"Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up"
-Richard III, Shakespeare


The sky is a bland face of gray linen,
a faded shroud-scrap, a broken nail
of moon lost in the bedsheets.

My friends live in the black skin
of the phone. They are lost gloss.
Golden windows swell and crack

with light in the early May eve.
Lager, sherry, scotch: dogs sniff
the dead things in the street.

I am a tenth of a soul. Unfinished
in this breathing scar, this scorn,
scarce half made. I am a tenth,

or less. I am sunken, buried
in the broad ash water.
My brown eye is custard.

I sink into my chair. What happened?
The night has slipped away.
The moon is lost in the sheets.

There is a cloud over Yorkshire...
it brings burst speech in the evening.

The grass is bending in the rain;
a fine fog slips goodbye like window fingers,

leaving behind a shining extract.
We're on the viscous edge of night,

straying into dim, broken hellos
that dissolve us like a companionable acid.

We cook our meals quietly tonight
in black aprons of lonely air.

The silver of the blade is dwindling.
Stars blink like vacancy signs.

Green wine in the afternoon...
I am flaking thru another Saturday:

a year ago I found you after years
in the milestone courtyard,

you bought me coffee and we compared notes
on the carousel of inadequate lovers

who had betrayed us and vanished,
but never quite vanished enough.

One night, late, I came by
& admired your house.

Then the waters slowly closed in
over me and my mouth crept away.

Now, you cut thru the ether
to recover the string of thought

that passed between us.
Thank you for that -

you have been a spray of stars.
I am the empty space in between.

You are the passing shadow in the lavender,
the new wet leaf on the budded branch.

You sweep the year away again,
the morning ploughed blue to yellow.

Low tide grips and goes,
a seethe of chilled salt and muddy mist.

What remains is a breeze:
your cotton sleeve sun-speckled.

I send you this verse
as a mourning dove lifts

its black penny eye
under strings of evening,

& sings a falling song
cheek to cheek with the glass.

My heart is muffled,
buried as if in sea mud
alongside thorned shells
nestled in the slick.

Purple gore rings it
in ribs like tented fingers
as it sits and waits
for nothing in particular.

By drunken prophesies,
libels and dreams,
it makes its needs known.
Like small birds on the wing

spreading wind-wetted seeds
into the endorsing green,
I half-hope that something grows
from this busily clouded chance-chain.

Maybe a small gesture,
made half-way, made in jest maybe,
might root in the red of the soul,
unmuffle the muscle's knell -

but it all passes by -
no one is waving this way.
The floor is an emptying pattern;
the rain is coming, the rain is coming.

I watch your legs -
not the denim or flesh,
but the long thigh bones

as they glide above the chevrons,
flourishes above the tile,
cursive scrawls in the wet air.

Strange thought, I know.
I cannot account for it.
My sister sends you regards

from New Jersey's Starland.
You smile with sweet tolerance.
Mezcal courses through my face.

Happy hour is ending,
& with it, my tenure in your kingdom.
I am cast adrift once again.

The moon is full tonight;
gravid, a white bursting.
It sings into the palms of my hands.

O bartender, bartender,
with your good posture:
who am I? Who am I?

Glossy-budded hair,
unnameably Portuguese,
your hand-picked star anise
floats in my pear sangria.

You are of the moment.
You are a smile and a nose ring.
You seem curious about me,
but you can't be.

Thank you for the swift nothings
of little talk that helped me along
on a Friday afternoon.
You couldn't know it,

but such small items
as bar talk have become, for me,
strange freedoms that bubble up
& sometimes displace the sorrow

that encases me perpetually
on these long spring days.
Your stance between the beer taps,
by the good scotch and gin...

it brings a faint gladness
to an ulcerated gray
that sweeps back westward
across the parapets of new night.

"Before our lives divide for ever,
While time is with us and hands are free.“
-Algernon Charles Swinburne


There is a strangeness in the air today.
New buds came out on the branch,
green and purple and yellow,
like bruises on old arms.

The sun is gnarled, wrinkled,
folded between ****** clouds
like stringy dough in the knuckles.
The sun doesn't care, it doesn't care

if I'm alive or dead.
It sits in its eight minute perch
in perpetual mockery
of my careful observations.

