Ladies on Water Street,
with coffee grounds
under your fingernails,
You are the reason
that I leave my bed before Ten
In the morning.

Some days I want to ask
if you’ve ever read Marquez
but I am far too shy and
you are far too
beautiful and
I think too much and
you are probably
Too Straight.

But while you are pouring that espresso:
Allow me (just this once)
To wade only ankle- deep.

Allow me (forgive me),
I know its marginalization;
You are a human and a person,
But I must give way to temptation:
let me engage in some
Innocent objectification
(an oxymoron, I'm aware),
as  I sip an Americano
through dumb lips
and watch the little
movements of your hips.

All I want to do is trap
words in nets
like butterflies.

It won't make sense.

My feeling... as if by the mere
fact that this is on something so public
everyone will see it.
It must therefore live up
to some standard.

If it were only me...

If Myself were the only medium,
it could never be anything but
the truth.

Smoking by the window,
her sigh is drowned by the rushing
of water through broken gutters.


She is a victim:
Bleeding out on the floor
at his feet.

What is left of me:
Broken dishes in a ***** sink
after a night I can’t remember;
A foot print in the mud;
Sweat soaked sheets
no one will think to wash for weeks.

Physical things; things you can touch
and feel
and tear.

It was different before:
Once I was elaborate and abstract;
refined and polished to a dull shine;
Held up to the light, each angle
would fascinate.

Now I smoke and drink
tequila straight from an old jar
with the label torn off;
This is what is left of me.

To me it will always be about the sunrise;
the way it looks when I haven’t slept and there is beer and whiskey
(and other things besides)
cluttering my veins.
I need to shower; badly need to feel the hot water
and the steam
and make a pattern in the moisture on the glass,
but there is still something
pure about a horizon tinged with pink and blue,
no matter how filthy my blood,
or my body, may be.

I don’t know where I stop and you begin.
it’s all just a memory, I know.
None of this is real.
I don’t deserve to have you written on my skin any more than you deserve
to be there.

Finding the start and the finish is not possible.
Before you is/was/will always be chaos:
Just the madness of myself, the insanity of Alone.

It does not fit a neat little plot. I can’t write it
or think it
or tell it
that way.

No longer do I subscribe to theories
that time runs in straight lines,
the future ahead and the past behind,
how could I sleep if that were true?

Everything happens at once.

I exist both here, and there.
We are together still,
and also apart.
I am comforted by the time I spend in your arms
and the knowledge that I will one day see your green eyes
for the very first time.