To future conquering civilizations
in galaxies far far away . . .
don't worry about polluting the air,
our smokestacks have shot *****-bombs
into the clouds for centuries,
mixing rain drops with the
black grime of industrialization,
transforming our children's tears
into cesspools of sulfuric acid and ddt.
We've also drained the bayous and swamps
and between you and me
don't even bother landing in Africa
there isn't suitable drinking water
for miles, you see.
You can thank years of colonization for that.
In fact, you may not want to land
on Mondays, Tuesdays, or Thursdays
in LA either-
on those days the air quality index
is 175 and far too unhealthy for any
biological organism to survive.
But at least you won't die of malnutrition
you've got decisions:
McDonald's or Burger King
choose
cholesterol and diabetes are your shock troops.
Send them in immediately,
there won't be much resistance
we've got these things call lazy boys
and daytime t.v which have
enslaved the population and decreased
the distance
between fully functioning
human beings and mindless apes.
Don't worry about bringing weapons
we've got those too
we've perfected the art of blowing each other away
there's not much for you to do.
we destroy cities with fire from the sky
and our mushroom clouds rise
at least ten miles high.
And god can't see, there's too much smoke
in his eyes
and our radiated children die
with radiated sighs.
While we are on the topic
don't worry about us spreading
propaganda
we've lost the ability to communicate.
We've learned
books turn a peculiar dark yellow
when lighted and burned.
And forget erasing history,
we've done that too.
Our subjugation of native peoples
is masked as 'patriotism'
under the red, white, and blue.

But don't get me wrong,
I tell you all
of this not to dissuade,
please come and attack,
please come and invade.
Here, I'll even turn
on the lights . . .

The representative from Ohio
wipes his *** with Jose’s brown
palms after a bout of verbal defecation.
Luckily, Jose’s food truck houses

a small sink in the corner where
he can wash his hands in between
baskets of chorizo prepared
for rich politicians.

Sometimes Jose scrubs so hard dream flakes
rub off of his skin and he throws them
into the wastebasket to be picked
up by the sanitation workers who

eagerly jump like frogs in orange vests
into the waste of Americana. When
the Representative stops by for
a plate of carne asada, Jose’s

dream specks pepper the beef
and his salty sweat flavors
the inside of the burrito. He grills
the onions and green peppers with

a dash of minimum wage and
boils the rice in a mixture of blood
and pieces of his heritage.
He serves the meal in a white Styrofoam

tray and drizzles it with cheese flowing
from an open wound. The receipt is an unpaid
medical bill, the drink an icy reminder
of his future sipped through a straw.

The nightly news tells Jose
the Representative is bedridden
with a stomach infection. He
complains his insides feel like

a million ***** feet kicking the lining,
like unheard mouths with rows of
sharp teeth gnawing at the liver.
Jose to the tv: tonight we’re not starving.

Pretend that you're a poet
& sleep beneath beer-stained sheets
Pretend that you're a *****
& lay down in the streets
Pretend that you're a Buddha
& delight in the peace
Pretend that you're a preacher
& drain them like a leach.

Pretend that you're a soldier
& cry when no ones there
Pretend that you're a lover
& kiss her when shes bare
Pretend that you're a housewife
& start to make a list
Pretend that you're a prisoner
& stare into the abyss.

Pretend that you're homeless
& and beg beside the road
Pretend that you're an alcoholic
& wake with guns to load
Pretend that you're a poor man
& sleep upon the floor
Pretend that you're a rich man
& you won't have to pretend no more.

The art of the geniuses
is packed like overstuffed crayons
in the alleyways of my city.
That one is picking his nose.
There is the bench-sleeper.
Here comes the nomad with the stroller.
I watch them carefully like
a soldier on an ambush,
bayonet at the ready,
a little drunk on
self-worth.
They approach and I pause.
I put the camera to my face
and press the shutter.
Turning to me their eyes
beam sorrow.
The nose picker slept alone last night,
the nomad is still lost.

In black and white they
will forever navigate the crawl spaces
of my mainframe.

it's 8:00 somewhere in Washington D.C.
and the global selection committee has made its picks:
for the 473rd time
all the number one seeds are filled by countries
that break the most rims and shatter the most glass.
here we have the U.S of the North American region
taking on Haiti, cos the poorest countries
always place no higher than 14.
China of the Asia region has drawn
Nepal,
Israel gets Palestine,
and Italy pulls Ethiopia.
There are no African countries-
they didn't make the tournament this year.
No problem tho,
the selection committee figures
they've been beaten up
too many times
to even make a layup.
Games start tmrw
so grab your favorite basketball merchandise
and keep the channel set.
There will be no upsets
so don't bother
pulling for the underdog.
They've already been
neutered, anyway.

