show
Sunday morning,
Saturday night really

I read Wallace Stevens in the field
And dream about jersey city

8/13/2014

"The cicada's dry monotony breaks over me.
The days are bright and free.
Then why did I cry today for an hour?

I stood under oak, while autumnal fog
eddied around my feet, waiting for the bus
with a dread that took my breath away.
I stood at the side of the road.
This summer- it was the only life I had."
Jane Kenyon

A Sourland night with some tylenol at my
side and a black shirt that smells like Pierre Cardin
doesn't sound half bad,
and if it does, let me know. Do you remember telling birds at 5 in the morning to shut the hell up?
That was june and time goes on. And now you flinch as if hit when you see the first gold leaf, huh?

The end of an era we could not say goodbye to came and it went. We sat sullied in our sunken brows like children who'd misbehaved and silently regretted. Our mouths
tasted of sunflower fields and henna birchs. You realize summer is over when you feel it was minutes, not hours that you killed off slowly.

Don't worry. Nothing Gold Can Stay, this time you can't stop the gold from staying, but the feeling of a hell hot afternoon layed out overwhelming like a blanket is gone.

1/29/2015
princeton thursday night
all out of coffee
and, sitting by wood slats of the
sad sunroom i
smile at a dead beetle

set the record down on
helen forrest and all she does it talk about
how she loves so madly

the sun sets on the west
sourland bramble downwards the cul-de-sac ridge
was in my line of sight long walks

but pulmonary bruises like the radiators
and that was in what? october? april?
no. april's too early

i close my eyes in bed and
i still hear that ****** song
enraptured i sink back and

i open again i open!
i can't afford to die or lose
same thing, just yet

i have dorms to sneak into and
cigarettes to put out,
more lifetime flatlines to complain about and

drain pipes to stand next to and
grass to sink into when it thaws and
unexpected phonecalls from past men
to receive.

month long in absentia you never called me first and now
i gotta go flip this record over, man.
stand up down the stairs off the bed
remind me not to blink for too long.