A wasp is
singing.
The wet dusk
is coming,
imprint
on the air.
The sun
retreats to
the far side
of the world,
bestowing
the sky to
a pink moon.

Dear Pisces,
I share these
things with you.
I give you
the scent
of rain over
fresh cut grass.
I give you
every cloud
set loose
in the sky.
I give you
the broken
cherry branch
the children
pretended
was a sword.
I give you
the haunting
shadows that
play across
the stoic faces
of houses on
Gallatin Street.

I give you
every word
of my life.  
A prismatic
night mumbles
with new rain,
and clouds
smear vaguely
across a blue city.
Come, be with me
in the middle of it.

White tongue of ginger,
black tongue of coffee,
& morning limps in
at 6 a.m., hiding between
the pages of blue books.
I'm under a memorial,
across five meridians,
fifty-five hundred kilometers.
My hands hope to drift
under the knit peach,
& I love you with both lips.
White tongue of lemon,
black tongue of cardamom.

Look, up in the clouds
full of black horizontals;
a night is born

in little dawdles,
in brown day bank gasps,
earliest stars bowling to break.

I am here, with you, under it;
planning to grant you
the little pictures

that you so desire.
This chapter belongs
to us; to us.

Look, left of the moon,
by the rain steeples;
a night is born.

There is a mourning dove
cocked and tense on the olive sill
in dense rain, watching me.
I could fly to you,
if I were built like that -
hollow-*****, flashing past
these green and pink limits.
My arc would be unique,
no little starling chop,
no house finch bolt,
or fish crow sine,
past seeded wood to the sea,
I'd manage the upper air,
the transparent sinew,
landing in that little fork
by your slid window;
the song I'd sing
would fill your heart
with new choices.

You're glassed into the closed door,
gloss across you like an aegis
against me. On your phone,
your eyes come up, see me,
send sorries, draw down.

In my first visit to the store,
I remember pamphlet pages
and seeking quinacridone.
It was the white wreath
of your soft look that I found.

Little magpie,
don't leave bed -
stay the day instead.
I have coffee, bread -
we'll be fed -
but that thigh
must elude this eye
or I lose the thread.
Did I hear you sigh?
Little magpie,
don't leave bed.

I hear it's going to snow tonight,
& untamed words run through my skin,
but I don't think I'll write -

snow may smear to tussled white,
but we're such fools for indoor sins
that if it's going to snow tonight

we'll stay in, turn low the light
until the walls are dim and thin...
I don't think I'll write

or hew you little metered sleights
of hand, more smoke than djinn -
No, if it's going to snow tonight,

sun sluiced away in spite,
sky low and gray and blank as tin,
then I don't think I'll write:

these crawling words are feeling trite
& the bedsheets gather in a grin.  
It's going to snow tonight,
but I don't think I'll write.

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.

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.

Curious things emerge
from this last cup of gin.
Maybe I've been too alone
with the rain and with drink
because strangers converge
into thumb-smudged skins
washing over smoothed stone
into the storm's glottal rink...
I'll stop there and stem
these mannequin thoughts
seeded by a dollar's solitude,
watered by a fallen hem
of night. Thunder's brought
a brand new mood...

Kite-flying in late April
is new love:

You take a thin string and run
forward until wind comes

to cast it into the upper reaches,
climbing with new life.

You can try to reel it in,
but mostly it follows

unseen impulses.
You can cut the string

& let the clouds eat it,
or rein it back until

it protests against the hand,
& sometimes a branch will take it,

or another kite will cross,
& give you a new string to deal with...

But while it's aloft, how true,
how just is that small parcel against

the powdered square face of sky,
riding a breath into the free rising?

Afternoon's eclipse
a sea of eager eyeless
reborn to the shade.

Look at them, the rain-spotted Lovers:
hand in hand under lathered moon
as the bars flood out at cold close.
The night grass is April swaying
as they bluely stroll down the road,
unaware of anyone, anything else -

there could never be anything else -
isn't that the rule of all new lovers?
No care for a bright-cheeked road,
no anxious looks at a dartboard moon,
just two pairs of shoulders swaying
closer, closer, closer...

Yet now that the bars are closed,
they must join to something else:
a long laughing file beerily swaying,
a newly louched breed of lovers
under foam-headed moon,
carried down a water-hearted road.

Perhaps they sweeten the sotted road,
these two who veer so close
& share this last garnish of moon,
carpaccio of stars and space and something else.
Cars throw dapples across the Lovers,
shy white coins in spotted sway.

