Red lucent smears
of black bird night
on flat water shine,
everything doubled
by the canal.

Sleep in beer,
old gold light
played over pine
& I'm troubled
by old rationales.

An image appears:
the same sleight
of heart, same shrine
made of rubble,
same blinded chorale.

My heart casts
a shadow
that takes
your form:
How can I
resist?

I'm hanging above
a checkered floor,
Lucy's on the other side
singing La Vie En Rose.

I wonder for a moment
if I could love you
into loving me,
but let's face it:

it's never worked before.
When she hits Night Shift
and I think how the lines
knock me out one by one

I just let go.
I shift against the bar
and serve as
my own self-prophet:

"I'll tell you when
I'm dying of something"

You are somewhere between
my unhurried steps and
the unhurried stars that
break free and easy from
the branch of rain that
hides half the world.

You are something between
the wild words of Yeats and
the wild words of your own,
handed to me across
the four hour sea,
full of firsts.

In high school
I met you,
you belonged
to my sister's circle

to the fresh night
to the scent of a book
open golden spine
in a vanishing

bookstore.
These impressions
of you were right:
You told me later

of your pride
in breaking
into the play
despite the crossed

arms of the drama
clique, scorning
you, jealous.
& you started

a coffee shop
to fill the gap
& cure the smallness
of a small town

that struggled
to hold you.
You were one
of those I knew

would be leaving
soon. Too clever
by half,
already in the world,

already aching,
a blind seed
in a paper garden.
You got punched

in the gut
by the burned out
girl, initiating you
into something

nameless.
Sliding out
of the house
after hours

to see the boy
under moon -
No, to see
the black days band

& float above
all the hands,
some touch you
as a woman,

& it was in this
awareness
that I met you
in the land

of dust jackets.
My curiosity
was sharp
as a wasp's song:

you were
a walking yes;
you told me
about Anna's

bonfire flicking
your face
as you cross
the quiet fields

littered with love
& you wrapped
in sky until
the girls went hunting.

How you pierced
yourself at
that festival but
I suspect

you pierced yourself
in others ways too -
you were so aware,
looking

for affirmation
for connection,
even with the teal
pager you kept

in pocket and
would then
plug in your
secret phone

just for the call.
You challenged
it all,
rebel

determined
to be yourself,
acute push
against the bonds

of salted adolescence
of a Persian family
of being a woman

in a world
that tried to
fold that
against you.

You told me
all of this.
I met you then
and never

quite let go
even in the years
that moved
like free water

between us.
You came back
& my old
school thoughts

drifted out
of my mouth.
You gave me
memories

that I engrave
here. This is
all you.
It's you.

This path
from Petworth
to the drowsy metro
is a bite of sun
across cherry branch
into the water head.

Greenleaf ways
& the grass throw
of the hum rails
cross the lefting
memory of a ride
in a salt shadow.

Saturday's breath
is sold to the hill
& in return
I get to keep
the sweet javelin
of her thought.

I post a warning,
old friend:
I feel violently
about everything
you remember.

Like when
American iron
thrummed the air
all the way down
to Richmond.

Your future wife
had uneven floors.
I said hello
& was defined by it,
I was just
hello forever.

Peeling paint
rubbed off
on my fingers
as you two
went up
the braid of stair.

You in your
old shirt,
while I stood
unsteady,
filled with
the glassy venom
of cheap gin.

Glowing metal
is taken directly
from a forge
and thrown
into a sea.
The blue
steaming
salt-hiss:
her eye.

What now?
Even the doves
flocking at
the window
chide me
as I weep
for the six
week anchor
inside me.

I will write about it,
someday. Today,
though, my life
huddles under
a blue raincoat.
Someday I will
tell it all, really.
See, the problem
is that I have
given away
all my secrets,
but not to you.

The steeple tree is always falling
today in the wood your hand
the flower walk and the
long east of it, the last one
Trish the bar four pints
distress bit lip call
Yes, I know it's, Yes
taffy-pink sky, orange stripe
leaning up, it stutters
hers, the place is, evenfall
& the bird-perch pole
wipe the hair slowly across
bare and my skin a garment
No, it's ok, I'm ok
a tightness gathering
"heaven blotted region."

16 miles and change,
26,000 steps
end with the ten
to the absinthe bottle
and back to bed,
dizzy with heartbreak.

