Billions of women
Have known how to prepare a steak.

Libraries of recipes,
A deep glut
Tucked neatly into ancient scrapbooks
Boasting of delicate marinates, spells and
Sleight-of-hand saucery

Like witches hunched over a cauldron
Stirring,
Kneading with the same spoon
That their grandmothers fashioned.

Taste,
True taste, is a subtle dance
Between giving one’s all
(Every fiber, every ingredient)
And knowing the appropriate spice
Ever-proven to suffice
By meticulous, observable
Experimentation.

Billions of women
Have had remarkable taste,
Memorialized and passed down in a scrapbook
Tucked under the cupboard.

There is but one of these
I cared to read.
But it is covered in dirt,
Encased in marble,
And nowhere near the cupboard.

Asphalt hot will scald the toe
The smallest step will stub it,
Succulent pots will catch the eye—
Surely to leave you rubbing.

And Fear, the wretched, ***** cat,
A mane sheer black with pause
Shimmies down the fire escape
Like good old Sandy Claws.

Blind as night these twenty years
With memory for an action.
Fear, that ***** is blind as me,
But she seems to find her satisfaction.

The difference between stepping
Stones and stumbling is the lesson;
You turned the light on, a quarter to three,
And from my blindness, drew a crescent.

Asphalt hot could scald the toe
Could melt holes in shoes, you know.
But nothing ever burns quite like
Denying your weary feet that road.

And Fear, the wretched, hoarding cat,
A mane sheer black and sane:
You ought to thank her for the ride
Once you’ve felt, at last, the pouring rain.

The thought of you makes me want to refashion old Bible verses,
“Consider it a pure joy to be a part of this trial,” I whisper,
“And you know that the testing of faith becomes perseverance.”

The sound of your voice carries more overlapping melodies than
Hard brass mallets hammering at the tips of my fingers,
More depth than does escape the open casing of my grand piano.

The warmth that flows from your heart is a testament to my lack
Of circulation, despite my ability to swim through the ocean naked,
Far passed the pier and into the horizon, every ceaseless morning.

The sight of you tears me open, tears me open, until I am all
But unable to put my nerve endings back in order, despite the fact
That they are reinforced every minute of my solitary waking hours.

That I always saw you in a white studio apartment
In the big city with its slanted houses surrounded
By the crooked, recycled fences;
That walls as big as mirrors can make your shivering
Thighs come off like sophisticated weaponry, or
That I had been on drugs when I begged you.

Did you know that the square root of any number
Is less real than what we saw on the television, or
That I believed in numbers and you taught me
Where the alphabets could never agree upon anything, or

That I’m not writing this for you. I can assure that you are
Dead and gone, the way hearing Snow Patrol for the first time
Can never be revisited.

Did you know that my drapes still moved like your body
Danced ruefully beneath them, like a ghost in the machine
Or a ghost machine, or a breeze, perhaps a spot of indigestion.
Did you know that I could never let that specter go, or
That I have now.

Why can’t these lines liberate
or conflagrate, remonstrate
or set me straight like
like they had in the
midnight hour
That may never have happened?

I saw you in a dream,
with no torso upon your legs
and I cried myself awake
unable to remember what you said
minutes after the doctors ascertained
all those swollen lumps had spread.

Like a pen could sort the difference,
pin my quiet words, or even listen
to the high-speed pileup of a listless mind:
pull my teeth and ask me one more time
What has more power than insistence?

Because your hair had once insisted that
even a dive can hold a rhythm,
and every follicle leapt from your head, lying
“We are the makers of our decisions.”

My pen just won’t translate clichés
For one reason or another.
It would rather ****** the page
Than aid in the smothering
Of youth, bridge the gap of old age,
Take mass graves and cover them, and
Would rather fade into disgrace
Than find a remedy to the blubbering.

