It is
12:47 P.M.
and I am drunk
as a dog.

The gin tastes
like the forest,
the beer like
the alley.

But I can feel
your pretty gray eyes
right down the street
staring at me,

wondering why I've
done this to myself.
In high school I
seemed so clean,

so pure. I guess I
fooled you, though.

The beauty of a woman
is in the poems she's wrote,
the dreams she's weaved
and all the stories she's told.

The beauty of a woman
is in the adventures she's taken,
the lives she's touched
and all the minds she's awakened.

The beauty of a woman
is in the caring she gives,
the sincerity in her laughter,
and the passion in her griefs.

It's not the expensive clothes she owns,
her body size, the diamonds she's worn.
Measure not the beauty of woman in gold,
for the beauty of a woman is reflected in her soul.

These are colors unseen
& fires unhidden
but you have to look
to discern.

In the darkness
of these corridors
we crouched
amidst low-hanging
ferns and sterile white
lights.

Wild animals crept
outside the windows,
birds perched on the
windowsills,
there were fish in the
streaming brown
sewage.

Beyond the wide wooden
doors, in the auditorium,
there are fires burning
that no one has seen.

There are plays
going on constantly,
embittered actors on
the stage, tightrope walkers
bedecked in merriment,
never looking at the sun,
pale like a polar bear's
fur.

They usher us in one
by one, taking our tickets,
and send us in
over & over
to burn in their
eternal furnaces.

I am not your enemy.
I want to give you a colossal domain.
I want to bottle up the seas for you.
I want to paint you a picture with the sun's rays.
I want to pull down the moon with a chain & tie it to your pretty waist.

I am not your enemy.
I would give you a palace if I could,
or a distant farmland if your tender soul required.
I would found for you a university,
so that the world's young lovers could learn your
proper caresses.

I am not your enemy.
I would catch for you, if I could,
the world's brightest birds, the world's fairest fishes.
I would build you a zoo, then, with an aquarium,
so that you could watch at your leisure
the creatures of your creation.

I am not your enemy.
I will build you a mausoleum, so that I can entomb
you somewhere where only I can visit you,
with flowers in my hand,
and a pretty pearl necklace,
and tears hanging from my
rounded chin.

says the old portly man.

He has a mustache and his face
is red like a beet and his stomach
is swollen like a tumor and his chest
is covered in coarse fur.

"Edit sober!"
says the young muscular man.

His hair is neatly combed.
His hands are calloused.
He has seen war.
He has known love.
And he will know
the barrel
of his gun.

I was outside
beneath the gray sky
this morning
smoking a cigarette
and my kitten's head
poked through the space
in the rotten fence

and I sipped my glass
of morning time ***
and went on with my bad
habits, and when my kitten
walked on by, feet
padding softly on the
wet concrete, I nodded
at him imperceptibly
and he looked up at me

and I guess he understood
where I was coming from,
because he looked as though
he really knew me, really knew
in these Scorpio eyes what
I was thinking about

and then he just kept on
walking in his utter silence
until he had reached the back
door, and then he mewled
softly, as is his way,
to let me know that it was
time to come back in

and I finished my cigarette
and downed the last sip of Bacardi
and went inside
to escape my bad habits.

"You're always so right about everything," she says.

Yes, dear, but it comes at a price.
I am hardly ever surprised.