I spent years
trying to change,
but I am more myself
than ever before.
The truth slips
over my neck.
My eye is dark.
Absinthe vanishes
from the glass
smooth as vapor.

She invited
my deepest hurts
so I gave them
in cries that
sunk into her
shoulder blade,
more than I've
given to anyone.

Time is a broken floe,
drifting and cold.
I am more myself
than ever before.
I wish I wasn't,
Oh god I wish
I wasn't.

Did she end it?
As I'm thinking,
a weight
of night
slips into me.

I don't know
where I stand,
exactly, but
at least
I don't leave

wanting to drink
this old grief
in gulps that
leave no room
for air,

like those
other times.
No one answers
my texts.
What did

those words mean?
The driver
talks on
about the night,
but has no idea

that I'm in
his backseat
eating the night
and dying.
Yes I know

I'm difficult,
is that what
happened?
Is that
what happened?

Saturday night's
rain down
the glass
reminds me of
when the sky
tipped
& beaded
on my face
in the spare
maple as spring
came on.

I laughed
& shook the shine
from my hair
as my fingers
gestured water
into the hillside
streeted
with roots.

I found the road
as the dusk
whistled
& followed it
back to the *****
where headlights
kicked against
the first pierce
of stars.

The rain sat
on the ruddy brick
& glowered.
I sailed
over lawns
black with dousing
& listened
to the drop
and lilt.

The night
closed and
my tears
floated the dark.

My body curled away
in betrayal,
unwilling to meet you,
and I hated it.

Anxiety rose
inside me
like an electric hum.
My face was a shine,
a gloss, a smear
that hovered.

Please,
look past
the beating blood.
This was never me.

It's around noon
& snow softens
to white puddles
in the street.

I'm standing
at 7th and Penn
& to the south
is a memory,
just a shape
in the air,
bent by a tree,
a little car,
a piece of lawn.

To the north is
what they now call
Chinatown,
where spelling
"*******" in
Chinese characters
is enough
to qualify.

There's no gloss
on the water.
Winter wets
my feet
in gray laps.
I still have
errands to do.

Sheets of fog
scarve the trees
& within
the rain hiss
the dawn
moves ahead.
Apartment buildings
wake on
Connecticut Ave,
& in the valley
an apparition
drapes the forks.

I'm alone after
another breakup
& it's starting
to weigh.
I tell myself
that it's all
in the trying,
but we all
know that lie.

******* it,
just let the fog collapse
back into the grass,
it's tried long enough
to be a cloud.

I remember you
& that rebel C
of blonde hair
by your ear.

You let me
tuck it back,
even after you knew
I liked you.

You were fourteen
& your world
was engraved
in italics.

When I cut myself
for reasons
I couldn't speak to,
you understood.

We were exiles -
but I always had
the impression
you found me

too safe to date.
Oh, how you were wrong -
an irony, for
you spared yourself

the wild hurt
of my terrible soul,
& the wrecked self
I gave so many others,

for when I said
"I love you,"
I always meant
something else entirely.

I started thinking back on you
as early as college,
glassy well of gin
weeping for me in my hand.

Years after that,
my brakeless bicycle
invited me into a bath of sun
& you were waiting there

as a thought.
I remember
being so divided by you.
My longings

were only ever half
about the blue
of your eye,
& that blonde C

I turned it back so I could
touch you by the ear -
a gesture you always allowed.
Mercy? Desire?

I never knew.
The other half was new,
a movement inside me,
learning how

to be in love,
a fourteen-year-old's
grand, hopeless romance.
I was reminded of this

that July 4th a decade ago
when I saw you here
in my city,
with your husband.

You still held
skeleton keys
that opened
my older locks.

Your intelligence
canted over me
& erased
almost fifteen years

& my chest was smoke
& my skin was a sky
& just as before, half was love
& half was not.

Slouch the rounds
of doctor
and therapist,
hands on my knees
in waiting room
chairs. My eyes
have trouble
meeting their eyes
and I become
an expert
in rugs and corners,
in traffic patterns.

A new drug comes,
and I take it
like communion,
holy water
from the tap,
wafer in
a blister pack.
It takes a week
to crenelate
the blood, until
the smoking mirror
in my mind
is cleared.
I exorcise
the patterns
of night thought
with bell book
and candle
that come
thirty to a bottle.

