He loved it when she slid up
to him, as sweet as a sprinkle doughnut -
but now, something has befallen her,
she's been burned or frozen, tastes more like
cinnamon raisin; but by virtue of his
firelit face and tall tales,
he still gets invited out.
_________

He creaks upstairs an hour late, we
are already tangled up on the
back porch, smoking, and the
liquor has made everything
an economy of scale.

He is a ray of sunshine. Tells us
all the old groaners. The big fish.
Ultimately says, "Happy birthday.
Never let your guard down."
and hobbles off, with barb-wire chafing
his heel, and the rheumatic suspicion
that "rest" and "wellness" are
the fables taught to us by
bogeymen, trying to convince us
there are no bogeymen.

I am a tender Twenty tonight.
I want to twirl my fists in Muhammad Ali speedbag-spirals,
saying, "I am the champion. Never undefended."
But I am too drunk, and maybe
too humiliated.

God! He floats like painkillers. He stings like loss.

There he is, the tall order, the iron giant:
a two-story brainfreeze milkshake.

I shudder, a pipsqueak of a prizefighter.
The bucktoothed squirt at the icecream booth,
too short to notice that there are only three flavours.

On my bed night after night I
sought him who my soul loves, I sought him
but did not find him...

I sought this morning
a handful of domestic tools.
I raked, I shoveled, I let fly
a gust from my mighty
two-stroke gas blower, which
shuddered to death in my hands,
before all of the leaves reached
the end of the ******* driveway.

I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem
that you do not awake my love until
the motor has had a chance to cool off,
or you might flood the engine.

David was anointed with the
oil of myrrh and cassia. My wrists
are caked in Havoline from
1998. Solomon ate banquets,
loved Sheba, three hundred
concubines and boats of perfumed wood.

Ramen at lunchtime. Sixty yards of two-by-fours.

If I never resemble a king,
let me sup of television dinners
let me work my hands in the valleys
of a clogged fuel line, let my bed
fill with the twin odalisques of
leisure reading and ***** sheets,
and give me never three hundred concubines.

And if I go about the city at night,
pleading with the watchmen, have they seen
she who my soul loves, let them answer:
"There."

The driveway is clean, now,
all the leaves left at the end to rot,
or be swept away.

A little known secret of actors:
you can force yourself to cry by
simply thinking about how badly
you want to.

Here's how it's done.

Start with fertilizer. Remember how
you felt that first year you
did so excellently at school, all-year
struggling and so devoted, woke up
Christmas to your mother's purchase,
eager for sugar plums and hedonist
things, ripped merrily into math workbooks.
The seed comes next, budding in the
open tunnels of self-worth - when
he told you that the thing you were
best used for could be done by anyone, really,
the oldest profession, and how you
liberated your oils on canvas long exiled
to make a scene of Rahab and Joshua,
and cried yourself away on alien bedding.

Water it all in whatever leaves the garden hose.

When they whistled without a name.
When your first time hosting supper was a catastrophe.
When you failed to keep certain things alive.
When the housecat burrowed in your warm
motor, and you just wanted to leave so badly.

Funerals of people you never knew, and
bugspray in your eyes.

One neglected message stays: anyone can cry.

Most mornings are not clear.
Most mornings are not the type with a
ten-state view from the top of
Clingman's Dome, and two very expensive
tanks of gasoline. You're welcome.

No, most mornings are battered
by some kind of weather condition -
rains and drizzles and nebulous fogs,
unhappy bedmates, a productive cough -
or else the sun just remits,
stays dozing until it has slept enough.

Then you get that gray sky-
chalkboard, the punitive slap of
humid cold on your early walks, your
coffee rendezvous. Then you have
too many garments at 3 because you put
on extra at 8. Morning, in short,
wishes you ill.

Be aware that if you were born
this century, you lurched into no
midwife's hands, full of love and wet, but
a surgeon's, gloved and powdery,
who spanked you firmly, knocked you
down with a commanding stare, and gave you
the first of many cuts you were to receive.

But for having woken up, let's say,
on the wrong side of the bed (if
even there's a right one), I would
like to think we've done alright,
are not too warm or upset at midday,
not too disappointed in ourselves, our moments
of astounding social gracelessness
that we leave like bits of sneaker in our wake.

Still, though, a question:
where grows happiness? Where sprouts
the silver trunk, the cypress or birch? Or
ficus or orange or ginkgo biloba? Tell me.
I would tap that tree 'til it withers, and die
under its trunk, and the two very expensive
tanks of gasoline it took
to get me where I am.