Someday my dead ash will mock
the fat red belt-bloat of the sun ,
expanded to eat the first couple planets,
maybe even ours.

But no one cares.
If there was ever a lazy, wanton god
who made all this waste,
he or she retreated long ago

to watch these jests from afar.
If there was ever a devil who scourged
the hells with a red hand,
he or she retreated long ago.

Now there are just free hands,
roaming in the salted night
of the inner city boundary.
Free hands can touch what they want.

We are all frozen in time
by our unregenerate desires.
We are free-handed, starry-haired.
We are just lines, wavering.

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day
-Lord Byron, "Darkness"


Eater of broken meats
touching the night skin:
an ebb and flow of rain
scolds the window.

My skin bursts with olive slivers
with no hand to calm it in the morning.
Scalpel water from the white basin
glistens on a lip tatter.

The moon is failing.
Crude isolate breath
hums above the bud-elm.
Young drunks are wailing

as they hug one another,
twinned by the street flicker.
I succumb to sleep's disease
with your book still in my hand.

"For where thou fliest I shall not follow,
Till life forget and death remember,
Till thou remember and I forget"
-Algernon Charles Swinburne.


The day is leaking out in the east,
from a spoiled, dripping lump of sun
that carves its way through calving cloud
en route to the pillow of your eye,

the eye that will never read this.
It's your birthday under cold green rain
in the almost-city, and my grief
stalks the quays, searching for a gift,

a gift that will never be given.
After all, "change is sovereign of the strand" -
the sea that burns blue and white,
inflicted with salt-ghosts that ring the sand,

the sand where I stood in a heart-sleep,
my name eroded by the spaces between stars,
with a cleaver stuck in my mind.
"Behold what quiet settles on the world" -

the world that has slipped away in the dark.
I send you a long sweetness, wrapped
in evening. I send you a poppy's red gown.
I send you whatever I have become tonight.

"Je vis assis, tel qu'un ange  aux mains d'un barbier" -Rimbaud
"I spend my life sitting, like an angel in the hands of a barber"

Here it is, another day.
This one is called Monday.

The sour yellow-white wax
smears bright as feathery snow

towards the westing.
"I spend my life sitting,

like an angel in the hands of a barber."
Clouds are old sailcloth,

gray hunches traded away
at voyage's end in exchange

for a handful of sallow moon.
I am missing a lot of necessary things.

I fill the gaps as I can, but, well...
I let my beard grow out, so that I look

as unwholesome as I feel.
Small birds chirp on branches

bare as flayed phalanges.
If love is man unfinished,

then so is death.
Brown hierarchies ride along

in the early holiday afternoon,
while brick squats off the road.

Here it is, another day.
This one is called Monday.

The heart is a grave,
logic is buried there.

City of stones and gamblers,
trees leafed with playing cards,

old men skimming coins
from the fountain floor.

Here in Alphaville,
romance is the gun -

pull the hat down low,
rub your lips with your thumb,

drive in the neon-beaded night
to the swimming pool gallows

where you broadcast a red truth
before the wet knives come flashing.

The heart is a grave,
logic is buried there.

A woman on the walk
chews on a white gap
that hovers in the tree.

A fleet of dead clouds,
dull gummy bumps,
reflect our hunched signals.

Even the road is false,
a mouth of crushed oil husks
that eats our fried blood.

This all collects into an afternoon
of chemical mistakes.
Thoughts that spongily refold.

We're reading with flashlights
under a shared blanket of grief,
eyes shining; incandescent wax.

Oh, little sweet one -
you found me early, and held on tight.

Hundreds of photos prove in chorus
the joy you took in living.

You would climb to my shoulder,
like a honey-brooch, and perch -

gazing green-eyed out the long pane
at the small traffic below, the playthings

of your curious thought. I cannot bear
to give away your beige tree

so frayed and leafed with hair.
I cannot bear to gaze at the rug

where you delighted in long quiet hours
of happy sleep, dreaming of running,

legs twitching. Your love of tuna,
& endless inquiries into the open freezer door

charmed me anew each morning. Your purr
gathered in little hums and circles in my hands.

