during my worst times
on the park benches
in the jails
or living with
******
I always had this certain
contentment-
I wouldn't call it
happiness-
it was more of an inner
balance
that settled for
whatever was occuring
and it helped in the
factories
and when relationships
went wrong
with the
girls.
it helped
through the
wars and the
hangovers
the backalley fights
the
hospitals.
to awaken in a cheap room
in a strange city and
pull up the shade-
this was the craziest kind of
contentment

and to walk across the floor
to an old dresser with a
cracked mirror-
see myself, ugly,
grinning at it all.
what matters most is
how well you
walk through the
fire.

the women of the past keep
phoning.
there was another yesterday
arrived from out of
state.
she wanted to see
me.
I told her
"no."

I don't want to see
them,
I won't see them.
it would be
awkward
gruesome and
useless.

I know some people who can
watch the same movie
more than
once.

not me.
once I know the
plot
once I know the
ending
whether it's happy or
unhappy or
just plain
dumb,
then

for me
that movie is
finished
forever
and that's why
I refuse
to let
any of my
old movies play
over and over again
for
years.

some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
twelve poems gone and I don't keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; its stifling:
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn't you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
next time take my left arm or a fifty
but not my poems:
I'm not Shakespeare
but sometime simply
there won't be any more, abstract or otherwise;
there'll always be mony and ****** and drunkards
down to the last bomb,
but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.

Go broken:
Succumb, surrender.
Who knows why you’re broken?
Maybe an accident
Slipped from clumsy, drunken hands
Maybe you were broken intentionally
only so one day you’d be fixed.
But none-the-less,
Go broken.

Your color is dull
and your shape asymmetrical.
You’re untouchable.
The clutch that dropped you into the tortuous waves of the night
trails blood down its fragile fingers
As they curse you for what you have done.

Go shattered:
Forget why; as she will when she finds you.
No one will see your story,
only your beauty
Once left shattered.

The light will reflect off your surface:
beautiful, translucent, and pastel.
Your color now sun kissed and weathered.
But the most beautiful of all is your touch.

When she finds you,
resting where the white crashing foam meets the dark hardened sand,
her finger can trace your once lethal edges
over and over.
She can seal her hand around you,
as she closes her eyes and breathes in the ocean air,
the sun kissing her pale face as it once kissed yours,
feeling only smoothness in that hand.

Can you feel the warmth,
where you were once cursed at and discarded?

Go:
Go to a new life
Where she can see your beauty
and feel your beauty.

Go:
And thank the sea as you go

Gravity pushes us down and together
But time's wicked ticking tears us apart
Away from our foolish dreams of forever
That echo the walls of my broken heart

I'm left helpless, restless, undone
Because no matter what I do
While the Earth may turn round the Sun
My world still revolves around you.

Broken.
Just a number in a long line of distractions from your monotonous existence.
Sleeping in separate beds, my ***!!
Lies.
Hurt.
I should be used to this by now.
Bring on the pain. It's the only relief to be felt.
Art of the skin speaks the beauty of the soul.
Just keep breathing.
The whole thing is one big illusion.
A black magic trick.
Your voodoo.
I'm done.