"I like my fire white hot
and my skin ice cold."
She talked at me crookedly
as she red-marked the rim
of the scotch glass.
The smokey haze almost masked
what she didn't want hidden.
"I like extremes, polarities, you know...
moving towards them,
pushing too far in a direction
to remove the possibility of return."
Clink-to-coaster.
*** oozed out in crescent-circles,
"I like you."

Her eyes were bloodshot brown,
all that caramel whiskey sweetness.
She had it in her:
all that passion, that lust,
that cruelty to never call again.
Her marked stiletto against my thigh
under that lonely spilled table
spoke volumes more
than her sideways looks.

Although I said nothing,
I had it in me too.
We'd connected.
I liked that
she lived
like that.

A beggar lays chained to concrete,
to skyscraper that stretches past clouds,
breathing aside, neither dead nor alive,
we've given up on his release.
For what purpose does he survive?
When his stomach knots empty,
he curls fetal, hands clench chest,
and sobs escape in pants and whines
and saliva and not an eyelash is batted
toward his cup that silently watches:
It hasn't jangled in days.

Lashes litter the sidewalks
from eyeliner applied while
rushing to an extravagant event
in midtown Manhattan,
lights lips reflections,
where all will will be watching
her every move, her every step.

If he wills himself survive,
we can clean him up
in loving arms of sleep deprived nurses
before we kick him back to the curb,
abandoned again with rip-rotting liver,
while we vultures eye another *****.

But that girl?
She better not trip over Prometheus
or we might just chain her next.

My limbs've caught fire.
Senseless, I no longer know pain
from passion from energy
from subconscious,
all are smoldering in my chest,
and my mind has vacancies
and that burning blackened lightness
flows as heaviness
through my fevered arms
and into my hands
and one of which,
palm up and hand cupped,
stretches out with fingertips starred
for the faucet in the bathtub.

Grasp, twist,
return-turn wrist.
Grasp, twist.

Toes bargained with Feet
and, upon agreement, conspired with Legs
for, what I can only hope was, a hefty price
to absently stumble and stew this body,
raw, in a basin too small for my meat,
and the cast-iron bathtub
will soon boil like a tea kettle
without a screaming spout
and I will steep my mate
without metal mesh and bombilla.
Too hot, for too long, with too little,
but I'll sip it, silently, as it bubbles.
Not a wince,
even if blood spills out my sockets
I won't close these eyes.
Watch them drink of life
as flesh drips down my lips
and reddened cave lights
emerge from the depths
and fill my eyes.

My movements were never aimless:
a body took advantage of my absentmindedness.

Worded arrowheads
are fastened to shafts.
They rain down on
our Love-fed ears.

Bowstring at ready
pulled back high-sky,
They strike down all
who lived this earth.

My soul, infringed,
asked, "How can this be,
with heart shut tight
from melancholy?"

Closed cold, a shield,
I thought could withstand
the force of a blow
guided not by your hand.

The force of a blow
guided not by your hand.
In time the sands
will salt our land.

Your words will crop
my sagging skin
and feed the ground
with hollow chest.

Death for the young
never-held as best,
but for this earth
a heart at rest.

But for this earth,
put Death to rest.
The price of youth,
pays for the best.

Amid wind and thunder, a coming storm,
a September coat rests silently upon my shoulders.
Leaves descend from the bending giants above me,
and still I sit here.

A flurry of passenger-filled cars sets the park spinning underneath me.
These people, they'll all be arriving somewhere soon, but, for now,
they flood my consciousness with homes decorated in aged photographs,
and still I sit here.

They're going there, those places that fill them whole,
with those people that lovingly adorn their company.
Though I don't accept it, I have people like that too,
and still I sit here.

My mind meanders the gravel path to a duck effortlessly afloat on the pond.
Doesn't she have somewhere to fly to too? To South? To warmth?
Maybe she enjoys the safety of my company, and so she contemplates herself,
and still I sit here.

Her wings involuntarily flutter from the assaulting gusts, until,
finally, she gives in. Her wings spread and beat against the water below her,
she's off toward clearer skies, not a thought on her mind, who could blame her,
and still I sit here.

As the sky opens up, drops and drenching, a chill sets inside me
starting with the ears and the fingers and the toes.
It creeps up my arms and legs, it violently spikes my brain
and still I sit here.

We all know where it finally stabs. Yes, you know it,
you've experienced it before. I howl uncontrollably in chorus with the breeze.
There's not a soul around, just the singing towers rooted around me,
and still I sit here.

At home my dinner awaits, it's steaming hot, it begs to be eaten,
but all this sutured heart can do is think about is that **** bird.
I should be going now, it's time to leave that soaked bench,
and still I sit here.

Stare at your bedroom wall
and bard me a story about
the creeks of white between
the sun-patches of blue paint,
the faded yellow of the door
where the damp towel was hung
day after day after day.
Tell me about the mark
of a swept paintbrush
that accidentally destroyed
distinction between wall
and radiator.
They're no longer clean,
either of them.
How are the door handle dent marks
from that hurried moment when
you rushed into your room
away from our argument?
What of those stories?
Will you need a new place
to erase the memories from your mind?
The flies and the walls cannot speak
to anyone but you now.

It's all rotten anyway.
The sweet stink of evenings
spent in an intimate supine,
with a cleaver caught upright
in the cutting board bedpost.
We were atop one another
with our faces to the ceiling,
reading passages of poems aloud
after drenching the bed sheets
in varied indentations.
Cut words and minced gazes,
we grayed as shadows
against those weathered walls.
I remember those walls,
moonlight had reflected off the frames
of littered photographs, those stories,
and created a dance floor pattern of crescents
and plank-meeting-plank askew.
Those walls will tell me stories
even if you decide not to anymore.
I'd buy them all up, I would,
as I do the meat hook-hanging
in the butcher shop.

What is my voice
but a flowing river.
Through boulder and stone
and fall after fall, it goes.
Afloat on its surface,
a piece of thorny bramble-
a smoke-seized throat,
brushed up against an overhanging trunk
at a narrow crossing.

Maybe it's caught there,
a blackened ball of death,
a soft lump that cannot be dissected
by even the most astute surgeon.
My voice gives me character,
is a character,
is my character.

My voice runs through hills like a raging river.