Every night
St George and
his red cross flag
wields a lance
of lithium salt
against a
perpetual shadow,
a piece of my brain
that flickers
and hisses
like the dead
channels that lay
between the shows
on my childhood
television.

I didn't smoke
but she did.
The orange glow
of the orphan
cigarette in the
ashtray grave
was a neat
counterpoint
to a light
greening rain
that lashed
at the window
in the coffee afternoon.

The moon rose
like ice in the spoon.

I laughed with her
& ate
a throw of sun.
Then I didn't eat
at all,
& grief-starved madly,
rattling the flocks
of my ribs.
I was a charismatic
wreck, secrets
blooming
everywhere,
like stalks
of foxglove.
I'd give you
a blossom
to taste
at your leisure,
but it would
stop your heart.

A child's recipe:
two crossed sticks
and yarn
to bind them
hung in the window
to watch
indolently
our blind dreams.

I couldn't have
guessed I would
keep making these,
not with yarn
but barbed wire.
Not with twigs
but bones.
No dreams
but ghosts
that pile up
like snow drifts
against the window.

Hold a name in the air
with the mouth’s moving shadow,
blotting hush clotted there.
Hold a name in the air
it unravels like prayer,
coring the marrow.
Hold a name in the air,
with the mouth’s moving shadow.

Earhart is static.
In Pacific attics,
searchers hunt smoke,
fold maps, pragmatic.
But the search for fires stoked
with brush is done. She provoked
the upper angels unprepared,
and was broken.
It’s so clear, all the air
over this sea: no twist or glare
blots the view for miles,
though magnetic snares
****** with fields of smiles
the wayward compass, routes
drift from proscribed aisles.
Did she ditch in the blue mute
expanse, flare's salute
a last hope to unwind miles?
Planes get drawn back. It's moot.

As Jack wipes blade against
Black butcher's bib,
Calm as clouds, London lies,
Dark sloe.
Extracted so easily, her heart’s
Firm in its new wax paper square,
Growing cooler by gradients,
Hardly weighing a pound, nestled
Inside his pocket as carefully as a wallet.
Jostled in courtyard, just
Knowing what they brush gives him
Little fevers that don’t stop burning.
Mary, Black Mary,
Nothing could have stopped him
Once he turned his mind to you, your
Painted paper skin, black pulp mouth
Quiet, and ***** hair rustling,
Rusting ginger to burned blond.
Saucy Jack sends his cards,
Then goes out and larks
Under a moon greasy as a kidney;
Violence foams from his lips
Where no one saw it before or
eXpected it. Imagine calming
Yourself as he does: surgical
Zeal transformed into the most banal hello.

I'm trying to tell you
about the life I spent
on the white elm
pin oak hill,
& about all
the manifold
pains there:
a child's mouth
******* tight
from the inside;
& from the outside,
nailed shut.
A death's place,
a Luxor or Karnak -
where the gods
were stony,
& answered
no prayers,
& where
I segregated
my emotions
into neat,
sealed containers,
for some
later life
to come.

Oh, it wasn't
all terrible:
I learned to
drink young,
& the yellow
night was full
of the river
at high water
mark, and I
looked at the stars
through the
bottoms
of bottles.
I found Jesus
at the side
of the road
& drank
through him too.
The blue light
of morning
came day
after day -
why should
it ever end? -
over the
funereal pin oak
& the sad-winged elm
& the tomb-moss
that settled
over my mouth
& my name.

The sun was
merely a function,
& days just
happened to me
& every bad break
confirmed me
as less than
the barest
crooked twig
broken in the yard.

It took years
to turn that back,
to spit away
the wavering blood
that filled my mouth.
It took longer still
to walk out
into my memory
of the green
light night yard
& recover that twig.
That's what
I'm trying to tell you.

"All fleshe is grasse" -
In danger of the mow,
we go to bed,
fight with touch
the shortness of life.
Death’s repeal is ***.

Economy dusk
of idled exhaust
& worn brick street -
Boston's signature
scrawled with a river.

Traffic's tusk
thru Copley frost -
Pru's moon's fleet
over Boylston ligature.
Wind shaves with a shiver.

Shavings of cloud
drop like cut hair
and brush my face.

Snow is plowed,
the street is flayed
and thrown with salt.

District sleet is like lace,
a wet veil, a noose,
more not there than there.

