Watch the pulse
in my skin,
"my heart
moves
for you."

Or does it?
You say no,
"I'm not
the one."

I guess
the heart
has its own
business
to run,

& who am
I to speak
for it?

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts. -Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep


Birds in flock are tilting
in the pink gloam,

a black convex wine stain
pouring from the last orange faces

of exhausted trees, flayed
by the new freeze.

My oldest friend smokes menthols
in the driveway, discussing

the crushing vicissitudes
of the women we have loved,

until voices thicken
into mint-smoke plumes.

Night is a coarse dough
come November:

knotted, knitted, clay-skinned.
These gaps between us all

are so lonesome. You expect
the silence to eventually contract,

but it doesn't; it won't.
Birds are slanting so heavily,

as if they are drunk.
"Dead men are heavier

than broken hearts."
They slip away, so that

the only sound is wind,
crawling up the hillside.

Here is the piercing sun,
its lean tongue carving us,
etching our unclouded skin.

Under the yellowed fingernails
I'm in the brew hall by the train,
missing my father.

Where are his memories?
When his liver folded away,
where did his thoughts go?

I hope he waits somewhere
in the yellow spurs of air
that radiate around us.

I must go -
my friend is waiting for me.
I walk down the canary *****

into midnight's arms,
gut full of fat blooded summer,
a fission of grief and understanding.

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.

The man in the white
sequin jacket shoulders
his way down Q Street
to 17th where jutting

red lights tint night
on blacktop, folding,
splayed across the feet
of the ladies strutting.

Screwtop wine's pylons
trip the turn as throats
strain to cheer & scream
as favorites drift by,

spitting "come on,
baby," then float
away, down the dream,
slipping us some thigh.

Behind me, an Italian
man breaks up
with his boyfriend over
the phone.

Around us a battalion
of truculent drunks
with fabulous drovers
ride some rolling crones.

An old sad cuss
continually thumbs
some poorly angled
shots of legs

Racing for the bus,
we quilt our memory from
spare light spangles,
wild dregs.

My
white
jag
of
heartbeat
on the
panorama
wall,

scrawled
like
a stock
market,
or
lightning.

Strange
thoughts
moved
through
me in
that
swerving
jetty of
blood
slip:

I kept
saying
your
name,
as if
the air
would
part
at the
seams
& reveal
you,

& when
I went
outside
my
pulse
splayed
itself
across
the lawn.

I read
a tedious
novel
of sun,
while
around
me
families
carouseled
with
lovers.

I felt
like my
heartbeat
remained
visible
to all
of them,
that they
all
saw it
taken
from
the
museum
wall
by
careful
curators
and
presented
to you.

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.

The drunk came down the marble stair -
"You're talking out of your hat, Ned."
Ned says dying is OK, other things are worse.
The drunk came down the marble stair.

The humid plate mail clasps the skin.
Boys eat fireworks on the hill.
A burning windlass in paper-pale sky.  
The humid plate mail clasps the skin.

Live an authentic life, if you dare.
Don't let them take it with expectations.
Don't let them take it with advice.
Live an authentic life, if you dare.

Do you
think about
when we
discovered
hornets
in the grass
lot by the
apartment?
They were
drunk on
fallen apples,
and just
watched us
laconically.

I hope you
think about
yourself the
same way -
look back
& remember
you were
a hornet,
lance-cruel,
drunk on sugar,
having wings
you didn't use,
as I walked away.

I'm sure
you don't
think of me
at all. Good -
I hope that
I am your
lacuna.

How I miss you!
The rubber sun
just shines and shines
without you,
mute and meaningless.

It shrugs itself up
into the air,
lights the lawn,
and slowly pillows
down behind the Cairo
& other tall buildings.

Then the moon takes over,
pallid and slow.
It pulls itself into the evening,
inch by inch,
transfixing the dead park,
the silent pavement,
the empty cars.
Until morning breaks
the spell, and the moon
hides away behind
low blue plumes.

How I miss you!
The sun and moon
are no replacement.
They only remind me
of your rhythms,
your chest rising, falling,
the way you put a book down
before sleep takes you.
How I miss you!
You are the center
of things.

I  always want you
to know who I am.
When the driving pink days
collapse into anxiety,
& the restless fountain nights
flood the streets
with gray shadows,
there I am, over the keys,
writing to you.
I'm the one who gives you -
across the sea, star to star -
something that you and
you alone can redeem.

I am the Empire in the last of its decline,
That sees the tall, fair-haired Barbarians pass,--the while
Composing indolent acrostics, in a style
Of gold, with languid sunshine dancing in each line. -Paul Verlaine, "Melancholy"


I am the Empire, in decline.
The elm tree is yellowing;
the rain-arm is broadcasting
from the cloud station.

I am the once-loved voice,
now a tired smear of memory;
the ghost of a market thrill,
a bed of smoke, a red register.

