Intimate adventures: purple sunset;
Sabrina Elliott at her canvas;
My brother boarding some Utah-bound jet;
Easton Connell reciting tender lyrics,
Caught in a mad faith’s unwitting net:
“Daylight licked me into shape”; then night fell;
The city struggling with unheeded debt;
Lieberman and Sathyadev dying young;
Their mothers, a heart-wrenched duet.
James Howard humming, his guitar unstrung,
Paganini in that delicate hand:
The failed romantics; a thing to be forgotten again.

Knocking on my door: Charlie Calgary is here!
His clothes in tatters, upper lip bleeding.
With tenderness my mother welcomes him. He looks
at me knowingly, pretending to tear.
Trickery! Always bluffing till they bring
Something free. He's among the youngest crooks.
She gives him dinner and one of my toys.
"Count your blessings", she counsels me. I frown,
flip Charlie the bird, get sent to my room.
This is the same game he often employs.
Later on, mother's in her evening gown,
Charlie's gone. I sweep the porch with a broom.
The day finishes. It's dark. Quite quickly
the starlight shows --- walking off carelessly, save
knowledge of wounding and cruel, fleeting thought ---
that sadistic boy Charlie Calgary,
whom my misled, well-meaning mother gave
stuffed-chicken dinners, new toys that she'd bought.

She looked into my eyes today;
The reflection was not her own.
I could not convince her to stay.

they told me
                      “poetry is dead”
in hope that when I found it I might leave it in the grave
in hope that a journey might not begin
in hope that I was

and, dying, I found poetry between
where the azalea knots its white crown and drops
between a hole in sunlight and the moon, where
between the living and the dead
a broken vase of its ashes sift

He knew his behavior wouldn't work.
It bred only enmity and sadness.
No one expected to love him less.
I've since pardoned the ****.

When first light breaks, the drapes
guard themselves
like wounded children,
whispering

There is no visible end
on which to latch.

Hatred shares
a wall with me,
shares
a callous countenance,
shares
a small, collapsing tear.

Much love to the one who wants it least;
they need it more than most.

Like rosaries
chanted
in an empty church,
I sing an impression of hope.

The hyacinth and the dahlia
Blossom
In one anothers' shadow.