We both hated our many moves,
but you always found the best parts

of our new homes so quickly -
the bat-squeaks on the school roof,

or the mourning doves beyond the screen.
I miss the scrape scrape scrape of your foot

in the litter. I miss the little splashes
you made in the water bowl.

I miss you very much, little one;
you were the best part of me.

Primo Sonno, the traditional First Sleep that was common before the Industrial Revolution, it occurred between nightfall and midnight after which the sleeper arose to interpret dreams, pray, write...

The cherry liquor puts me down
around the time the snowfall arrives,
when the blackish hem of night
is snugged over the last lacy orange light.

I have jamais vu - I see the familiar,
& feel nothing, an iron-browed stranger
gazing out at the dim flake-fall,
the urban hush that sweeps away the scrawl.

At midnight I wake to an insistent horn
deep in the street pockets. I dreamt
of people with guns following me,
gluey-eyed, marching quay to quay.

In the dark, I almost remember her.
In the dark, my stomach is filled with acid.
Shadows hiss in the bleary mirror,
a cold breeze scrapes a little nearer.

“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.” -Edgar Allan Poe

We're all sick animals, tied together
on this clouded ball. Wet snow erupts
on a Sunday night, a gray flake navy,
mobiles above a black crib -

snow loosens into shaking sleet.
There is no one here - not even me.
The night is pink and orange,
under an anesthetic dome.

Don't we deserve more, better?
The streets are filled with taillights,
red rivers of light, salted, frothing,
as the freezing drips spray the pane.

Maybe we don't. Look out there,
at the wet world. We're just seeds
that open a root to the flood, swept
away into the teeth of the past.

We look for solutions to this problem...
in the cloud rush, in the oven gas.

I found a medicine that I drink,
it clears the night wreathes away.

Duran Duran's "The Chauffeur" plays
while the rain stomps in the black road.

That was us.... we were then,
among the cobbles and tombs,

hand in hand, absinthe and sugar
searing the air. We were; we were.

You held my thigh at night,
a bone against the insomnia.

The dark didn't come until later;
it had such a broad wing.

The hours grew late. The purple vine
clawed upward. The walls crawled with taste...

I lost my hold on things. Do you remember
how we watched the old Dean Martin

movie on TV in Rome? I drank beer
from a can while you laughed.

You laughed - it was the sweet middle
that sustained the world.

Now... now... the hour is long in the tooth.
My chest is a grave. There is nothing after this.

No, nothing - I'm sorry.
Dig this earth for no purpose, friend...

My ash collects around the fingertips,
waiting for the grand canal.

Most of the snow has melted now,
gray dough-banks ****** on curbs
under a wind-lacquered gloss.

The Thai salt sits in me, hours after,
stirs thru blue yarn veins,
sharp in the stomach's wax-pit.

Night declines when lamps snap on:
dead, reclusive salmon eyes that broadcast
onto the cold screens dotting the walk.

I haven't seen anyone for so many days -
my tongue is still as a lake skin.
Lost hearts voyage in whitened dunes

of all my yesterdays. The winter pattern
is so quiet. I am a crease in the fabric,
a black ache in the ruined prism.

"And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." -John 1:5

I find whisky grammar in the cold sluices,
in the curve of the thickened glass-ash.

The bourbon cask gave its woody soul
to the barley spirit, to the amber shadow.

The New Year comes but I reject it;
the sun-ball drifts yellowing like an old page,

the moon rises like a bleached skull.
Ireland came and went, full of green iron secrets.

My life was full, but now it is empty.
I live in a high room full of guitars,

full of alcohol, full of deathly ulcers,
full of Plath and her sweet ether.

The air is seared. The water boils.
The witch shakes her hazel wand,

& demons sigh in resignation - why bother?
Humans move the darkness in little pieces.

Somewhere in Sicily, in Silesia, in Kent,
my blood is moving without me. My blood -

it's loving another. It's never had a headache.
It actually lives a full life, somewhere else,

that good red life. But not here: Here,
I drink in the old cemetery, with the blurry pebbles.

Bruisy clouds slouch across a grayed glower
on a brisk, anesthetized Tuesday.

All these people, coming and going on the walk,
ignoring the sobs of the frayed man who digs

squelched cigarette butts out of the mulch
packing the dead-headed elm at the bus stop.