I am the Barbarian, grown fat
after the stuttering blonde pyres
are stilled: finger-flickers of ash.
I am the white noise nocturne

after the rerun is over.
I am the cathode ray,
the scent in the glass.
I am the Empire, in decline.

I awoke,
I understood,
I took in the meaning of it,
the meaning of your right foot
victorious over your left,
The Cairo perched above Q street,
the creak of my knee on the stair.

I was awake,
I saw it all,
the piles of fog like white
mattresses after the rain,
the scent of tobacco in the night
after the screech of madness,
the too-proper-by-half letters
I received from you...

I am waking,
I am open to it,
to the secrets that you tell
on a night when you are drunk,
to the wells in your eyes,
to the way you hold a pen
when you are telling me
goodbye.

I can't help you
where you are.
The apple crown
of summer is stuck
in my humid lung
and words dry
out on the line.

It's fine to be quiet
together. When our
arms cross my Sicily
is ten shades darker
than your Istanbul.
I inhale the silent sun
and run it through
my teeth like yolk.

I hardly know what
to say. I'll be your
flying buttress, your
Pegasus wing, your
silver brace, even
as the kingdom
of my words falls
into string.

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come
-Sylvia Plath


because you're often here:
my head is booked with you,

heart wrapped in your worm;
even my feet walk where I do not want to go

thanks to old paths you laid to bone,
invisible, revived by instinct.

Don't get big headed about it -
you know my memory, I recall

every figurine caught in the web.
Many have no names now

& some of the rest are only names.
But unlike most, you're wont to escape

this night scribble brain garden,
percolating into a shapely world.

From time to time I wonder where they go,
all those strange and lovely yous

that leak in photo negative
from my mind's eye with dusky limbs

& that unforgettable voice,
paroled and incessant...

If you are ever out strolling
by your canal where the waters are so still

& so black that the drunks swerve away
& the sodium vapor eyes recoil,

& you hear following steps and look back
& there you are...
                               walk faster.

I heard it in the evening,
those sad, hopeful voices.
Astonished, I was caught
in a grace. I thought
of the strangest things:
Corso's leopard-apples
& lost watches,
flowers pressed into pages,
aluminum foil and how
once creased it's creased
forever, the scent of a pear,
the scent of hide glue,
astonished as these strange things
rioted through me
uncontrollably, as the music
moved forcefully forward,
however unfinished,
and I was stricken
with a nearly perfect moment.
Astonished, when you said
this was your funeral song.

Your
voice
combs
the
blue
of my
blood -

you're
so deep
I hear
you
even
above
the
knocking
gray
of work.

Your
voice
flares
in me,
a beacon
to
something
that
swallowed
400
blazing,
aching
pages,
& still
is
ravenous.

Chest packed
with fearful
breath.
Sun wash
the bright
piece low.
Don't move
farther,
stay here
by my blue
posting.
Answers
flock and
scatter.
A handful
of lilies,
the knot
that cruels
in the throat.
Come and
claim me -
isn't it clear
that I just  
want you?

I love you
like eating bread dipped in salt
like waking up burning at night
like drinking water straight from the tap.
like opening the heavy package in the mail
without knowing what it is,
excited, happy, suspicious
I love you
like crossing the sea for the first time
like something moving inside me
when night falls softly over Istanbul
I love you
like thanking God that we're alive.

[Seviyorum seni
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Mortal pink to gray crest -
the fox sun and cloud hedge
advance thin as wax,
strew frost on the yard,
& wrist peach away,
as light leaks, hours ahead.

Soft-boiled sun-yolk
spills west, and sill-shadow
splits and spreads
across chestnut slab:
a stillness - someone's missing.

Soft draft of moon
& rescinding cloudburst
over green-oiled yard:
April night.

Morning light skips across
the water like a smooth stone.
Tall bridges coagulate in
memory, colored the
bright yellow of the savanna.
The city swarms with business.
Coins sleep in the fountains.
Rain comes in old surprises.
Noon slips. And soon  
I'm thinking of you again,
sleeping in your green city.
Oh, if I could ride the sun
to your sunrise, throw off
the shining bridle and
kiss you from the
soft grip of dreams!

I'm always being born -
even this morning,
when I was thinking
too hard about it,
curing myself at 8:30
with scotch that reeked
of dense iodine
until a bray of laughter
became a choke
as I returned to the scene
of the ******,
pushing a belly of snow
back into the past;

I'm always being born,
blinking in surprise,
drawing this breath,
instinctively turning to you.

I met you here,
in this nowhere.

Between us was
a world made
of a single
held breath
& we unfolded
it so carefully.

Then we
exported
hundreds of
pages, fragile
& subtle,
& my poems
released their
grip on sorrow.

Blue gardens
in your smile,

sun's epochs
in your laugh.

