I've beaten too
many poems to death
to really care.

She, living in Baltimore,
had not spoken to her Mississippi
sun-burnt father in seven years.

He was a farmer,
she wanted a boutique.

There were the phone-calls,
at least in the beginning,
but then they too dried up
like clay pots cracking under a solar flare.

Her scars were still there at least,
she reckoned,
and those were enough to
disconnect any phone line.

But there is still a gnawing
at her insides, an impregnation
of her nose hairs,
a waltzing of her taste buds.

She picks up the pay-phone,
breathing heavier now,
sobbing as if the dial tone could touch her.

She knows that some fields
just can't stay fallow
forever.

You and I sit here
like two lily pads
waiting to be submerged.

We float
this way and that
collecting algae
and the ashes from
cigarettes that somehow
make it over the railing.

When you talk I start to
float away.
But I'm still listening.
I hear your voice even louder
as my eyes chance upon a toad
waiting to leap.

I want him to land
on you
and drown each
lotus leaf.

I once knew a girl from Baltimore
who wrote three times a day
who stayed up late
and sat and painted
and molded birds of clay.

They said her mind was beautiful-
as elusive as an eclipse
and when she spoke
the words shot forth
like shooting stars from her lips.

We'd sit and talk for hours
and I'd try and catch the stars
but my hands grasped only stardust
which I saved and
kept in jars.

But now the jars are broken
the stardust is no more
Our photographs are sunburnt
the birds lay smashed upon the floor.

I hear she married a banker
lives a subway life in N'York
they tell me she works in retail
and sleeps alone when not at work

But before she sleeps
she turns and tosses
and wonders why time flies
and then steps off her single bed
&
writes before she cries.

If he says he's a poet,
turn and run away.

you made quite an impression on me
old man. Something about the dichotomy
of your mangled mechanical motion
and the cobble stone streets of Portland
-and every other city constructed with a bipedal complex-
made about as much sense to me as a lilac shooting
upwards through the parched desert earth. From the other
side of the street I saw your ***** calloused
hands grasping the wheels of your entrapment.
Hands for horses crooked legs for reigns,
your mind harbors the immutable knowledge that your
wheeled prison can't be escaped. But then, for a moment, it happens:
With a desire for movement unparalleled by even the most
diligent of wayfarers you break free from
the confines of immobility.
you are a great steamboat disembarking
from a familiar port, traversing the
***** rivers of black tar and cement,
fires stoked by the thoughts of what was and is no more,
drifting along to the tempo of a softly beating heart and
the feel of a woman's touch....
it pounds and you listen
and you and her are wrapped
tightly under sheets of linen again,
legs intertwined, arms embracing
the undulating curvatures
of a supple young body
and she says she loves you
and you say its requited
and she says we can make it
and you begin to run your
clean youthful fingers through her hair
and then boom,
your ship runs aground
and you once again become enslaved
to your affliction. Upon the curb
you sit old man, stagnant,
face in your ***** hands
thinking of where
you've been
and where you will never go.

And it is only after the last text is sent,
the last dinner enjoyed,
the last weekend spent in the mountains,
the last flower picked
or taken and destroyed ,
the last conjugation of two calloused hands,
the last artwork smashed,
the last passionate kiss shared,
and the last “I love You” spoken

will you know what
it is truly like
to bleed.