There's a grave in the air,
it's filled with my father.
My heart turns to water,

it just breaks loose -
it's nobody's fault.

Out beyond the chilling rain
that crawls along the window pane
you arrive into this city.

I sip coffee and calmly wait,
watch the glimmer of your plane,
out beyond the chilling rain.

The heavy clouds are strangely straight,
and through their splitting throat's refrain
you arrive into this city.

From my body's thin estate,
black capes of breath emerge and strain,
out beyond the chilling rain,

to gather by the open gate
where with your bright campaign
you arrive into this city.

The dawn seems oddly late,
but I know that in this hour's strain,
out beyond the chilling rain,
you arrive into this city.

I was speaking
the words
that divorced her
sometime long ago.
The words
were less
than air,
& multiplied
like bacteria.

Some version
of them happened
again in a
cell phone
& again,
years later,
in another mouth,
while I watched
& again, again
came the words.

I gave them
my absence
too many times.
Now I sit alone
with a Scotch
on the rocks
inviting
the repetitive eagle.

Whisky bottle's a wishing well,
but wishes aren't free;
whisky bottle's a wishing well,
but wishes aren't free;
when I drink from the bottle
the bottle drinks from me.

I drink down to the bottom,
there's nowhere else to go;
I drink down to the bottom,
there's nowhere else to go;
I know there's no way to win
but I can try losing slow.

Whisky bottle's a wishing well,
but wishes aren't free;
whisky bottle's a wishing well,
but wishes aren't free;
when I drink from the bottle
the bottle drinks from me.

It's snowing
tonight,
and I think
******* Dad,
when Maryland
beats Indiana
and I move
to text him.

He's beyond
snow now.
So what do I do
with these
unbearable photos
he took of me
standing alone
in the withered sun
on monumental trains,
I was six or seven,
out by the
rusting roundhouse
in Brunswick?

It's been snowing
for hours
& I carve
a footpath
out to the
unplowed street
to watch the
shining gray
banks under
the amber light.

There is no
route to carve
through this silence.
My father
was built
from ghost towns,
from Manzanar,
from the endless
pine-dark
of Idaho's
rivered night,
from all the
unmapped places,
he grew complete
in himself.

And even now
as I watch
the snow slant
and stumble
I am left behind
as his son
apart from him
& without.

The snow dives
into the
night blankness
& I wonder
if I had died
first, cutting
short this reckless
careless crooked
sprawl, would he
be writing here?

The smeared
gray glow
of the screen
across his hands,
the fat flake
snow rising
like dough
beneath the windows?

There were
those thickets
of flat
graying trees
and a frozen
skin of lake
out by the
hunched rink
behind Georgian Woods
the terrace apartments
where Dad lived
after he left
the family.

Left to my
own devices
while Dad
delved in books
I slipped out
the sliding door
through
the frost-grass
and the
snow branch gap
into the
unfolding stillness
of the drowsing park.
Sometimes
my sister
was there
with me
in the woods,
our play
always some form
of running away.

In the early
years Dad
smoked a pipe
his thick
blue rug scented
with Captain Black
**** tobacco,
the white tin
with the rigged
ship logo.
The humming silo
of the air purifier
Dad's concession
to my convulsing
asthmatic chest,
close-gathered lung

like the branch bark
that scraped
my lip
as I ran in
the park wood,
blood slipping
across my face
and down
into the ache.

On my eleventh birthday
Dad gave me this book -
The Eyes of the Killer Robot.
Inside the peach cover was
gothic baseball,
malevolent wizardry,
small breath horror, and
magic, cut with 1950s science.

In the book a madman
learns how to extract our eyes
and uses them to power
an evil golem ace.

This morning, twenty-seven years later,
in the pre-Christmas rain
that pools black in the brick
I suddenly wondered
if Dad with his incurable
glaucoma his eye drops
and surgeries, realized he'd given me
a book about the fears of stolen eyesight.

And the son came to know
what the father knew:
the terrible softness
of a trembling eye
under the blooming
steel of the speculum.

Open eyes and rise,
lope to the bath,
salt meridians on cheeks,
third day this December,
though no dreaming cries
whose bleach-paths
waken one weak
are remembered;
the night-face dries
and the aftermath
is grief's white speech,
a scrawl in slumber,
unmapped marks
a brush's lead-white arcs.