We drunks of course are also swaying
vaguely down the rained road,
but how different our rhythm is; these Lovers
tie spring breath tight as twine, and close
their fingers like mating snakes - no one else
seems tide-locked like earth and stubborn moon:

since this frozen-faced scrap of moon
refuses all requests, it's we who must sway
with them, at least until we find something else
on this cloud-tented tar-sown road
to hold us oh-so-close;
they're home, these Lovers,

& so someone else must follow the lolling moon
to become the newest Lovers who will sway
on wetted road as night closes off behind.

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.

"Then I realized I had been murdered. / They looked for me in cafes, cemeteries, and churches / …. but they did not find me. / They never found me? / No. They never found me."
-Lorca, "The Fable and Round of the Three Friends"

I dreamt that I died in green,
on a midnight hill slab
where the grass was speaking

in the hungry language
of new summer:
"Your headstone is but a tooth

gritted in my lawn jaw
gnashing the June fog
while wind slouches

into the crutched arms
of the evening maple wash.
Who will find you here,

your tongue throwing poems
clotted with moss and mood?"
I woke to a jousting shadow

charging up the wall
& the toddling pink sun
lathe spun to brighter pool.

The dream of death
hung from my ear,
whispering of green.

Join me, in this tumbledown
brick palazzo ruled by the bones
of a queen singing and swearing
that we'll never walk alone.

We can read in the oak pocket,
order ale from the cellars,
watch as the hanged man
steams with oily nostalgia,

well-waxed stories blossoming
& shrugging from his trolley tongue,
tales of silver-roaded loves he's had,
back in a lawless youth.

Love is a game you can't win,
insists the hanged man,
but if you're oh so careful
you can lose very slowly.

The nightingales are sobbing in
The orchards of our mothers,
And hearts that we broke long ago
Have long been breaking others
-W. H. Auden

At 6 am there was thunder
loud enough to wake me and the cats
rain toe-tapping on the pane
calling us to the theater:

"Come look at us, heavy clouds
of dark morning: spray-headed,
sunrises in our throat.
Enjoy our Sunday eyes"

I did. The paper people
at the bus stop huddled
& dissolved under wet slants.
The crust of horizon broke away

into thick puff-parcels, and
beneath it all the water flung
itself against the scory stone
before escaping down the drain cape.

"Come look at us, the wet-nurses:
our hands on the doll-face petals,
the walls of leaves. We evaporate
into the sea engine, purring with life."

Temperance is simply a disposition of the mind
which binds the passion.
-Thomas Aquinas

June sun wakes and slowly rakes
its brow, a lemon-clouded reach

that staggers broad-brushed fringe
& stumbles over tenement bustle

awash with sweat and coffee steam.
But under modest morning's facing

flower riots of desire:
bitten lips pout in open windows,

coarse, carnal hands glissando
over fruit in grocery bins,

a stranger's barking blossom laughter
a little too long and loud to be entirely proper...

Even here, where my lover tightens the knots
with one hand, shining scissors in the other.

The truculent sun
escapes cloud guard
& serves us day

over green bonnet trees
that birth false fruit
where wasps crawl.

Now the roads fill
with rioting flax,
rose rays, rude rain -

there's too much life -
the world's heart is burst,
blonde-broken sobs.

Long stripes of petrichor,
gather in the cuff-corners
of the nightwalk - I miss her,

the blonde from group therapy
however many years ago, L-----,
whose upper case traumas

mirrored mine on that beige couch
by the waiting room sand garden.
Hard-hided years, those,

& I hope she did OK.
Myself: I tried in desperation to marry
someone who simply didn't run,

& you can imagine how that went.
I remember seeing L----- on a Wednesday
or Thursday morning, so surprised

I existed outside therapy. Greening wings
of grass spread across Farragut's diagonal,
& her black shoe arch pressed the world

firmly away. She rafted into a doorway
as everyone eventually does in a life.
The sun called in sick, the moon

maw yawed and yawned, the sea
throbbed foam over stone. New rain
on my face - it was just rain, just rain, just rain...

Sun is hotter,
but moon is nearer.

Yellow-belted dress
in runny mirror?

Come naked night,
intent is clearer.

In the day air
you can hear her

bright beguiling verses;
after dark is dearer -

moon-mouthed poems
are sincerer.

I.
Optimal allocation for partially replicated database systems on tree-based networks (1992)

My father the mathematician
his carapace beard slow-stained

with moon brook as he worked
at his pine wing desk, an old door

perching on cheapo steel cabinets
with a squat beige computer

whose fan hummed hymns,
strumming the dark.

II.
A lower bound on the probability of conflict under nonuniform access in database systems (1995)

Long drive in smooth maroon
the university belted by fog

Mandelbrots of rain blotching
the windshield face.

