Come to me vagrant, O Death:
starved of bone, starved of lung,
dime-eyed and savage.
Do not come to me gorged and gorgeous,
for it is only when you have known
true hunger, withered to a stalk,
submitted to beggary and stale breads,
you may come to my door, my table.
It will be then, O Death, that pity
becomes you - it will be there
in my clouding eyes you bear witness
to what makes grief a giving - it will be
there in my dry cracked palms held
empty before you, not a partaking of life,
but a share of a hunger assuaged and willing.

Burnt in the steam of crab,
there was no in your eyes.
There was no on your fingers,
peeling the apron,
splitting the shell,
scraping the devil,
digging the claw for meat.

I found someone came like a mallet,
but it was you walked away,
bored in youth,
bored in the shell of love,
met on a crab lunch hesitant,
in an inland cafe,
where they only steam female
not thrown back to sea for spawning.

But what else could I say?
If honest is the plate of love,
then I served you well.
But what came hot,
like a platter of crab,
was quickly indulged,
and all that remained is the no:
the no in your eyes,
the no on your fingers,
the no on your lips.
the no that always lingers.

Tobacco tar walls,
Resin ceiling,
Dun carpet floor -
all receding -
creased receding
to the elevator door -
and the doors -
the doors - the endless
doors repeating.

I drop a penny.
I squat but it's tails.
I look up at a girl
looking up.
Her hair is black,
tangled comely.

She has a chocolate smear
on her right cheek,
Her uncertain teeth
bared in child's
glee and caked with it.

She wears a mustard
blouse stained canary
and her pants are
frayed at the ankles.

Her eyelids are ticking
ticking the flickering light
She says,
"The light turns everything yellow
and nobody picks a bad penny,
that lift only goes down."

She says her name is Mara,
"Mara will be around."

Sheathed in a concrete calyx,
a flower, a generation folded in
upon itself, waits the horrors of the sun.

These petals once unfurled, fell upon
by hard rains and scorch care not, I am told,
the grim and arrowed planting, but
brace against the stem of the next blossom,
for none, I am told, hold the wind alone.

But that is not for me to know.
I only know that these seeds forever sown,
do not prove lustrous on the hills,
in the fields, narrow-tilled,
worse yet, in a vase, I am told,
worse yet, in a vase for gazing.

She was a slim volume really,
a short read, an afternoon
in shades of cypress, conceived
on her own costly parchments.

She prefaced a day a warning,
that if any eye should scan her
lines to her own bleak skin,
to her own terse margins,

to the limbs akimbo nonsense
implied by her scrawling,
there would be a price to pay,
found blank beyond the epilogue.

But she was a slim volume really,
a short read in shades of cypress,
grass and thick with bugs.
And there, pocked by her words,

torn by such strongfrail inks,
torn like a hyphen dangled
at the bottom of a page,
ripped from her tongue

I hung on the breath of an epilogue,
A few faint phrases:
"All that you have read here is true.
All that is consumed here is you."

It is not inconceivable
some smeared and blind thing,
like hail or perhaps some top spun
cue ball, maybe some blunt
beaked bird wary of our passage,
or a bullying stone,
unchaperoned in a spiraling sandbox,
or a slap to the back of the head
by the swift palm of a correcting mother
for some thoughtless remark -
a child's tongue unrestrained...

A child's tongue unrestrained,
naive, precessed, tethered
and dragged, star-eyed and still
reeling because I said "hell"
in Hecht's men's department
on a Thursday, because I didn't
want peas, because I wanted
pudding and said "hell"
and she smacked me,
just stiff enough to tilt the axis,
just enough to shake loose the leaves,
freeze those vanilla puddings.
Yes, that must be the reason for winter,
the start and wobble of all things northern,
cold-shocked by the sun's glancing blows.

Gimme swill,
not one for smooth liquors,
I cannot fathom velvet.

Jigger me a burlap,
stir me a drink
in low thread counts,
course cottons and twill.

My throat itches for wool
and stiff denims. My throat
itches for loose weaves,
warped lazy on a loom,
distilled with a towel,
stiff on a rail in some
damp and arid bathroom.