I cook a small lunch that threads the studio
with citrus fingers, above the coal painting

that dries flat on the Sicilian game table,
but my mind is elsewhere. I am thousands

of miles from this bricked-in niche where scotch
and stout stand sentinel on the granite bar:

I am walking step by step through Lansdowne,
past the silent salt-nose of each slate-slanted house,

on my way to the sand where the power plant
reaches upward with muscled black arms

so that even the froth withdraws into a curtain
of coming rain... strange, always a gray rain,

that comes so quickly. It heavies the sweater
of the yellowed dog-walker, steadies the rasp

of the cigarette digger, peppers the mirror
that spreads its silver shell across the asphalt.

This littling rain calls me back from Sandymount
and its endless bench. The black paint is dry now,

& the old year has died, flung to the floor like a rag
you cough into when you breathe the wrong way.

A year ago today,
I walked the dark canal bank,
water chopping the long stone
as we went to the grocery
& bought wine and meat.

We cooked, fed each other,
as the wind came down
to shake the branch.
My mouth was full of love.
My hands played cat's cradle with fire.

Oh, love: you were a camera,
shutter snapping my best days.
I posed against Wilde's grave,
when the magpie played
with your blue boot.

You caught me against the red trees,
you caught me in the flat green.
You caught me among the rare books
scented with old glue, you caught me
with a Guinness in my hand.

It happened a year ago,
but it could have been this morning.
It could have been twenty year ago.
My life has not moved on, at all.
I see other women and feel nothing.

My Irish and Turkish girl:
What did you do to me?
The swans in the canal glanced my way,
the distillery cooked their malt and grain,
& my life froze forever in a high, foreign place.

A year ago I stepped into the green coffin.  
The Grand Canal was so sweet beside my feet,
by the one-winged bridge. Then the ocean
receded, a long sand-salt, beckoning.

Now, I am in the long black river city.
The leaves fall to their little deaths
on the illuminated sidewalk after five.
The twilight bull charges in on deadened fog.

The Wharf's anesthesia blanks out
while new yuppies roast smores in fake fire.
A blue tree shines from the reflection.
Cars park in yellow spots, music dies away.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the day
that I flew to the emerald. Now I just air fry
sweet potatoes, listening to old Bowie,
shedding blood into the dead rug.

I miss my green coffin. I laid there so still,
so quiet. I heard the birds and the drunks
in the early morning, crying out; I miss them.
I took the train back from Phoenix Park,

where the cross recited a towering prayer above me.
I walked among the O'Connell shoppers,
the Georgian families, the sweet swans...
I have become nothing at all. Nothing, at all.

Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. -Ahab, Moby ****, Hermann Melville.

The winter's body shakes in little slops
that beat against the window, sloping
upward out of the dead-leaf carousel
into the black sheet-fold of cares.

I shaped my life around someone who is gone.
Therefore I have no shape - I am a vapor,
a bolting-breeze, a formless sherd of glass
freed from the vandalized car window.

Every breath is glassy, an anesthetic
that numbs me to the next one.
Every beer and scotch liberated from the cabinet
helps me drift toward a wet oblivion...

What now? What now?
I don't struggle with dollars or dolls,
preferring instead the silence of the studio,
the slow march of ink across the face of it;

it snowed this morning.
My heart gave way. I opened the window
& let the frost enter the bed:
the scent of bitter coffee floods the air.

"Sleep: those little slices of death, how I loathe them" -Poe


In my dreams I am always dying -
a Sicilian orange rolls down the walk,
the yellow branch-hand lets go,
& the starlings have all flown.

Why bother? My childhood sweethearts
are all miserable. Their children
have their own children,
terminal sin after terminal sin.

Ambulances go red as they float
slowly down the street. The dream ends
in a strange puff of vapor. Clouds die.
**** bodies move, then stop moving.

Let's face it: little slices of death
bring dark oils to the cheeks
of the depressed canvas. A skull in black
stares at the keys. It's over. Over.

I'm just sitting here,
thoughts sieving through the pane
in little tarry slices, sluicing slurs
or slurries against a night
of Georgian house-faces crowding
their brick-point cheeks
eastward towards a flat disc
of frost, cut with black wings.