Dad sat and glowed with glass
commingled with chalk scent

I became part of Andre's posse
in an atrium bleached with cold air.

III.
Minimizing message complexity of partially replicated data on hypercubes (1996)

When Dad moved out of the farmhouse
we realized he couldn't see well anymore

a thick glaze of dust sticking to everything
coffee mugs of bourbon seeding every room,

******* glaucoma; pride and denial
kept him thorny, but my sister got it done.

When the ***** finally claimed him,
he vanished into the air like pipe smoke.

I am looking away
my head in glass

across bell wedding hill
where fireflies lace over

green ******* of evening
bounded by bay grace

when a restless thought
slips brain pocket

& hides in castled teeth
like a relic of sugar -

a friend I gripped too tightly
when grief rose above my head

she pulled away gently
leaving only her name behind.

Ah! Here is a line of groomsmen
humid row by the bower

the last is the man she loved
he's brought a wife, a child,

& he won't catch my eye
I know he's broken her heart.

The towers of love have fallen
quietly in our private groves

stones bearded over with cold moss
until indistinguishable from hills.

She said she got out of bed with me
feeling halved, as if something was removed

during the night. She called us the zeroes
in the hundred, with the world our one:

we got kicked from bar after bar
when she blew up at me, threw pints

& chairs, and then later we'd make up in bed
until we were both crying from the toll.

Friends would pull us each aside
& whisper warnings, ask if we were sure

this was what we wanted (of course not,
but in for a penny in for a pound).

In NYC at the old pine bar on my birthday
she got so drunk she fell from the bar stool

& sobbed on the floor that no one loved her:
"You should save her, even if you can't

save yourself," said the old devil
conjured when I was 4, still there at 29;

I listened as it made secret promises of love
in exchange for burnt offerings, broken meat.

I remember the slip of her hand in mine
while she stepped around a tarnished

subway grating for fear she'd fall through
& be lost to the stone: "That's it," she said,

"that's my worst nightmare down there -
to be all alone, hurt, crying out from a well,

crying from the dark, the wet dark,
to be in a place where no one gets rescued."

"Wealth is lent us, friends are lent us,
man is lent, kin is lent;
all this earth's frame shall stand empty."
-The Wanderer (anonymous, late 800s or early 900s, as translated by Michael Alexander)

To hell with all of it:
shove sun away,
bury a moon in a drawer.

Let lovers lend a mouth or breast:
we beetle down our daily work,
lulled to amnesia by the churn.

Our meal of the world is so brief:
televisions smear us with static,
while the sky dwindles to a scream.

"All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts"
-Shakespeare, As You Like It

Panic flocks to an actor's lip:
my perch and cackle cauldron eyes
grow to zeroes at the bed-end of this,
the only stage & staging of my play.

The plot unknotted shows that
money's short and friends are few,
the body betraying itself busily:
an absurd third act.

The audience talks over my lines,
ignoring the tree tops exploding,
the neighbors *******, the heavens
& the hells standing empty.

Yet they hush when the curtain rises
on mosquitos haunting a Brazilian cafe
dotted in cochineal - Aperol spritzes
scatter along a failing, darkling rail.

We can't pick our audience;
neither can we deny that they
can only do their best within their needs,
nothing else or more,

& midnight confessions, truest
& heart-rent soliloquies, are nothing now
but furtive scrawls across a torn ticket,
swept up when the house lights come on.

The falsetto
"no no no"
shot down
the steepled
maple *****
into the walking line
by the metro.

How someone
got up there
we never knew, or
what made them yell.

I remember only
that the sky
was littered
with the wrecks
of clouds, and
it was a Friday
in winter.

We all stopped,
though we
saw nothing,
& then
it was over.

The grass
waved away
the watery
minutes,
& the sun
rolled loose
among the wrecks
in the blue ditch.

So we towered
over red tile
on the metro
platform,
hands heavy
with phones,
until the train
obliterated us
with its urgency.

There's a quaver in the skin
by the blue eye plaza:
Bundy's glittering lips
spread and spread and spread.

We all love a pretty mouth
filled with charismatic teeth
that assure you: all is well.
All is well. Come: get in the car...

No, no, it's alright - it's an actor,
it's a screen, a script -
glass and paper.  
It's not Bundy, it's just Mark:

Mark the UCLA quarterback,
drinks his beer and takes his shoes off
like anyone. But you have to wonder
how sticky the mask becomes.

I went to
weddings on
the mountain,
I went to
weddings by
the sea.

I went to a
wedding of
paper,
I went to a
wedding
of flame.