I received the news, this time exactly:
Nine-thirty-two in the evening.
A Saturday, the tenth of April.

Listen carefully:
run beside the surf, but know
the ocean is not your friend.
There is no smile in the way the waves
drown swimmers, the way they founder
mighty ships and save the sum of our loss
at the bottom, buried with the silt.
But could you so quickly hate the ocean?

Pain grooms itself, wants to be known
unsolicited, wants to steal away,
wants to bury its cold hands,
wants to wail but also to hush,
to quietly bristle in a bed of tar.
To wipe its face clean. To
seek love, and then to forsake it.

I cannot calm it - could never calm it.
I have no balm to blunt it.
We stem our grief as easily as blood from a wound -
hold your arm where the shell cut it,
on those sharp sands, and nurse it 'til it ends.

I read a story to my son. Really,
I am composing it, off the cuff, but
there is no reason his mother should know.

One day, Elliott built a rocket ship.
His rocket ship was going to take him to the moon.

The boy sees nothing silly in this, and
for a second, I don't, either.

And every spare minute, Elliott worked on his rocket.
When he was at school, he drew out in
blue, and chalk-white, a dream for his rocket.
When his mother told him to do his homework,
he worked on his rocket.
When his mother left him
in the dining room to finish his carrots,
he worked on his rocket.
"I wish I could work on a rocket,
instead of eating vegetables."
Tonight, you won't have to.

One day, Elliott finished his rocket, and he went to the moon.

From the Moon, he heard the earth mumble.
From the moon, he saw the tide hug the shore,
and knock down his sister's sandcastle, left
on the beach from the summer before.
From the moon.

"He saw China!"
And Brazil. And India.
"And he got to see what his school looks like at night!"
He wouldn't know that, as a a boy, I went safely walking there,
and as a foulmouthed teen, I was drunk in the playground, at night.
That I looked down, from the hospital adjacent when my father was there.

He asks if, from the moon, you could see plain
the shadows of the craters on our planet, too broad
to behold, on sidewalks and soccerfields, during a game.
"You could. All the shadows, in the cities and the seas."
And his ruby face relaxes, deeply struck,
and musing, I think, that maybe
shadows aren't all bad.

Elliott came back, in time that his mother,
could wake him up, and he could loudly fake a snore.
And he righted his sister's sandcastle.
He went to Brazil.
He was drunk on playgrounds.
He saw shadows. They weren't so bad.

And often, when he would walk on the
sidewalk, his feet would feel light, like he
was on the moon again.

"Because the Moon has no gravity."
No gravity at all.

When I leave, and land beside my wife in bed,
I admire the helmet on my mantel,
I crumble old moondust in the paw of my suit,
I feel, still, the dimples of the sheets,
light, and shadowed, like the clefts of the moon.

See that little match-stick,
see that candle there?
See that hard-worn photograph
taken for a year?
Take them punches, boxer-girl!
Much to your chagrin,
it comes back in equal part -
hard and deep within.

Consider bonds between us heat.
And fuel, the time we spent
sleeping close in tousled sheets -
a sky towards us, bent:
gray and cloudless, quick and fleet.
Candle-flame is meant.
to take those memories, and to eat
the message that you sent.

Photo attachment 1: You, him - bottle of Cointreau. Bite marks on your thigh like only I should have left! Grass (both types), a camera. Wrestling. ******. ***.
Photo attachment 2: You, him: carousels, cloven-footed balloon-man (whistling high and wee). Hot dogs. Ocean. Wrestling. ******, ***.
Photo attachment 3: There was something about a penguin… and there was cake involved. Polarbears - must have been a zoo. Causing me to mope at the keyboard: wrestling, ******. ***.
Photo attachment 4: It’s really just *** now.
Photo attachment 5: Please stop.

Shouldn’t be so callous:
that password is personal.
I shouldn’t really have it,
Well, this is what I get for exploring the caverns of iniquity
(that’s slang for your hard-drive),
***** little …
I can’t … cuss you out.

All photographs marked 10/18/07 for devastation.

Now, this thing has ended:
sad, though brief and gleeful.
We were consumed by happiness, never sorrowful
and nothing meaningful;
everything beautiful, nothing painful.
Princess, that work was masterful -
breaking that, making great things hurtful.
But worse still?
I can’t hate you.