The storm glass has birthed
a wicked ammonia flake
from the quartzy ethanol thigh,
which I guess means rain
will break in soon to blotch
& pock the walk, breeding
petrichor into the wine-dark
water-heart of sinking air.

I make rough gestures
towards civility and society,
keep the words floating above
the sutured margins of the wound;
wouldn't want to alarm anybody.
There is no rescuing sleep tonight,
only this scrying glass clotting up
with starburst funeral wreathes.

Deoch Bhleth - the fourth drink of the morning, taken while the morning oats are being ground

The heart is drowned in dream
as the body motions towards coffee,
whisky, water, pills.

November slouches in slowly,
all sharp shoulders
& muscular knees.

The black circle turns and screams,
the beacon spits morning news,
an island of misery emerges from the salt-froth.

The wet streets are slicked to a shine;
I've gained weight. The day moon
is pregnant with blue.

Blood is thin and slippery in the vein.
The razor leaves fine lines all across my face.
My arm is singing. Psalms drop from the sleek

yellow womb of the ****** sun.
Alcohol climbs within me: I fall back on the bed,
thinking of her again. Where is she?

Is she staring out at the magpies
that gather on the wet lunch-branch?
Is she by the Liffey, watching the slate glint?

I am trapped in this plaster tomb,
my head a bridge between past and present;
somewhere a chain is being broken.

Deoch Chas-ruisgte - the third drink of the day, taken while still barefoot

Face to face with soap-fingered morning,
an abyss bounded by vapor trails,
an unblinking eye stares back from the glass.

Once, I woke with a lover in this bed,
her hands braced against my back,
as if keeping me from falling.

Now the daylight is my chilly crutch,
a mocking rain-ring sliding over
the madhouse orange of the turning trees.

When I was a child, I was left to my own devices;
you'd think solitude wouldn't poison me this way -
yet even the afternoon breeze shaves me down.

The little cat and the sunbeam
do their daily pas de deux
while I think about the blood-flower

that emerged from an angel's mouth.
A year of snow-tides, of shipwrecks...
Oh, god...

Froichd-uilinn - the second drink of the day, taken while propped up on your elbow

I sink my bones, crooked in mattress,
lower the liquor to lip as calving sun
leaks through the east-faced pane.

I think back to La Fontaine Sully
in La Marais, on the way back
from the graveyard...

But to what profit?
My memory slices me open,
revealing a slow web of star-gutted stairs.

"Immer augen" my grandmother says,
or said, or will say. The street slouches
with honey-feet, red wine drips into the river.

Fashionable diners spread themselves
across the sidewalk. Laughter launches
like stones into this tower window.

Old thoughts are a slaughter.
A marriage didn't happen.
Bright lights against the meat-black

of night, the shroud-cloth
over my own face, lips wet
& shining with liquor.

Sgailc-nide - the first morning drink, taken while still laying flat on your back

A caustic belt of autumn sun
flings itself through the glass,
yolk wasted across the blood-rug.

Last night's final slug
of scotch sits waiting
on the blackcloth nightstand.

I gather it into my fist,
take a look at the blue syrup
of morning light...

I will tell you all
that the first morning shot
glows like a new blind heart.

This future is mad with silence,
while the past asserts itself
in lost faces, so many lost faces.

I have a bruise on my face
that I can't recall getting.
I don't remember the evenings,

although last night I cut my hair
with a rattling metal hand
that sharped at the skull.

Each morning is a scrape.
I don't recognize this lonely man
in the acid sluice of mirror.

I watch the flash of their eyes,
the inhabitants of this mansion
who sometimes hear the rats
rushing downward in the walls.

Perhaps they pause for a moment.
Perhaps they have an upsetting second.
But they make their way back to the bar cart
& pour another grocery store *****.

Then there are those of us, my reader,
who step into the dark below the basement,
into the hewn room with the odd altar
covered in very old stains...

There are even those among us
who find the unfortunate stair
that leads down into the bleak bowels
where subconscious reigns,

where the sins of the father
are visited upon the children,
where faces are married to the pit,
where you can only stumble forward

until, at least, you reach the black lake.
Looking down, having eaten yourself
with a red smile and the knives of love,
you see your own face in the still water.

