Nectar of the grape
Anesthetizing myself
Emptying bottles

no way you could know that
I have driven US 80, when
the Pennsylvania Turnpike
was considered a legitimate deathtrap,
and 80 was a god-send

shuttling back and forth tween
Cleveland (o/k/a The  Burning River City) and NYC,
in the crappiest weather man
could just about tolerate,
and 84 was just an
incomplete dream then,
so we one day,
could skip that idlewild,
Passaic, New Jersey,
back in '69

indeed the Pocono deer that
came through the windshield,
luckily, legs first,
after smashing the radiator,
that I dragged by hooves
to the side of the road,
still well recall, for that
was the first time I touched a
living thing dying in my hands

when I broke my arm in
Tannersville one summer night,
they drove me to the big city,
Scranton,
woo hoo,
cause the break was bad ,
they need to operate,
so they left me there,
w/o any anesthetic,
in the hallway(!) till morn
and a "see ya later kid,"
how they did things in a tough place
known as central Penna.,
which now I think of
semi-fondly as the place where
a piece of me was left buried
and I am still alive to swell tell

but people were tougher back then,
even me, a city 13 year old boy,
cause I had dreams of  girls,
wonderful girls, who had powers in their bodies
that could do things to me in the Poconos forests,
that were unthinkable (for them) after crossing
over the Hudson River,
and that was plenty
anesthetizing

so dem my bona fides,

and Now I Will Write
just another overdue thank you
for Balise, who writes
with a coolest heated blazing detachment,
and then at the very end,
IN ALL CAPS,
smacks you on the head
via the heart

writin'  
of
this n' that,
Mass and men,
worshipping a river called the Lackawanna,
the bleakness of a not quite grimy poverty,
(I worked in  Republic Steel warehouse)
that made grey a bright color,
and the sun was invisible from October to May,
in a world where people PROUDLY,
clung to their guns and religion,
(you arrogant out of touch Harvardian snob,
Mr. Obama prima donna),
you had to see it to believe it

of
herons and beer cans,
of parents and pain,
so exquisitely,
that I would gladly
drive to Tannersville again,
right now,
if I could, if I could,
yet learn that skill under her tutelage,
which by the by, is why some call me
still crazy, still crazy, after all those years,
crazy from a balise,
a wintry blizzard heating the readers eyes, and
who reads my footnotes
and thus
only this woman,
knows, better than she ever realized,
where his undulatin' poems come from...

I lie sprawled on the dead crusty grass of Winter,
breathing in the frigid night.

A passing car ambles by,
headed for destinations unknown,
a mystery on wheels at this hour,
its eyes ripping the velvety shroud of darkness.

I lie in the darkness
beyond the periphery of its piercing gaze,
until it rumbles by and on until it is gone,
and darkness settles once more.

The wicked wind whispers
soft lilting nightmare lullabies
that float through the frozen forest branches
into my numb ears.

I lie in the darkness,
entranced by the bitter breeze’s melodies,
until it blows by and on until it is gone,
and hushed stillness falls again.

My body shakes
with deep rustling tremors,
to defy Winter’s icy kiss or maybe just
to break the mesmeric silence of the night.

I lie in the darkness
as the cold steals the breath from me while I tremble,
until it gusts by and on until it is gone,
and a modicum of warmth returns to my bones
and I am still.

I stare up and away into the night
until my eyes water and freeze and blur
as I stare at one star and the rest disappear
into the folded shadows of the sky.

I lie in the darkness,
a creature of the frigid Winter night,
enfolded in its quiet embrace,
oddly soothed by its anesthetizing touch,
lost in its starry splendor.

Bones need not to be ashamed when under
florid light’s strict surveillance.

Take this as advantage. This means invitation.
Dragged you into a terrible work of a labyrinth,

anesthetizing your execution, your critical art
you had secretly loved and loathed –

Sensing out a pattern, your vision as tour:
we see nothing but wreckage, heed nothing but lassitude,

and when their faultless gravities fall
upon, let them interrupt us. When we are broken,

repair with beauty all who elude us everywhere:
introduce them kintsugi – all these years

of specious encounters: I have marks to prove,
telling like an alphabet, scattered like punctuation.

