Around street corners,
On dimly lit sidewalks,
She’ll come back to you.

As a burnt cigarette drops at your feet,
And you let out your last warm gasp of nicotine,
She’ll come back to you.

As you feel the cold on your bare cheeks,
And zip your sweater all the way up,
She’ll come back to you

Outside the liquor store on 8th street,
With a brown bag in one hand,
She’ll come back to you.

As she takes your other hand in hers,
And burns through you with her smile,
She’ll come back to you.

With warm brown eyes that feel like home,
And skin you could melt into at any second,
She’ll come back to you.

With her kiss,
And her sweet red lips,
She’ll come back to you.

When your head hits the pillow,
And your mind looks for its favorite story,
She’ll come back to you.

In the night.
In your dreams.
She’ll come back to you.

Jenny it’s getting dark and
             I should really be getting home,
                                                But I’m in New York City,
And I’m drunk,
And I don’t know what I should be doing with my hands but
I wish I could hold you in them.
Just so I’d know what to do with my hands.
And they wouldn’t feel so weighted,
        And there’d be something in my palms
To keep them from balling into fists.
         I wonder if you were here
If you’d even see me at all;
Now that I’m such a New Yorker.
          And do all these things I’d like to say I hate
But love.
        Irreverently.
                       Passionately.
                               Painfully.
I’m not not myself.
        On the contrary actually.
  I’ve just finally discovered the tools necessary
To make me who I’ve always been.
  I was not who I was.
And you were not who I thought you were.
Or maybe you were.
                     Who am I to say.
I’m just a man you never knew who is deeply, foolishly, and                   completely irresponsibly in love with you.
And who wishes you were here
So he could hold you
And keep his hands from balling into fists.

A Tequila Sunrise
at the Roadhouse.
A warm cup of coffee
with cinnamon sprinkled in.

I begin my dissertation on Ted Berrigans Sonnet 2.
A piece of my soul.
Although I am not 18 and my hands hardly shake anymore,
And I absolutely do not in fact know better.

The wind is angry tonight.
Conquering the dark with its horrible howls.
But it will not prevail against these walls,
That stand around this little Eden.

A bed, a candle, some stillness and calm;
I need nothing more than these things.
This is love—to be plain.
This is all love has ever been—to be plain.

Graceful.
Is what I strive for.
Graceful.
Is the feeling of holding Venus in my arms.

Row by row and row by row,
Marching too and then marching fro,
The Ancient saints, gone—gone—gone,
Into the sea’s most violent throws.

Brothers and sisters look on,
To the bare grey of the new dawn,
To however this sets them free.
Waves pull the pelican and swan,

Down into antiquity.
No tears cried, no lost sympathy.
Mary, the Lord is with thee.
Hail Mary, the Lord is with thee.

With the pale cracked mouth of a saint you spoke
In patterns; like all my favorite prayers,
Ave Maria, Our Father, so on.
Pray, pray, the old forbidden question.

Au revoir! Scene!

A half burnt cigarette lands at my feet.
Oh what’s it all mean? What is it to me?
The old Manhattan Opera is all filled
Up with those glowing pretty faces I love

Perfume and cologne, fur coats and bow ties.
The cool night rain douses the red embers,
I look up from it before i miss them;
The apparitions could disappear soon.

Any second! At a moments notice!
I could lose every single one of them,
And their glory, and their beauty, all gone.
Oh, but I pray, what would it be to me?

In the blink of an eye they could be light
Years away, and what would that be to me?

They are marching in Warsaw,
Through their wind and their snow,
With their banners and their anthems,
And their God and their crucifixes.

They are marching in Warsaw,
Scared and proud,
Strong and powerless,
Loving and enraged.

They are marching in Warsaw,
With thundering footsteps,
That’s clapping fades into the sad,
Sad hums of something destined to be lost.

They are marching in Warsaw.
In vain. In vain.

You are where you’ll always be
Laying silent in the crawl spaces of my mind
With hands filled with dirt and crushed pebbles
Eyes closed and that ****** bleeding smile
Basking in the glory of your own destruction