****** wine-light crawls
the window ledge in Chelsea.
From our hotel room we can see
a blond wig fall to the floor
in an orange room across West 28th.
Out on the street, brown beer stains
spread across the peculiar night cloth.

People who can forget can let go;
the rest of us will remember
the way the moon rolled over
the highrises in Little Italy
by Gelso and Grand,
& got stuck in her eye;
I died more than a little.

O, Van Gogh... I am the swipe of wrist
that doubles your ear outside the Christmas brothel.
I am the heart that falls out of your mouth
into the green jelly of the absinthe glass.

The pearl toenail of sky curls and curls
into the split skin of the world.
I stop at the bar on the way to your roses,
drinking aching rye with the bearded bartender.

I aim the gun at my chest - it's so heavy,
all this black metal. My heart is so sick.
The nacreous clouds roil and roil,
& trees turn bus-yellow, taxi-red.

O, Iveagh Gardens... what I would give
to be back inside you, among the secret fruit,
the elephant bones, the faceless statues,
the richest green I have ever seen.

But I am not there. I am in this white hell,
I come from a cancer family. Cells disobey,
clump and grow. Soon I will be the age
of my mother when the breast cancer came

& lived in our house with its chemical face.
When I am ash, spread me in Paris:
even if you must bring your own *****,
dig in Père Lachaise, in a corner,

& funnel me into the brown pit.
Let me rest among Abelard and Heloise,
with Oscar and Edith. Where I strolled
with my heart in my hand, my dead hand.

Exit Tchaikovsky into the smoking mirror,
humid masks of the night servants
stalking down the water-walk.

Ash falls from a high tongue
all across the face of the moon embassy
like a bony comb through snow's hair.

Fade to brass: the cars sneer across the street,
interrupting blonde melodies held rapt
in plastic by cigarette Rapunzels.

I sit by the flower dress.
Bare legs slip across the old eye trellis
that masses by the death-green park,

muffling the memories that break free
from the black seance. I'm a braid of regret.
A bird is dead on the cement.

The orangish streetlamp breeds sick spots
that stick to the gray street; the cubist bus
throws yellow beams into the insect air;
the humid black collapses like a bad hand
into small pyramids of dead cloud;
gel-bleached eye-fillings branch out
from the faces of strangers, full of vinegar,
unfriendly, averted. This glass of ***
is dark flecks on a hollow. The night-face
rotates slowly with metallic disease,
old scars that shine in the uncanny swell
of dust that breaks loose in the children's mulch-park.
She is long, long gone: a tomb-scrape in Paris,
a walk to a cafe where the yellow liquid waits;
I stalk through the stars, and then die up there.

O xanthous brickwork, your scars
canted with shadow... my mirror platter
cries on the left hand side, and cool air
settles in the burnished tree tops.

It's almost October and the days just pile
on top of each other without any meaning in them.
I wet my face at the vessel, soap to soak,
waiting for the death of the aloe flower

that perches on its lonely stalk,
defiant and sorrowful, tendril shaking
in a cold busker's breeze.
Scuttling traffic claws into the dim hour,

the sun wests away; brick goes dark,
browning like steak. The air rises
into the ape-hour to meet the landslide
of dead angels flickering across the band.

This breeze would scarcely stir a wasp-wing;
how will it ever bear away the coming rain
massing in loose cuffs over the flat-faced slate?
It won't. The rain will squat here in the gray
like Baba Yaga's hut. My eye drowns
in the soft drift of the water petals.
There is a single white cloud, doubled
in the black water of the road. It doesn't move,
as if paralyzed. There is no joy in this place,
only this numb wisp that hangs
like a poorly glued ornament:
a quick wheeze, a gasp, a cigarette breath,
a wracked cough, a corpse-smear.

Blue-bruise gore slips
down the slick mirror face
of the lithe knife that skips
between the ribs - I've looked
at our old photos again.
Rotting ash knots choke the slow
red rhythm of the blood.

A bird dies against the window pane,
just a small thump in rain.

A ghost-head cinder
leaps from a white stalk
thrown to the gritted curb -
the moon is a wrecking ball.

It's a night to fold away
my thoughts like old sheets.
I let my submerged face swim
like a black-scaled fish in my glass,
before raising it to my lip slash.

