In the cold silence of each and every morning,
I close my eyes and wish you were here next to me,
The stillness of the sunrise
Wrapping its joy around me
With the subtlety of a silk scarf,
Your heart touching mine so gently and certainly.

It’s a long narrow line
That flows between our souls,
remembered fondly and followed to our feet,
where stylish obstacles and visions remain subtle,
But constant and well-defined.

Tears begin to fall down my cheeks,
Over the corners of my mouth,
And on to my shirt.

I dream of you frequently,
Where your heart beats as fast as it can feel
And the firm hugs and long gentle kisses
Rarely end, even upon departure.

Though speechless,
I softly utter words of joy,
For you are the peace and sunshine in my life,
And you fill me with music, love and poetry.
Free to breathe and live the life of a thousand seaside sunsets.
Where high tide passes for royalty
and sunsets become one with the morning.

Please tell me that one day
this deep hollow feeling I have
when I think of you
will never go away.

If I could ever smile again,
I would sense a bright underpinning.
If you ever knew how I felt about you,
You would never cry,
Saving me from myself.

If I look deep in my soul,
I can always find you.
Life without you was like a flower without fragrance.

As the sun goes down,
The spirits stay sober.
As I begin to dream of rain washing away all of life’s sorrows,
raindrops tap on the rooftop, waking me up,
then they slowly lull me back to sleep
with the soft humble hang time of pleading.

No matter how difficult a day has been, I smile when I think of you,
The moon suspended by nothing more than
The soft intensity of your loving eyes,
Your open arms,
Your attentive ears,
your powerful mind
And your warm curious heart.
The steady beat is like sparrow chirping to the backdrop of a soft mountain breeze
That slowly steps around decayed spruce trees hanging on by tiny delicate branches.

I am thinking and dreaming of the strength and peace
of a life spent reminding you that you are loved.

My soul is open,
Enter as free as a dolphin crashing into every other wave,
A billboard that loves to be looked at,
But feels content enough to refrain from grief,
Never fearful of anticipation of things that you know deep inside
Are wonderful, beautiful and inevitable.

You entice me into a life
Filled with pleasant insomnia and early morning buzzes,
Fearless magnolias and tearless nights.
finding solace in the mellow solidarity of an unanticipated rainfall,
That is constant,
Though naked to the ear.

Can you feel yourself being free
While we rest in each others arms,
Gripping tightly, thankful
only that we entered this world together.

New York, July 1992


We will need two passport pictures
one inch by one inch,
black and white
with you looking
exactly forty five degrees to the left;
exactly forty five degrees to the left...
just enough
so we can barely see your right earlobe.
We can't let you into this country without them.

Do you have a coat named Cassandra?
Are we the dead swordfish cripples?
Are we postponing the end of reality?

Is one man perched on a cloud
of skunkweed aromas and spiral lights?

Are you trying to sharpen your pencil
with fingernails submerged
in lethargic gardens?

God is decrepit.
Can’t even stand up straight
or walk inside the lines.

Kick out the sky like a drum
A strange blind man with yellow teeth
evolves through a pearl necklace
in a cloud of birds and helium
as soft as a paper serpent,
as simplistic as the underlying echo
of raindrops beside an
apocalyptic train tunnel.

Go ahead,
try and be a woman.

Flamingo!
Or was it Flemenco?

Everyone’s looking for a Mormon groin
To pat on the toilet.
Everyone wants lap-teasers;
bursts of energy
contained in porcelain urns.

You realize anything you write down that rhymes
is mystified, temporarily,
the real nothing curving back into the landscape.

You look fine,
figuring out the label.

Before the swollen eyes burn,
***** wanders and remodels.
It reminds her of the cavern that remained
in the side of her head
and the stain its warm good-byes left
on the open half
of the flower sun
on the Indian tapestry.

I want to share
the broken cores of the walls
with the rippled blue label
on the ******* clad bottle.
They will meet,
marry
and view death as friends
watching each other deteriorate
into puddles meant to be wheatfields.

No vines,  no veins

they pace only to summon the light.
This speech is spellbound
and holds no boundaries to our power.

Don’t follow my path
to indignant extinction.

Breath likes resurrection
Death likes restitution.

It was the stare I remember
and he was the one who lost
the lickable paper
I vaguely
(and foolishly)
recall with pride
for playing anything less than psychotic

I am the psychotic
I’m the last of the crass;
a head I can brush her hair with.

The crash of a familiar tongue
distances itself from the ivory face of a December midnight,
standing in shadows of crimson silence.

We see no need to thank, but do it anyway,
by necessity.
It’s a fear that wakes you in the night.
You turn on the light
and there’s nothing there.

Where is the lifestyle I want?

Flying
flying
flying
flown, as a vision through the light,
a vision beyond that vision I saw
Death and the echo of raindrops
remain boxed together in a stool sample.

As she rested in her bedroom,
she looked up,
blinded by a blank light shining down
from a spirit she never knew, but  to whom she was loyal.
The hazy evening skies and the bright sun setting under the horizon
joined to form a seasonable warmth.  
This did not seem to bother her, though,
as she sat on her cot,
a musty dilapidated mattress stained red
like the sky on a summer morning
blue like the veins that flowed through her body,
dried out and callous like her Navajo homelands.