The neighborhood's gone to ****
and no one seems to care    the doors

are blown off from the tempest
blackening the air.  Swanson sleeps

with Harbors who takes Johnson in her mouth
while Johnson picks spare change from

the cushions in his couch. Brinkley's
unemployed but subservient to Mrs. Langer,

while Desmond reaches for two shotgun
rounds and places them in the chamber.

Boom went the weasel and Jill's on
methamphetamine

while the neighborhood we knew and loved
went harshly down the stream.

The months can be a ***** and the year's
have been a *****,

the neighborhood's gone to ****
and I'm finally crawling out the door.

And only when every prison
in the police state has
an art gallery
only when hip hop
sounds like a revolutionary
sermon
only when Congress disbands
itself for lack of moral conduct
only when condoms
are jammed tightly
into high school backpacks
only when free speech
isn’t subject to search
and seizure
only when housing projects
get gated fences
only when college
athletes use pi
to find the circumference
of a basketball in their spare time
only when food pantries
exist in old NRA hangouts
only when Monsanto scrubs clean
every black cloud
only when Noah comes back
and transports
two of everything to
a protest movement
only when a protest
movement morphs
into a diversity celebration
and only when the U.S. government
writes a 5,000,000 page
apology for every ****,
******, and Bill O’Reilly
sentence uttered

will I even consider having
a picnic.

Calling the two blocks
of brick shantys
a “neighborhood”
is like calling Chris Columbus
an entrepreneur.

Columbus had three wooden pontoon boats
& a palace in the new world.
My students have Columbus’ outhouses.

I don’t even enjoy walking through
there anymore. It’s not a stroll in the park.

There’s only so much imperialistic **** you
can step in and wipe away
before you
start to track it in your
house.

For Ricky

*Ricky Williams, Miami Running Back (2002-2003, 2005)

When the news broke and the camera pointed at a torn tent
on the outskirts of Miami where you sat knees-up-to-chest

professing enlightenment, the football world sacked itself
wondering how good your *** really was. Must have been

growing straight from Buddha’s back yard because to give
up 16 million like that, to go from bachelor pad demigod

to hippy hero of the pimply *** smokers, requires some
kind of unfathomable spirituality. I wonder if the Sadhu

could even find a desk big enough for your frame. All 230 pounds
lurching forward with brittle bones towards some kind

of endzone sanctity not represented by a smiling porpoise
but a transcendent 1st and ten where maybe you’d be happy.

After your final game I imagined you’d do what so many
washed up athletes do: find meaning in the parking lot

of a used car palace or open up a Dairy Queen, maybe
join your kids PTA and tell fourth graders stories that

you now half-believe. I didn’t think it be like this: you smoking
****** under a mauled tarpaulin, brushing fly’s away from

dingy dredlocks, running forward, exasperatedly free,
while a nation wonders why you’ve failed us.

Turns out the King of the Projects
couldn’t even tie his shoes.
Couldn’t draw or make love.
Hell could barely even read
and definitely didn’t know how to sing the blues.

Turns out the King got his crown
after two and half games of basketball
on the weedy court at sundown
the day before his tenth birthday.

Turns out the King was the roughest,
toughest, scabbiest fourth grader
in the whole **** grade, raised
from good Somalian stock and
willing to sucker punch kids
darker than he.

Turns out the 4 ft 5 King of the Projects
stood mighty tall over the
class pet ferret, ephemeral
creature of habit,
watched the
rodent with eyes peeled as if the two
shared the same beating
heart boombox.

As it turns out,
every day at noon we had music
but the drums were always
taken by the King who
pounded a steady beat to the
shake shake shake of
the music teacher's 'script
of benzos, eyes still glued
to the ferret, seeking a ritualized dance.

Turns out the class pet escaped last week.

Turns out the King stopped coming too.

Shame really. As the teacher, I felt I had
to have something to say to him.

Turns out I was just as scared as he.

Looking back on it now,
after the wars & the peace & the wars,
I wish I'd never met you.
Imagine what your life would have been like:
you would have finished graduate school
and gotten a cushy job at a large bank
and worn those **** office suits of secretaries
that show just enough cleavage to make
the boss wish he had more ******,
and your sales for the quarter would have
skyrocketed like a smooth stone
fired from a slingshot and you would be
as happy and content as you were
in the age of innocence,

And you would pass the field
where I lay sometimes on your way to work, staring
at the seas on the moon-wondering
why they look like closed eyes-
But alas,
-things didn't work as planned.
We met and fought and made peace
and now we spend our nights together
in that lonely field,
staring at the face of the moon,
eternally wondering why He
doesn't smile back.

