We are drunk again.
The smell from the dustbins below
rises up to our luxury balcony
that overlooks a building site.
A phoenix is going to rise
from the ash, when the city burns.
I think it will come in half-price rentals
and coupons for a sack of rice.
Nothing makes sense
in this dying skyline,
all the people in planes
will go back to where they
came from before.
If they are lucky.

You asked me to talk some more.
To acknowledge your existence.
A selfish mood and darkened clouds
cut in by September.
It kept us inside and barely alive.
Everything became a block of thought,
each separate from the rest.
I lost my peripheral vision.
Could only see my sadness,
and not the wave-breaks that it makes.
We sat on a beach in Indonesia.
Ran to collect shells in the peculiar
ocean retreat. When the waves
came back as a cathedral,
we never stood a chance
in the blood-shed
and lack of air.

There is a rubber ring
out there for me.
Beyond the paranoia
of possible sharks and oil spills.
When I get pulled on board
they will slip me into a suit.
They will let me write poetry
in the day-time, and be cradled
by the sea as I search for sleep at night.
In the morning I will eat without sickness.
I might talk to the waitress,
prove myself sober with an orange juice.
She could laugh at a joke
I would only tell about myself.
If I was lucky.

I can run when we make the first port.
Whatever tongue, whatever lips
to set upon, I will take it.
A bed for the night
or coupons for a sack of rice,
I will drag the loot home
and fall asleep in my clothes.
Learning Spanish from a folk-singer,
he stubs cigarettes into my fingertips
and feeds me whiskey
to **** the pain.
The wine is cheap and the people
are easy, they let me smoke inside
if the weather is turning blue.
They bring grapes when
they sense a sadness,
and will not gripe with me
until I am ready to gripe with them.

I tried to write you a letter of apology
but it read more like a suicide note.
It is hard to talk about circumstantial meetings
when you can see this nonsense world
dissolving into parts.
The sun-set makes no sense to the poet,
and still he will quote it all the same.
A convenient landscape for any occasion:
you can use it for the end-piece.
Everything I could write to you
would only sound formulaic;
the best melodies have now been played,
and so we are left with imitation.
For now I will have
a plastic-bag career,
walking home on foot
and sleeping soft at night.
There are no chances
of new landscapes in the present.
So I will lay open in bed
and allow this landlocked town
to be my paradise.