Skin’s crawling, the edge of square roofs glowing
with a cold sweat,
eyes are sharper at the crack of a brown dawn.
Dogs own dominion
in fish markets that smell of yesterday.

Their lives and mine are perfect
by the all too human reckoning
of a life’s worth calculated by wants supplied.

A lone cyclist pedals a basket of dew-drenched vegetables
to his usual earthen haunt and tarpaulin,
swerving around the territorial pack
as they change course, trot over and throng me
muddy paws on the best clothes I own,
breath smoking in the dry chill,
I buy myself a pack as the cigarette vendor
unpacks his wares out of damp sacks,
it is a miracle that my breath does not catch fire
or that my eyes have not turned into cotton-*****.

Yet another stranger has brought me home
to the sputter of a third-world petrol engine.
He gets his fare, it’s only fair,
and I’m just glad that I will sleep,
I have nowhere to be in the morning,
I have adventured and now
I am tired and there is a yawning hole
that I slip into without knowing.

It is warm at last,
I cradle my head with the soft side of one hand,
as if it were mother’s,
and this is well, for as things stand,
my dreams welcome me in
and their characters are so familiar,
that I may have just woken up
from a foggy, unmemorable dream
into childhood sweet and clear.

I hang from your words like they’re gallows,
dripping, running, hardening like melting tallow,
I escape your mouth, only to fall into your eyes,
spurned twice, but still I want you thrice,
you burn, and I am a child who cannot learn,
mark me a fool with the nails in your mouth,
plough furrows into my back, till my land,
still my words, breathe my stale lungs,
feel my rough hands on your mountain roads,
my feet on yours, barely treading water.

I would steal the wings from the birds, the fins
from the fish and the limbs from the beasts,
rip the stars from the sky and the trees from the soil,
dry the sky for your parasol, and I would gladly
burn the entire world for just a little light to see you by.

The ***** of a heedless king
drips down a chrome tire.
It smells, “MINE, SO BEWARE!”
His loyal pack sniffs about
the borders of the kingdom.

That tire drives through a strange land
halfway across the city, growling cars
and glowing yellow eyes that do not blink
threaten national security. Perked ears
show no fear! What nerve! The audacity!

A dog’s bark
possesses.
It is a war-cry,
a display of strength, defcon 3,
a campaign of awe and horror
where sleeping dogs discover
the wolves they came from.

I lost my cellphone then
on a sultry June night.
I was quite claustrophobic
in a pair of midnight jeans
that I wore only so you
would not think me bohemian.
I did not mean to forget it there,
but I was only making sure that
your lips were okay in that heat.

You saw me in a pair of cool khakis
on every midnight in that fevered summer
and you didn't care much, you said,
you wanted me comfortable, you said
because I ground words for long hours of the day
and for longer hours at night to keep you.

That struggle was like singing songs to an Angel
to make her forget the choirs of Heaven,
it does not matter how beautiful are
the slender cracks in the human spirit
which are slivers of the infinite grace of a love
that is common as air in that Kingdom.
To such a creature, surely,
even the whole world would not be enough.

A man with nothing is unequal to the contest, and
a new cellphone enters my life,
to replace the one I lost months ago,
but I have no one left to speak to.
The world smiles as if to say, here's a toffee,
it really is too bad that you've been starving,
and here is a consolation prize you cannot eat.
Here is something that cannot sustain.

What I came to understand was that we are
a line drawn between only two points,
a string taut from a stationary niche
to a pencil desperate to escape the leash-
the string snaps and all that is left
is the thirst of entropy too long bereft,
a scratched scar leading off the page,
but circles in peace, and others in rage,
in obsession, and in indifference,
gibberish as a poet's language
to represent what once made sense.

You are the broken pottery
I bear in my broken hands.
You are the cracked glass
that split the world in half,
the sawed-through cane
I rested my burden on,
the frayed noose you
fashioned into a leash.
You are broken, my dear,
like everyone else here,
I carry you like an illness.

I have discovered that my blocked nose
is not the reason I can’t smell roses.
The smell has been cut out of the genus
for the sanity of sensors on cargo airplanes.
What then, about my children and their’s,
when they discover old books for themselves
and ask questions about the smell of flowers?
About poetry, and the Nineteenth century?
How would I tell the tale of family Plantagenet,
with flags as dead as Lancaster and York?

This tragedy seems so terribly unfair when roses
are so much prettier than instruments on planes,
every petal a miniature piece of God’s own skin.

I need to walk down to the roadside florist if I can
get out of this sweaty blanket into this chilly weather
and find one of these ****** roses so I can dismember
its petals one by one. I must disembowel this litany if I can
she loves me, she loves me not, she wants me extinct
bred out of this world for convenience,
just like the forgotten smell of those roses.

The tragedy to be told is that women are not supposed
to be the main course in your life, the glorious bouquet of roses
that you set the table around. They are more like condiments
to an existence already charmed, but if the ketchup has gone rotten
it tends to put a damper on how everything tastes and everything smells,
I can’t smell the flowers and there are too many forks.

The clock strikes midnight,
the hour hand a hammer
the minutes a skinny nail digging into tomorrow,
but my heart is drunk half a day in the past,
clinking fragile glasses with ghosts.

How can this be the same planet
when we share its land and its air
but not its days?
There are two worlds that exist,
one the night before, one the day after,
and the gulf in between is sealed.
You live in one, and I in the other.
They are not at war
but like cousins who once fancied the same girl,
they meet only on occasion.