Sometimes when I pick up the pen
I feel my 5 ft 7 and ¼ inch frame
perk up like David at the sound
of Goliath's slurs.
I swear i'm 6'6"
and ready to dunk the basketball
straight over Wilt Chambelain's head
made soft by the kisses and “**** yous”
of the 20,000 he probably never called back.
Sometimes when I start to write I believe
that I am invincible like James Cameron's
submersible in Titanic's
C deck sifting through soot and broken china,
floating over smoke stacks and rusted bedposts,
or reaching out my robotic arm to open
up the door to the radio room that once
buzzed with hellogoodbyes.
Sometimes I feel like the soldiers walking
behind that little napalmed angel screaming
down that dirt road in Vietnam,
oblivious to the fire of my words.
Her cries shrink me back down to size.
But most times I feel like I'm hooked
up to a lie detector test in the dank basement of
an FBI facility, blood pressure rising while
the polygraph line traces
the outline of a mountain range
no one has ever hiked.

Who knows if Werner Heisenberg
rammed his head into the wall
after discovering the uncertainty
of the electrons of his lover.

Imagine having a brain the
size of Utah and not knowing,
with certainty, where to find
her nucleus.

If lyric could **** I’d want every one
of my poems to be a Walther P38 w/
a silencer, the kind of gun protruding
from Bond’s pocket like
the metallic ******* p-shooter
he’ll stick into some Russian
beauty by the name of Svetlana
at the end of the movie. The poem
would be **** (right?) bc everyone
knows a big gun translates into a
bigger ****. I’d whip it out when you
least expect it and blast a full
chamber of multi-syllabics into
your cranium. And the best part,
bc it’s so silent, you wouldn’t even
notice the eruption from the barrel.
Your last thought would be, “how beautiful.”
Then blackness.
Afterwards, I’d remove your brains from the piece,
and watch as the words trickle from your
wounds. I'd leave the poem at the ****** scene
and call it art. Surely then it would draw an audience.

I come outside
at the wrong time.

My brother, shirtless,
bakes under the Mississippi

oven sun, tosses
a frog into the air

and watches
its eyes pop

as it nears the concrete,
grinning as it splatters

and looking at me
for further direction.

I nod and watch.
Inside I cool

and await the
coming guilt. I start

to feel my skin itch
and I scratch madly.

I transform into
a stick held in

the sweaty palms
of my brother. He

skins my bark with
a knife, rubs flint, sparks

me, burns me. I crackle
in the fire. In another life,

another world, I’m
fashioned into a spear

by tall Mississippi frogs who
like the way humans


sound when they fall.
I’m impaled on a stick

outside of the frog temple
and long frog tongues **** me.

I’m never offered
to the gods.

When the summer of our youth has passed
and the bane of winter draws near,
we sit alone in opaque rooms
and crack ourselves a beer.

To the north we look with glossy eyes
yet to the south our mind wanders freer
we laugh and smile and grimace and weep
and crack ourselves a beer.

We think of days of wonderlust,
of scenes of timeless cheer
of children playing in the rain
-and then we crack ourselves a beer.

What happened to the upbeat muses?
did they take and destroy their lyre?
we wonder where the bluebird went
as we sit and crack a beer.

We haven't seen him for a time
and because of this we fear.
The gourds of innocence broke and leaked
and so we cracked ourselves a beer.

And with them chipped
we quaffed long and deep and into lands we steered
destined for hate and war and poverty
and so we cracked ourselves a beer.

Instead of honeysuckles and wafers
we feasted on bloodied deer
and watched our parents fight and die
as we cracked ourselves a beer.

Trees of mighty oak that hoisted forts
have fallen in the clear
as have the mounds of Geronimo
while we cracked ourselves a beer.

And so our friends have left us
our lovers are nowhere near
last seen flying away with the bluebird
because we cracked ourselves a beer.

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.

My city's face is blemished
by the clogged pores
of black asphalt
and motor oil.
Her naked, metallic body
repeatedly burns from cigarette
ash dropped upon
sidewalk cracked lips.
Her teeth are disjointed metro rails.
Her hands stand arthritic and proud,
balancing skyscrapers on
broken finger tips.
Breath like
black smog
she coughs blood
and inhales the broken
english of her immigrant workforce.
Yet when I get the chance to bed her,
the city and I become one
continuous concrete paradise.
I gently kiss her and tell her that she's beautiful.

