The rain stops time tonight -
it halts in icy webs on glass.

All my friends have ditched;
I sit alone in a ***** tower,

the others look with pity
as I sip this cloudy beer.

I think about poetry:
a hundred years ago

I might have survived,
carried by some fortune,

but now I stare at the moon
hungrily, gently starving,

slavering for metaphor, but
nothing comes, nothing comes.

Rain freezes on the step.
The moon devours us;

my mind is a dead machine,
full of ice and grief and rust.

Fat flat building with slick shark skin
I've found myself under you again -

remember how I first strutted heedless
into your faux-stone lobby, head full

of myself? And how I left an hour later
with cold water where my heart was,

bolting from your thin-throated halls
to blow off work the rest of the day -

I toured the liquor ruins, saw a movie
in a shared oubliette as salt draped

over raked velvet, strolled a park
packed with straying rose slips,

heels hushed and stuck to diary pages,
unknown castles falling within me.

Black-hided commercial mid-rise,
your windows eat the morning sun

but you're powerless now. I walk
through the freeze of your face.

You’re never going to have the cake
Learn to like the taste of bread.

You’re never going to wear diamonds
Learn to appreciate cut glass.

You’re never going to hear applause
Learn to marvel at the stillness.

You’re never going to win the gold
Learn to admire the shine of copper.

You’re never going to be adored
Learn to love just being liked.

You’re never going to live forever
Learn to be your best today.
                 ljm

M. G.,

It was years ago in the A-frame,
beside a cold bachelor's lake

that was clogged with reflections
of raving burst-headed trees,

that we laughed as Jake threw up
the Genesee river in the midnight sink.

When you caught your breath
you told me how you had traveled,

how you'd found a woman and gone to her,
it was the most you'd ever shared with me.

But this letter cannot reach you, friend,
because Jake just told me that you died.

My head fills with the numberless times
I drove by your long-lawned house,

or knocked beers in a rampant yard
while fires fractured dull dark.

I consider that love is a terrible thing
when I see what it's done to my friends -

it didn't rise as sweet slow dough,
it wasn't a shyly signed valentine -

it was a Petri dish of troubled sleep
that bred malformed dreams;

it was a crocodile's jagged jaw-drag,
it was the dross of unwise prayers.

Well, hell: let this letter remind them all
of that barking laugh amid the stray pines

as Jake birthed a twilit river from his teeth.
Your Friend, Evan.

Lightning spit across the alloy face
of the dishwasher I was filling a half moment

before a high black throat unfastened
with a sunken bellow that scattered rain

like sodden hair along a sheer pane scalp.
Hell, a storm? On New Year's? What an insult -

because it's been a long year down
for the lonely and eroded angels, the poets

whose orchestras of synapses decay gently
into fresh stanzas. I don't know about you,

but my inbox was a chorus of No, No,
Not You, Never You. It ate me

inside out, but I pressed on in new poems,
both mine and yours - I stumbled blindly

into rooms full of your renewed voices -
reassuring me that silence is not the way.

These are not poems, you all told me -
they are beacons, telegrams, phone calls,

they are pleas, they are screams, they are alive
like the cursive lightning scrawl that paints

the kitchen and bids me stand up straight.
It's been a long year but I came here to say

my mouth is filled with thank you;
strange friends and colleagues, thank you.

To all of you, and your hard work this year.
Your poems were read, and remembered.
Thank you for all of it. It changed me,
for the better, and was appreciated.