We bring the New Year in together by being half a world apart
as if to prove that despite empty spaces where you were,
you remain.

How do you share a new decade
with the soul you’ve shared for half
when the miles will not speak to each other?
They eat my words and misreport my intentions,
and my heart will not coax them into cooperation.

Frost earned his wisdom from walls,
but bricks are far more forgiving than the miles
and teach softer lessons.
The Atlantic is a moat and
my daydreams may be dogged swimmers,
but they are dashed like dying starfish on the East Coast with the tide.
Half the world is a wall and I whisper to you through peepholes,
cursed to peer through one eye and by half the world’s light,
reaching into the past desperately with a hooked finger.
It is as futile to describe the rift with this shadow of sign language,
as these words are.

The Earth turns one full circle into next year,
and I find that I have also been turned around,
but it is only me that has turned, and nothing has changed
about us spinning, spinning.

A tattered flag dances on a rusty pole,
having forgotten what color it once bore.
It has forgotten that it is a flag,
and what flags are even for.
Was it a bed sheet caught by bad luck,
or a symbol of hubris since humbled?
None can tell, the reports say,
there are none left.

The rag flutters at full mast, saluting the death
of civil servants muttering below their breath.
Everyone's dead! scream the rotting newspapers
behind the cracked glass of their rusted dispensers.

This is a planet suffocated by an idiot race
that left a running car indoors,
stayed for tea, lazed and slept,
multiplied and made merry,
then burned the bodies to hide
their monumental stupidity.
Easier to remember faces than dig holes,
and if you can fit thirty five heads
into a two body boot,
just imagine what you can do
with a billion unused cars.

It looks like they built and they built
until there was simply no more room,
and they ate and lived and fathered
and sang and thought and wrote,
made love, war and many a treasure,
and used and churned and measured
and grew and burned and murdered
until there were no more brides or grooms,
just the long prophesied doom.
There are no more funerals,
no fun in this immortal ******
that is half clay, half undrinkable,
there are none left to sing elegies,
every ending should have eulogies
so silently final.

Under layers of dust and ash,
under this meaningless, floating rag
and beside the splintered corpses of trees leafless like discarded matchsticks,
every poem is posthumously ghost-written and never read,
the bricks have crumbled into desiccated bread,
but bone persists through the ages.

There is something about seeing a woman
in a man's clothes
that hints at recent sins,
for where are her own clothes
and why does she choose to wear
a man's shirt? A man's stink?
His salty passions, faded nights
written sartorially in drink?
The wood of his wardrobe
and his love of meatballs?

Jackets are overcoats, clothes lie,
skin peeks from behind rolled up sleeves
pants are dated, we say, **** pants.
There is a sense that what I've been wearing
has never seen better days.
I study this creature with a cat's grace
masquerading in a mongrel's wrinkled skin.

It is then I decide that these clothes
are no longer mine, that they belong
to she who they've chosen and that
I'd rather be naked than feel the shame
of being second best for my own things.
Quietly, I peel her like an orange,
tongues singing like electricity.

Old men in older times once agreed
that everyone should be able to say
whatever to whoever they **** well please.
Old men today have decreed
that everyone should be able to say
whatever old men in new times please and
you can't say what you **** well please
unless everyone is **** well pleased.
Might as well adopt a Communist manifesto
to quote to each other for conversation, and
tune every radio to the same fascist station.
Be politically correct, but otherwise wrong-
it's not free speech for the dumb when you're
humming the same old tuneless song
in the country of liberated photostat machines.

Victuals for intellectuals:
be quasi and prototypical,
not pseudo or ritual.
Feel shame and wonder.
Don’t blunder in the shallow muck,
shovel to your knees and look under.

Do not track linear paths:
Think sideways, backwards,
upside down, exist laterally.
Accept contradictory truths:
they are not just possible
they are inevitable.

If you haven’t found one
in your search, keep your
head down and eyes open.
Be new to avoid ennui, and
let no truth chip your tooth.

Be quiet, not stupid,
be rarely edible and
hoarse from spirit.
Be invisible, not loud,
be a hoax until
you are undeniable.

Poetry is sometimes easy like the wind rushing
to where there is not much wind, caressing in waves,
invisible and pliant like the air, as effortless as
breathing it. Poetry is sometimes impossible,
like turning the tumbler of a lock with your fingertip,
like climbing a mountain barefoot in a blizzard
of screaming, sliding sleet, like a tearing cry
that dies into a whimper in your throat as you
realize the futility of that which you do,
the implacability of the beast you fight.

Sometimes, there are no words that can describe
the machinations and the subtle ticking of a clock
that beats in time to the human soul. Not hearing
the rhythm, you forget the music until your heart
sings again and you dance free like a young ballerina
cutting ballet. No poem is a picture that captures
the fluttering, soaring and sinking in the heart’s chambers.
You choose a word that fits, discard ten of its brothers,
yet feel surprise when your sentences have no answers
for the questions in your chest. You mourn every phrase
you have lost as you fell asleep. Knowing not
what you forgot, you move on to new questions.

You cannot miss what you’ve never felt, but you can yearn for
something you’ve forgotten. What is the difference to you
if you cannot remember the difference? The embryos of
the heart and mind are fragile. Your heart sings of a country
it cannot see anymore now that your back is turned,
you cast fishing nets behind you into the past blindly.
You remember that you have forgotten, and you forget
what bears remembering. You remember a day long past
not as the day that passed but as the memory of its passing,
yet feel surprise when years later and many forgettings hence,
it happened to someone else altogether.