Because this pen was not designed
To draw rainbows from hurricanes,
It would rather commit every crime
Than sketch new hues to the stain glass
Windows of anarchy and rhyme;
Rather commit arson daily

Than dig up the past for all to see
But none to find.
And one day soon you will race past the
Apple Store with its blaring screens,
The calamity of another mise en scéne
With nothing new to say but alas,
You can always find my pen in dreams
That make burning sense
Before they come to pass.

I wouldn’t be high for a couple years
cutting your chin through our chatter, I remember
the churning of yearning,
an abrasive fear
forgetting every tooth in our smiles.
November, our supple glands exposed
we were four ships
brushing quietly in the bastions;
so you poured kerosene over our toes

and taught poised and cackling tongues
until we never slept a wink
without the sigh of something greater
Here, tear apart these things
pay no credence to their creators
so everything
was the truth
with your fist its righteous order
as you pulled us from the garden
and you taught us of the Lord—
oh, how these blisters ache in light
how they clog up all the pores,
now that every ship drawn to our eyes
drifts unrecognized
on to shore.

The horoscope instructs you when to try,
Sportscenter shames
Time poorly spent,
And a commercial on the tv tells you why
You tried to earn more
Than covered rent.
In fact, you’ve learned that you can sigh
From the same logo that aims to prevent
A tree growing straight,
Still wondering why
The kid from Into the Wild preferred a tent.

The weatherman told you when to go but
Those hills have eyes that
Tickle your spine;
You can convince your arteries’ juice to flow
But some streams run deep,
Deeper than a drill could unwind.

The schoolboard cannot be stopped
In rain. In snow,
Knowledge breaks the naked man’s vision.
The hardwood floors in an old house
Grow, and when those panels crack
I hear they glisten.

The only thing I want for Christmas this year
Is an idea, one that doesn’t crack under pressure
Or insist on its originality, like 50 Shades to an era
Raised on bootlegged copies of the Old Testament.

Holidays are overrated but just this once, Santa,
Bring me a body more intangible than yourself
That can stir up the kind of emotion that adults
Would lie to their children for. It’s torture, the way
Few words sound before they join the tongue,

The way some names should never be spoken.
You can wrap a gift in a hundred different skins but
If it’s still fragile enough to swallow, snort or smoke,
Then Santa, I insist you hold onto it this year.

The Panther scales above the infirmity of the jungle
like a reverent vicar, in her mouth
she clutches an infant. To some this is
the most intoxicating world—so long as you don’t mind
a little ruse, how could there be a day in your whole life
that doesn’t consist of a flurry of happiness?
Below, game lopes abundantly as the ocean tributaries,
each frolicking along a distinctive course, not that
she ever really ruminates over them, or anything else.
The panther has never had to digest a fable,
though her existence propagates an analogous terror.
When predators raid her hearth, they remain
ephemeral, irrelevant – her insatiable hunger the only story
she has ever managed to revisit.
Your skin will never feel her eyes. I cannot say
she is wrong. Piously she prepares her supper,
with its meager, undeveloped vigor, erupting
a contented roar in the conversion of its properties.
She exists the product of her kind, the natural order her excuse
as she scales back above the inconsequence of the jungle
again, to do the same thing
(as I’d longed to do something, anything) perfectly.

I feel your eyes under my skin
Coursing, they dart up my arteries
And breathe in the vessels
Three days still after the mark.
Full blue moons on the horizon, I
Drink elixirs to see their tidal
Wave ripples again in the dark.
It remains an inconvenient truth,
Carefully lain glaciers melting to
Erode the stability of mountains.
The intricacies of habitats drowned
By the Holy Spirit, a reflection of the
Sun. The heavens still would be nothing
Without the spirit of two blue moons.
I know the planets well, those caught
By your orbit at the dawn of ages and
Still, I could have held you better.

One of these days
those static, predictable
moments
that you call chance
or good fortune

will become your
warmest reality.
You may take them
lightly or
overcompensate
at the moment,
but they will ultimately
define you,
especially if
by their absence.