The roof tiles peel away.
Bellies of shadow perish
in the autumnal cascade.

This grief settles in the grave-gully
of the pillow. Crooked queasy dreams
rise like foxglove from the sheets.
A thick paste fills my mouth: sleep.

All the missed opportunities,
the collapsed, balled-up destinies
entwined with small scotch:
the heart misses a beat

when WhatsApp chimes in:
a message from A-----,
who got the wheel moving.
She's had a baby in Dublin,

but is looking to move back stateside.
The whole year waves violently
as it drowns in a Glencairn.
The clouds are fried on a rain griddle,

grease-dark, the outer bands
of the hurricane carcass.
A catalog of dresses sails on down
the long cement string, oblivious.

My little cat sleeps on the red rug,
& my old friend reads the legions
while I pluck at the silver tomb-pall
of my two day shirt.

Turn on the dread lamps,
let the bitter day escape into the vents
of the cyanotic eve - another fell day
chokes itself black into the withered ether.

Blackly digging in the ten o'clock hour -
the rain already came and went -
the District is dying of moon-steam,
a summer that chokes even the princes of air.

I am mortally alone. My chaperone,
a brimming glass, turns a blind eye
to my piling thirst. Pylons of shadow
gather in the alley like barren trees.

My monstrous shirt clings to me,
accentuating the beer-pounds.
I pray for a swift end to this grit-grind,
a legacy of revolving abandonment.

Numb, dulled, I stare out at the sparse
traffic cleaving to the bitumen, red lights
& bare legs floating by in the wheeling hour,
tone poems of pale flesh and sad laughter.

This is very close to the bottom:
the scotch that scrapes my tongue clean,
the freshly washed glass, the beckoning bed
that promises only dead dreams,
                                                          pillows of sand.

Thick-lidded Argus
peers across the rain passage:
dozens of glazed, framed eyes
congeal until split with a smoky flick,
tumbling their beige gazes
down onto the spitted walk.

Behind one eye, a woman
cooks her midnight meal:
instant soup in bleachboard
emerges from the microwave throat.

Behind another, a light screams
from a fluorescent hip, ramming itself
into the bruised wall color
before dying in a waving pool
of yellow-milk curtains.

I open the maple door and hunt
for the sweet wax-wet relief,
the glass-arch scythe: Scotch.

Grass castles spring
from the cindered lawn,
the Argus-faced building fades
into rectangles of dulled evening,
& cross-hatched breezes launch themselves
at a ****-haired moon fracture.

Happiness is a quay across the sea.
In this uncaring world, she is a gold reef
in the earth's slow stone:
my failed escape, an inaccessible chance,
a remedy for the thin blood
in the blue universe of the middle-aged vein.

Beer, wine, scotch,
it all goes to the same place -
I have lost patience
with this unsolved heart.
The trees tremble with shadow-spoons
under the Argus building's corpse-pale
fearful installations. Terrible shrieks for help
balloon obscenely into laughter, before
they are gobbled roughly into silence.

Dearest,

I sit with your plucked wildflowers,
in the near blue hours that ramble past
like a coach-and-four. You return
"upon the morrow” and I have said
your name aloud so often
it is thin as gold leaf.
Crow's speech marks the new day
under a gunmetal fog-dome
that slips spells in the sinking heat.
The gray river sidles along the city;
I'm out of time. I send my love.

Up the black, sticky stair,
break into the wet street
just before eleven; a girl
with lopped lilac bangs snarls
in profile while curling beams
seep from her cell.

I walk home, avoiding my reflection
in the shop windows, mumbling
the pine bird sermon I heard years ago,
when I was drifting drunk
in the fire yard, full of honey and ash,
bottles popping in the pit.

Let the night slide on -
let the black gull draw down -
The door closes so softly
on that old smile...
The sheets on the bed
grip me with soft, cold hands.

This is my left hand in the mirror,
twinned and pinned to the glass,
hanging in the black valley while a song
rips me along the old perforations,
& the whole moment splits -
the light wavers over the mantle,
a ball of ghost, a past thing,
memories sold away in ingots.