When Dad died
I had this nightmare
of him standing
by the bedside
ten feet tall
at least
trying to say
something
but the air
only congealed
into a
black paste.

A few of
those dreams
& sleep keeps
its distance.
So I go
running,
not to escape it
there is
no escape
it colonizes
the mind,
but to exhaust
the bones
so old Hymnos
can descend
on his one
charred wing,
and mute
the memory
of Dad
in the
hospital bed,
waxy gasps
collecting
in the air.

Tonight
I run west
with the
gale wind
that rubs
against the slate.
Along the
crannied angles
of the money houses
where windows churn
with the cadmium glow
of happy families.

The invisible gale,
the voiceless flat
slabs of slate.

Detroit dropped away
after the big band wedding,
where The Sheik of Araby
climbed the hot pine hall
& the two of us killed
a bottle of Laphroaig
that we bought by the church
from the bulletproof glass man.

The next day,
she got the call -
he had died
in her room.
The marriage
began to sag
at that exact moment -
something failed,
something failed,
something closed
that never reopened.
I was alone
breathing
her desperate air,
her secrets almost
off the tongue,
almost vulnerable,
but left unshared,
carried alone,
held away from me -
I found it out the hard way.

I still feel it,
the green empire
of the reception night
punctuated by her
lipsticked cigarettes,
& the trumpets calling
both of us back inside
for last call.

The floor howled
in the last
lazy binge
of bronzy sun
before I broke free
to go running
the two miles
to the hospital
in Georgetown
where Dad was.

As I ran, I thought of
The Wreck
of the Old 97
which played on
the car radio
when Dad
drove us back
from the
Charles Town
racetrack
where I kept losing
the same $20
while Dad
placed exactas
and trifectas
to win
dinner money.

Turn it up
turn it up and listen
as the Old 97
engine over-coaled
and waving
with heat
races beyond rule
a bright streak
down the hill
down, always down.

The Icarus myth -
the father disappears
while the son melts
in the exploding face
of a memory.

No phone call tonight.
The sick moon
coughs a cloud -
like a gray stain
on its face -
& I watch
as the new cloud
falls through the night
like a guillotine.

Sick moon,
thin and waxing,
my chest is
a curving hurt too.
Twisted and torqued
by the old carving forks
from the Thanksgivings
where red wine
sat screaming, and
polished plates
were also moons,
hard and silent
and empty.

No phone call now,
the breakup is done.
I shed my skin and salt it.

No phone call now,
only vagrant silence.
The sick moon breathes
a scrape of cloud
down the quiet
spine of night.

There is a moon on my back
down the rising line of street.
A cold night-throb echoes.

I can't get a job to stick
and the web of days
is more gap than thread.

The gaps are quiet, though.
Fourth story wind carves through
the screen like an axe.

The Monday girl is gliding
under the brown ice clouds.
Things aren't very real anymore.

I walk in rooms of winter,
looking for a handhold.
I blame myself for this

depression, whose greasy claws
fill my mouth. Whole childhoods
of rain are slanting to snow.

The walk from bed
to office is littered
with impatient dogs,
tongues floating
above the brick walk.

Spice trees front the embassy
and lean into the morning's shape.
Each step farther from you
is a ballet of snow
upon the brain.

This poem has moved beneath me.  
No melancholy pang can withstand
a white sail smile.

I'm hunting the moon
with a harpoon of wine -
and you'll be here soon.

Play the wicked tune
that licks my spine
as I'm hunting the moon.

Pillows' scrimshaw dunes,
my veins like vines -
because you'll be here soon,

a swoon
bound with ribbon and twine.
I'm hunting the moon,

as it climbs in my room
trailing white foamy brine -
you'll be here soon.

It sways and croons
atop us, crystalline:
I'm hunting the moon,
for you'll be here soon.

This opening world
is full of visible breath
curling over the blood house.
     I'm not in love anymore.

The air is crisp as bitters,
as spackled mud freezes
into rutted battlements.
     No, you haven't been.

Winter is a spill of grass
laced with sleet,
a quiet rind of snow.
     How long have you known?

A brittle red cloud
of sloey ice scatters
from a ginning curve.
     We should stop talking.

Domed salt vaults
rise by the highway
like a black dough.
     We can't keep doing this.

Drink winter down;
envelopes of night
are rapidly sealing.
     It's over, over.

My hands of old snow
are pulling down drafts
of brick-blooded sloe.