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.

Believe it or not,
there are men who shriek like
banshees at the deathbed of a sickly dog,
and women that remain impenetrable
like the broadsides of an iron ship
at the prospect of loss. Not all
executives wear the silk tie
of haughtiness, but bump shoulders
with the rounded backs of street beggars.
And just as the moon waxes and wanes, organizing
the stars into a symphony of light, so too
do the clouds occasionally close the curtains
on the whole performance.
I am a poet but I do not cry.
I am a man but I do not push nor pull,
throwing around wantonly the weight of the cosmos.
I like to think that each of my billions upon billions
of atoms move as gracefully as swans
under their own microscopes,
forcing each and every onlooker to stare
and pick at their own skin
in a search for uniqueness.

I miss the crinkle smile
lines slithering up your
cheeks like canals on
the Martian surface-
evidence that life was once there.

Or the way your laughter could penetrate
the depths of my dead skin like
harmonious frequencies
erupting from a kitchen muse.

And where your hands touched
so did Midas follow;
and where your hair spiraled
out of your face in pinwheels
so did galaxies imitate.

The bed is colder now that you
have stepped away.
I miss the depressions in the sheets.

Oh yes I miss a lot.

But most of all I miss
what I never thought i would miss-
the ability of your lips to create
the sweetest music I’ve ever heard,

a thousand lyres playing in unison: I love you too.

I stumble into the morning ritual like
clockwork and press my face so far into the sports section
that I can smell the burning black ink from the printing press.
I shovel eggs and bacon
down my throat in such a manner that when I kiss her, the grease from the bacon leaves
a slimy residue on both our lips.
I do not stop to admire the way
the sunlight coming through the window hits her hair,
or how her smile
releases a thousand butterflies housed
somewhere between my stomach and my heart.
Work calls and I'm late so I rush out the door
and give her the generic “I love you” I've
mouthed for years, but she's crying behind the door
-I can hear it as the lock clicks. And the mailman
comes and the lawn grows and the children
grow up and graduate and she never truly knows how I feel
until it's too late, until she draws her last
breath at her deathbed
and looks at me with large full moon eyes
that say nothing more than
“Who Are You?”

Writing poetry is like
making love to a woman
whose moans awake
sleepers in adjacent rooms.

Each verb thrusts into
the bent-over orifices
of the human heart.

Each line seeks to impregnate
the womb of the receiver.

And after enough time and
attention one will ******.

The question is, will you wear
a ******?

And although
they’ve spent
nearly 25 years
cleaning the same

***-less bed sheets
every two weeks
and have used
the same blue soap,
the same rusted spoons,
both believe
another’s body heat
may be more comforting.

To her the morning coffee
cools quicker
than it used to.
His conversation
reminds her
of unsalted grits.
She sees the lines
beneath his eyes and
wants to tug
at them like zippers.
She’s contemplated
******, even.

At night he touches
himself. He moves
blankets off and on,
side to side.
He awakes wet.

In the morning
he looks at her and
wonders why
she stabs at her eggs.

It begins on the curb,
spoken through a language that
cannot be discerned,
not a compilation of adjectives or verbs,
but a discharge from the sensory nerves.
And it isn't defined, so do not be perturbed,
call it Tabula Rasa- it needs experience to emerge.

And then it busts through,
from the places unknown,
its abundant in Philly and areas closer to home,
taken and shaped and
inspired by the human genome
         -Creativity Arises.

as if* the neurons in my brain
joined rank and gave me
a synaptic '*******'

as if the god's turned their backs
while Zeus shot lightening
bolts through my computer screen

as if the Earth gravitated to her
new lover Mars while
the saddened Moon
watched from a starlit view

as if the page was the curved
ivory tusk of an untamed mastodon
charging from the left indent

as if the blinking cursor was a dagger
ramming itself into Caesar's back

as if the word processor itself
was a ticking time bomb
with enough explosive force
to rip through the loose-knit fabric
of literary space-time

and as if the words themselves were locked
away in some distant prison,
sitting in death row,
*waiting to be executed