She read Dostoyevsky with a certain ease.
Einstein wandered into her spirit
for a lesson she would never learn.

She looked up again,
saw the sun become the moon, and wondered why that was.
The moon rays and the sun beams continued to shine down on her,
as her mother glanced through the bedroom door,
telling her to stop dreaming
and finish reading her Crime and Punishment.

She looked at her mother with her pearly eyes and asked
"Mother, is my dreaming bothering you?"

So
what
you
are
telling
me
is
that,
I
must
buy
my
own
band
aids,
condoms
and
cough
drops,
but
you’ll
save
me
from
myself?

I gave 75 cents to a homeless man
sitting on the frozen sidewalk
holding a half eaten loaf of rye bread.
It's 13 degrees and the sun's out.
Times Square, December 2, 2005.
A lanky man dressed like Santa walked by,
glared and shook his head at me.
He took a step sideways
and continued on, stumbling down the sidewalk,
stopping to lean against the building
twenty yards away.

He slid down the wall
and sat in an empty doorway,
his red and white costume sloping down on one side,
the elastic beard matted
with sweat stains and fresh egg yolk.
Gaps in the fabric revealed black stubble
with streaks of gray along his cheek bone,
his belt far too big for someone twice his size.
One of the lenses on his fake coke-bottle glasses
was cracked down the middle, but he didn't notice.

How come Santa drinks so much, my little cousin asked,
trying to absorb the idea of habits.
She's smarter than most seven-year-olds.
Some day she'll realize the therapeutic power of bourbon,
whether she wants to or not,
by virtue of a twisted and distorted lineage.

Remembering back to a time when I believed,
I asked myself,
Was he always so intense and disruptive?
Did he always look so disheveled?
Waking up in ****** unfamiliar motels,
fur stuck to his tongue,
feeling cheap and
smelling like reindeer?

Doesn't he have family to go home to?

I distinctly recall Santa getting agitated
at a pawnshop in Jersey,
hocking a six year old Rolex knockoff,
arguing with a deadbeat in an orange latex bandana
about whether it could get him 5 bucks or 50.
Santa is a hobo who should be in rehab
but decides to sit back and take blame,
driven by dollars and cents, not peace and love.
Fictitious friends have more of an impact,
imagining someone out there barks like a dog
when a strange man in card-carrying colors
gets too close to either side of the line
and lodges himself in a chimney
too small for his socks
but too large for his vision.

Think of the profile:
An obese elderly  man, about 6'1",
big bushy white beard
puffy red cheeks
and glazed over eyes. Dresses in red velvet,
has eight deer he runs until they drop,
overwhelmingly fond of children,
known to sneak around
in the darkness late at night,
carrying a sack,
usually around the holidays.
Santa is a transient worker.
But does he have a record?
Was he always a bag man?

Busted for B&E;
at the Christmas Tree Shop in Danbury, 2001,
then fast forward to indecent exposure
inside a moving vehicle
somewhere around 23rd Street
where the sun becomes the moon.

Everyone is old enough to know
not to sleep in soiled piles
reeking of their own fermenting remnants
of a night gone sour.

But he meets Betty Ford for drinks anyway
in a seedy club in Queens,
one night too many,
one night in particular, in 2003,
strung out stiff on single malt,
he grabbed the reins, lost control
and flipped back to front on a car full of elves
at a busy intersection somewhere around LaGuardia.

He showed up in night court
with a ****** who promised him a good time
but gave him more than he bargained for.
He never said he was innocent,
just that he didn't think he could be convicted.

Across the street, he pulls himself up,
throws an empty bottle against the concrete wall
and crosses back over toward us.
The stale stench of cheap red wine
permeates from the center of his beard,
with permanent stains across his chin
and all along the white fabric pleasure
path that connects one head to the other.

Santa glares at us again,
mumbles something in Croatian
and falls face first into a pile of stones
deep down the alley,
two sheets to the wind,
and ten steps closer to Brooklyn.

London, 1999

Oh the fences they hold true,
wandering through heavy woven forests of tree roots
to pastures of sunken vegetation
along dirt roads nestled in overcast shadows,
as a family picnics, or so it would appear.
A rejoice of sorts if only you were still here.
I see your silhouette appear and reappear,
the wind etching your likeness
upon each cairn that dots pastoral.

The walking path becomes overwhelmed by sunlight.
Perhaps you are still working in the fields,
Your wind-burned and calloused exterior
holding rough rooted abhorrence in your lowered brow.
You remain sanctified and unpolluted,
piling sun bleached stone upon sunken roots,
the dark shadows solidified in foreground fate.

Oh how your canvas womb gives heartless birth.
Thrice mangled memories,
of dark French roast in an earth tone demitasse
and crumpets served slightly charred on the veranda
on a chipped porcelain Victorian saucer
with only a faint shade of lavender along its edge.

As the dark brown stain in the once white silk tablecloth
glowers through the prongs of your tarnished silver fork,
You stare across the table
at the emptiness of the once filled bookcases.

I realize that your only genuine notion of remorse
is in the severed piece of an antique plate.