I recite your scent to my every acquaintance
as if I have spent a lifetime living in fields of it, canopies of
you atop a jungle. Truly, it has only been a mass of airplane rides –
maybe two or three or four or five with one stop – that I
have sifted you through my candy-and-smoke air
and that makes my stomach turn over like soil and earth.

There is no distance and stretch in time that’ll give
me a stuffy nose: we have had bike-baskets filled to the brim with
tropical rainstorm waters, and we have never caught a cold.
Nothing’s bitten me hard enough
to uncurl my toes, swinging above you on monkey bars.

I smell your scalp although it is not visible, I have your shampoo
memorized by ingredient and chemical property
to play scientist when the park closes.
All I need are cinnamon roots long as asparagus. The
morning dew climbs the tree I am in, this is a room I can never
escape. This is you materialized – buds still in growth.

and it’s cold outside
on the dock
the dog is chasing mosquitoes
and I am drinking cheap wine

I wonder if my mother knew I’d be
as ugly as the world
black and blue and green
but mostly black
and I think back to high school
when I aced calculus
and made out with Ashley in the back of her Jetta
but I’ve always hated math
and Ashley died drunk driving her Jetta, I think

the dog and I head back up to the cabin
for another bottle of wine
as I walk up the steps
I can hear Hank Williams on the Silvertone
             “my bucket’s got a hole in in it
my bucket’s got a hole in it”

i might give you this. but you won't change. we have new ways of getting the pain in.
are you aware of the practical agony of our bliss-less gloom ? our two rooms a-jumblerumpskin ?
we live in the crease of at least two invalids. but you steal cake and i witness. ****, i've been this
nitwit who had a mind but squandered the perils of success in a losing myth. i was a shut in
over the moon of my misadventures. tucked into jupiter sugar with my hair clean.
but my fear out.

my love is that love
swerving in novas, gobsmacked and gibbering...
a funky cuss of lust
oblong in the short run
sprinting to horizons of forgotten doves;
cooling heel and grind-
in peat moss
of mauve thoughts; so lurid you could find them
in pitch dark.

my love is the love
that chinks your armor.
the  soft clang of a raging Kismet
port of your starboard !
i am in love with you
and this thing

is  "mostly harmless "

How do you know that the pilgrim track
Along the belting zodiac
Swept by the sun in his seeming rounds
Is traced by now to the Fishes’ bounds
And into the Ram, when weeks of cloud
Have wrapt the sky in a clammy shroud,
And never as yet a tinct of spring
Has shown in the Earth’s apparelling;
O vespering bird, how do you know,
How do you know?

How do you know, deep underground,
Hid in your bed from sight and sound,
Without a turn in temperature,
With weather life can scarce endure,
That light has won a fraction’s strength,
And day put on some moments’ length,
Whereof in merest rote will come,
Weeks hence, mild airs that do not numb;
O crocus root, how do you know,
How do you know?

i became the jumpin' jack flash in november '77.
there was slush in new york city and the bums at the piers
still burned trash in metal barrels you could see from over on coney island even.
just like kerouac said.

in the daytime foolish kids picked weeds in central park
and called them flowers. they got laid by stringing charming words together as they gave them
to the thousand daughters of manhattan's old monied men,
the wall street hacks hanging from the teats of the
great & frenzied cash cow of capitalist interest. the milk
came slow that winter.

one week, early december when the slush gave way to furtive snowfalls
i took a bus to patterson, NJ
for a few days, drank a lot of awful coffee writing obscenities in my journal but speaking
them aloud in the restaurants and bars and so
was deemed just like everybody else in patterson, NJ.
drunk & high, helicopter tours, stuffed with bread and half-truths.
and when shortly my irish luck ran out i raced back to the big smoke
in a drop-top mercedes driven by a man whose thick accent i couldn't quite place.
whose only serious question was whether i knew anyone
who had good coke.

in the city it rained for three weeks straight and
david byrne, in some bowery apartment wrote a song called 'flood'
which was never released on any talking head's album
but lingered in his brain as a reminder of the three weeks
he spent cooped up, eating saltines and dancing to the rhythms of the thunder and rain outside.
totally alone with his mind & a bass guitar. tina weymouth, naturally, was furious.
the bass was the last thing she had left in a band she half-started. and david had stolen even that.

but that was tina weymouth, that was new york.