There are no
sane words to
describe you.

Ropes of
champagne,

thickets of joy,
moon-pure,

hazeled Pisces,
canyon of
ravishment.

Our cheeks
ached
with bliss.

The world only
makes sense
through you.

Your hand-cut
bangs and
slender neck...
Something knocks
over in the night -
it's my soul.

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.

Deleted from glass
by water greens,
I slake a gutter
of scotch.
Over the floats
of black holly
galaxies rip
like stockings.
Jealousies clump
in deathbed lanes,
sag across bedposts.
Swiped away,
I eat the dark of the hand.
Sleepless station,
thinned in the wash.

Tell me I'm not here, alone -
that I've finally traded this broken meat
for vapor, a stock-share of memory
that wavers through the dusk screen
into a charry blued imbuement -

For a moment, I'm by the riverside
in Paris, eating bread and wine with her,
a small and stony autumnal Eden.
Now I'm dying in Saint-Eustache,
craning my neck into the god-vault...

O reader, I can't lie to you:
I am here alone, after all.
This blood-ended prison twitches
with memories of Les Halles
& Tiquetonne, and that's all.

Paris was, not is. What "is"?:
Medusa's severed head in a cake box;
an anchor of whisky nestling itself home
in the cold iodine of the soul;
my name dissolving into a beard of ash.

We built a little night
but you emptied it.

Your Dublin beachhead
is all undertow.

Dead menus blow from
one gutter to the next.

Westward parks
fill with fever.

A gibbeted sun
hangs ignored.

O darling...
I'm not this way,

I'm not this way -
remember what I am.

The airport
bar in Boston,
I'm sway
drunk
& holding
my glass as
if it's liquid
gravity.

She sits
next to me,
technically.
But she's
drifting away
like Orion into
unreachable
courts of evening.

Its a hard thing
to live with
someone who
loves you
less and less.
Rooms are
always empty
& loneliness
settles like
ash on the soul.

The heart
passes sentence
against itself.
Guilt's rapier
parries any
kindness.

Sometimes
I was desperate
and clawed
my way through
acres of gin.
It never
ended well.

But at that
airport bar
I first heard
a voice calling
from under the
scattered waves of
the alcohol sea
inside me.

It told me
the truth:
her love was
guttering
like a candle
whose wax
is fleeing
across the table.

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.

Two marriages
lay like stones
in the desert
behind me

& yet

I'll be sizing
rings with her
this weekend,
this new bond.

The heart
is so irrepressible,
so unregenerate,
so sincere,

even as it risks
everything.
I hold my breath
for years.

Tonight
the Potomac
strokes the
wing of the
Chesapeake.
Washington
turns on the
lights, goes out
to dinner, catches
up on television.

But in four days
you'll arrive to
break all of it,
& build it again
in your image.

From that frozen
moment in the
terminal - like
an eclipse -
we will count
all the petals
in an eye,
all the clouds
in a hand.

In January, sleep packed
its suitcase and left out the window.

I patrolled the rooms,
waiting for it to return.

I became friends
with the **** tin moon,

I found leaves of tears
inside pillow cases,

I sat with a flowering aloe.
Nothing brought sleep back,

not even the song I found
along my body in the broken bath,

not the poems that dripped
from my fingers after washing

with charcoal, not even
the green prayer of the couch.  

It was only when I rejected sleep
that it returned with laughter in its hand.

These words are
    your soldiers.
These poems are
    your armies.

Let them march
    to the drum of joy.
Let them march
    to the fife of sorrow.

They will always obey
    their general.

I hear the
fan blades

churning the
darkness,

& the minutes
seep like cough

medicine into
the floorboards.

Sleep is so thin
tonight, wasp-

waisted and
easily broken,

rising just
above me in

the black dell
of the room.

Beside me is
the flatness

of the fabric
where she'll

soon be, to
model the

sweetness of
night's middle.

But until then
I drift in

& out of the
dream where

I'm losing teeth,
my slow heart

pushing words
around the room,

thinking about money,
weighing my soul

against a feather,
using her pillow,

rustling against
that flatness

& inhaling
the vacancy,

listening to the
fan blades

churning the
darkness.

A shadow spread over us
as we lay there in the fields.

It ate flower, grass, and hill
with ohaguro teeth.

The world was soft and chilled
in the belly of the shadow -

we hid our hands
under each other's shirts.

When it moved we chased,
laughed among blonde furrows,

stumbled in the gritted ruts -
but it was gone. I think

we both know what it meant.
Where are you, now?

Cut and curled,
our brandy faces'
blood-pulled art
lifts and drops
with water moves.

A hundred world
of summer place's
galloped heart,
some teething lops
& dayside loves.

I watch the small birds
chop across caroled glen,
bunch split on branch,
push through bitter yard.

In this way I have missed you,
stirring myself thing to thing
in the same small spaces -
finding only thinness to rest on.

