he wasn't much on saying so
but it made its way onto birthday cards
and deathbeds

the long thin fingers of a girl of twenty-four
wrapped tight around the handrail of the L-train
bright-blue-eyed but for the temple bruise

                   he loves me
                   and the mess I made

everything tattooed (everything everything)
invisible on her cheeks and in the hollow of her shoulderblade
her lower lip and wristbone
but for the temple bruise
darker by two shades

          a four-in-the-morning-night cottoning her tongue
          not-the-first of many and her long thin fingers
          white-knuckled

          little joys to light on the handrail
          not his warm-hot-ice-hard chest
          or his loud voice (woulda been real handsome
          if his eyes weren't so cold)

but for the temple bruise

                                                         ­   i
                                                           ­ fell
                                                            in
 ­                                                           love so many times that day
                                                            t­he first sunday of its kind--not drenched
                                                        ­    in imperceptible airdrops

                                                       ­     the red-brown beard of the business suit
                                                            ­and the freckles undermining the punk-rock
                                                       ­     vibe of the dark-eyed fox-girl

                                                       ­     but the thin white knuckles
                                                        ­    and the temple bruise

                                                         ­   --none more than her

we laugh twice--

first loudly; of course
they can't hurt us

quiet, freeze-dried smiles
nervously after
what if they hurt us

it’s just one

letter in the box (that you checked
and checked
and checked
till the fountain dried up
on your pen-tip).

I waited--
bated breath and newsprint
on my knuckles
--to tell you what I knew now,

but you shouted over the
first syllable
and never heard the rest.

patiently I watch the red flag
rise and fall with daylight--
bated breath and newsprint on my knuckles
--for your word.

some days I feel it coming
comeoncomeon

it’s just one

high voiced Irishmen and spun sugar turned to
teenaged dreams and a teenaged circus

cold beaches in October like candlewax and promises
to call
bacon on the stove and cemetery gates and no one
to answer

if-this-was-the-cold-war to
this-is-the-*******-cold-war to
how'd-you-ever-get-so-blind

to the summer of warm warm warm and
the nights you'd have wanted at
sixteen and twenty
if you'd thought about it

and the big empty road in front of you that
under Orion's patent-leather belt looks so
not empty

how you're tall
and freewheeling

but not without

“let’s celebrate a beautiful year,”
said one particularly sentimental mosquito
on a sideways tree in central park.

she and five girlfriends floated down
and joined us by the earth.
they paused over me, breathing my air

then moved on, instead
choosing his calf muscle for their joie de vivre
—his blood is sweeter than mine.

there exists a breed
of butterfly that lives
on the blood of departed
human bodies.

from afar it is mistakable
for a monarch--
the covergirl fireflower
of the insect world
who drinks from petunias.