We built a little night
but you emptied it.

Your Dublin beachhead
is all undertow.

Dead menus blow from
one gutter to the next.

Westward parks
fill with fever.

A gibbeted sun
hangs ignored.

O darling...
I'm not this way,

I'm not this way -
remember what I am.

Stay in
late on Sunday,
when sleeves of keening rain
drape downcast hollies by the street.
Come here...

Chess in the
afternoon sun.
Jazz floats over
the silky couch.
Backs ache, while
hearts break.
Bishop takes knight,
and France falls again.

The masks are all
broken under the
cerulean blue skies,
while she eats berries,
and smiles in her
pink polka dot dress.
The pawns are all smug,
and queenie's on the rag.
Italy surrenders, and from
the grave, Charlie Parker
still hammers home
those soft amber notes.
I can smell her heat, and
I think they play
Jazz in hell.

There's no more romance
in this February world,
but we can still miss each other
and say little love yous.
Night will still drop on us,
it will still flake away from us,
& I will still curse the distance
from my low, black chair.
I may only be your halfway darling,
but I'll gift you lakes of kisses
until the screen goes dark
& the evening covers my name.
The moon is so still,
like a removed lung.

The rain plows leftover vapor
off the street, and into
the fawned sugar yard;
it's almost spring, and your birthday
is around every corner.
For me, nothing can dull it,
not even this smother of sun
screaming into the blanket,
or chilly gods that straddle
the graves of the air -
winter holdovers.
We are paused.
This gives me down
a jag of ****** noses,
& stain to salt my eye...
but I still adore your new nails
that pop scarlet,
your cloud of hair,
your count-coffee thoughts.
I hope you don't mind
that I can't always speak
without this heart-warble,
& that New York
doesn't wait for us,
not this year.

I just wanted to say to all you awesome HP poets, that I'm sorry I don't comment as much as I should.  

First, I have pretty bad anxiety, so if I try and comment I usually have to write and rewrite it like 50 times, decide not to say anything, feel guilty, and then, ultimately, just say something like, "Awesome."

Second, I feel like I have to conserve my awesomes, cause at some point, they're gonna run low, and I'm gonna have to resort to saying "Rad," or "Radical..."

Aaaand then someone is gonna be like, "***, who's grandpa is this?  ARE YOU OK OLD GUY?  Someone better come get him..."

i can still feel it — the ghostly echo of storm clouds it in my throat, now dry and emptied of the softest sighs. they all had fallen on my flower-bed skin, pristine as the petals that once were. or so i pretend. i can still feel it in my throat: the storm, looming. the calm drowning itself, and its haunting, beckoning call to which my feet slowly walk.

some days, it's just you and the uncharted depths of your own skin.

some days, you can bother with poems — some days, you can only drown.

He punched me last week
And told me that he was joking and that's between me and him
My friends saw and helped me break it off yesterday
Today is my eighteenth birthday
And I am nothing like my mother