These spiritual window-shoppers,
      who idly ask, 'How much is that?' Oh, I'm just looking.
      They handle a hundred items and put them down,
      shadows with no capital.

       What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
      But these walk into a shop,
      and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
      in that shop.

       Where did you go? "Nowhere."
      What did you have to eat? "Nothing much."

       Even if you don't know what you want,
      buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.

       Start a huge, foolish project,
      like Noah.

       It makes absolutely no difference
      what people think of you.

i brush the popcorn off my jacket.
outside the theater where they show
fassbinder films
i dig for spare change in my pocket
for the homeless man on the corner of
seventeenth and arbor.

heard through the psychobabble
as he extends his hand:
“get a girlfriend
get a job
stay warm”

the things we do to be human.

perhaps *******
are unaware of themselves
until they blossom at the touch of
the cold
or
hungry hands
mapping
the topography of skin. perhaps
they wait
for lips and ivory teeth
to explain every pregnant
pause in your touch;
each time we undress our bodies
are new again.
we emerge
from the cocoon of bedlinens
coloured and crumpled and
left to dry in the sun.

sometimes I find
poems by accident:
I trip over them in the shower or at the bottom
of the stairs and I
apologize for my misconduct but
what the **** were they doing there Im not
supposed to be inspired
by yearsold graffiti or
words scratched into
bathroom stalls or
in the dulcet tones
of the woman on the other end of the
payphone that ate up my dollar fifty
stop ******* the sleep out
of my eyes scratching at
the scrabbleplaying part of my mind that
wants to steal other people’s words and
dress them with the playclothes of
my fiveyearold daughter
why the **** is it
that when I see strangers at the coffeeshop I can’t
just let them be strangers anymore

The aroma of coconut milk
permeating the frost
of the windshield.

Vague scent of cigarettes and Febreze
in your hair.
Your teeth between my thighs.

Your tongue
circling mine
like two hyenas
scavenging .

You taste like
the tea you drank
half an hour ago.

Neutral
This car has been hit before.

I am frightened by your
automatic seatbelts.

i.
your drunken goodbyes
hang so sweet in the air
filling the space with a
desperate needy embrace

ii.
i stand before you with
no defenses and nothing
i could possibly say except
what do i know about love

iii.
i walk you out into the
East Village night to
see about hailing a cab
sun peeking over the bridge

iv.
everything seems to be
coming apart i wonder
when i surrendered to you
what do i know about pain

v.
i wave goodbye to
the back of your head
and turn back to look
at the pink, foamy sunrise

concave,
convex;
you stretch and shrink

from the blood and chocolate
on your tongue.
a mouse, peripherally,
jumps sobbing out of your
breadbox.

you drive your fist through the mirror and when
i walk in you
are at the dining table,
playing chess with the pieces of your shattered
soul
the blood still running
from your knuckles.

on the impracticality of
impracticality
of the
wings of dragonflies made of
cellophane in which
i wrap myself in the hopes that one day i will
suffocate on the impracticality of
shoulders moulded to fit
the leaning heads of our lovers on the
impracticality of
bedsprings
creaking to wake up the neighbors at three forty-
six a.m. or
clouds, even
bursting at the seams to drench us with our own
tears
why can’t we just
**** each other from the
outside instead