The dusk smells like the dank moldy parts of the basement, old and decrepit. The days are short, like lives of butterflies. Only stray cats roam the streets after dusk like men in trench coats looking for your children. This is where the buzz of sports games fights through voices like car accidents, wafting through the air with the liquor that fuels them. The mix of rotting seaweed flesh and burnt cheerios intoxicates the wharf, drunker then the teens in their parent’s basements. Anyone can tell you where every **** store and Tim Hortons lies, where bass and basket ***** echo in the roads of chicken wings and blizzards. ‘Beautiful River’ you are where the hearts are strong as bison and tongues sharper then sabers. Yet among the old eyesores you'll find the hope of a city. It screams through the rusty and cracked windows; negligence made mosaics. Based on a pride that runs deeper then it's waters, the strength of those who reside in this urban Crayola box crown and shine like the tips of the waves cascading past the falls.

and the streets breathed
as crows rose and took the sky
crying in anguish.

Each pad sinks deeper into the soft
smushy, slush that was once hard like
Oak paneling in an old farm house.
The snow melts into calm reflecting pools
but constant spring is not a blessing
to the pink skin underpainting
of the great white bear.

He is not in a gold rush,
or a hurry, but he cannot swim forever.
The rising tides will bring the whales
closer, and only leave oil
and Caribou behind.

What shoes should you wear
when the ice goes renegade
and leaves you all but stranded
on a liquid isle?
Polar bears do not dock their boats
in Bernard Harbor,

so check your snow shoes
at the door and be prepared
for pirates. For when deer
jump eight feet into
pools, predators
should still know how to hunt.

Light; form shadow; cast shadow
and it drags on, and on.
Across the ridges in the marbled concrete,
like the dark hiding behind, until the light ends.
What is it like, to have your head

separated from the rest of you,
and cast to the side? Like the head
of the Afghani citizen, skewered
on a rock by the barbarians who trudged
through, and ended the light of the unarmed.

Casts for crayfish, to sew their claws
back on so they may hold their heads
up high into the dimming light,
as Canada steals the sun away.
Bridges for peace and walls
that break between river and canal

where teenagers row, stroke after stroke,
down past dead deer and graffiti.
Where the two Puerto Rican brothers
hid the pieces of their mother in garbage bags,
after they chopped her up,
like minced vegetables. He said

the helicopter hovered
feet before their boat, while black
plastic bags rose from the depths
filled with carbon dioxide made
from decomposing flesh.

As my hands danced across his back
I told him I walked along that wall
to watch fireworks, or catch glimpses
of a weasel that lived within the rocks.
The wall was not built for the disposal
of mothers,

but for the seagulls. So that they can drop
their prey against it, until the shells crack
and their warm innards
are spilled out upon it
like the hot Afghanistan sand.

Like western ice melting and pooling into puddles
filled with crimson Caravaggio blood.
You moved your hands like I was something porcelain,
something breakable.
The sheets became giant waves filled with debris and pollution
crashing against sea glass and lime stone,
and you still thought I was something incredible,
something unreal.
The walls creaked and breathed while the room heated,
filled with secrets and Christmas lights
that dimly lit nothing but shadows and silhouettes,
and you still thought I was something crystal,
something beautiful.
The marks and scars and memories caught my throat
suffocating my face under layers of empty pages
and water stained notebooks,
and I thought I was something untouchable,
something tainted.
And you laughed and ground palm against cheek, mortar against pestle
and I smiled and thought you were something extraordinary,
something honest.
So more like snow dissolving
into the depths of bottomless oil wells, I blinked
and disappeared into something dangerous,
something wonderful,
something real.

I crushed it, and it regrew anyways.
The hypothesis, was more romantic,
than tossing and yearning all night
over losing teeth in a giraffe fight.

Your hypothesis, was more romantically
worded, than a thesis on how birds die on impact
when colliding with a glass windowpane,
retrieving teeth lost during a giraffe brawl.

Worded, like the thesis about how birds die during impact,
each line of the letter dripped with invisible ink,
like colliding with a glass window. Pain
is only fleeting, if the end comes close behind.

Every line in each letter, drawn with invisible ink,
doesn't sound in the pronunciation, which
is only fleeting, if the end line draws closed behind.
So close your characters behind you, and don't let the draft in.

Does it not sound in the pronoun, the annulment of which
leaves every thing indefinite, and incomplete.
So clothe your characters before you, so they don't let in a draft,
and catch a cold from ****** or being indistinct.

What leaves everything indefinitely incomplete
other than the ability of the mind to hypothesize,
and catch a cold in the **** state of being extinct?
The inability to reconcile your metaphorical heart and instinct.

The others, they, have the ability to hypothesize,
about what makes us toss and yearn at night.
I forgave your inability to reconcile. My heart: pure instinct.
So you crushed it, and still it grew anyways.

Her eyes burned from ammonia and snow as she shoveled the driveway
in the parts where the cat litter failed to appropriate traction.
This is what cars are for she said before she slipped away onto a twin mattress
next to pile of laundry and a pillow of books.
Sleeping with dryer hot clothes is only comfortable until you realize
you are still alone and loneliness is only formidable when you know it is indefinite.
So she folded each item into a pile and wondered if a suitcase wouldn't be better
than her dresser. But running away is not an answer like pit bulls and vipers having daughters, even though they ran out of formaldehyde and jars.

"The only thing wrong with love poems, is that the poem outlasts the love"
- Unknown

He said that he loves
the way that I laugh, because it shakes
and moves my whole body.
I got drunk and told him
I loved him after a week and four
days. I didn't remember in the morning.

I could never imagine him in mourning,
he was too good of a lover.
Even when he was tired and four
a.m. came faster than the spins and shakes
of alcoholism and ***. Everything in him
makes my mouth grin and gasp more than anybody.

He told me I was cut off after four
Long Islands, an archipelago in a body
of stomach acid. I had to shake
my head and laugh; In the morning
I kissed him as if I loved
to be woken up at five a.m. to blow him.

I have only ever been in love
twice. That's more than most can shake
a stick at. So, never listen to your body,
it lies like it is pathological. With him
I swear we have only slept apart four
times since that first morning,

and those few nights without him
made me wonder what I did before,
and if this time, it wasn't what I didn't love
about him that made my body
uneasy, but the thought of the next morning
alone, which made my hands shake.

Until now I've always been for
a lack of lips on the face and body.
They have never given me quivers and shakes.
But when his mold with mine in the morning
it makes me think that maybe falling in love
wouldn't be a millennia better with him.

I swear it is not just your body that I love,
or the way your breathing shakes my bed in the morning
But that I can tell them, I was never happier before.