The TV's glass glow
is hard as a haft
in my hands of old snow.

Night thick as a dough,
bleeding moon like a shaft
of brick-blooded sloe.

Slip the man what I owe
in black dollars that laughed
in my hands of old snow.

Face bright from the blow,
a drunkard's witchcraft
of brick-blooded sloe.

This tired old show
again autographed
with hands of old snow,
of brick-blooded sloe.

I can feel the vacancy
you leave when you are far,
and a melancholy's taken me.

This autumn core has wakened me,
but the sun's removed from sky,
I feel the vacancy.

Other couples drift complacently,
in and out of bars,
and a melancholy's taken me.

The joy of the new art's forsaken me.
I hardly know what we are,
but I feel the vacancy.

I cross K street mistakenly,
distracted by a reminiscent car,
and a melancholy's taken me.

We flower in this latency,
this "attend et regarde."
I feel the vacancy,
and a melancholy's taken me.

I painted some poppies a year ago,
long-headed, red as the watery sun
that floats in the Bay at evening.
A girl I knew asked for the painting,
and I said yes, it was hers.
Then her silence gulped months away
in great raw swallows.
One day my phone shook in my hand,
and the girl who wanted poppies was there.

By then I was alone, in an abyss,
so I was ready to answer a voice
that drifted down in flurries.
She sang jazz across the city
into my pressed left ear,
and I opened to her
like a drawer full of old knives.

I tried to embrace it
but it wasn't two weeks
until I was in bed,
staring at the wall
where the poppies hung,
long-headed,
red as the watery sun
drowning in the Bay.

My body was against me
even at birth,
trying to strangle me
with my own
umbilical cord.

It kept pulling away.

Sometimes it loaned
itself to a lover,
no matter
my ambivalence.
Or refused itself
to one
I desperately desired.

Sometimes it added
to itself in greed,
and then shed it,
in grief.

I understand
a little more
why my father
filled a coffee mug
with bourbon
every early morning
I spent with him.

The body is quiet
when alcohol speaks.

In the bathroom at work
cheap dime-store razor
blunt as a wood-axe
plowing my beard
of coarse Sicilian hair,
a surprising amount gray.

Men from other offices
wandering through, eyes
that click judgment
while they wring their paws
under a tepid sink:
well, *******, I think,
who's holding the razor?

Maybe they object
to the blood that spots
the buff-colored basin,
though I'm careful
to push it down the drain,
streaking the porcelain
like a peppermint candy.

Captive of the mirror,
prisoner of myself,
radiant with anger,
razor in my pocket,
blood on my face.

In the Wednesday sun
crossing Farragut Square
beside a beautiful woman
of half-developed feelings,
there is a temptation
to forget thirty-eight years
of women just like her.

All my romances
are desperate tries
to close the old voids
that my family seeded in me.
Love me,
accept me,
stay,
please stay,
just stay,
I will take anything,
be any shape,
anything you like.

I loved women
one to the next
a wreath of sincerity.
I was always astonished
when it fell apart.

In the Wednesday sun
I am depressed.
I say goodbye
to my blonde friend,
and I curl up inside
like paper burning.

Anger soaks the room abruptly,
I'm thinking of you.
Cleaning out my black bag
I find my tarot deck, waiting
in its green tin tomb.
I shuffle and deal across
the face of one of the paintings
I've been working on,
a red face scratched out.

The brown lid of night
hinges closed hard,
and lamps take up the slack
with yellow spittings.
I draw the Tower,
the Ten of Swords,
the Hermit.
Past, present, future tenses,
all corrupted.

But who's surprised?
I derailed it all myself.
Only the cat,
the palette knife,
and the lonely guitar
bring life to days
made thin with the grim
solipsism of therapy,
intolerable solitude,
and the conviction
that I am unsuited
for all of it anyway.

Of course, sometimes
the depression rots away
back into the sickly loam
where it first bloomed.
It's replaced by the mocking
low-key mania that howls
half-hopes, that each throb
like a throated singing bowl
combined with the profane
drone of an air conditioner.

In those moments,
things get done.
Bills get paid.
I reach out to other people,
breach the indifferent yawn
I feel between each of us.
I splurge, scrape a stool
up to a bar, borrow
an acquaintance for an hour,
or else drink hard liquor alone
until my teeth sing and drown.