You fickle *****
You try too hard
You bite too hard
You sigh too much
You try too much
You're fast to love
And fight the fall
With all the bruises on my skin
I wonder why I try to fight at all

Oh Jesus time by the pink and purple sunset
Thinking of a traveling guitar boy,
of chai sleep broken by dying beggars
all trying to tell me something.
If the ocean lights don't call us home
we could backpack to the crocodile places
eat thirteen camels with the people
smoke tea and rainy day cigarettes.
Heartache sits like snow on the roof
of the hollow hut Connecticut.
The kids tried too many times for nothing.
Mom dream better for me
Wear your peace face
I'm trying to change

You're talking France nostalgia while upstairs
the weaver makes seven-dollar laments
for international slum chickens.
We can't do better than the break-bone average
reading scorched Chalbi newspapers
hacking coughs and statii soup for company.
Bukowski's in Mumbai eating cheddar
My siblings are in cages down in Egypt
The Spanish Communist cowboys
spill Turkana survivors on the floor of the Greyhound bus

Is there a hood idealist, ghetto healer?
My Sacramento roommate's drinking skeleton coffee
in the bathtub, she's got the Arab fever, so have I,
and not much else but these crazy plague jackets
this hungry smoking December
and Rumi's kids in cold-bread streets with protest signs.
We're easier taught the panic than the magic or the save,
There's too much strange and midnight waste.
You didn't know I needed you but you came through.
You're shimmering in clothes of saxaphone

On a Greyhound bus from NYC to New Haven
I sit down next to a skinny man named Fatz
who looks at me askance.  He says:
Long as you ain't crazy.
Long as you ain't gonna
stab me up in here.
Fatz? I say.
We agree.

I know I should stop criticising
Every minuscule error in revising
The grammar in here
I should not interfere
And I really should stop analysing

But I cannot erase what I see
And the teacher insists inside me
That I share what I know
About grammar and how
To revise before posting for the world to see

Your and you're are some major sinners
They make good poets look like beginners
Plus confusions in tense
Make them seem rather dense
And that's sad when they should look like winners

we are carbon,
ashes,
craters,
two towers,
after.

rubble,
mist and manholes.
your eyes on a
cloudy day.
the aftermath of destruction.

we are leftover scratches
on gas chamber walls,
corpses,
cremations, and gravestones.

vision without glasses,
abandoned buildings,
the residual newspaper ink on
your palms.

we are static, crumbling nihilism,
aged hair, and dust sifting through
frost bitten fingers.

cavities, apathies,
blank television screens,
sketches, ghosts, absence,
dust, collapse,
driftwood.

we are driftwood, not enough
for a life-raft,
sometimes, where there is smoke,
there is no fire.

i guess it’s where we were always heading,
dulling, deconstructing, disintegrating.
after all, every thing
reduces to this.

Sweetness
In
The soft flavour
Of vanilla
To savour
Generously administered
So pleasing and cool
To numb heated
Senses

Craving

Fire
In the violent rush
Of peppers
To accommodate
Necessary complexity
So raw and depraved
To set aflame
All buds