for C.S.R.*

One morning I find my f(r)iends’ eyes are lead;
  That evening I pace in gullible love;
Night falls, I find wished-on stars have fled.

With intravenous need their hearts drop dead
  (The inward death boyhood knew nothing of).
At daybreak I find my f(r)iends’ eyes are lead.

The mind, encased in a dark, narrow shed,
  Blindly estranges the sunlight above.
The unlit night resembles my dread.

From the pulse of my trusting veins they’re bled.
  Fitting like a vinegary glove,
The needle transmogrifies their eyes to lead.

Unforeseen fallout from the needle's head—
  Drug-sickness, self-contempt, flesh grown mauve—
Imprisons them. (The stars are dead.)

Maybe if I’d not trailed their pitch-black tread
  My Pyrrhic sobriety would be enough...
One morning I found my f(r)iends' eyes were lead
And all the stars I'd wished on fled.

I tip my hat to Kierkegaard
Who was there when things were hard,
To Mr. Hofstadter
Loading my cannon with fodder,
To Willie Yeats
Who showed me my poetic cognates,
To the Buddha
Who, mentally being a barracuda,
Illuminated what patience really means,
To Graham Greene's
"Brighton Rock"'s influence on Morrissey,
Which made me smile at the sea
And recognize "in my own life
What Robert Browning meant
By an old hunter talking with Gods;
But I am not content."

I have two scars on my face; neither one's very visible anymore. One I received at age three (late 1992), falling face-first into a dry riverbed on my first camping trip. I landed hard, my forehead colliding with a crescent-shaped rock. I remember my father turning me over, my vision going red, the blood flowing into my scleras and pupils. The rock missed my right eye by millimeters.  When J.K. Rowling published Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 1997 my peers began calling me "Harry." Dark-haired, bespectacled, similar scar -- whole package. My comeback: "They should call Harry Potter 'Chris Gorrie', I had the scar first." Not until ten years later, when The Deathly Hallows was released, did I realize Harry was "born" in 1980.

The unmitigated silence of night:
solitary confinement. A freezing
dog barks at homeless veterans' wheezing.
Overhead clouds obscure the moon from sight.

I have no tongue for whiskey.
In turn, the whisky tasting
was a waste.
I got drunk
unenjoyably.
Maybe whisky's best use is as an
emergency antiseptic.
Someone asked, "How was that one?"
"The physical manifestation of 'NO'."
Walking home,
I fear this will be the taste
I taste while dying.

Coughing up tar on an Irish roadside,
I think of you.

Stranger things have triggered such recall.

Always, for some reason,
your reflection
is in every
black pool.

Hot tar and a thirty-year-old nickle's scent
broke the evergreen air as the bleak moonlight bent
shadows into the semblance of a grated vent.

On my cell phone I repeated what I meant
to a man behind three to four months on rent.
"Three or four thousand, come on Kent,

I'll let it slide for even two. I've lent
and lent and there's a considerable dent
in my wallet." He said the check would be sent

by the next week and remarked, "Time went
out the window. It disappeared in the events
of yesterday and was spent."

A week later a check was present
in my mail. It was crisp and unbent
but was written for "172,800 minutes and no cents."

I called up Kent, that incredulous tenant,
and said, "What is this check? It's content
is silly and makes no sense." "Relent,

relent, it's for four months of pent-
up time that was spent." "Time? The rent
can't be paid with a check to augment

lost minutes!" "You agreed to it before, on my word, as a gent."