Leaving Minnesota on train or buses,
crowded and alone, were you fearful
to sleep on couches and of the Village
people with a rhapsody of dreams

and cacophony of chords, under rain
and sewer stank was it hard,
to step inside and play
the first time for glistening eyes
and stage lights and to let melody
escape your belly-throat

for them, or did you know
more, that words can sculpt
delicacy as smooth
as Donatello and that life can be bought
without wrinkled greens and pressed

threads? Walking under a hard-rain
of assumption and change, did Greenwich
birth a demon-sadness, so you hid
your neck beneath collars and dark
glasses and smoky rhyme, when the ship

comes in will you be onboard or escape
to Louisiana, misunderstood, working
a river boat after you give Lennon
a puff and Warhol a tight-fist?

Did sad-eyed Sara send you back
leather spanish boots or forget,
and was Christ able to mend that
broken love, and did you later kick his idiot
wind away and in 2009 on stage when I could
see emptiness and heartbreak
hidden underneath your creased stetson,
were you still singing
it ain't me, babe?

Walking with a baker's
dozen white eggs

I see her dancing
slippers behind notebooks

and burnt out
candles in the corner

of the apartment's
closet and I

wonder if you
didn't put them

with the other's
in the brown cardboard

boxes as a reminder
of the ballet

in January where
I slipped under

ropes to be with you
backstage that first time.

Asphault rats                             Lonely suits
guide longing                            snug tightly
hungry beasts                            around cigarette
under bridges                            smoke hidden
through afterglow                    under ******
oceans rippling                         Ivy League
snarling hoods                         fraternity paddels
through tunnels                       slapping clean
leaving subway                        bruised-white
cars lonely                                old-money *****
trudging aimless                     walking tall
after some                                through window
fortune here                             lookouts of
in S.E                                        shining N.W
corners D.C.                            sidewalks D.C

When your fingers move
within the betweens of keys,
white then black, scaling
and tumbling through and over
knuckles and joints and wrinkled
imprints does your chest flutter
arpeggios and dance along
with tender pale-pink ballet
slippers balancing, spinning
in a reflecting room of mirrors,
the echoes of a pentatonic scale
the pounding of parallel chords
nudging your toes exactly right,
do you forget your wives and daughter,
both Emma’s, when you let the genius-flow
and the grand piano waltz
with your soul,
do you fall in love with something
more I cant describe
in verse, delicate Debussy.

Turning his back now
and through the turnstile, under x-ray arches
and a uniformed pat down,
under a white tunnel and spotless linoleum
flooring and after a ripped ticket and hidden
smile and through another tunnel with a
cold breeze trickling through and a
plastic smell seeping in, he steps one and then
two feet onboard, ready to take-off, back
to New Jersey, back to the only place he has
left (a mother's home), away from a new wife,
now divorcee, and new diamond ring, and away
from St. Petersburg and away from
the Neva River and away from the Baltic Sea and
his blonde accountant wife and from
their flat on the river on the fourth
floor leaving the keen walls,
aware of his shouting and her swelled bruises.
His visa was expired anyway.

Would he still feel comfortable
in brooks brothers felt trousers or those loafers
with golden ornamentation or with pale white
business cards being traded between moisturized

fingers. With hands clutching a cold metal
pole on the subway and swaying to coltrane
from his headphones would he still trade glances
with the woman in good humor whites with two

black babies and a clear tub of windex and fresheners
and rubber yellow gloves. Or just stand tall and straight
and rigid and lifeless and keep his eyes
on the black floors and the loafers
and the illuminated emails shining from his palm.

With a newer suit and pay raise and the snarling of his new office and the desk with his middle aged secretary, would he still treat her kindly and keep her father's cancer in mind or instead, (next month), ask for a younger blonder girl from a better school (and bigger ****),
after the man finally makes his seven figures.

Maybe when she's older she'll understand why
she can't hold a relationship with her mother
and sister and all those boyfriends that left
with sagging hearts and her boss who made it
clear she wasn't ("fit to work in this office") with

him. And when she's home and the tv flutters between cable
news (and reality tv) and her watered down
glass of pinot with the ice cubes dying and
melted she feels at peace. And when the door slams

shut from the outside where another (ex-lover) walks
away and the ashtray he left, (but that she never used), is filled
halfway with his dust she'll wonder why
apathy kills and then go on not caring. Because

with another day comes another interview
for a job (as a copier) and more cute skirts and business
attire to pull her from the house and out that door. And when
she comes back to the plush couch she'll notice

the change in her mood that comes with more glasses of wine and
more slipping opportunity but that won't make it any different
here in the home. She knows the couch is her's, (with its floral print
and frayed pillows and left over stains of ***** and wine),
it can't leave her too.