I went to two
of my own.
Somewhere
is a third
that will last
the distance.

Charmed alliance,
are you the one?
By leaf or sand,
whatever binds you,
are you the love
I need?

I'm watching
a day rain
that moves
so immensely -  
heaven's wet
mile, spans
& masses
of gray.

It can be
measured.
Yet there
is no tool,
no machine
to measure
the width of
this love.

I know that
you can never love me.

But even so,
the glove of evening
slides off as you approach.

So many have tried
this comb - and now you,
the man on the horse.

My lips starve to feel
more than the air
around the sound of your name.

Memories hang
like windchimes in me,
knock darkly to each other -
I carry them with me,
ingots of loss,
stacked steams of grief.
All these memories,
clicking like x-rays -
I take you and gently
add you to them.

When I ate with you
in Merrion Square,

flicking rain
from my eyes

as it wandered down
from the jailing trees,

had you already decided
to leave me?

There I sat, thinking
I was Orpheus,

come to Dublin
to return my lover

to my world,
not looking back

at what she did,
not ever looking back.

There you sat, knowing
I was Eurydice -

to be given one last longing look
before I was pulled

from Merrion Square,
from Dublin, raked over

the sea changes,
until all I had was the dark,

the jilted dark
of the bedroom

that doubled
as a hell.

Come, see the men
waiting for the silver
metro side with
pound-penny eyes.

Their little pistols
of breath break
the morning into
loaves of ash.

Look - the train
is a giant's rattle,
churning us all,
tattooing the path.

The cleaning woman
escapes the door into
a cleated brightness
full of hexagons.

The man in the suit
with the sad wrist
avoids my gaze
with leathery intent.

Look - children
chase a lost sparrow
that flew into
the station vault.

I exit the orange gates
out into the empire
of the sitting sun.
The sounds of the metro

decline into the earth.
Deduct the moment
from your day,
be glad of who you are.

The clouds are entrails
full of meals of sun.
There has been a petite
****** between us,
but I've forgiven it -
the heart is water.
That could be a lie;
the scalpel's slit is finer
as I sit here,
the ideal patient,
staring at a street
scrubbed with wind.
Please, never read this.

Pink supernovas
call monarchs to crawl;
poison milk drops from
broken green breast.
Fields flicker with rivers
of afternoon latex.
O fluent wound,
this is a poor man's Lethe.
There are better ways
to forget what happened
than the annihilating
milkweed cripples.

Well, here I am, without her -
in this new dark space
where I'm slowly breathing.
I pour another drink in the dark -

a few tremulous stars
encrust the subfusc city mantle,
& a bus growls off
down a flat hallway of road.

The floor is paved with books -
the cat sleeps under a half-moon
that's curled like a rotted aloe leaf.
How are things in Dublin, I wonder?

The night pools in the air,
above the sighing branch.
The kitchen is smaller here.
Grief leaks into the tight hours.

I see a bathroom light snap on
across the street. Birds clap across
the row. A car races down the rack,
& one more minute stutters away.

My face, knotted in the shopfront glass,
then smeared smooth, unfolding

in strangest waves and furls
until it's me again, the mask restored.

I do this several times. Step left,
I'm a minotaur, a funhouse scream,

a maze-horror, a twist and blink.
Step right, the pane straightens me

into a mid-life crisis.
But I can't help but wonder

if it's like a coat hanger:
once bent, never really true again;

the mirror regurgitates destinies
as casually as How Do You Do.

I wander down the walk and wonder
if my eye is still slivered and daubed

into a blanched, branched pool
of wild milk spoiling in the open air.

Night-hinted marriage
& old story ******* -
then another mono morning,
my mind a mountainside.
When I almost make you late,
your face so serious,
my polished misericorde
slips between the shining
plates, it knows with such
precision where to cut.
It's a proving hour,
long ices of thought,
before I pull it out. You
rest your head against me
& I imagine dropping
the blade into a scabbard
of blue hydrangeas.
I ask of you, if I lay down
beneath your troubles,
empty my unhappy hand.

We lunch on dust.
We wake, wage our campaigns

of mistakes across a quiet,
wary, unwaving old world.

No greeting, no parting,
no arriving, no leaving -

we are jabs in the air,
crudely curbed animal feints,

& then our names are packed away
& left forgotten in a taxi,

or in a train station bathroom,
or in a fray of rain.

Don't think too hard about it;
that, too, is a mistake.

