7/21/2015

sitting on the wooden bench in the middle of the park the
couple across from us rolls something
to smoke the “hooligans”
(who am I? That was me months ago)
congregate on a bridge overpass
a dog lies down

your tears do not fall steadily and well
practiced like mine,
in a cacophony like an abscess
in a concrete dam wall

clutching your shirt, cursing masculine dogma,
my fingernail pushes a little orange seed of water and you
blindly take out a pack of menthol

you offer me one– you never do
I take it, light it, burn it out after five moments,
I press my face against yours so our tears blend, this nodule of saline congregating merging like a bacteria

as it falls ahead on the ground
our tears, one
hit the Silent concrete on the grey New York

fat rats  play on the nettles behind us.

7/14/2015

"I mean I just don't get excited
anymore, you know?"
but even that
statement drains all the life out of me,
grabs a spot in my ribs, twists it, pulls it out like a dandelion ****.

I decide walking on 3rd avenue in
a Brooklyn neighborhood that I don't
need energy anymore
or, I've been doing well with the scant
supplies I have of it.

The day before, blow dried hair sticking to my neck because the windows are locked,
I had listened to the radio
Billie Holliday: oh lover man where can you be?

I know **** well where mine is,
unfortunately across the hudson
but I think I am happy for him because
any sane person would be otherwise in
princeton after a while

I count and recount the oaks and pines outside my house and the cardinals and bluejays and mocking birds, try to find something, don't find it,

Read a book, and I yell to myself:
"'That’s funny! there’s blood on me.'
- Frank Ohara."

“’Have you ever seen a man?’ I knew he meant naked. He disrobed.Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. Then I felt very depressed.”*
- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Afternoons while the dog sleeps
turned over on the side and i wonder what organs i push on
liver? spleen? clean the bile for me, please

and then I  shall leave extra gratuity.
Please don’t cry, I feel a hand on my hipbone
my eyes pressed against the olive cushion

The green and the wood of the trees blur into one outside my
june july window
much like the book of Esther i look for a place inside

myself to stop the killing of decency inside myself and
i cannot muster it much like anything else.
I wish i had never asked that December night to go

I stop the disgust cut it at the bud
find a way to necromance up my personality
the outside is smelling of charcoal

i stare at his flesh,
then at mine then
at the floor.

he says we shall wait all i want and
now he is looking at me with doe eyes and i
nod. I nod. I feel i am ok now.

7/1/2015

"you will remember, for we in our youth did these things:
yes many  beautiful things" - Sappho's fragments

Greenwich Village, NYC

Only the 24th of June and
Simpson and i already
tire of the summer weather.

I always seem a little thinner these months
i note, i bite a strawberry candy and show her
how to light her lighter

just hand me the fork
no more callousness
both on palmflesh and human dealings

the building facades on Charles street
as in the southern Chawellsss....
she explains alcoholism runs in my family, you know?

i nod. no other problems i presume?
the community garden nods and
people who will always be richer,

prettier, strut past with tuesday briefcases
and their children's wheelcradles with ethiopian
and guatemalan hands on the handlebars

follow a block behind.
But we're from Joisey, and **** proud of it!
Lobster rolls and jimmies and johnnies and

boardwalk planks Erin dreams of
broadway instead and neonatal nursing,
who doesn't?

the only youth on the street that day we
teetertotter past all the cafes and pubs and
laundrymats

*you know, if this was the school year we'd
get picked up for skipping school

5/13/2015

There happens to be a tremendous peace in a spring night late in the season, sultry humid mornings and days seem brash in comparison to this light blue thing clouds crawling across the sky to the tune of mourning doves and woodpeckers. I cannot remember primaverial scenes before last year's. It seems spring is the shortest, the frigid isolation of winter is so permanent and branding that I can recall every individual one since perhaps '11. Fall and summer always seem to blend into a purgatorial gloaming paste. Throughout all these seasons one always feels he is a single pedestrian (or is there another name when one is wholly alone?) walking down winding drives and straited cremated avenues. Perhaps it is not so common– perhaps it is me, but even when walking in deltas of human life one in winter feels alone. But writing this by the Japanese oak under the beak of a woodpeckers I feel the same apprehension. It is me, I have decided.

6/17/2015

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."
– Sylvia Plath

the green monet blur of
blades splay across my window
like a ***** on a bed

the garter on her leg:
purple asterids
and buttercups.

i realize something inside me
has changed:
i no longer am accustomed

to the looks of campus on foot
however the way it looks
driving past, splattered dead

on my glass.
I balance on the smog settled
Sidewalk

"I cannot remember things I once read  
A few friends, but they are in cities.  
Drinking cold water from a tin cup  
Looking down for miles
Through high still air."*
– Gary Snyder

a cloud like the tower of babel
behind me, and the sun rides high
to my right on the handlebars of
six pm.

she cried to me that she missed
getting smacked little blows in the face
i told her that isn't a relationship

but it's only a little bag of dust,
she proclaimed and i wondered why
we are, ultimately, all made out of dust

our bones art frames for our
failing livers and kidneys and
me? well my lungs are perfectly fine.

the best compliment she ever told
me: i am the anne to her sylvia.
i sit on the deck of a street bridge,

the gurgling mountain creek
below me vomiting into a pit
of mud and tadpoles.

the cars brush my hair with
every pass or maybe it is the
storm wind from the tower cloud.

i am her anne, she said
she is my sylvia, she said
it is june and i am not tired of
being brave, i am

tired of waiting for her to be
saved.
Even gas ovens are made of dust,
somehow.