Bones need not their love for understanding.
When spread on a territory, virulent like a makeshift

field effect: necessary when transcribed what the utterer
resembles an intone of a blatant present: you too mirror

my figure. Shatter it when you are done with.

it creeps out of my core that i have emptied myself of something that has been considered a self- pillar for years. that i wholeheartedly accepted to fuel my engine with anesthetizing void and made it difficult for the engine to pump with ease and beauty. since the day i strode out of your arms and asked you to safely explore, if you think i have stopped loving you by then, take a swig because i never did.

yet i do not adore you for the way you are right now. my heart is just helplessly trapped in this tale crafted by our long-forgotten personas eons ago. the very souls we cannot have back because we have already traveled immeasurably far. separately.

i keep on retracing the orbits constructed but the stars will soon, just as always, steer me back to that consciousness that a one-time collision just lasted like a flicker. nevertheless, the flicker caused a gigantic crack. now, i’m all left with two separate voids, slowly linking each other perfectly, engulfing my wee core with nothing but desolation.

1.
I am optimistic enough this day clings to the highest mast,
is now born out of prophecy.
                           I pass by the old mirror: see myself: blear myself:
is blot to canvas, slit from the wrist of this home:
   I witness how it is to sustain beatings.

2.
In the empty lot, age 9, we wrung frangipanis and ruined
   the pedicle somehow a map of a history where this ground
  shook that was once an old cathedral. We blew

               bubbles out in the haziest of days, pallid and droopy
    the clouds identify in their short collisions – the stream that was
   the sky
       the  face of  my mother when found news of my would-be death
    1996, Kawasaki my mother's clutch on the soiled linen
                 beginning an autopsy

3.
I conjure a frayed upon image of death in its colloquial.
       a fractal of mistakes taken as righting out. I sense prognostication
when potential for a satisfied framed encounter or out of luck that was
       a night making all of this less than total.

I     remember the discoloration of the many lights – the sky beginning an
  erratum: this could have been your last – what is exacted here
        like a tarot, the culprit a newfangled man in the rearview mirror.

4.
How can I forget you – all of you? You wear light like karsunsilyo.
You are all flowers I arrive at a contusion of gardens.
  Rinse me with light – abandon me after.

5.
  Made air staler. Dew my maiden when lit
  from the matutinal – in tow, a bedraggled kite soaring in the heat
  one distinct summer,
      wish it pure that was I, almost touching the vermillion,
my faintest image of freedom was a bird trapped in between
   the venetian.

6.
  In a dream, I am pursued by a train in an alley – in the next scene,
I am being forced to take a plunge
       into a chasm: the fall did not scare me – but my acquiescence
made me flinch: standing before space, anesthetizing
       the skin so it made me more than metal, the clangor

   suggests a tragedy. Awakened by violent nudges
from       my mother: it was the New Year. Pyrotechnics paint the sky
over and over an ephemera in the bleak behemoth of this:
       a makeshift home ruined by untranslatable music

the sound of rain at 11 in the afternoon and a nearby funeral.

Every time she sees a cactus, her heart cracks back open, bleeding hurt all over her insides. The hurt colors her vision, dulling vibrancy to a lackluster grayscale. It muffles her hearing, deadening melody to a lifeless buzz. It desensitizes her tastebuds, quashing wine to stagnant water. It numbs her skin, anesthetizing the insides of her elbows to empty hollows. But her heart is not dulled, deadened, quashed, or anesthetized. Her heart is a throbbing, fiery ache of pain, longing for the desert.

he stares
he covets
he loves
he hates

not only the elixir,
its anesthetizing allure,
but also its vessel

in which he can see
reflected, his hands,
his mouth

though not his eyes;
they reveal too much:

his last human touch
lambs on blood red fields of war
his mother gasping her last breath
his stillborn son

in this parley
his eyes cannot belie  
he hears screaming voices
in an empty, stone
quiet room    

the glass, then, will win;
‘tis an unfair balance; its perfect
symmetry, its solemn silence
the almighty alchemy it holds  

against him--his ghosts,
his hands, his mouth, all ready
to concede defeat

time can not apportion

her inelegancies--

know which baby to

steal candy from.

until her framework

of anesthetizing voids

take numbness aback--

with the succor of the

sweetest candy left to

the devices of a baby.