November rains and nothing's new:
Let's go back to writing poetry for two.
I laugh outside the echo chamber, and read O'Hara in blue.

God is gay. His name is Frank.

We've been at this for years, my dear!
So why seep into silent sludge. Ink blots
on the sole of my shoe. If not for you.
The max! The wax! The musical goo!

As you know, it's all true -
However the weather,
Dead Girls last forever.

The winter is slowly killing her
and me
but on the deck by her side
at the low tide
the river at three is a sparkling glass
feeding a belief
there would be no end of us.

Did I touch you as I left?
That night of beer and music
Almost tipsy,
laughing good-byes

Backing into blindly
I felt an arm... a moment
guide me
before I all but fall
against you
Knew that warmth
of mass was male

You exhale
I sense your being--
behind
Amused
By accidental intimacy
I come unglued
By your flirtatious
catch of eyes
in lowered light
By faint fragrance
of whatever it is
you've drunk or used
to put yourself together

Turning
guarded
Apologize
glancing down


Women always look, though
however briefly

they’re pouring out of the
woodwork
those pretentious machiavellians
in ailing albino frames
eccentric masked figures
milling about the glow light
like night moths
in a london fog

lunatic gazers
with seeping moles
pinned by frogmen and twine
spider climbers
in hell fire
splitting seams
on the fading
and hideous ink

guards of the perch
stand on hades hand
while monsters and demons
with severed limbs
taunt the condemned
and wanting
souls of the ******

cauldron fire
in blood red sky
silent screams
hack and wheeze
gas lines broken
words unspoken
teetering backwards
in the dark shadows
of a phantom abyss

It was not, by any means, a loss of faith;
Indeed, her devotion was a boundless, unfettered thing
Beyond proscription, beyond rote chant and catechism,
And what she found as a novitiate
Were shuttered gates and gossipy confessionals,
Standoffish priests, pig-eyed and pinch-lipped
Sisters who thought life’s commerce
No more than mechanical prayer and spotless linens,
The whole enterprise
Smacking of the exclusion of Heaven’s bounty.
So she demurred when the time came to take her orders,
And she returned to the world of pavements and lesser pieties,
Free to seek God on park swings and barstools,
In pleasures of the pastoral and the profane,
Though her faith is no Dionysian walkabout,
As she is passionate to the cusp of maniacal
When it comes to the Book of James’ admonition upon works;
She is often found among the sisters she once tiptoed alongside
At food pantries and clothing drives
(She is scrupulous about ministering to only secular needs,
As the Bishop is not happily disposed towards those
Who choose not to take the veil,
And the specter of excommunication is a prospect
Too awful to contemplate)
Afterwards clambering onto some vaguely roadworthy MTA bus
Back to her studio apartment in Green Island,
Where she often walks down to the Erie Canal lock nearby,
Praying for those who have travelled  near and upon the water,
Convenience store clerks and ragged Irishmen fleeing famine,
Feral kittens and insufficiently mourned mules.

and there I was, sad

my robot
giving hell
to an elevator

and I was forty-one
and still not there
the day that kid
got beat up
for keeping sadness
close

and I was never the poorest
in any room

is this what being poor means or meant

grief
that we can brush at the fossil
of grief

I scrap and peel the patchwork of the earth
Half written dreams dust the floor
In the crook of her neck we drown
Secrets eat away the floor
The petal of her taste nips the winter pain
Bird travelers taste the treetops
Torn like a page from the language of your touch
I'd split my bones to place you indside
The day seemed so young as the floors begin to moan
A hummingbird sobbing in the deepness of time
As the night dreams