I'm alone in my room.
There is a green-skinned lamp
casting a level wave
onto an orange cat.

Bourbon, on the rocks,
waits in a shallow brown shadow.
The open window
is a breezy mumble.  

Peerless girl,
come inhabit all the sweet spaces
of my slowest imagining
with your light and wild step.

The moon wears a dull brown gown,
& the stars seem braced up there,
a few tired Christmas bulbs
pinned to a threadbare pine.

Dublin is just as far tonight
as it ever was,
& again I'll sleep alone
in an alien city

where fleets of black-bellied cars
crawl among the funerals,
over the fur of the earth
roughed and matted with rain.

In this last push before sleep
I'll choose instead to remember
your susurrating hair,
fanned across the pillow.

New-make maiden, soft as flake,
staring at a flower cake field
as brass-headed bells are bawling:
a cloud’s detonating head rings you.

I have also been reshaped by promises,
& felt the dead-dream weight
across the shoulders. It stings me,
seeing you yearn for the old skin.

A river is ****** inside us,
& grows wider and wider;
the shop registers are singing
after the sun-brunch.

A river is rising within us,
& grows deeper and deeper.
Come, take the tennis court oath with me -
let us revolt in the afternoon.

I refused you, heart.
I saw the end parenthesis.

I escaped
the ten year wall.

There was an empty,
starry sting.

I pulled my thoughts in,
raised the sail into the wave.

From every corner
I heard C minor.

O heart, I refused you
& look at me now -

stone-mute, castle-hearted,
dying of it.

You're in hell,
a fractioned
ghost, eating
clay and dust.
You suppose
time moves
in this abyss
but there's no
way to be sure.

Then:
a scream
at the gates
like all the
winds that
scrape at
the heart.
& it doesn't
take long
before the screams
resolve to a name:
Ishtar is here.

She of ***, war,
& the moon, all
of them long
absent in
this place.
She wants in,
to rule this
forsaken empire,
to take it from
her older sister,
to conquer
one more thing.

She fails,
of course.
Her sister
tricks her,
leaves her
naked,
without her
powers,
after the
final gate.
Ishtar howls,
and leaves
to eat men
like easy grain.

But imagine
that brief
moment,
when you
think that
maybe, just
maybe, you'd
see the organza
ball of moon
again, that
you and the one
next to you
might embrace
in shaded lust,
engender
a new empire
in the dark,
& overthrow it all.

Hold on to
your hope:
Ishtar has
never been
patient.

I still see you
laying in the balled dark,
moon-pretty,
pinkish ache,
webbed in lash.
I still hear you
& fall in swoon
when you tell me
in Turkish
that your little left hand
is still sleeping.
O darling...
I stand in the doorway
& let my heart *****
to your ghost.
You're here and not here.
How can I sleep like this,
on a bed so pricking with memory?
In this slush of shadow,
this leavened night breath,
your absence feels almost like love.

“Spirit
is Life
It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea”
-Gregory Corso

A hundred thousand red laps
from one midnight to the next:

the valve clutches and clasps
at wet clapping truths

but they slip away like silk scraps
in the black gap breeze.

The heart is no throne, but wrapped
gnarl - the abandoned winter's nest,

denuded strakes of burlap strap
curved and curled into the branch fork,

disguising the lacuna and the lapse.
Does the river gladly pass into the sea?

Or does the sea sip it down, easy as a nightcap
with chill willow and spruce,

another blue vein-line snuffed on a map,
another salt stone silting an unseen reef?

It is a night
of champagne and ashes.

Here is a glass
that never stops weeping,

singing your name
with a wheeling hunger.

I sit just nearby,
under yesterday's chandelier,

reaching your sleep
with all ten fingers.

Tonight I'm rioting
with your smile,

and my skin
is insane from wishing.

Tomorrow I will be satisfied
with your wanton eye,

and the clever flood
of your lip.

Bittersweet,
this leaving.
It may have
turned a little,
but it was always
underneath you,
a comfort.

Still, your
blissed heart
is filled with
butterfly wings,
& the book-edge
horizon beckons
with sunrises:

You'll go east,
to friends who
can intuit the
new green spaces
growing inside you.
Tell them
       everything.


I will be waiting,
the face that
adores you,
like a prince
trapped in
a mirror,
restless to come
& enter the
world of hands
and lips -
& whispers that
ignore the ear
& dive straight
to the castle
of the soul.

It's tempting
to restart history
with this nocturne
I play for you.

Let all the books be
an empire of cinder
swept away by an
indifferent breeze,
long diaries of ash
caught in the pines.

Your words, your kiss
will be the first on record.
We will write new volumes
in a ****** world.

But first let me finish
this nocturne I play
for you late, late
in the night.

They buried an elephant
here, in 1922:

White and brown
wet and scattered
branches.