This sordid exorcism hinges
on night pictures that I can't shake:
a backward lens, a frozen belt-step,
a long lawn with green marrow.
No, that dream is just watery pulp,
like when you squeeze a plum too hard
& the juice sticks and stains
in the white noise web of your fingers.

Something withers in the gut;
a light goes out. Air dribbles down,
down, settling in the soles of my feet.
I'm alone under the wing negative.

The seething mottle of clouds
brushes past, old bruisers.
I am trapped down here,
in the memory cycle that lurks
inside all the glassware.

Everything that came before
seems like it happened to someone else.
There is no after; slices of globe
are dappled by thoughts that get lost
in the salt-surf marrow. Rain claims
an errant soul with bolt-iron drops.

I dabble with shadows,
eating them like hors d'oeuvres,
but nothing's enough for the broad yawn pit.
A green altar sways in the vowelish breeze,
a light blinks on, but suffers back blank.
Imperfect things, loving imperfectly,
sweep down the road, thin as eyelashes.

The stair-shadow bar
a blackwood twist that swims
& recurves under elbow and pint.

Eyes knock in the false, exacted twilight,
against the yarded backdrop
of felt puddles stroked with chalk.

Here is a glass of rye - it waits
in amber for the pink warm wash
of my prowling, kissing palm;

here is a glass of Powers - the sweet
scent flowers the stale angles,
fumes away beyond the lip line.

Things can't quite be read -
what does the canted shoulder mean
when it turns my way?

Words tumble into the chrome-crumbled
struts of the barstools. A kölsh floats into me,
then two, small columns of silted yellow.

On leaving, I am amazed to find
the cheer-charred night, rude gestures
of moon sweeping the towers,

& a fearful silence that finds its harbor
deep inside the glen of my ribcage:
a barking heart, chained to its house.

See-saw thunder dives in the eaves,
whipping rain snaps and jaws,
lightning wrinkles the pale cheek
of the sub-city in the distance:
lit windows are yellowed eyes
in a ashen face dotting the fat flat edifice
across the road. Steam-oars extend
from a pinnace-cloud that races
across the flooded jowls of the evening.
I offer these things to you, sweet reader,
because she is not here. Join me
in this storm as it evaporates upward
into the strange and blankly lidded salt of moon.

The great key is twisting in the lock -
the keyhole moon is spinning.

Empty bottles rise like grass
from the ceramic tile.

The scattering people on the street
slice little hunks of joy

from the black slab
that squats over the city.

The sky is vacant,
the stars vacuumed away

so casually, replaced
by a fat cobalt shroud.

The scents of gin and ****
finger up through the humid cloak

before disappearing from human record.
This bed is a pit of silence,

a soft red hell, a place
for lonely drunks who turn the world,

waiting for her to come round,
come round, come round.

There is a cough and a bark
& then a roar, and suddenly
the green night is singing.

A light rain hangs like a history,
the silver toad bus squirms stop to stop,
the street racers flick rubber kisses.

In the opposite building, a woman
undresses before watching a movie:
the rain begins to flop and hook.

A bicyclist shines and streaks down
the sleekish funnel. The moon is forgetful.
A love story is playing out on the sidewalk.

The green night cascades smokes
with sharking clouds that drift north
into Maryland with their lethal line.

The cat sleeps on my great-aunt's rug:
I am alone in this quiet. Something is dying.
I watch the rain dry on the summer road.

little birds swerve
into green chandeliers
in the park hexagram
with a seethe and a sigh -

hungry angels fill the air,
the sun gripes with marthambles,
melancholy fills a larynx
& light-shells spree across the walk.

I spent six hours at the bar,
wet talk and high song,
but the bier-bed at night's end
beckoned with red vacancy.

The aloe flowers are dying, drying
to flat little coral-colored bell-shapes;
hungry angels and little birds
peck at the windows just before noon.

Everything is blue:
the night-skin, blooming
with ten thousand street lamps;
the hall light in the stolid building
across the street, where shadows
drift leftwards like old smoke;
the dead clouds, that process
themselves across a drum-tight
cobalt heaving with rain;
the restaurant at closing time;
the cars that push up and down
the gaudy road;
the laughing bridge above
the humid blue park.
The city drinks ink and chokes,
throwing blue dice,
forgetting everything.