We became friends later.
On that day we were
combatants.
Two kids trying to
prove their manhood.

I circled left, shot a quick
jab.
I missed and Doug laughed.
He hit me fast with a right.
Laughed again.

I circled right, this time my
jab landed.
There was a gush of
blood from his nose.
He wiped at it, and said,

My ******* sister hits
harder than that.
I hit him again.

I'll bet she doesn't hit
harder than that, I said.
You'd lose that bet, Doug said.

Mr Jester came running out of
his house.
You boys quit fighting and shake
hands right now...I want you to
say something nice about each other.
He motioned towards me.

Well, Sir, Doug here has a tough sister.
She hits harder than most boys,
at least that's what I heard.
Doug grinned.

Oh, a regular Marciano, huh Doug?

Oh yes, sir.
She can be a real mean ***** when she
wants to be.

Mr Jester said,
Hey, watch your language you
little degenerate.
Who do you think you are,
John Dillinger?
Doug muttered some
sort of apology.

Go on, the old man said, it's
your turn.
"Tommy boy here has a
great curve ball.
He got five strikeouts last week."

"Hey, that's great son, you gonna be
in the major leagues when you grow up?"
Yes, Sir, I said.

Someone was mowing their lawn, and
the smell of fresh-cut grass filled the air.
We were young, green, and tough.

"How about you son, do you want to play
in the big leagues too?"  Jester asked.
Doug grinned.
"No sir, baseball isn't my thing.
When I get older, I'd like to ***** one of
your daughters."

Doug took off running.
He ran track for the team.
100-yard dash if I remember right.
I could hear Mr. Jester just
barely over the lawn mower.
Come here you rotten little
*******.

When I was ten I stepped on a honey bee
resting in the gravel, it stung me and died

& in that moment I tried to bargain with death,
I said I will **** no more bees and in return

I too will not die. Death said nothing, of course,
he, or she, or it, was quiet as an elm or a shingle,

as the millionfold language of the grass.
I imagined assent but now, looking back,

I realize that nothing was finalized,
we never shook on the deal. No, the bee died

on my bare foot, defending itself against
a strange olive hide that blotted the sun.

Three and a half decades later I perch here
in my tower, my brain congested

with depressions, my heart a fallen fog,
my hands ache strangely and my legs tire -

perhaps the best I can manage is to further
the stoic philosophy of the slaughtered bee:

sometimes the best you can do is to slow
a shadow that's more real than the object.

The calliope plays
its jaunty tune.

A cow is on
fire. A drunken

entrepreneur shoots
an apple off the

head of a child.
A young woman

in the audience
is having a

****** fantasy.
A monkey juggles

beakers of volatile
chemicals. Soon this

carnival will be
bankrupt, but for

them another way of
life is unimaginable.

In Dublin in December I sat
on a shore bench in Sandymount

& watched thunderheads strut
on stork legs of raking rain while

bullish boats trundled through
with taut cheeks sobbed with rime.

My heart was full of weeks of doubt,
I'd flown in on a night plane

aching with the knowing
that something was badly turned,

distance could no longer be borne,
all the miles within and without.

We drank, coupled, and confessed
through long, long nights as outside

the high open window the stars
sloughed their waffling shine into

the many arms of the river, and gulls
eavesdropped on desperate sins.

By day she showed me her city
of castles and secret gardens,

elephant bones and electric trees,
& quietly urged me to join her.

As we crossed Beckett bridge
to seek troubled love on her couch

we pierced a cold and hanging fog,
prehaunted by the loss that followed.

Once upon a time, I scratched out
verses in dozens to a girl over the sea -
O, I was no naif, two divorces

had cooked me down to syrup,  
my heart was leather-withered,
wary of wonderlands and Technicolor.

Yet I held faith that love might
be the blossom and not the vine -
even as she closed her interior doors,

even as we came rapidly to zugzwang.
In a broken green betrayal
I watched Dix Pour Cent for hours,

tried to sell away the lonely murk,
trade inconstant moon for steady sun,
Akhenaten in a third-floor studio

for two and half years of sag and salt.
But as often happens time and chance
hewed new love and now I sit with her

in a tiny theater to see Romeo and Juliet;
Romeo just took four shots of rail whisky
to the delight of the wet blurry mouths

that roar from clay-thick shadows
beyond the clutch-cloth footlight fringe.
After the lovers die in stony Verona

we leave and somehow end up at Stan's,
a bricky subterrestrial parlor where
with cocktails we thresh from our heads

the melancholy of a troubled world:
sirens mourn the mauveness of evening
& clouds are killed, ripped to wisp.