If you sit alone in opaque rooms
and wait for a few good lines to inject themselves
into your brain as if they dripped from a syringe
then its time to try something else. Poetry is like
a gigantic exotic insect that shouldn't be squashed with the
***** undersides of rubber boots but captured
by meddlesome mesh nets and elbow grease,
put in display glass cases where the wild things
are and frequently washed clean of the stale,
insipid grime of life. And after enough love
it will entrap itself in the great transmutable cocoon of time
and break free. Poetry is in the bark of
old grandfather tree stumps out back behind
the barn, each circular line revealing
multitudes of cacophony and pain,
yet you wouldn't have known the taste
of the ligatures of wood without
first running your tongue along
the metallic axe that hued them. Poetry
hesitates for those who stare with naked eyes at the
cold quilt of patched grey clouds looking for symbols, choosing
to instead reveal itself to the telescopic lenses
of admirers of orbital spheres.
Whereas sometimes the cracking Sphinx confuses even the
pristine muses and the sound
of thunder at night makes the dog
cry so does the effervescent poetic
smiling of the moon inflict pain
onto the hearts of the lonely, yet they
still dare to look. Poetry isn't a noun
but a verb. It is the act of jumping
into leaves, of stepping off the precipice
of normalcy, of falling ever deeper
into the dark abyss below.

Father, it's been quite a while.
I can see the long hand of the clock
stroke your face,
and although there are no
numerals, the monotonous
tick of the second hand beats against your brow.
Father, you are nothing but an exoskeleton
of your former self.
The soul trapped between your
crisscrossed face lines
is not your soul.
The hands that wrinkle
like underwater mountain ranges
are not your hands.
I don't believe it's you, father.
You were once a great rumbling earthquake
with enough force to shake
laughter and happiness into the concrete
bones of whomever.
That was then and here you are now-
a quiver, a ripple,
nothing but a humming aftershock.

I can't count the number
of times I was told not to cry
by my father.
He'd say “real men don't cry” in
a sand-paper voice,
turn and walk back into the kitchen.
I think I was 14 or 15
when I discovered poetry:
one big pulsating
heart beating against the
chest like the roar of a cannon.
It's raw, more jagged than
a broken nail on a chalkboard,
a rusty nail contorting itself
in the wood.
But there's a certain
music in it too-
like the singing
of a jay.
And sometimes it allows you to cry,
a cup held under a spigot.
I normally hold those moments back
and complete the daily motions.
Yet eventually the levees break
regardless of the thickness of your concrete.
It pours from the hole.
The sentences get moist,
and the ink transforms into black mud
and the page turns
into a crystal clear blue lagoon,
letting you see what lies
in the trenches.

I have this bar
where the tables
are stickier than a bog,
where the lights dim
like a yellow moon,
where the people talk
and cry
and laugh
and argue
and go home feeling
a little less alone.

And when fate pitted the two colliding
gods in battle, the outcome
was what you'd expect:

both rising up from
the cracked asphalt, one light
the other dark, one evil the other
misplaced, the earth split apart
and the trees bowed their heads
in silence for the figure
laying on the ground with a glock 9
bullet in his temple and a smashed
candy bar in his palm.

How senseless
the war between ideas, between
wrong and inconclusive. That afternoon
morality
was a crow frying itself
on a power line.
Common decency and respect
were lost tourists who
couldn't speak the native tongue.

And now, in the wake of the colossal battle,
the entire country washes its
hands in blood and pauses to weep
for the martyrs
who continually rise and fall for
nothing.

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.

Some days I wish I could just
crack my head open with
a monkey-wrench and let the words
flow out of my split cranium
like alphabet soup. If I'm lucky
the letters will coalesce into
sentences and form something
someone will call genius.
People will look at my body
and call it poetry.
They will see the monkey-wrench all covered
in the soupy denouement.

I've left the key under the doormat,
*come back home

There are many many people
who do not feel as if they have to
write poetry. They are not moved
by the smell of black coffee and
cigarettes in the afternoon sun. When I pass them
I can tell that 5 angry men with
machine guns do not have them
pressed up against a wall demanding
they dream. They do not feel the unrequited
desire to run their calloused hands
along city pavement and smear the
black smudge on the cups
and plates of their solitude.
But they are the lucky ones I suppose.
They may not be invited by the muses
to the party,
but they sure as hell
can never be kicked out of the bed
once its finally over
and the city has
buttoned up its jacket.

When I’m with you it’s
as if Gabriel never fell from the sky.
Or maybe he did and he bypassed hell and
fell straight into the arms
of a miracle.
You make me want to write sentimental poems,
but I like my poems a little ugly,
with the teeth knocked out,
a smidgen of blood on the verse.
And without getting too sentimental
You make me perk up at the sound of your voice.
I swear it keeps me in tune.
It’s as if your voice is a little metronome,
Keeping 4/4 time
And saying dance with me,
-angels keep tempo too.

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.

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.

As we lay there,
she looks at me
with eyes deeper
than canyons,
letting me
know the earliest bus comes
at 6:30.

I turn over
and sleep well.

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

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