Woe to the world, the sun is in a cloud,
And darksome mists do overrun the day;
In high conceit, is not content allowed;
Favour must die and fancies wear away.
O heavens, what hell! The bands of love are broken,
Nor must a thought of such a thing be spoken.
-Robert Devereaux

Goodbye, mockingbird -
I must leave you now.
I have often watched you
hash across the yard
from your holly station,
chop chop chop with such vim,
from the leaf to the post
to the high-lidded lamp
that surveys the night dispassionately.

In return, how ungrateful I have been -
what terrible things
I have offered your shining bead
of an eye. In your tenure
on the gray-green sill
you have listened to the sharp salt
of my many difficulties
with perfect equanimity.

But now I must go.
Perhaps you will find me,
across the living ruins
of this capital city,
in the raining triangle
that corners down to Dupont.
Or perhaps you will stay sentinel
over this nest, deep in the green.
I will miss you, little bird.
My two brightest years
passed under your wing.

The clock was set back,
and now night rots
away the afternoon.
Gray light spills,
slouches, sloughs
into my hair,
my hands, across
all these strangers.

Ovals of alcohol
keep the rain away.
My life is moving
stave by stave.
I used to go to school,
have a social circle,
idle through hobbies,
new days, new days.
What the hell happened?

Like burning marshmallow,
the clouds this Monday.
Thumb over the phone
& the words to you pop
& sway like gin pink
with bitters. Lily lady,

O my lily lady,
kiss me marshmallow -
sticky and tinted pink
with lip on a rainy Monday.
Green window pops
arrive on my phone,

this sweet black phone
that brings you, my lady,
over Atlantic's salt pop
& volted marshmallow.
So on this Monday
when the sky draws pink,

& clouds too are toasted pink,
I take this thin phone
and find you. On this Monday,
my Dublin lady,
under a melting marshmallow
sky, I seek out your hot pop,

that flame that's popping
in the twilight, red and pink.
Sweet as marshmallow,
you burn through my phone,
my smiling lily lady,
even on a Monday.

& so this Monday
like a soap bubble pops.
I'm inspired, my lady,
by the silken pink
thing. On your phone,
a swan's wing of marshmallow.

Yes - Monday's poem comes pink,
& pops with phone messages
from my lady, soft as marshmallows.

Moonflower,
sewn through the trellis
with your lemon scent,
breasted nocturne blossom,
your intense distaste for the
bardiche sun that swings
across the high meridians,
how I favor you -

I will be your vambrace,
your cuirass, your sabaton -
your ancient metal shadows
that cool you from
swipe of day,
     my moonflower,
until the short-sleeve
freedoms of night.

O moon, I will save you.
I watch you rise in the daytime,
stunned by the squat cancer blue,
overcome by snappings of cloud,
letting go the night-anchors,
looking lost up there.
I passed out, drunk
for the second time today
& when I woke up,
you were broadcasting
several degrees deeper
into a fool's gold evening,
a sickly sweet beacon, luminous
almost to the point of absurdity,
I saw all your seas and mounds
unskirted. You seem alarmed,
watching my wounds so closely,
yet absent of gesture,
an affixed milk-marrow.

I will save you, moon;
after all, I am your Sisyphus:
I push and push at you
with these soaking stanzas
& each night you tumble back.  
Do you remember rising over
the Hotel Tiquetonne in Paris,
when I tried to prize you
from your socket
above the church in Les Halles,
& give you to her?
But you resisted, so I exchanged you
like currency; the stars so fluent,
bands of bleach in your halo,
you grew hair that fell out
in screaming stripes,
& I ate tartare at midnight.

O moon, I know now
that I cannot save you -
if anything, you must come
& claim me away.
You seem happy in your tides,
so certain in your arc and arch,
the delight of little elevations
in the black valleys.
You are the knot in the bark,
celestial gland, eternal bone
that rules over all bones -
so come and get me.
O steady eye-knuckle,
someday you will rise
over a world that is unencumbered
by my step; by any step.
In its last days, the earth
will call you home,
long after my memories
of Tiquetonne seep into loam.

Cyclical cinder, little ash,
you will not weep -
you will not weep,
O salvage moon,
but will transmit the final stanzas
of a requiem to a world
that cannot speak your tongue,
but will understand the paleness
of a poem that is dying.

I am staring out
at the black shoulder
that fell an hour ago
across the yard lap,
thinking about it again:
that love is a game
with no way to win;
but you can lose more slowly.

The sun is loathe to rise.
Beige, bored,
morning crutches
to some kind of
vertical birth.
Your rain plinth
glissandos don't
quite make it here;
I get cerulean void.
When the sun
finally coughs up
a gray beam
over the bellies
of tenements,
I've moved on,
to the seethe
of your notice.

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.