Cool Hand Luke has permafrost eyes
as he smirks down the fiftieth egg.

Lawrence doesn't mind that it hurts,
holds up a match and blows out the sun.

Frank Booth huffs his gas, "now it's dark,"
& new parents replace the old ones.

The lights come up, the professor
steps to the lecture square, underneath

the once-flickering wall's altar wing,
& gathers thoughts like garden stems.

Some of us were baptized into celluloid,
we opened our eyes and were submerged

into a breathless 100 minute night,
a wilderness of grayscale myth.

Charles Foster Kane dies today in Xanadu:
his life shuffled for us, as if it means something.

I am flying over Vietnam
watching night clouds slaughtered
by the sleek plane arm
with engine hands.

My book has become tedious,
my partner is sleeping,
so my thoughts spin awry,
a mad turnstile oiled with grief:

Where did my father go?
Where is his mind now?
& What about the curious pull
of the undertow in his soul?

These questions that have no answers
fall like rain into the night sea;
I, too, am part of the cloud division:
drifting along, severed into air.

Please tell me why the scotch
Swirling around the glass
Stokes the fires in my soul
As it swirls playfully along my tongue
To incite the words brushing against the smoke as it leaves my breath

Till the glass is empty
and fires go cold

This is for Liz, who once sat down with me
& spoke of terrible but necessary things.
Her eyes browsed me and I paled:
she locked our minds together
to make sure I understood
exactly what she meant.
Liz died last Saturday.
In our joint years of poetry
(filled with unexpected stings
that left our arms in gooseflesh braille
'til she digressed to dogs and leather)
she taught me this: that sorrows should
be shared - cultivate them, let them ferment -
so we could drink them down like Cabernet.

Bartender, bartender, tell me a tale
while you sell me a pint of whatever's on sale
-Traditional

Barflies stuck not in amber
but in soft varnish on pine,
steel pole legs scraping the planks:

men bluster in bleary candor
while women lay it on the line.
We at the bar give golden thanks

for this wet and flickering space,
tended by our good mistress
who heals most open wounds...

but not mine. With a tired grace
I slip outside, dissatisfied, listless
under the frozen starless dunes.

We knew him well before the fall -
before the nights when the only stars

were the dying ones whose darkling scrawls
slouched into the bedtime bar

to perish with a knowing wink,
smothered in an iceless drink;

before his slippery smiles
were filled with gravel,

before the many tired trials,
& clapping gavels;

we knew him well before the fall,
before he shook us off to crawl

into those tents of blue and gluey smoke
crowding every corner

with the lies he claimed were jokes.
We all felt like secret mourners

of the boy we knew so well -
or thought we did, before he fell.